A metaphysical & scientific study of the evolutionary prospects of the human body in the light of Sri Aurobindo's vision & assurance of the body's divine destiny.
Chapter IX
Thine is the shade in which visions are made;
sped by thy hands from celestial lands
come the souls that rejoice for ever.
Into thy dream-worlds we pass or look in thy magic glass,
then beyond thee we climb out of Space and Time
to the peak of divine endeavour.
(Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems and Plays, Vol. II, p. 122)
He has seen God's slumber shape these magic worlds.
He has watched the dumb God fashioning Matter's frame,
Dreaming the dreams of its unknowing sleep,
And watched the unconscious Force that built the stars.
He has learnt the Inconscient's workings and its law...
Its somnolence founded the universe,
Its obscure waking makes the world seem vain...
He must call light into its dark abysms,
Else never can Truth conquer Matter's sleep
And all earth look into the eyes of God.
(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book VI, Canto II, pp. 449-50)
We have seen in the course of our study of longue haleine on the occult nature and function of sleep that the periodic spells of dormancy of our body need not prove to be an unavoidable evil nor a handicap to our spiritual growth. In any case, our physical sleep does not necessarily mean an abeyance of consciousness of the whole of our dynamic being, nor a nightly falling down, nor even an interruption in the pursuit of our Sadhana. On the other hand, this may be transformed, if we know how to do it, into a sleep of experiences giving us an access to the inner domains of our being.
But whatever may be the value of the sleep-existence, to live in the dream-world at the price of the suspension of our waking awareness cannot be considered a laudable achievement in the Yoga of Transformation of Life. We have to bring out and call down the riches from our subliminal depths and superconscient
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heights and make these an acquisition of our waking life. Our physical consciousness has to be "spiritually awake"1 and "as open in the waking consciousness as in sleep."2 We have somehow to "arrive at a point when one remains outwardly conscious and yet lives in the inner being and has at will the indrawn or the outpoured condition."3
It is thus evident that the irresistible bouts of unconsciousness of sleep to which our body's waking status occasionally succumbs cannot but be viewed as a sign of imperfection in the prevailing organisation of our physical being. What is then necessary is that — and this must constitute an essential element in the total transfiguration of our bodily existence — sleep must be raised from the level of necessity to that of a free acceptance, as and when so willed, as an indrawn absorption of our consciousness.
Thus the mastery over our nights should be followed by the attempt at an absolute conquest of sleep. But is this total victory over physical sleep at all feasible in the present human body? And, if not, what are the essential conditions that have to be met before this prospect for bodily life enters the field of realisable possibilities ?
By way of answering these crucial questions we propose to put forward two related problems and venture some tentative solutions thereof.
How to Reduce the Hours of Sleep?
On the purely physico-vital plane, sleep has for its essential function the restoration of the nervous physical energies of our fatigued bodily system. But for an effective fulfilment of this function, it is absolutely necessary that our sleep-life should be calm and reposeful, relaxed and luminous. But very rarely do our nights measure up to this criterion: these are, more often than not, more fatiguing than even our days for reasons which often escape us.
But the Mother has warned us that if we get up not so well refreshed in the morning, it is because of a formidable mass of Tamas. "It is Tamas which causes bad sleep. There are two kinds of bad sleep: the sleep that makes you heavy, dull, as though you lose all the effect of the effort you put in during the preceding day;
1 2 3 Letters on Yoga, p. 1483.
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and the sleep that exhausts you as if you were passing your time in fight.
"...Two things you must eliminate: falling into the torpor of the inconscience, with all these things of the subconscient and of the inconscient that rise up, invade you, enter into you; and a vital and mental superactivity where you pass your time in fighting literally terrible battles. People come out of that state bruised, as if they had recived blows — and they did receive them, it is not 'as if'!"1
(A)Relaxation: Now, since the total time interval needed for the recuperation of our energies is in inverse ratio to the quality of repose that we attain in our sleep, the very first procedure we must adopt to cut down the duration of our nightly sleep is to practise the art of complete relaxation of body and mind, a short period of which proving to be more refreshing than hours of restless sleep. In the recommendation of a Buddhist author: "Relax each portion of the body deliberately and consciously; then close the eyes and try to visualise utter darkness. Feel yourself floating in a silent void, and deliberately empty the mind of every thought and feeling by imagining such a condition as Swinburne's "Only a sleep eternal in an eternal night."2 And the author concludes that, once the proper knack is acquired, even a short duration of this exercise will produce an abundance of fresh energy and a clean-swept and invigorated mind.
Be that as it may, this negative method of relaxation cannot take us very far on our road to the conquest of sleep. It should form rather the essential preliminary step to a far more effective and spiritually beneficial one: to become conscious in our sleep and deliberately utilise our nights for progress.
