The Destiny of the Body

Chapter II

A Semblance of Victory

Life was a search but finding never came.

(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book II, Canto VI, p. 174)

From food man was born. Verily, man, this human being, is made of the essential substance of food.¹

(Taittiriya Upanishad, II. 1)

If a person does not eat,...he has to give up his life at the end; on the other hand, if he takes in food again, he becomes richly endowed with life.

(Maitri Upanishad, 6.11)

It is a common enough observation that a living body may sometimes appear to manage without any food-intake, if not for all time at least for a short while, under some special circumstances such as fevers and consumptive diseases, starvation and fasting, hibernation and estivation, and of course in the case of what has been termed 'suspended animation' or 'vie ralentie'. Now, how does the organism manage to go without food and remain all the same a viable concern, albeit temporarily? Do these phenomena offer any clue to the solution of the problem we are grappling with?

The answer is an emphatic NO. For, as our study will presently reveal, the success achieved by embodied life in these instances of suspension of food-intake is more apparent than real. For, as a matter of fact, the process of food-utilisation continues all the while with this sole difference that in these special cases external alimentation is replaced by the tapping of the reserve food already stored in the bodily system through prior food-intake.

Indeed, one of the principal characteristics of a living organism is to strike a proper balance between what it receives from outside in the form of food-energy and what it has to expend through its multifarious activities, so that there may always be a reserve pool. Of course, we can conceive of "an organism which balanced its

¹ Sri Aurobindo's translation.

Page 232

accounts from hour to hour, but never had much margin. There are such organisms which live, to use a homely expression, from hand to mouth. They are viable, going concerns, but thy are trading on a very restricted basis of capital. It is plain that organisms could not have gone very far on such dangerous lines. They could not have survived any crises. There is obvious advantage therefore in storing energy in potential form, and this accumulation of reserves is fundamentally characteristic of organisms."¹

Thus the organic aliments that are usually taken into the body are not all used up immediately to meet the necessary metabolic needs: a part of these is stored in the body for future emergency uses, mostly in the form of lipids or fat deposits and glycogen or animal starch.

Now in conditions such as starvation, when all external supplies are cut off, the energy-need for the various metabolic processes in the living body continues as before but the source of fulfilment is now the body's own reserves of fats, carbohydrates and, to some extent, proteins. This process of consumption of body substances, this 'self-devouring' or 'autophagic, as it has been so well termed, cannot however continue indefinitely and obviously there comes a time when these reserves are exhausted or seriously depleted: it is then that death ensues.

The progressive loss of body matter due to this process of 'self-devouring' during the period of continuous food privation has been experimentally well established. Thus it has been found that at the very beginning of the period of starvation the glucidic reserves in the form of glycogen are attacked and used up. But at the end of four days the contribution of glycogen to the fulfilment of total energy need of the body falls to a bare 1 per cent and the rest has to be met by the mobilisation of lipid or fat reserves. After five days of starvation even the proteids, the vital building materials of all living substance, are called on to contribute their share (roughly 15 per cent) of metabolic fuel. But the body struggles hard through intricate physiological processes to keep down their consumption to a minimum. But as the period of fast lengthens and the fat reserves are totally used up, the ratio of protein degradation abruptly shoots up and the organism falls a prey to death.

¹ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (Ed. Hastings), Vol. 8, p. 3.

Page 233

The substantial loss at the moment of death has been statistically determined to be about 40 per cent of the body weight. But all the tissues and organs are not equally affected. The adipose tissues completely disappear, the liver loses 60 per cent of its weight and the muscles get diminished to the tune of 40 per cent. But the heart and the nervous system withstand all material loss. In fact, it is when the brain, the last line of the body's defences ("ultime donjon de la defense"), begins to falter and disintegrate that the animal dies.¹

Mr. W. M. Smallwood has experimented with some fish and has been able to keep one without food for twenty months at a stretch! But the inevitable result was that muscles of the piscine body became very much reduced and the fish was hardly able to move. A similar situation develops in human beings in the course of prolonged illness; the body becomes very much lighter and emaciated. And all this is due to the withdrawal and utilisation of the energy-stuff stored in the muscles of the body.

One encounters the same phenomenon of 'self-devouring' in the case of hibernation or estivation.² It has been noted that hibernation and starvation are two closely allied phenomena. In both the instances the organism falls back upon its reserve pool and sustains itself by utilizing the energy stored in the body. In fact, "the hibernating animals possess between the two scapular girdles a many-lobed organ of brown colour. This organ otherwise called hibernal mass appears to play the role of a nutritive reserve.... This hibernal mass is indeed very rich in fat content ...and its volume is considerably diminished in the course of a hibernal fast, only to be reconstituted during the next active phase of the animal's life."³ A brown bat may thus lose 35 per cent of its body weight and a ground squirrel 80 per cent during a single winter.

But how, through what physiological mechanism, does the body contrive to utilize the stored food products in all the aforesaid instances of food privation such as starvation or hibernation or

¹ See "Pertes de Matière pendant l'Inanition" in Morphologie et physio-logie animales by G. Bresse, p. 438.

² During periods of cold or during periods of drought when the available food is in short supply, certain animals enter a state of suspended animation called hibernation or winter dormancy and estivation or summer torpidity.

³ G. Bresse, op. cit. p. 740.

