From Man Human to Man Divine

ON PHYSICAL TRANSFORMATION*

By Wisdom all these are guided and have their firm abiding in Wisdom. For Wisdom is the eye of the world, Wisdom is the sure foundation.¹.

(Aitareya Upanishad, III.3.)

We want an integral transformation, the transformation of the body and all its activities.

Formerly when one spoke of transformation, one meant solely the transformation of the inner consciousness. One endeavoured to discover in oneself the deeper consciousness and rejected the body and its activities as a burden and a useless thing, so that one might be engaged solely in the inner development. Sri Aurobindo declared that that is not sufficient; the Truth demanded that the material world too should take part in this transformation and become an expression of the deeper Truth. But when this was told to people, many thought that it was possible to transform the body and its activities without troubling oneself at all with what was happening within - which is of course not quite true. Before you take up the work of physical transformation, which is of all things the most difficult, you must have your inner consciousness firmly, solidly established in the Truth...

(The Mother, Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Vol. XV, No. 4, p. 51.)

Our sadhana has for its goal not merely the spiritual liberation of some isolated individuals from the shackles of phenomenal Ignorance but the establishment of a divine life upon earth, ihaiva. But since Matter is the foundation of all evolutionary efflorescence of Life here upon the terrestrial plane, our body assumes a

* This chapter acts as a bridge linking the present volume to the other book by the author: The Destiny of the Body.

1. Sri Aurobindo's translation (Eight Upanishads, p. 247).

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supreme importance in the total scheme of our spiritual achievement. For "the body is not only the necessary outer instrument of the physical part of action, but for the purposes of this life a base or pedestal also for all inner action."² So a full play of divine life demands as its essential prerequisite a totally transformed physical body which will as a supple and flawless and transparent instrument respond fully to each and every call of the self-manifesting Spirit. "At present the notation of the body and the physical consciousness has a very large determining power on the music made by this human harp of God; the notes we get from the spirit, from the psychic soul, from the greater life behind our physical life cannot come in freely, cannot develop their high powerful and proper strain. This condition must be reversed; the body and the physical consciousness must develop the habit of admitting and shaping themselves to these higher strains and not they but the nobler parts of the nature must determine the music of our life and being."³

Thus a divine transformation of our physical sheath, annamaya koṣa, is an indispensable concomitant of a truly divine living in the world. But in the actually realised status of consciousness of man the mental being, this transformation can by no means be achieved nor even initiated on the plane of the body. It will then be like putting the cart before horse. For, where is the necessary lever of transformation or the potent agent to effectuate the change? In reality - whatever may be the appearances to the contrary - it is consciousness and consciousness alone that is always the prime determinant. So, before we can at all expect any transformation of our physical existence, we must first acquire a divine consciousness within and effectuate a total liberation of our Purusha part. Then and then alone can the question of the liberation of our Prakriti part and of the divine transfiguration of our bodily instrument acquire some practical importance, not before. In the forthright words of the Mother: "You must begin from within. I have said a hundred times, you must begin from above. You must purify the higher region and then purify the lower."⁴ Sri Aurobindo too has warned us:

"The transformation to which we aspire is too vast and complex

2.Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 701.

3.Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 702.

4.See Nolini Kanta Gupta, The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo (Part Eight), p. 102.

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to come at one stroke; it must be allowed to come by stages. The physical change is the last of these stages and is itself a progressive process.

"The inner transformation cannot be brought about by physical means either of a positive or a negative nature. On the contrary, the physical change itself can only be brought about by a descent of the greater supramental consciousness into the cells of the body."⁵(italic ours.)

Yes, it is the 'supramental consciousness' - understood not in the sense of any and every spiritual consciousness above the plane of Mind but in the specific sense in which Sri Aurobindo uses it -that alone possesses the Knowledge and Power to effectuate the transformation of our physical being. It is the descent of Super-mind from above and the emergence of involved Supermind from behind the veil into the arena of our manifested becoming, that can progressively divinise our inner existence and finally proceed to the divinisation of our body itself as the summit achievement of the evolutionary elaboration of life. No other spiritual consciousness or power short of this Supermind, this divine Gnosis and the Truth-Consciousness (ṛta-cii) of Sachchidananda possesses this power of integral transformation. And that is why a subjective spiritual liberation of our inner being and an inner change of consciousness alone, although the essential precondition for any attempt at physical transformation to be at all made feasible, cannot be as a general rule sufficient by itself.

