the difficulty of difficulties is self-created, a knot of the Ignorance; when a certain inner perception loosens the knot, the worst of the difficulty is over.
one carries it with oneself, for the difficulty is truly inside, not outside. outside circumstances only give it the occasion to manifest itself and so long as the inner difficulty is not conquered, the circumstances will always crop up one way or another.
difficulties and perplexities can never be got rid of by the mind brooding over them and trying in that way to get out of them; this habit of the mind only makes them recur without a solution and keep up by brooding the persistent tangle. it is from something above and outside the perplexities that the solution must come. it is a subtle law of the action of consciousness that if you stress difficulties - you have to observe them, of course, but not stress them, they will quite sufficiently do that for themselves - the difficulties tend to stick or even increase; on the contrary, if you put your whole stress on faith and aspiration and concentrate steadily on what you aspire to, that will sooner or later tend toward realization.
-passages from "DIFFICUTIES", Dictionary of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga
