The Destiny of the Body

Chapter IV

Metaphysics of Hunger: The Universal 'Yajna'

A thousand salutations to the Great Mother who pervadest all becomings in the shape of Hunger and Thirst.

(Chandi Saptashati, III.16,19)

To whatever god the oblation is offered, Hunger and Thirst surely have their share in the offering.¹

(Aitareya Upanishad, I.2.5)

By the Apāna...food was seized and of Apāna Death was born.

(Ibid., I.3.10 & I.1.4)

They preyed upon the world and were its prey.

(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book II, Canto IV, p. 144)

A Hunger amorous of its suffering prey,

Life that devours, my image see in things,

(Ibid., Book IX, Canto II, p. 590)

Without being possessed one does not possess oneself utterly.

(Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 495)

Let it be the divine Enjoyer who possesses the enjoyment and by him let us be its possessors.²

(Rig Veda, VII.41-5)

We have ventured to put forward the suggestion that because of the actually prevailing predatory method of satisfying its hunger, bodily life has ultimately to fall a prey to death, and this is due to some occult interlinking between the two processes. We are therefore in search of a solution that will obviate for the body the necessity of grabbing material aliments but enable it all the same to remain a viable concern with all its dyamic activity unimpaired.

But we have suggested, too, that the physical body's hunger and thirst and the particular way of their satisfaction are but reflections

^{1 2} Sri Aurobindo's translations.

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in the physical sheath, annamaya koṣa, of something that is operative in all other sheaths or koṣas of our being. And unless we effectuate a transfiguration of the very principle of Hunger and the manner of its satisfaction in the higher and deeper and more fundamental strands of our complex existence, no solution can possibly be forthcoming in the outermost realm of our physical living.

Let us then begin with a probing inquiry about the genesis of Hunger and Thirst in their most generalised aspect and try to find out the compelling factor behind the 'wrong seizing of food'¹ that has brought in its wake all sorts of malaise to the embodied life, culminating in the sombre finale of death.

This world has been created out of the Self-Being of Sachchidananda for His possession and creative enjoyment, prajāvat saubhagam, and it is He who is tasting all Beings and Becomings in an all-possessing and self-possessing self-existent delight.

Now all that is is Sachchidananda, vāsudevaḥ sarvam, and "every separate object in the universe is, in truth, itself the whole universe. The microcosm is one with the macrocosm."² Thus each being is in its essence one with the Lord of the world, visvapati, and is therefore secretly spurred to appropriate for itself the 'seven delights', sapta ratna, of existence. The individual would, if it could, possess and enjoy the whole of the universe, just as the omnipresent Lord in the exercise of His omnipotent Will already does. The individual would like to have 'the wideness and plenty of earth and the vastness and abundance of heaven', and all the treasures of the mental, vital and physical existence multiplied a million-fold. Indeed, the goal of individual existence is the divine beatitude in dynamis as much as in status, and in consequence a total and perfect possession and enjoyment of all that enters the field of universal movement. "All being has this divine enjoyment of existence for its aim and end, whether it seeks for it with knowledge or with ignorance, with the divine strength or the weakness of our yet undeveloped powers."³

And this is as it should be; for the individual creature knows itself, albeit obscurely in its depths, to be the Lord, the divine Enjoyer, bhoktā maheśvaraḥ, for whose food this whole world has

¹Aitareya Upanishad, I.2.

²Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, p. 24.

³ Sri Aurobindo, On the Veda, p. 575.

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been brought into being, annabhūtamidaṁ jagat. And this being so, "a physical, vital, moral, mental increase by a more and more all-embracing experience, a more and more all-embracing possession, absorption, assimilation, enjoyment is the inevitable, fundamental, ineradicable impulse of Existence, once divided and individualised, yet ever secretly conscious of its all-embracing, all-possessing unity."¹

But although the spur of the cosmic Divine urges the individual on his path of ever-widening possessions, his demands for infinite and unfettered enjoyment cannot be satisfied, by the very nature of the situation, on the basis of a separative fragmented consciousness. For the absolute completeness is not feasible in the finite ego-bound individual existence that artificially cuts itself off from 'the One who is all and in all and beyond all' and, by an ignorant exclusive attachment of the idea of self to a single formation in Time and Space, stands out from the rest of the cosmos as a separate existence different in being. Because of this liability of separative ego, the individual fails to realise itself as but a conscious form of the One, and instead of 'embracing all consciousness, all knowledge, all will, all force, all enjoyment and all being as one with its own', it regards all cosmic formations and movements as alien and not-self, anātma, excepting the limited mass of experiences that 'flow out from and in upon' its illusory particular self-centre. But the inescapable result of this artificial dyking of the individual life from the All-Life is its inability to enter into harmony and oneness with the universal movement and a consequent incapacity to possess and enjoy it. For "though Life is Power and the growth of individual life means the growth of the individual Power, still the mere fact of its being a divided individualised life and force prevents it from really becoming master of its world. For that would mean to be master of the All-Force, and it is impossible for a divided and individualised consciousness with a divided, individualised and therefore limited power and will to be master of the All-Force; only the All-Will can be that."²

The separative individual is thus faced with an impossible situation. On the one hand, the innate impulse of self-expansion and all-possession cannot be abrogated, for "it does not and is not

¹ The Life Divine, p. 194.

² Ibid., p. 191.