But why is it so? Why have the states of spiritual consciousness attained so far by men of spirit in different climes and times failed to mould the physical existence in the image of divinity? What are the basic difficulties that render this task of physical transformation almost impossible of realisation?

To have a proper grasp of the problem we must at the outset take note of a few cardinal points concerning the process of transformation in general:

(1) In order that a particular part of our total existence may be transformed, it is essential that the part itself seek for this desired transformation. It has to grow self-aware of the need for the change and acquire the necessary capacity to bear the transfiguring touch when it comes.

5. Sri Aurobindo, On Yoga II, Tome Two, p. 567.

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(2)A higher consciousness acting from above or imposing its influence on any lower part of the being, without the latter's self-conscious and willing collaboration, may indeed modify to some extent the prevailing nature or working of this lower part, but can never altogether transform it. "If the work were done from above, from some spiritual height, there might be a sublimation or uplifting or the creation of a new structure compelled by the sheer force of the influence from above; but this change might not be accepted as native to itself by the lower being; it would not be a total growth, an integral evolution, but a partial and imposed formation...; a creation from outside the normal nature, by imposition upon it, it could be durable in its entirety only as long as there was a maintenance of the creating influence."⁶

(3)The higher Power and Consciousness has thus to descend into the lower part and dynamically act therein, seeking to awaken in the process the consenting participation of the latter. But this meeting of the higher and the lower has a reciprocal two-way consequence. While the higher seeks to transfigure the lower with its own power and its own law of nature, svadharma, it is at the same time modified, its light obscured and its effectivity curtailed by the counteraction of the lower. To quote Sri Aurobindo again;

"A descent of consciousness into the lower levels is... necessary, but in this way also it is difficult to work out the full power of the higher principle; there is a modification, dilution, diminution which keeps up an imperfection and limitation in the results: the light of a greater knowledge comes down but gets blurred and modified, its significance misinterpreted or its truth mixed with mental and vital error, or the force, the power to fulfil itself is not commensurate with its light.... A mutilated power, a partial effect or hampered movement is the consequence."⁷

(4)Now the capacity of the higher principle to modify or change the lower without at the same time itself undergoing any dilution or mixture depends upon its essential potency. "It is not likely that it will be able to bring about an entire transformation if

6.Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, pp. 915-16.

7.Ibid., p. 916.

8.Ibid., p. 704.

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Now, if we view the problem of physical transformation in the light of the above points, we can very well understand why this problem has defied any solution so far. First of all, our body itself possesses a subconscient consciousness of its own which clings with an obstinate fidelity to its past habits and modes of functioning and automatically and invariably offers a dogged opposition to all that seeks to change its nature. And this is so because the process of evolution here upon earth has started from an inconscient base and all that has emerged and developed afterwards has had to appear as a superstructure upon the unchanged foundation of Inconscience.

Thus even in man, as yet the summit product of evolutionary becoming, the substance of the normal being is moulded out of the Inconscience. "Our ignorance is a growth of Knowledge in a substance of being which is nescient; the consciousness it develops, the knowledge it establishes are always dogged, penetrated, enveloped by this nescience.... The nescience invades or encompasses or even swallows up and absorbs into its oblivious darkness all that enters into it; it compels the descending light to compromise with the lesser light it enters: there is a mixture, a diminution and dilution of itself, a diminution, a modification, an incomplete authenticity of its truth and power."⁹

Thus, unless this 'blind Ananke of the Inconscience' can somehow be illumined and transfigured, there can be no prospect for any physical transformation. For this 'dragon base' remaining as it is now, the dead weight of the inconscient substratum of our physical being, the inexorable downward pull towards the original Inertia and Nescience, will infructify the action of any intervening Force that seeks to effectuate a radical transformation. Even the higher spiritual-mental powers and their intensities entering into the substance of this Inconscient foundation, undergo this inescapable disability and cannot annul the disparity between the consciousness that comes in and its force of dynamic effectuation. Thus whatever the degree or status of the subjective spiritual illumination of the sadhaka, this substance of Inconscience constituting his body and physical nature continues to circumscribe and diminish "the sovereignty and freedom and dynamism of the spirit with its own force of adjustment by limitation, demarcation by

9. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, pp. 960-61.

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incapacity, foundation of energy on the repose of an original Inertia"¹⁰, and as a consequence remains subject to the established and inexorable laws of Darkness and Incapacity and Death.

