अप्रकाशोऽप्रवृत्तिश्च प्रमादो मोह एव च ।तमस्येतानि जायन्ते विवृद्धे कुरुनन्दन ॥
aprakāśo’pravṛttiśca pramādo moha eva catamasyetāni jāyante vivṛddhe kurunandana
Nescience, inertia, negligence and delusion—these are born when tamas predominates, O joy of the Kurus.
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
AI translation
Essays on the Gita
Tamas, finally, is born of inertia and ignorance and its fruit14·8 too is inertia and ignorance. It is the darkness of tamas which obscures knowledge and causes all confusion and delusion. Therefore it is the opposite of sattwa, for the essence of sattwa is enlightenment, prakāśa, and the essence of tamas is absence14·13 of light, nescience, aprakāśa. But tamas brings incapacity and negligence of action as well as the incapacity and negligence of error, inattention and misunderstanding or non-understanding; indolence, languor and sleep belong to this guna. Therefore it is the opposite too of rajas; for the essence of rajas is movement and impulsion and kinesis, pravṛtti, but the essence of tamas is inertia, apravṛtti. Tamas is inertia of nescience and inertia of inaction, a double negative.
Record of Yoga
(c) Tamas is Aprakasha and Apravritti. The result is fear, idleness, too much of sleep, ignorance.
Letters
Yes, of course, I have been helping Jyotirmayi. Always when somebody really wants to develop the literary power, I put some force to help him or her. If there is faculty and application, however latent the faculty, it always grows under the pressure and can even be turned in this or that direction. Naturally, some are more favourable ādhāras than others and grow more decisively and quickly. Others drop off, not having the necessary power of application. But on the whole it is easy enough to make this faculty grow, for there is cooperation on the part of the recipient and only the tamas of the apravṛtti and aprakāśa in the human instrument to overcome which are not such serious obstacles in the things of the mind as a vital resistance or non-cooperation of the will or idea which confronts one when there is a pressure for change or progress in other directions.
Human nature and the character of the individual are a formation that has arisen in and out of the inconscience of the material world and can never get entirely free from the pressure of that Inconscience. As consciousness grows in the being born into this material world, it takes the form of an Ignorance slowly admitting or striving with difficulty after knowledge and human nature is made of that Ignorance and the character of the individual is made from the elements of the Ignorance. It is largely mechanistic like everything else in material Nature and there is almost invariably a resistance and, more often than not, a strong and stubborn resistance to any change demanded from it. The character is made up of habits and it clings to them, is disposed to think them the very law of its being and it is a hard job to get it to change at all except under a strong pressure of circumstances. Especially in the physical parts, the body, the physical mind, the physical life movements, there is this resistance; the tamasic element in Nature is powerful there, what the Gita describes as aprakāśa, absence of light, and apravṛtti, a tendency to inertia, inactivity, unwillingness to make an effort and, as a result, even when the effort is made, a constant readiness to doubt, to despond and despair, to give up, renounce the aim and the endeavour, collapse.
Still, if the call of the soul is there, although not yet full, however great and obstinate the difficulties, there can be no final and irretrievable failure; even when the thread is broken it is taken up again and reunited and carried to its end. There is a working in the nature itself in response to the inner need which, however slowly, brings about the result. But a certain inner consent is needed; the progress that you have marked in yourself is due to the fact that there was this consent in the soul and also in part of the nature; the change was insisted on by the mind and desired by part of the vital; the resistance in part of the mind and part of the vital made it slow and difficult but could not prevent it. The strong development you have observed in your powers with its proof in the response of others is due to the same reason; part of your being consented to it, wanted and needed it as a self-fulfilment of the nature and the soul wanted it as a means of service to the Divine; the rest was due to the pressure of the Divine force and my pressure. As for the distaste, the lack of interest etc. all this is temporary and belongs only to a part of you. In so far as it comes from a kind of vairāgya, it may have helped you in overcoming some of your attachments, but it is defective in so far as the element of tamas and apravṛtti is there; it is not so fundamental as to resist the victorious drive of the pressure of the Divine Force.
It is not a question of the inner being, even of the inner physical. It is a question of the physical consciousness. The habit of tamas manifests itself in the very fact of the constant alternatives of experience and inertia. The principle of tamas is inertia, aprakāśa and apravṛtti shown here by its being unable to keep the prakāśa of the higher consciousness or answer continuously to the activity of sadhana — also by the rising up when it comes of sex etc. in a mechanical repetition of old ideas and feelings. It may be from the subconscient, but if the physical had not that habit of responding, it would have no hold. You would not be affected or feel yourself invaded or the sadhana stopped.
Evening talks
There are no limits to the ways of God. In the Ashram here, once people began to feel a tremendous force in their work. They could work without fatigue for hours and hours. But they overdid it. One has to be reasonable even in spirituality. That tremendous force was felt when the sadhana was in the vital being. When the sadhana started in the physical, things were different. The physical is like a stone, full of Aprakasha and Apravritti, darkness and inertia.