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meant to measure or limit itself by the limit of its present force or capacity."¹ On the other hand, by the very definition of ego, its capacity for enjoyment is miserably circumscribed by the limitation of its force. Now from the unbridgeable gulf between the impulse to possess and the force of possession the phenomenon of hunger with its 'strainings of energy in passion and in desire' arises. The individual formation tries to assert by its external, aggressive and inadequate means 'its innate character of Ish or Lord and so to possess and enjoy the world.' It seeks to gather 'food' and become the 'devourer' (annāda) all the time. It would like to have the role of a fire that,

...growing by its fuel's death,

Increased by what it seized and made its own:

It gathered and grew and gave itself to none.²

But the very nature of this cosmic Manifestation debars the separative individual existence from the assumption of this unique role. For although the ego would feign that it is really a separate and independent formation and a centre around which the whole of the universe is destined to turn, bringing to its altar a continuous supply of sap and aliments to assuage its insatiable hunger and thirst, it is not so as a matter of fact and cannot thus live to itself even if it would; for, all are linked together by an indissoluble bond of a secret Oneness. Indeed, unity is the master principle of world-existence of which division is but a subordinate term and as such "to the principle of unity every divided form must... subordinate itself in one fashion or another by mechanical necessity, by compulsion, by assent or inducement."³

As a matter or fact, it is around the principle of 'sacrifice' understood in the sense of yajña of ancient Indian spiritual wisdom, that the whole of the cosmic Becoming is inexorably woven. With sacrifice as their eternal companion, says the Gita, the Lord of creation has created all existences. Now, 'sacrifice' is a process of giving and receiving, of interchange, intermixture and fusion of being with being. This law of sacrifice, law of mutual dependence, 'each growing by each and living by all', is a common divine

¹ The Life Divine, p. 196.

² Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book II, Canto IV, p. 149.

³ The Life Divine, p. 201.

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action from which no separate existence can ever expect to be exempt; for it is the symbol of the solidarity of the universal existence that is innumerably one although phenomenally divided. It is because of this truth that a mutual giving and receiving has become the very principle of life, without which it cannot subsist even for a moment. Each existence has thus to give out from its assets and acquisitions in streams that go to all that is around it, and in return it receives something from its environment. And this process is operative in all the planes of our existence. Modern biological researches have shown beyond any shadow of doubt that our body, falsifying the illusion of its apparent fixity, is in reality in a state of dynamic equilibrium, undergoing continual interchange of material with its surroundings. Studies with radioactive isotopes by G. Hevesy, A. Krogh, R. Schoenheimer and others have strikingly revealed that practically every chemical system of a living organism is in a continuous state of change, being remodelled with a quite unexpected rapidity, and in constant equilibrium between ingested substances and identical ones which have already been incorporated into the body.¹ The overall effect is that "the tissues forming the animal body are composed of chemical substances all of which are derived from its environment, and in the course of the animal's life these substances are returned to that environment many times over."²

But this dynamic interchange, this mutual yajña, is not confined to our body constituents alone; it governs our vital and mental sheaths too. The extent to which this law reigns in Nature has not yet been fully recognised by men of our time, — who take their stand on the supposed substratum of Matter, — and indeed cannot be recognized, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, "until we have a science of mental life and spiritual existence as sound as our present science of physical life and the existence of Matter."³

When that day arrives the man of science will wake to the discovery that "not only the elements of our physical body, but those of our subtler vital being, our life-energy, our desire-energy, our powers, strivings, passions enter both during our life and after our death into the life-existence of others.... Our life-energies

¹ Vide: (i) "Properties of Living Matter" in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 3, pp. 606-09; (ii) "Nutrition" in ibid., Vol. 16, p. 652.

² F. R. Winton and L. E. Bayliss, Human Physiology (1955), p. 181.

³ The Life Divine, p. 201.

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while we live are continually mixing with the energies of other beings. A similar law governs the mutual relations of our mental life with the mental life of other thinking creatures. There is a constant dissolution and dispersion and a reconstruction effected by the shock of mind with a constant interchange and fusion of elements."¹

The whole process of the universe is thus seen to be in its very nature a sacrifice, a process of interchange and of mutual 'feeding', of fusion of each with each and of each with all. Self-fulfilment by fulfilling others, to possess by being possessed, to enjoy by being enjoyed, to grow by giving is the universal law. But the separative ego in its ignorant isolation tries to set this law at nought. It seeks to erect a barrier of defence around its divided limited existence with just a one-way opening left, through which it would seek to gather its aliments from outside but which would prevent by all means any outward flow. But the false hopes of the ego founder at every moment, and when sacrifice is not voluntarily offered, Nature exacts it by force; for the law has been imposed from above and, even from those who do not consciously recognise its validity, the universal World-Force invariably exacts and takes the sacrifice. Only in this latter case, the harmony of yajña is rudely disturbed and as a result the poor, limited, individual existence helplessly thrown into the arena of constant cosmic interchange of force fails to embrace freely and grow eternally by the shock and pressure of the universal Life, and instead gets disrupted and devoured at the end. In the words of Sri Aurobindo, "that which refuses to give itself, is still the food of the cosmic Powers. 'The eater eating is eaten' is the formula, pregnant and terrible, in which the Upanishad² sums up this aspect of the universe, and in another passage men are described as the cattle of the gods."³

So long as this law of sacrifice is not consciously recognised and voluntarily accepted, so long as the individual formation displays its habit of predatory hunger, the law of interchange, of action and reaction, will see to it that the devourer itself is constantly fed upon by universal Life, and that the separative existence

¹The Life Divine, p. 201.

²Cf. "I being food eat him that eats", ahamannamannamadantamā'dmi (Taittiriya Upanishad, III.10.7).

³ Sri Aurobindo, On the Veda, p. 316

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through an ultimate exhaustion slides down into death and disintegration.

The kingdom of death cannot be overpassed, the state of Immortality cannot be attained, unless and until the individual existence renounces the fetters of its separative ego, merges its will with the All-Will, becomes one with the All-Force and in that process changes the straining rapacity of its hunger into the motion of the free and all-possessing bliss of the Infinite.

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