Faced with this almost insuperable difficulty of physical transformation, most spiritual seekers have tended to turn away from the physical being of man with aversion or even total denial, and reconciled themselves to its supposedly unalterable fate of ever remaining unregenerate and untransformed. But, evidently, this cannot be the right attitude for the sadhaka of the Integral Yoga. Since a divine transformation of all the parts of our existence including its most material foundation is the goal envisaged by the Yoga of Integral Transformation, we must seek for the clue that will resolve the age-old deadlock and open the portals to the transfiguration of our body.

We have seen before that a 'static seizure' of the domains of the spirit in our inner consciousness is not sufficient for the physical transformation; for that to be possible there must come about a dynamic descent of the higher consciousness into our physical nature and a luminous awakening evoked in the very bosom of body-consciousness itself.

Now, it is only the supramental Force, the 'original and final self-determining Truth-Force of the self-existent Infinite' that has got the necessary potency to entirely overcome the iron hold of the basal Inconscience. For only the supermind can descend into the subterranean reaches of our existence without losing in any way its full dynamic power of action; for "its action is always intrinsic and automatic, its will and knowledge identical and the result commensurate: its nature is a self-achieving Truth-Consciousness."¹¹ To the dark negating Necessity of the Inconscience, supermind opposes a supremely imperative luminous spiritual Necessity that is irresistible in its power of effectuation.

It follows then that if there is to be an entire transformation even of our material existence, supermind or divine Gnosis must directly intervene in our earth-nature and overtly act therein. From the point of view of evolution, this supramental intervention will take the form of a twofold process. When the evolutionary Nature is found ready and receptive, there will occur "a supramental inflow from above, the descent of a gnostic being into the

10.The Life Divine, p. 962.

11.Ibid., p. 917.

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nature, and an emergence of the concealed supramental force from below; the influx and the unveiling between them will remove... the nature of the Ignorance. The rule of the Inconscient will disappear: for its Inconscience will be changed by the outburst of the greater secret Consciousness within it, the hidden Light, into what it always was in reality, a sea of the secret Supercon-science."¹²

As a result of this transmutation of the inconscient foundation of our embodied existence, spirit will become the truly sovereign occupant of form, our bodily existence will transcend the present law of death, division and mutual devouring, the material substance itself will be transfigured and spiritualised and our body will become the body divine that will "reflect or reproduce here in a divine life on the earth something of this highest greatness and glory of the self-manifesting Spirit."¹³

At this point the sceptic may raise his eyebrows and exclaim: "Impossible! This is too fantastic a possibility to be realised by the future evolution of man, albeit supramental." But have not the achievements of each new phase of the evolutionary unfoldment of life upon earth looked like fantasies when viewed from the station of an anterior phase? Who could have possibly imagined that in the midst of the inanimate and insensible primal desert universe of "nebulae and star-clusters and suns and planets, existing only for itself, without a sense in it, empty of cause or purpose"¹⁴, there could at all be first an outbreak of teeming life and then the appearance of a thinking mind? Would it not have seemed to be a sheer absurdity to foresee that "in this minute island of life,... so inconspicuous amid the immensities, in one sole species out of this petty multitude, a mental being would emerge,... who would create all manner of utensils, tools, instruments out of Matter for all kinds of utilities, erect out of it cities, houses, temples, theatres, laboratories, factories, chisel from it statues and carve cave-cathedrals, invent architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry and a hundred crafts and arts, discover the mathematics and physics of the universe and the hidden secret of its structure, live for the sake of mind and its interests, for thought and knowledge, develop into the thinker, the philosopher and scientist and, as a supreme

12.The Life Divine, p. 968.

13.Sri Aurobindo, The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth (1952 ed.), p. 74.

14.The Life Divine, p. 849.

