Integral Yoga wisdom of today

On the path of integral yoga, the feeling is often of finding the worst when we had wished for the best, of waging war when we had sought peace and light. Actually, let us face it, it is a battle. As long as we are swimming with the current, we can believe ourselves to be very nice, proper and well-intentioned individuals, but the instant we take another direction, everything begins to resist. We begin tangibly to appreciate the colossal forces that weigh upon human beings and stupefy them; yet it is only by trying to get out of their clutches that we can realize this. Once the seeker has had a first decisive opening above, once he has seen the Light, then almost simultaneously he feels a kick in the shins, as if something in him were in pain. Now he knows what Sri Aurobindo meant by the wounded gloom complaining against light.²²⁶ And he will have learned his first lesson: each step upward is necessarily followed by a step downward. Instead of taking these sharp jolts as a kind of fatality, the seeker will make them the basis of his work. Indeed, this dual movement of ascent and descent is the fundamental process of the integral yoga: On each height we conquer we have to turn to bring down its power and its illumination into the lower mortal movement.²²⁷ Such is the price for transforming life, otherwise we merely poeticize and spiritualize on the peaks, while below the old life keeps bumping along.

Source : http://www.aurobindo.ru/workings/satprem/adventure_of_consciousness_e.htm#051