The Destiny of the Body

Chapter XIV

The Conquest of Mortality

Let deathless eyes look into the eyes of Death,

An imperishable Force touching brute things

Transform earth's death into immortal life.

(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book X, Canto IV, p. 664)

For this she had accepted mortal breath;

To wrestle with the shadow she had come

And must confront the riddle of man's birth

And life's brief struggle in dumb Matter's night...

Whether to bear with Ignorance and Death

Or hew the ways of Immortality,

To win or lose the godlike game for man,

Was her soul's issue thrown with Destiny's dice.

(Ibid., Book I, Canto II, p. 17)

And yet I know my footprints' track shall be

A pathway towards Immortality.

(Sri Aurobindo, Last Poems, p. 5)

Naturally, the release from subconscient ignorance and from disease, duration of life at will, and a change in the functionings of the body must be among the ultimate elements of a supramental change;... if the transformation of the body is complete, that means no subjection to death.

(Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, pp. 8, 11)

A certain mystic with prophetic vision has aphoristically stated that 'a day will come when death will be a sin'. The implication is that death is not a necessary accompaniment of all manifestation of life; it is no more than incidental and hence eradicable if only certain conditions could be fulfilled. And in the victorious march of the evolutionary life here upon the earth-scene, these conditions are bound to be met today or tomorrow, thus rendering anachronistic the meek and helpless submission of the life-spirit to the siege of death.

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We have already seen in the course of our study what the various factors are that have made inevitable the intervention of death. In this penultimate chapter we may restate them in somewhat different terms as follows:

Any attachment to limited being and to things perishable is totally incompatible with the prospect of the physical conquest of death. In the words of the Mother: "If you wish to escape from death, you must not bind yourself to anything perishable."¹ Did not Etana² fail in his quest after the 'Herb of everlasting Life' simply because at the penultimate step the attachment to his past and limited being overpowered him and he implored the soaring eagle on whose outspread wings he was being carried heavenward, to interrupt the ascent and bring him back to his habitual abode ?

The sense of egoistic separativeness from the unhindered play of All-Life is the second contributory factor that ultimately dissolves the individual life in death. The Upanishadic Rishi emphasised this point when he declared: "He who sees separation here proceeds from death to death."³

The urge of all-consuming hunger that the individual in his egoistic self-limitation insatiably feels becomes in the sequel the harbinger of death. For in the cryptic utterances of the ancient Indian mystics: "Hunger is death."⁴ "Anna is eaten and it eats; yea, it devours the creature that feeds upon it, therefore it is called anna or aliment."⁵

Sexual impulsion is a particular form in which manifests the blind drive of hunger felt by a separative ego. But a body given over to the functioning of sex cannot in the very nature of things escape the clutch of death. This was already hinted at in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh wherein it is shown that the indomitable hero Enkidu fell a sudden prey to death after he allowed himself to be seduced by a courtesan of Istar.⁶ It is of deep import that the Mother has announced that a supramental body — a body that will transcend all subjection to death—will be a sexless one.

¹ "The Fear of Death and the Four Methods of Conquering It", Bulletin of Physical Education, February 1954.

² Babylonian mythology.

³Katha Upanishad, II.1.10.

⁴Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, I.2.1.

⁵ Taittiriya Upanishad, II.2.

⁶Vide: D. Merejkovsky, Les Mystères de l'Orient, p. 299.

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A total victory over Time is another achievement that one has to secure if one would seek to affranchise the body from the obligation of death. One must reach a state of consciousness involving even the consciousness of the body when one would be able to exclaim with the mystic of the Mahabharata: "No time ripens for me, time is not my Lord."¹ It is worth noting in this connection what the Mother has pronounced on the subject of indefinite durability of a physical body:

"What is quite worth noticing is that one must change one's sense of time if one is to be in the state of consciousness where waste does not exist; you enter into a state where time has no more the same reality. This is another thing. It is very special, it is an unnumberable present."²

All the disabling factors mentioned above have come into play as appendages of the besetting obscurity of cosmic Ignorance whose vassals we at present are. And unless this Ignorance is eliminated at its base there is not the least hope of attaining to earthly immortality. Thus, Trishanku³ was balked in his attempt at a physical ascension to heaven, and the vessel of amṛta or the life-giving nectar is carefully shielded from the eager grasp of Asura-consciousness (amṛtam sunihitameva cakrire surāḥ).⁴ A flaming sword that turns every way is indeed keeping the way of the tree of life⁵ so that its fruit may not be undeservedly usurped by the ignorant consciousness of man.

But even if this state of cosmic Ignorance is subjectively abrogated, that will not suffice to confer upon the body the boon of immortality. For that to happen, the body consciousness itself, even to its subconscient foundation, has to be totally illumined and the bodily instrument made infinitely receptive and pliable to the demands of the indwelling Spirit, with a capacity for progress that knows no bounds. It has been well said that 'ageing begins when growth ceases'; also that to 'avoid dying one day, one would have to be incessantly reborn.' Sri Aurobindo has pinpointed the basic issue when he says:

¹ Kālas na pacyate tatra Na kālas tatra vai prabhuḥ.

² Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Vol. XIX, No. 1, p. 75.

³ The Ramayana.

⁴The Mahabharata, Adiparva, 14.50.

⁵Genesis, 3.24.

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"The physical being could only endure, if by some means its physical causes of decay and disruption could be overcome¹ and at the same time it could be made so plastic and progressive in its structure and its functioning that it would answer to each change demanded of it by the progress of the inner Person; it must be able to keep pace with the soul in its formation of self-expressive personality, its long unfolding of a secret spiritual divinity and the slow transformation of the mental into the divine mental or spiritual existence."²

We have investigated the law of Death, a law not at all immutable, absolute or inexorable inhering in the very substance of life itself, but a law altogether relative and germane to a particular stage of incomplete manifestation of Sachchidananda. And, as Sri Aurobindo has warned, "there is no more benumbing error than to mistake a stage for the goal or to linger too long in a resting-place."³

After all, laws are nothing but the "habits of the world,"⁴ and the divine soul has taken its birth in the field of its apparent negation in order to accept laws for the moment and discard them when their necessity is over.

And it is in this high and noble spirit that the Sadhakas of the Integral Yoga would like to tackle the problem of Death. It is not out of any sense of ignorant attachment to terrestrial life nor because of any pusillanimity before the prospect of their bodies' death that they seek to abrogate the stringency of the Law of Death. In fact, the attitude they should bear vis-à-vis the phenomenon of death has been clearly delineated by the Mother in one of her talks addressed to the young inmates of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram:

¹ Footnote appended in the original: "Even if Science — physical Science or occult Science — were to discover the necessary conditions or means for an indefinite survival of the body, still, if the body could not adapt itself so as to become a fit instrument of expression for the inner growth, the soul would find some way to abandon it and pass on to a new incarnation. The material or physical causes of death are not its sole or its true cause; its true inmost reason is the spiritual necessity for the evolution of a new being."

² The Life Divine, p. 822.

³The Life Divine, p. 732.

⁴Thoughts and Glimpses, pp. 33-34.

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"After all, if one has to leave his body for some reason or other and have other bodies, would it not be better to make of death a magnificent, glad enthusiastic thing than to make of it a disgusting defeat ? The people who stick on, who try in every possible way to put off the end even if by a minute or two and who give you an example of frightful agony, do so because they are not conscious of their soul.... After all, it is perhaps a means —you may change this accident into a means; if you are conscious, you can make of it a beautiful thing, a very beautiful thing, as with everything. And note, people who have no fear of it, who do not care, who can die without any sordidness about it, are the people who never think of it, who are not haunted by this 'horror' ahead from which one must flee, and that one tries to push as far away as one can. Those people, when the time comes, may lift their head, smile and say 'Here I am.'

"It is they who have the will to make of their life the maximum they can make of it. It is they who say, 'I will remain here as long as I must, till the last second, and I will not lose a single minute to realise my goal.' It is they, when the necessity arrives, who show the best figure. Why? Very simple, because they live in their ideal, according to the truth of their ideal, because it is the real thing for them, the very reason of their being, and in" all things they can see this ideal, this reason of being and never do they descend to the sordidness of material life.

"So the conclusion:

Never wish for death.

Never will to die.

Never fear death.

