For all the loftier achievements of living an unimpeded flow of life-force or libido or spiritual energy is necessary. It is possible to exist automatically with the life-force dammed back, but creative awareness demands a free flow. The eastern idea of ignorance may be compared with the Christian conception of original sin. The term covers the entire range of sensational and emotional experience. By continual practice he learns to realize that the cravings of the physical body, the constant play of the emotions, the automatic weaving and interweaving of the ever-active mind, are exterior to an inner consciousness which is himself.
Experience then becomes more objective, less enthralling and yet in a sense more interesting.
Whereas desire, the entanglement of the self in experience, is predominantly a question of the emotions, and its true opposite is hate, aversion is an obstacle occasioned by the workings of the concrete mind. That yoga in its traditional form is essentially an eastern practice unsuited to western life and temperament I am prepared to admit.