Except for Mother and Sri Aurobindo, I do not see other spiritual personalities talk much about this desire soul called vital being.
I would like to know what part mind and vital both play in human destiny and which is more dangerous and needs to be kept more under discipline and control.
Yes, quite so. The realised beings have gone beyond the sphere of suffering where good and evil, positive and negative are locked in a struggle none can ignore. Absorbed by the deep and intense spiritual urge in them they pierce a hole through the circle of ignorance and get out of the stormy isles of life on ground. Looking back and looking down upon it, they see, and rightly so, that the mind in its ignorance does create many problems and complicates others. It is because the mind neither understands things in the true sense, nor gives a true value to things. Hence its responses are also faulty. Their solution too is therefore very general. It is to step out of the entire zone of ignorance and immigrate to the port where there is no struggle nor suffering nor fear or grief. Then the rest can be dealt with relative ease like someone who has decided to leave a city for good stops caring about its roads and facilities and systems and governence. They don’t need to understand or explain anything. It is like giving up on a person whom you have labeled as mad and declared as incorrigible. That is why most mystics make poor psychologists.
Do they say, change your destiny by changing your thoughts? I don’t think so unless it is a modern interpretation. They generally say that by taking the right attitude, through right understanding you will suffer less and find peace amidst the storm. But destiny will continue to cast its dice and the response of nature will be there by force of habit and conditioning but you have to stop bothering about it. Stay focused on the higher goal of liberation, nirvana. They don’t speak of the desire-soul but they do speak of the ego-self and desires and advocate moderation and mastery. But there is no elaboration of the mechanism, no revealing truth about the occult necessity behind the birth of cosmic ignorance, no discussion about fate beyond the law of karma, no possibility of changing the field of nature in which the soul finds itself trapped. Hence there is no further discussion on the various instruments that operate right now under the spell of ignorance. They do talk about the vital and its five-fold movement (not the modern interpretors of course) and the need to overcome lust and anger and greed and all the rest. But it is only with the view of extricating themselves from the dark net.
The cardinal mistake they make is to think that the Mind in ignorance is all and all it can do is to create the double values of pleasure and pain. The advice therefore is to withdraw from the mind (being the author, creator of the drama of life and its joys and sorrows). To the modern interpretator who says that there is a good, a positive way of using the mind to create happiness, the mystics will say that this is a lure and a trap. For if you chase the positive, the good, then the negative, the bad will follow as its shadow. Hence the advice for the seekers of liberation is to either abruptly cut the chord of negative and positive or else slowly replace the negative with the positive, the rajasic with the sattwic until the bond is loosened enough to open or break free. Here too they are quite right. Yes they speak of the mind and the vital as if they are synonymous. That is perhaps because people become aware of the desires, anger, lust etc only when it takes the form of thoughts. But that is a minor issue. The main deficiency is about the birth of the Mind itself, the origin of ignorance and Avidya and its purpose in the grand scheme of things. Above all the possibility of not only freeing oneself from ignorance and live as a jivanmukta but to live divinely, of going beyond good and evil, pleasure and pain and living in delight, in the freedom of the infinite, stainless and pure even amidst the mud and the mire.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