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defiance to the reign of Matter, awake in himself to the hidden Godhead, become the hunter after the invisible, the mystic and the spiritual seeker."¹⁵

Indeed, no limit need be or can be put to evolutionary possibilities. Actuality never exhausts the sum of potentialities.¹⁶ And, as Sri Aurobindo has so forcefully pointed out, to argue that something cannot be done because it has never yet been done is to "deny the possibility of changing things and thus of evolution, of the realisation of the unrealised,... and reduce all to a matter of rigid and unalterable status quo, which is an insolent defiance to both fact and reason (!) and suprareason."¹⁷

But this cannot be. And evolutionary Nature brushes aside all our preconceived notions of plausibility and proceeds always to conquer ever-new terrains of achievement.¹⁸ But a valid question may be raised whether the process of evolution is still continuing, particularly so far as form-evolution is concerned. We maintained that the divine body to appear in the course of the future evolution of man will have a different structure and a new type of 'physiological' functioning and acquire hitherto unrealised evolutionary capabilities. But has not the process of organic evolution stopped long since? And has not the human body with all its foibles and virtues, its chemistry and physiology, already acquired a well-set unalterable disposition? If so, the present structure and habitual responses of man's body must be deemed to be permanent and binding and incapable of any alteration. After all - the disbeliever would so declare - the body is the product of inconscient physical energy and the consciousness that seems to indwell it is only a derivative outcome of the operation of this energy. Hence it follows that once the evolutionary process has come to a stop, there is no more any scope for any adaptive improvement and our bodily system is destined to remain bound down to its present form and functioning. For, if the process of evolutionary transfiguration is set aside as not being operative any longer, what other alternative

15.The Life Divine, p. 850.

16.Cf. "Impossibility is only a sum of greater unrealised possibles. It veils an advanced stage and a yet unaccomplished journey." (Sri Aurobindo, Thoughts and Glimpses; p. 6)

17.Nirodbaran, Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, First Series, pp. 62-63.

18.Cf. "All things (not only those that are conceivable at the moment, but all those that are for the moment inconceivable) all are not only possible, but will be realised." (The Mother, Bulletin, Vol. XIII, No. 3, p. 51.)

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mechanism can at all be conceived of that can bring about the necessary change?

But this train of reasoning is altogether fallacious. For, the implied assumptions and hence the conclusions are only half-truths, and has it not been well said that 'half-truth is its own Nemesis'? As a matter of fact, doubts and misgivings of the above sort arise from a superficial consideration of the truth of things, which again is due to the thought's concentrating on the appearance alone and missing thereby what lies behind the frontal process. But a deeper inquiry reveals to us that:

(l)'The true foundation is above while the branchings are downward, ūrdhavudhna nīcīna-śākha (Rig Veda), ūrdhamūlo'-vākśākha (Gita). Consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of Matter; it is on the contrary Matter itself that is derivative and a phenomenon of Energy. And this Energy that is secretly and universally operative behind all manifestation is 'not without a Being or Existence possessing it or a Consciousness supplying it': it is indeed in its essential nature the Consciousness-Force, cit-śakti, cit-tapas, of Sachchidananda.

(2)Thus our "body is not mere unconscious Matter: it is a structure of a secretly conscious Energy that has taken form in it."¹⁹ And consciousness that "seems to be a result is - in its reality, though not in its form - the origin; the effect is in the essence pre-existent to the apparent cause, the principle of the emergent activity precedent to its present field of action."²⁰

(3)That the embodied soul is so much dependent upon the bodily and nervous life, that the physiological functionings of the body govern and determine the reactions of the subjective being, is thus seen to be only a minor and secondary truth. The major and primary truth is that Consciousness is the real and original determinant of our bodily life; it can, if it so wills and under proper conditions, transmit its commands to the bodily instrument and govern its reactions "even to the overriding of its normal law or conditions of action."²¹

(4). That the body and not the indwelling consciousness appears to be the primary determinant is only a provisional evolutionary arrangement. For in the involutionary self-shrouding of

19.The Life Divine, P. 305.

20.Ibid., p. 853.

21.Ibid., p. 306.

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Consciousness, the principle of Matter represents the nethermost stage of the descent, 'an abysmal sleep, a fathomless trance of consciousness',²² in which the absorbed Energy is totally oblivious of its origin and real self, and supports the physical existence in a somnambulist action. Thus in our body, "the outer force and figure of being, what we might call the formal or form existence as distinguished from the immanent or secretly governing consciousness, is lost in the physical action, is so absorbed into it as to be fixed in a stereotyped self-oblivion unaware of what it is and what it is doing."²³

(5)But behind the outer veil of material inconscience and the iron-grip of physico-chemical determinism, a secret involved Consciousness, cosmic and infinite, is always at work in our body. And without this supporting greater Consciousness-Force that is 'awake in all that sleeps',²⁴ our physical system itself would have no power of action, nor any organising coherence at all.

