The Destiny of the Body

Foreword

As the Editor of Mother India, Monthly Review of Culture, published from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, I was happy to bring out most of the essays that make up this book. It is not always that an editor comes across plentiful evidence of an

understanding that grows bright Gazing on many truths.

Reading the series of studies contributed by Jugal Kishore Mukherjee I could not help being exhilarated not only by the scholarly thoroughness of its knowledge but also by the wide-ranging vitality of its insight.

The theme is one of the most challenging that the mind of man has faced: the evolutionary prospects of the human body. The human body is a bundle of opposites. It combines an ingenious system of interrelated life-serving functions with a fragility of overall balance seeming to invite death through many doors. It has an in-built process of growth, maturity and decline on the one hand while on the other it has the instinct of an interminable existence as if it wanted to wage constant war against its own mortality. Often it has harboured the mood in which

Life is a long preparedness for death,

but with equal frequency it has sought for an elixir which would banish all frailty from the flesh. Again, although its brain is only one of its numerous organs, it has a concentrated poise there by which it can ponder and affect its own organic processes as well as look behind or beyond them. This curious detachment and freedom shows it to be both subject and object at the same time and therefore the symbolic expression of some truth of physical being which is not exhausted by the present possibilities of living and conscious matter

. There is here a sense of

Infinite riches in a little room —

riches that could transfigure the limited-looking composite of solids, liquids and gases that ordinarily passes as the human body. Philosophers have attempted to understand the self-view and world-view from the brain-box as the result of a presence other than physical within the confines of that composite. They have also tried to explain away the search for the elixir of eternal youth as a misplacement of extra-terrestrial longings within a terrestrial context. "Not here and now but elsewhere and afar is your fulfilment": such has been the refrain of accredited wisdom. And indeed the masters of spirituality have found and revealed the Immortal who abides in the mortal and can fight free of his trammels. But a persistent voice rises from what appears to be mortal, crying: "I too am a god waiting to be found and revealed. Who shall free me from the disguise that disfigures my immortality ?"

Jugal Kishore Mukherjee brings the legitimacy of this utterance home to us by various interesting and illuminating routes. His exposition is a reminder to the champions of the spiritual life that the inner divinity is meant not to tear away from the outer form but to awaken that form to a natural kinship with it. It is also a reminder to the champions of the physical life that the ultimate source of this life's full flowering lies in that inner divinity and its awakening touch on matter.

Mukherjee's double reminder catches in a fine crystallisation of the intellect the light which Sri Aurobindo sheds in the closing couplets of two sonnets: The Guest and The Inner Sovereign. As I have said in the course of some notes on Sri Aurobindo's poems, these couplets —

He hears the blows that shatter Nature's house:

Calm sits he, formidable, luminous

and

Nature in me one day like Him shall sit

Victorious, calm, immortal, infinite —

summarise most pointedly, by a technique of varying sound-patterns and a few repeated expressions, the twofold movement necessary to the Aurobindonian Yoga: first the discovery of what the one poem calls "my deep deathless being" which is absolutely independent and then the forceful extension of the inner immortality to what the other poem terms "the blind material sheath"

which has so long been accepted as a thrall to limitation and imperfection, mutability and death.

The titles of the paired sonnets are very significant. The Guest indicates that the Divine is a grand sojourner, safe by the power of His eternity, in a house not His own, as it were. He lives and acts in it but is yet aloof as well as immune from its gradual breakdown at the hands of Time. The Inner Sovereign suggests that this same mighty resident is also a master of the house, capable of rebuilding and transforming it into a Nature-image of the perfect Spirit-reality.

Mukherjee's book should serve to carry to the all-scrutinising mind typical of our scientific age the conviction of the body's divine destiny.

Pondicherry, 19.10.1975

K. D. Sethna

(Amal Kiran)