Page 234

emaciation from sickness? The prevalent theory is that it is the internal enzymes, — those ubiquitous biocatalysers responsible for the efficient functioning of almost all the biochemical reactions in the body, — that reverse the gear, so to say, whenever there is a demand for food-energy and attack the muscles in order to "release the food-energy that exists as muscle which thus freed is carried by the blood to such parts of the body as demand food to keep the organism living."¹ It is interesting to note in this connection that it is because of this reversibility of enzymatic action that "a chemical examination of the blood of a starved fish and of one recently caught revealed the fact that there was about the same amount of food products in each."²

But it is after all beside the question to investigate the actual nature of autophagic The essential point we have to note instead is that, in all the situations cited above, the body continues to make use of food if not externally and in a direct manner yet at least indirectly and in a more covert way. For, there ensues a "struggle of the parts" of the body, the less resistant part breaking down and serving as food for the rest. So these instances cannot be considered to illustrate how embodied life has achieved some success in tackling the problem of food-intake.

But there exists a striking phenomenon that seems to prove that in some special circumstances the food-need of the body, whether external or internal, may be drastically curtailed' or even altogether abrogated. We are of course referring to the phenomenon of suspended animation with its reduced metabolism.

The metabolic criterion is one of the two principal criteria of all manifestation of life, the other being the reproductive criterion. Indeed, a living body is the arena of a ceaseless process of innumerable biochemical actions and reactions of synthesis and degradation. Now all this metabolic activity requires the expenditure of energy and this energy is usually derived from the chemically potential energy of material aliments. Thus the more rapid is the rate of metabolic processes the greater will be the need for the consumption of food.

Now experimental studies have shown that this metabolic criterion may be altogether suspended in the case of seeds, in many bacteria and in a few small invertebrate animals that can be dehydrated by the process of freeze drying, in which condition

^{1 2} W. M. Smallwood, A Text-Book of Biology, p. 62.

Page 235

viability may remain for years together. Some of the poikilothermic animals, even those quite advanced in the scale of organic evolution, such as the Fish, the Reptiles, and the Molluscs, may be exposed to very low temperatures (-30°C) and reduced to an inactive life without at the same time losing the capacity to come back to life-activity whenever they are de-frozen in a sufficiently slow and graded manner. Many lower organisms have been cooled in liquid oxygen to a temperature of -183°C and a few in liquid helium to -269°C, that is to say, to a temperature little above absolute zero (-273°C), and have still survived!

The explanation lies in the fact that the metabolic rate decreases with the fall in body temperature and life enters a state of quasi-static latency. It is through such a process of reduced metabolism and therefore through greatly curtailed food-need that many hibernating animals manage to survive the winter on the body reserves they possess. As the temperature of an organism progressively goes down, the speed of physiological processes gradually diminishes, the oxygen consumption is reduced up to one-hundreth of the normal, the heart rate goes down to a few beats per minute, the circulatory movement is practically suspended and the organism becomes lethargic or torpid.

But for obvious reasons this too cannot be the right solution from our point of view. For what we envisage as our ideal is a divinely dynamic outpouring of life and not the dormancy of the life-processes in the bosom of still inactivity. But in the prevailing conditions of the body, any increase in dynamism entails a higher metabolic rate and a correspondingly greater food-intake. "The enormous amount of extra energy required for activity is clear from the change in the metabolic rate of a humming-bird in flight"¹ which is thirteen times more than that of the same humming-bird at rest. "The increase in the rate for a man who performs work at his maximum capacity is also about 12 to 15 times his resting metabolic rate."²

Conversely, the metabolic rate for a dynamic living remaining intact, food privation is bound to reduce the dynamic play of life and seriously sap the physical-vital vigour of the being. Where lies then the solution to the problem?

Here at this point we must turn our gaze to the other end of the scale and take cognizance of the significant fact that the problem

^{1 2} K. Schmidt-Nielsen, Animal Physiology, p. 34.

Page 236

of dynamisation of life-activity even in the period of a total fast has been adequately solved in some Yogic Siddhis.

It has indeed been practically demonstrated that it is possible, through the application of Yoga-Shakti, to prevent the inevitable energy-loss due to starvation or fasting and to replenish the living system with vital, mental and even purely physical energies drawn directly from the universal source and not through the cumbersome process of material alimentation. Thus Sri Aurobindo certifies from his own personal experience¹ that "it is indeed possible even while fasting for very long periods to maintain the full energies and activities of the soul and mind and life, even those of the body, to remain wakeful but concentrated in Yoga all the time, or to think and write day and night, to dispense with sleep, to walk eight hours a day, maintaining all these activities separately or together and not feel any loss of strength, any fatigue, any kind of failure or decadence."²

Is this then the solution that we have been seeking after? Unfortunately it is not, for herein there is a snag that has not yet been removed; it is the ineluctable withering away of the material substance of the body in starvation. Thus, as Sri Aurobindo himself has warned us: "One thing one does not escape and that is the wasting of the material tissues of the body, its flesh and substance."³ And as long as this cardinal problem of preventing the disintegration of the gross material basis of life is not satisfactorily solved, "we have to go back to food and the established material forces of Nature,"⁴ for "as her basic means for maintaining and renewing the gross physical body and its workings and inner potencies Nature has selected the taking in of outside matter in the shape of food, its digestion, assimilation of what is assimilable and elimination of what cannot or ought not to be assimilated."⁵

We are thus back at the point from which we started and, indeed, the problem will always defy any solution unless and until the basic metaphysical question of Hunger and Thirst be previously solved. For, a little reflexion will bring home the truth that the body's hunger is only the outermost fringe and a physical symbol

¹ Consult for necessary details: A. B. Purani, Life of Sri Aurobindo, pp. 141-43.

^{2 3 4 5} Sri Aurobindo, The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, pp. 51-53.

Page 237

as it were of a much more profound and widely operative universal principle of Hunger and Thirst.

What, then, is the metaphysics of Hunger? — the nature of the problem and its suggested solution?

Page 238