(6)Now, the whole nisus of the evolutionary process is to bring out to the front the totality of this involved Consciousness and make it the overt master even over our outer existence and nature. It follows then that the evolutionary emergence cannot stop short with man and mental consciousness. For Mind is no more than an intermediate power of consciousness, limited in vision and limping in movement. Now, "evolution is an inverse action of the involution: what is an ultimate and last derivation in the involution is the first to appear in the evolution; what was original and primal in the involution is in the evolution the last and supreme emergence."²⁵ Thus spirit being the original involutionary element and factor must be a final evolutionary emergence. The evolutionary progression is thus bound to continue till Supermind, the original 'creative medium' of the Divine, and the triune glory of Sachchidananda stand evolved here in the material universe.²⁶

(7) The old evolutionary procedure that relied on a prior form evolution

22.The Life Divine, p. 593,

23.Ibid., p. 711.

24.Ya eṣa supteṣu jāgarti. (Katha Upanishad, V.8.)

25.The Life Divine, p. 853.

26.Cf. "The Divine descends from pure existence through the play of Consciousness-Force and Bliss and the creative medium of Supermind into cosmic being; we ascend from Matter through a developing life, soul and mind and the illuminating medium of supermind towards the divine being." (The Life Divine, p. 264).

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to effectuate a resultant change of consciousness has now been superseded. Indeed, "in man a reversal is possible, indeed inevitable; for it is through his consciousness, through its instrumentation and no longer through a new bodily organism as a first instrumentation that the evolution can and must be effected.... It is no longer the change of body that must precede the change of consciousness; the consciousness itself by its mutation will necessitate and operate whatever mutation is needed for the body."²⁷ (Italics ours.)

(8) With the emergence of Supermind in evolution, will come about the discovery of all the hidden truths and powers of the concealed Spirit; and the right dynamisation of that higher knowledge will establish the Spirit's total mastery over all its fields of operation. Matter in general and the body in particular will then be obedient instruments of the Spirit and pliantly move to fulfil without any let or hindrance all the demands made upon them.

We conclude then that when we speak of the ultimate conquest of the present disabilities of our physical existence to be achieved through the process of an evolutionary transfiguration, we are not indulging in a child-soul's phantasy or its demands for arbitrary miracles nor are we visualising any impossible chimera that goes beyond or outside all forces of Nature. What we are envisaging is the control and conquest of the prevailing determinism of our bodily system by the higher determinism of the supernal grades and powers of our being. And there is nothing "miraculous" or "irrational" here. Indeed,"what seems to us supernatural is in fact either a spontaneous irruption of the phenomena of other-Nature into physical Nature or... a possession of the knowledge and power of the higher orders or grades of cosmic Being and Energy and the direction of their forces and processes towards the production of effects in the physical world by seizing on possibilities of interconnection and means for a material effectuality."²⁸

But why at all these misgivings and doubts about the prospect of

27.The Life Divine, p. 844.

28.The Life Divine, pp. 874-75.

Cf. "I may say with certainty that people who want to see miracles are people who cherish their ignorance!... There is miracle, because you do not give people the time to see the procedure by which you do things, you do not show them the steps." (The Mother, Bulletin, August, 1964, p. 31.)

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some wonderful achievements expected to come from a future supramental evolution? Is not, our body, even in its actuality, already a marvel product of organic evolution? We do not pause to study and contemplate its weird functioning and its intricate structure; therefore it appears to our blissful ignorance altogether self-evident, simple and natural! But anyone who studies the physiology and biochemistry of a living body cannot but be struck by the amazing ingenuity displayed by life although acting so far under the heavy load of a frontal ignorance. To cite only a few amongst a host of instances that baffle the comprehension of even the twentieth-century men of science:

(a)Harmony and co-ordination: We know that life is largely a matter of enzymes. Even the simplest of living cells contains a thousand or more of them. Thus the "picture of the smallest living cell is already one of a complexity which the mind finds difficulty in grasping. How all these separate and complex enzyme molecules are packed away in a tiny fragment of protoplasm, how they work in harmony with each other, producing that result which we recognize as life, we hardly know."²⁹ (Italics ours.)

