The Destiny of the Body

Chapter XIII

Conclusion

If the ways are crude, it is because the Manifestation itself is [as yet] very crude. And as it perfects itself, as it becomes more fit to manifest that which is eternally progressive, cruder means will be left behind for subtler means...

(The Mother, Bulletin Vol. XIV, No. 3, p. 47)

There are many, a very large number, who ask what the new life would be like and I answer to them: "There will be an interchange of forces, a circulating energy: the building of the body will be quite different, all these ungainly organs will disappear and be replaced by psychological functions; and the necessity of eating, eating always will disappear."

(The Mother, Bulletin, Vol. XVI, No. 2, p. 57)

For the manifestation or building of a divine body on earth there must be an initial transformation, the appearance of a new, a greater and more developed type, not a continuance with little modifications of the present physical form and its limited possibilities.

(Sri Aurobindo, The Supramental Manifestation

upon Earth, p. 71)

We have at last come to the end of our survey. We have endeavoured to study the problem of material alimentation in all its aspects, physiological, bio-chemical and metaphysical, and suggested some possible ways in which an evolving body can expect to meet its energy-needs and replenish its substantial stuff otherwise than by the absorption of foreign matter in the shape of material aliments. The physical process of rapacious devouring will then surely come to an end; all the crudeness associated with eating will disappear altogether; new instrumentalities will emerge in the body and new processes subtle and potent will be discovered by it in order to maintain its integrity and growth.

The consequences of this victory over the need for material alimentation will indeed be momentous. For it is not simply the

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present food-habit of the body that will be replaced by something direct and refined. The liberation of the body from its utter dependence for its very existence upon the assimilation of material aliments will undoubtedly have a great repercussion on the very structure and organ-systems of our body. For even a little reflection reveals to us that our physical system along with that of other multicellular organisms owes a great deal of its present structure and form, internal as well as external, to the elaborate mechanism devised by evolutionary Nature for satisfying the nutritional requirements of the body-cells. It will indeed be no exaggeration to say that almost three-fourths of the complexity of the prevailing organisation of our body is due to the present mode of alimentation. Thus the various organ-systems representing the digestive system, the circulatory system, the respiratory system and the excretory system are all geared to play different but essential roles in the total nutritional functioning of the body.

As a matter of fact, our body-cells require a constant supply of aliments for their growth and proper functioning. But these cells of a multicellular body are not in direct communication with the external world. So nutrients have somehow to be brought to these cells. Hence arises the necessity of the circulatory system which assures through the agency of lymph and blood a continuous transport of cell-aliments to the various tissues of the body. But the nutrients that are directly assimilable by the cells are not ordinarily available in the external world. So the body has had to be provided with the digestive system that has for its role the biochemical break-down and transformation of the ingested foodstuffs into simple nutrients capable of being used by the cells. In order to effectuate these bio-chemical transformations the body has to create a large group of bio-catalysts called digestive enzymes. But this is not all. The cells have to gather all their needed energy from the oxidation of the aliments brought to their doors. So, along with these aliments, a constant supply of the vital gas oxygen must be maintained throughout the body. And thus arises the necessity of the respiratory system. Finally, in course of metabolic changes the cells liberate some obnoxious products like carbon dioxide gas and urea and these must be eliminated from the living body in order to maintain its well-being. To fulfil this function of elimination the excretory system had to be devised.

We thus come to see that so many organs and structures of our

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present body, e.g., the alimentary tract, the stomach, the intestines, the lungs for the respiratory exchange, the heart for the pumping of the blood, the kidneys, etc., etc., are not at all fundamental and essential to any and every embodied life, but are merely accessory appendages brought into existence as responses to the basic need for the material alimentation of the body.

And all this has brought about such a complication in our physical structure! At the same time it has created for the body almost a vicious circle. For although it is a fact that in order to assure the supply of energy-aliments to the body, these complex organ-systems had to be elaborated, a great part of the energy released is actually used up in driving this complicated machinery itself! As the Mother has pointed out in connection with the possibility of a direct tapping of the universal Pranic energy:

"If you can assimilate that energy, assimilate it directly, then there is no limit to your energy.

"It is not like your stomach which can digest only a limited quantity of food and this food again can give out only a portion — a very small portion —of its energy. For after the energy spent in swallowing, masticating, digesting, etc. how much of it still remains available? If, on the other hand, you learn...to draw from the universal energy which is freely available in the world and in any quantity, you can take it in and absorb as much as you are capable of it."¹

Also, the fantastic complexity of the body-structure arising from the exigence of material alimentation makes our body susceptible to a great deal of otherwise avoidable disorders and complications. And the Mother is categorical when she declares:

"The body feels much, very much that everything could be simple, so simple! And for the body — this kind of individual agglomeration — to be able to transform itself it has just that need of simplifying itself, simplifying, simplifying. All these complications...which one is beginning now to understand and study, which are so intricate for the least thing — the least of our functionings is the result of such a complicated system that it is almost unthinkable. Certainly it would be impossible for the human

¹ Nolini Kanta Gupta, The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo (Part Eight), p. 97.

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thought to foresee and combine all these things — now Science is discovering it And one sees very clearly that if the functioning is to be divine, that is to say, if it is to escape this disorder and confusion, it must be simplified, simplified, simplified."¹

Sri Aurobindo too envisages a radical change in the structure and functioning of the body 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 become a disorder, open to a general or local disorganisation"² represent too heavy a liability for the actually elaborated human body to act as the physical base of 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 he 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 stil be there and could only be shut out by a constant vigilance or perpetual control obligatory on the corporeal instrument's 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, it may well be, of the structure...of the bodily system would be imperative."³

Indeed, one of the urges of the supramental evolution will be to effectuate the necessary change of the most material part of the organism, its physical constitution and its bodily processes. And it is quite clear that with the achievement of the victory over food-need as a consequence of the direct and overt intervention of Supermind, many of the organs of the present human body will be

¹ Bulletin, Vol. XV, No. 3, p. 49. (Italics ours)

²The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, p. 60.

