The Seba library treats Inertia in 9 passages, across 7 authors (including Aurobindo, Sri, von Franz, Marie-Louise, Horney, Karen).
Tamas is the principle and power of inertia; rajas is the principle of kinesis, passion, endeavour, struggle, initiation; sattwa the principle of assimilation, equilibrium and harmony.
Aurobindo identifies inertia as the precise psychological and metaphysical content of tamas, the first of three gunas that govern all natural experience, making it a foundational cosmological category.
, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948thesis
Matter offers to Spirit, is this that it is the culmination of bondage to mechanic Law and opposes to all that seeks to liberate itself a colossal Inertia.
Aurobindo frames inertia as Matter's primary weapon against Spirit, a mechanically-imposed force that chains existence to unconscious law and resists every liberating impulse.
, The Life Divine, 1939thesis
a woman in this trancelike state is not receptive; she is drugged by animus-inertia and imprisoned in a stone chest.
Von Franz distinguishes animus-inertia from genuine feminine passivity, identifying it as a pathological trance-state that masquerades as receptivity while actually imprisoning psychic life.
, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970thesis
The more the inertia spreads, the more the person's feelings are affected by it. He needs stronger stimuli to respond at all.
Horney describes the progressive spread of psychic inertia in the resigned neurotic, charting how it colonizes emotional life until even pleasurable experience requires extreme stimulation.
, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950thesis
The inertia of unconsciousness is overcome by an impulse toward a higher level of consciousness.
Von Franz translates the fairy-tale motif of 'the terrible mother overcome by the hero' into rigorous psychological language, equating the mother's power with the inertia of unconsciousness itself.
, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970thesis
Waite talks of, 'inertia, sleep, lethargy' in life. This sense of a sluggish, boring life masks the sometimes desperate battle of the ego to avoid change.
Pollack reads the Tarot's reversed Death card as the ego's deployment of inertia, lethargy, and boredom as defensive concealment of a terror of transformation.
, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, 1980supporting
Perhaps the enemy of heroic action is not where it used to be—the inertia of raw materials, the sloth of labor, the drag of tradition.
Hillman critiques the heroic mythology of business by questioning whether inertia — traditionally the adversary of heroic accomplishment — remains the true obstacle in contemporary culture.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995supporting
inertia, 393, 425; change involved in, 223; dreams-series and, 290; religion and, 59
Jung's index clusters inertia with change, dream-series, and religion, indicating its systematic presence across psychological transformation, unconscious process, and religious experience in his thought.
, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting
utilize a support of energy (an electron cloud in a field) with a very slight inertia, such that the state of equilibrium... is obtained in an extremely short time
Simondon invokes the physical concept of inertia in the context of individuation theory, using minimal inertia in electronic fields to illustrate rapid actualization of potential energy.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020aside