(b)Enzymatic action: its speed and efficiency: We know that almost all biochemical reactions in a living body are mediated by enzymes. But how, through what mechanism, these wonderful bio-catalysts bring about these diverse reactions is still "largely a matter of conjecture".³⁰

And the speed and smoothness accompanying these enzymatic actions are something that the chemist can hardly match in his laboratory experiments. "In practice, chemical synthesis in the laboratory is often very difficult. Compounds have to be transformed one step at a time, often by wasteful processes, using powerful chemicals, heat, and sometimes electrical actions, to bring about the desired changes. It may take months to build up a compound, by a complicated sequence of actions, which a cell can make in a matter of minutes."³¹ (Italics ours.)

It is not only the speed of these enzymatic actions that is breathtaking; their efficiency too is wonderful. These enzymes bring about rapid chemical changes and in large bulks, even when they

29.J.A.V. Butler, Inside the Living Ceil (1959), p. 27.

30.Ibid., p. 25.

31.Ibid.,

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are present in very small quantities, and that too without being changed themselves. Thus, "a solution containing a ten millionth of an ounce of pepsin has a powerful effect on the clotting of milk; rennin, another enzyme present in calves' stomachs and used for making junkets and cheese, can clot ten million times its weight of milk in ten minutes. Urease crystals produce a hundred times their weight of ammonia from urea in. five minutes; it is said that one molecule of catalase can decompose over two million molecules of hydrogen peroxide every minute."³²

(c) The mystery of specific protein synthesis: Proteins are the most essential constituents of all living cells. But these are different and specific for different kinds of cells. Now, all these various proteins are made up of highly complex chains of amino acids and "the number of possible ways of arranging, say, a chain of one hundred units chosen from twenty different kinds is enormous. But the cell selects the amino acids and places them in the correct order with great ease and speed. In many bacteria a new generation is produced in thirty minutes or even less time. In this period, the full complement of proteins for a new cell must be synthesized. It is evident that the protein synthesizing mechanism works with great speed and efficiency. What is its nature?"³³

Modern science has not yet been able to unravel this greatest mystery of life, the mystery of how specific proteins are made.

Instances are indeed legion that go to demonstrate life's wonderful ingenuity and what has been termed by Walter Cannon ,'the wisdom of the body'. We need not cite any more examples here, for even a slight acquaintance with the organisational details of living bodies and with the behaviour patterns of different creatures cannot but convince even the most casual observer that behind the apparent inconscience of the workings of physico-chemical energies there must be operative all the while a conscient purposive Force. The physical scientist may seek to 'explain' away all these things in terms of physical causality bearing such high-names as adaptability, homoeostasis, feed-back reactions, etc. But this sort of 'explanation' does not go very far. For it explains, if at all, only the phenomenal 'how' and never the intrinsic 'why'.

Now we can very well imagine what wonderful results will be achieved in the overt frontal plane of life, when the divine

32.J.A.V. Butler, op. cit., p. 24.

33.Ibid., p. 50.

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Supermind will emerge from behind and descend from above to take charge of the evolutionary process.

In referring to the supramental evolution, we have been so far speaking in the future tense, but that should not convey the impression that the supramental manifestation is something that is still lying in the womb of distant future and its possible glorious achievements that we have mentioned above are only the golden ineffectual dreams of incorrigible optimists. No, the supramental manifestation upon earth is no longer just a speculative conjecture; it has already entered the phase of active realisation. For the divine supermind has descended into earth-nature and is now dynamically operative to liberate the supramental principle involved within her.

As a consequence of this supramental descent and its subsequent action, something of capital importance has happened in a particular individual body, that unmistakably heralds the emergence of a divinely transformed physical existence in the foreseeable future. On this point let us listen to the words of the Mother about whom Sri Aurobindo declared a long time ago: "The Mother comes in order to bring down the Supramental and it is the descent which makes her full manifestation here possible."³⁴ Also, "Her embodiment is a chance for the earth-consciousness to receive the Supramental into it and undergo first the transformation necessary for that to be possible.³⁵

Is it not She again who Herself announced to the world in the month of March 1956 after the descent of the Supermind:

"Lord, Thou hast willed, and I execute:

A new Light breaks upon the earth,

A new world is born.

The things that were promisded are fulfilled."

Now, as regards some of the most significant results already attained of this supramental manifestation upon earth, the Mother says:

"There are many kinds of freedom, mental freedom, vital freedom, spiritual freedom, which are the fruits of successive mastery. But there is quite a new freedom that has become

34.Sri Aurobindo on the Mother, p. 48.

35.Ibid., p. 49.

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possible with the supramental manifestation, the freedom of the body.