³Ibid., pp. 61-62. (Italics ours)

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automatically changed in their material working 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." ¹

To minds attached to the present form of things this sort of 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 nothing impossible under the sun.

But a lingering doubt may still incite the sceptic to declare that even if theoretically valid, the dream of the emergence of a divine body upon earth may perhaps be realised only at the end of thousands of years. So any discussion of the divine destiny of the body or of the possibility of its conquest of sleep or food-need may appear to be premature and therefore bereft of any immediate importance.

But this doubt has got no solid foundation. For the descent of Supermind into Earth-Nature has marked a decisive transition from the evolution in Ignorance to a conscious evolution. The divine potency of Supermind has brought in an element of greatly accelerated speed in the whole process of evolutionary progression. In the words of Sri Aurobindo:

"The increased rapidity is possible ... because the conscious participation of the inner being is there and the power of the Super-nature is already at work in the half-transformed lower nature, so that the steps which would otherwise have had to be taken tentatively in the night of Inconscience or Ignorance can now be taken in an ncreasing light and power of Knowledge. The first obscure material movement of the evolutionary Force is marked by an

¹ The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, p. 70.

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aeonic graduality; the movement of life-progress proceeds slowly but still with a quicker step, it is concentrated into the figure of millenniums; mind can still further compress the tardy leisureliness of Time and make long paces of the centuries; but when the conscious spirit intervenes, a supremely concentrated pace of evolutionary swiftness becomes possible.... An involved rapidity of the evolutionary course swallowing up the stages can ... come in when the power of the conscious spirit has prepared the field and the supramental Force has begun to use its direct influence."¹

Now, such a stage in terrestrial evolution has already arrived. For, since 1956, Supermind or the Truth-Consciousness of Sachchidananda has overtly emerged in the field of evolution to become the governing principle there. And in due course this supramental action is bound to bring about a divine transfiguration of our embodied material existence. And a most important element of this figured physical transformation will surely be the elimination of material food-need along with all that it entails in terms of body-changes.

But a Sadhaka of the Yoga of Transformation should not for that matter force the pace, abstain from eating and adopt ascetic exercises with the false idea that he can expect to reach the desired physical siddhi through external means and arbitrary decisions of the mind. Imitation or semblance will not help in this matter. The main stress should therefore be laid on the change of consciousness, on an "inner liberation by an intimate, a constant, absolute, inevitable union with the vibration of the supramental forces. Then the preoccupation of each moment, the will of every element of the being, the aspiration of the whole being, including each and every cell of the body, will be this union with the supramental, the divine forces. There is no need at all any more to be preoccupied with the consequences that might follow. In the play of the universal forces and their manifestation, what must be will come naturally, spontaneously, automatically; one has not to think about it. The only thing that matters is keeping up the complete, total, constant — yes, constant — union with the Force, the Light, the Truth, the Power and the unspeakable Delight of the supramental consciousness."²

¹ The Life Divine, p. 932.

² The Mother, Bulletin, Vol. IX, No. 3, p. 145.

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So, the proper attitude for a Sadhaka should be not to make any call for an extreme or precipitate rejection of food-need for a still untransformed body but rather to establish a union of the entire being, including the body cells, with the vibration of the supramental force that is actually manifesting in the earth atmosphere. When this union is established, one becomes "free not only from all attachment, from all desire and preoccupation for food but even from all need in respect of food, by being in a state in which these things are so foreign to the consciousness that they have no place there.... Then to eat or not to eat, to sleep or not to sleep, all that has no longer any importance. It is an external rhythm left t6 the play of the universal forces in their totality, expressing themselves through circumstances and persons around you, giving to the body united, united wholly with the inner truth, a suppleness, a constant capacity for adaptation. If food is there, the body takes it, if it is not there, it does not think of it. If sleep is there it takes it, if it is not there it does not think of it. And so on with regard to all things."¹

Finally, with the progress of the supramental transformation of the physical system, if and when the moment arrives for the need of material sustenance from outside to be completely transcended, it must come "as a result of the awakened will of the spirit, a will also in Matter itself, an imperative evolutionary urge, an act of the creative transmutations of Time or a descent from the Transcendence. Meanwhile the drawing in of the universal energy by a conscious action of the higher powers of the being from around or from above, by a call to what is still to us a transcending consciousness or by an invasion or descent from the Transcendence itself may well become an occasional, a frequent or a constant phenomenon and even reduce the part played by food and its need to an incidence no longer preoccupying, a necessity minor and less and less imperative."²

At the end, new processes will surely be discovered by the New Body and new instrumentalities are bound to emerge therein in the course of the supramental transformation of our physical existence, which will annul all necessity for material alimentation.

And if this attempt at scoring a total victory over material Hunger looks like an act of sheer folly, we may only quote what

¹The Mother, Bulletin, Vol. IX, No. 3, pp. 141-143.

²The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, p. 54.

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the Mother has said in another context — the context of the physical conquest of death:

"That seems a madness. But all new things have appeared as madness until they become realities. The hour is come for this madness to be realised."¹

End of Part Four

¹ Bulletin, Vol. IX, No. 2, p. 85.

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