Most often progress is understood as having unusual experiences such as ‘visions and voices’ or else developing certain exceptional powers that are not generally seen in the average human being. These can be and are often misleading yardsticks. While certain powers do awaken sometimes when one undertakes the yoga and one may open to certain kind of experiences such as visions and voices if there is an innate capacity, these are not the indicators of progress. Nor is the ability to sit in meditation for a long time a sign of spiritual progress. These things belong to the occult dimension of our existence, to the inner vital and mental regions.
Yoga is about the growing contact, closeness and eventually change of our consciousness by a progressive union with the Divine. The signs of this growing union are both subjective and objective.
The subjective signs are, positively, a growing impersonality and equanimity, calm and peace and inner quietude in the different parts of our being, growth of love for the Divine that tends to become a universal love for all creatures, growth of faith, sincerity and surrender and of humility and gratitude, the awakening of intuition in the work that is given, the sense of wideness, a state of deep inner felicity independent of outer circumstances, negatively an absence of fear and restlessness, freedom from greed, anxiety, wrong attachments, anger and lust.
The objective signs are an increase in health and vigour, a certain natural mastery over the environment and the forces around, speech that rings with inspiration, intuition and revelatory notes, the sense of the Divine everywhere and in everything, etc.
We could add to the list, the urge to serve the Divine, the growth of aspiration in intensity and purity and integrality, the will for purity in nature, an increase of psychic qualities such as gratitude and compassion, the passing away of desire and the sense of I need and my-ness…
About Savitri | B1C2-10 Condition of the World (p.18)