"One of the very first results of the supramental manifestation has been to give to the body a freedom and an autonomy which it had never known. And when I speak of freedom, it is not a matter of a psychological perception or a state of inner consciousness, it is another thing and it is much better - it is a new phenomenon in the body, in the cells of the body. The cells themselves have felt for the first time that they are free, that they have a power of decision.

"Normally as it is, the body lives always with the impression that it is not master in its house: ... Now, with the supramental manifestation, something new has happened in the body: it feels it is master of the house, autonomous, both the feet planted upon earth, if I may say so. The impression it gives physically is that the whole being is erect, it has lifted its head - one is master... Yes, things have changed. It is the body that has a direct power without any external intervention. I consider this to be a very important result."³⁶

Then the Mother adds significantly: "This new vibration in the body has made me understand the mechanism of the transformation. It is not a thing that comes with a Higher Will, a higher consciousness imposed upon the body, it is the body itself that wakes up in the cells, it is a freedom of the cells themselves, altogether a new vibration, and the disorders are mended, disorders even antecedent to the supramental manifestation."³⁷ (Italics ours.)

The divine transfiguration of our embodied material existence and the emergence of a divine body upon earth are no longer dreams, to be realised, if at all, perhaps at the end of thousands of years from now. Here and now, we may remind our readers, the process of physical transformation has already been undertaken and is being executed with the full potency of Supermind in action.

Now what will be the ultimate impact of this supramental manifestation upon the physico-chemical structure of our present human body? Sri Aurobindo envisages a radical change in the structure and functioning of the body itself before it can serve as the vehicle of a supramental divine life. For, the human body's present "minutely constructed and elaborated system of organs and a precarious order of their functioning which can easily

36.Bulletin. Vol. X, No. 1, pp. 81-85.

37.Ibid.

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become a disorder, open to a general or local disorganisation"³⁸ represent too heavy a liability for the actually elaborated human body to act as the physical base for a divinised existence. In the words of Sri Aurobindo:

"Even if we suppose a soul, a conscious will at work in this body it could not arrive at a divine transformation if there were no radical change in the bodily instrument itself and in the organisation of its material workings. The transforming agent will be bound and stopped in its work by the physical organism's unalterable limitations and held up by the unmodified or imperfectly modified original animal in us. The possibility of the disorders, derangements, maladies native to these physical arrangements would still be there and could only be shut out by a constant vigilance or perpetual control obligatory on the corporeal instruments' spiritual inhabitant and master. This could not be called a truly divine body; for in a divine body an inherent freedom from all these things would be natural and perpetual; this freedom would be a normal and native truth of its being and therefore inevitable and unalterable. A radical transformation of the functioning and... of the structure... of the bodily system would be imperative."³⁹ (Italics ours.)

Indeed, one of the urges of the supramental evolution will be to effectuate the necessary changes in the most material part of the organism, in its physical constitution and its bodily processes. As a consequence of the direct and overt intervention of Supermind, many of the organs of the present human body will be automatically changed in their material working and use, and the need of their instrumentation and even of their existence greatly diminished. This change might ultimately go so far that some of "these organs might cease to be indispensable and even be felt as too obstructive: the central force might use them less and less and finally throw aside their use altogether. If that happened they might waste by atrophy, be reduced to an insignificant minimum or even disappear. The central force might substitute for them subtle organs of a very different character or, if anything material was needed, instruments that would be forms of dynamism or plastic transmitters rather than what we know as organs."⁴⁰

To minds attached to the present state of things these sort of

38.Sri Aurobindo, The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth (1952 ed.), p. 60.

39.Ibid., pp. 61-62.

40.Ibid., p. 70.

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revolutionary changes in the physical structure and functioning of the human body may appear to be a senseless and impossible chimera. But, Sri Aurobindo warns us, no limits and no impossibility of any necessary change can be imposed on the evolutionary urge. And when Supermind, the divine Gnosis, takes charge of evolution, there is absolutely nothing impossible under the Sun.

Let us conclude this chapter and the book with some prophetic lines from sri Aurobindo's Savitri:

"The Spirit shall look out through Matter's gaze

And Matter shall reveal the Spirits' face.

Then man and superman shall be at one

And all the earth become a single life.

....

The Spirit shall take up the human play,

This earthly life become the life Divine."

(Savitri, Bk. XI . C . l , pp.709, 711.)

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