In every circumstance, will to exceed yourself."¹

Yes, the unflinching and ever-ascending will not to remain content with the achievements of the past but to proceed to earn ever new laurels of victory for the manifesting Spirit in this field of Becoming. And since the obligation of physical death is the principal symbol of imperfection to which the embodied being is at present subject, also since death and dissolution are no necessary attributes of life but have rather been introduced as a temporary expedient to serve the purpose of life itself, the Integral Yoga of Self-Perfection has set for its ultimate goal the annulment of

¹ Bulletin, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, pp. 73, 75.

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this doom of physical mortality.

But does this mean that a Siddha of this Yoga has perforce to keep the same physical body for ever and for ever? Evidently not, and this we have pointed out already in Chapter IV ("Mortality and Immortality: The Real Issue"). What we seek to achieve in our Yoga is not the irrevocable continuity of a particular physical form serving indefinitely as the vehicle of manifestation for the indwelling Spirit, but rather the elimination of the elements of inevitability and forceful dissolution in the process of death. A complete liberation from all possible attacks of illnesses and the power to prolong life at will (icchā-mṛtyu) are the two essential insignia of this figured victory over death.

And this is what is now being effectively done in the sphere of our terrestrial existence, through the descent and the concomitant emergence of the divine Gnosis, Supermind, here in the midst of the evolutionary Becoming. For, the true and radical solution of all the difficulties that the embodied life has to face and battle against and that culminate in its ultimate dissolution, lies in this divine principle, Supermind, "of which Immortality is the law"¹ and about which one can say: "there alone is the conscious unity of all diversities, there alone will and knowledge are equal and in perfect harmony, there alone Consciousness and Force arrive at their divine equation."²

It is through the supramental transformation of our actually limited and rigid existence, down to the very cells and functionings of the material body, that the law of death at present inevitable owing "to the law and compulsion of the All-Life in the material universe, to its law of supply of the material of form and demand on the material, its principle of constant intershock and the struggle of the embodied life to exist in a world of mutual devouring,"³ will be abrogated and our earthly and mortal existence will flower into the immortal Life Divine.

For, in the divinely transfigured bodily existence, the physical being of man would be "made so plastic and progressive in its structure and its functioning that it would answer to each change demanded of it by the progress of the inner Person; it...[would then] be able to keep pace with the soul in its formation of self-expressive personality, its long unfolding of a secret spiritual divinity

^{1 2} The Life Divine, p. 215.

³ Ibid., p. 193.

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and the slow transformation of the mental into the divine mental or spiritual existence."¹

Thus will be made possible, nay, inevitable, the consummation of a triple immortality — to which we referred in the beginning of our essay — "immortality of the nature completing the essential immortality of the Spirit and the psychic survival of death."²

But to a mind bound to its actualities this may very well sound like an impossible prospect. Indeed, as the Mother has pointed out in one of Her articles on death, the very first battle that the embodied soul aspiring after physical immortality has to engage in is against this "suggestion that is collective, massive, overwhelming, compelling, a suggestion based upon thousands of years of experience, upon a law of Nature that does not seem yet to have had any exception. It translates itself into this stubborn assertion: 'It has been so always, it cannot be otherwise. Death is inevitable and it is madness to hope that there should be anything else.' The concert is unanimous and till now even the most advanced man of learning has hardly dared to raise a note of dissidence, or of hope for the future. As for religions, most of them rely for their power of action upon the fact of death and they assert that God wanted man to die since he created him mortal: ...In spite of all this, the mind must remain unshakable in its conviction and sustain a will that never bends. But for one who is resolved upon conquering death, these suggestions have no effect and do not touch the certitude based upon a profound revelation."³

As a matter of fact, for "man [who] is God hiding himself from Nature so that he may possess her by struggle, insistence, violence and surprise,"⁴ the sense of impossibility is the beginning of an eventual possibility. For, "impossibility is only a sum of greater unrealised possibles. It veils an advanced stage and a yet unaccomplished journey."⁵

¹The Life Divine, pp. 822-23.

²Ibid., p. 823.

³Bulletin of Physical Education, Vol. VI, No. I, pp. 69-71. (Italics ours) ⁴ Sri Aurobindo, Thoughts and Glimpses, p. 15.

⁵ Ibid., p. 6.

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