(B)Conscious utilisation of nights: At this point we would like to dispel a possible misunderstanding that may arise in connection with this suggestion for a conscious utilisation of our nights. There may be a lurking fear in some minds that this attempt at the cultivation of the vast fields of our nights, instead of bringing in a more reposeful and therefore a more invigorating sleep,
1 Bulletin, Vol. XII, No. 4, pp. 87-91.
2 The Buddhist Society (Compilers), London, Concentration and Meditation, p. 44.
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would on the other hand affect its depth and detract from the efficacity of our nightly rest which is so salutary and indispensable for our physical health.
But this fear and doubt have got no basis in fact. For, as the Mother has assured us, it is only the useless and uncontrollable and mostly subconscious activities in our sleep that make our nights more fatiguing than the day. On the contrary, "if our night granted us the acquisition of new knowledge, the solution of an absorbing problem, the establishment of contact in our inner being with some centre of life or of light, or even the accomplishment of some useful work, we should always get up with a feeling of vigour and well-being. It is the hours wasted in doing nothing useful or good that are the most fatiguing;"?
This conscious cultivation of our sleep-existence for reaping fruits for our inner growth is then the second essential element of our endeavour to make the state of physical sleep a real restorer of our energies.
But the gain acquired even in this way seems to be limited in its scope so far as our main problem of drastically reducing the hours of sleep is concerned. For that we have to become conscious masters of another significant phenomenon of our sleep-life: the possibility of entrance into the "suṣupti of Brahman or Brahmaloka."2
(C) Attainment of Sachchidananda immobility: Once before, we have already made a passing reference to this state of luminous rest in sleep. As a matter of fact, for sleep to be at all worth the name fulfilling its role of the restorer of energies, it must be either one "in which there is a luminous silence"3 or else one "in which there is Ananda in the cells."4 The rest of our sleep-life is an attempt at sleep, not sleep itself. To quote from the Mother a passage to which we have already referred:
"There is the possibility of a sleep in which you enter into an absolute silence, immobility and peace in all parts of your being and your consciousness merges into Sachchidananda. You can hardly call it sleep, for it is extremely conscious. In that condition you may remain for a few minutes, but these few minutes give you more
1Words of Long Ago, p. 42. (Italics ours)
2Letters on Yoga, p. 1484.
34 Ibid., p. 1483.
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rest and refreshment than hours of ordinary sleep."1
Sri Aurobindo too has treated this topic on numerous occasions. Thus, to quote from him only one passage :
"In sleep one ... passes from consciousness to deeper consciousness in a long succession until one reaches the psychic and rests there or else from higher to higher consciousness until one reaches rest in some silence and peace. The few minutes one passes in this rest are the real sleep which restores, — if one does not get it, there is only a half rest."2
But, as a matter of fact, this brief Sachchidananda period of "luminous and peaceful dreamless rest"3 that "gives sleep all its restorative value"4 cannot be had "by chance; it requires a long training."5 Indeed, our ordinary sleep, even when it is of the best variety, is mostly taken up with our actual travelling towards this state of Sachchidananda immobility and our return journey to the waking awareness, without very often ever reaching the state at all.
And even if we reach this state on some rare occasions, "it is done unconsciously as it is. If one wants to do it consciously and regulate it, one has first to become conscious in sleep."6 And then alone can the prospect possibly open up before us of reducing the hours of sleep to a bare minimum.
But even this cannot altogether eliminate the necessity of sleep. The reason is twofold, physiological and occult-spiritual, to whose consideration we now turn.
How to Eliminate the Necessity of Sleep?
Physical precondition : On the purely physico-physiological plane, since sleep is the body's unavoidable response to its overstrain and exhaustion through an ill-balanced expenditure of energy, what is needed is the total annulment of all possibility of our body's fatigue. And this brings us to the general problem of incapacity and inertia of our present physical organisation. For, although it is a fact that "either the yogic or the vital energy can
1 Conversations with the Mother, p. 27.
2Letters on Yoga, p. 1484. (Italics ours)
3 The Life Divine, p. 425.
4 Letters on Yoga, p. 1484.
5 Conversations with the Mother, p. 28.
6Sri Aurobindo, Elements of Yoga, p. 107.
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long keep at work an overstrained or declining physical system, a time comes when this drawing is no longer so easy nor perhaps possible"1 and the bad results long held back from manifesting explode all at once and a breakdown ensues.
So the problem of incapacity has to be tackled and solved on the plane of the body itself. For "the body is the key, the body the secret both of bondage and of release, of animal weakness and of divine power, of the obscuration of the mind and soul and of their illumination, of subjection to pain and limitation and of self-mastery, of death and of immortality."2
But what is the inherent reason for this fatigue of our body? Why does our physical system get periodically tired? Why can it not work in a continuous way?
In the words of the Mother: "The fatigue of the body comes from an inner disharmony. There may be many other apparent reasons, but all amount to that fundamental circumstance."3
What is this want of harmony due to ? The answer lies in the fact of a limited life-force, lodged in the confines of a limited and ego-bound individualised existence, contending in vain with the universal All-Life and All-Force that seeks constantly to govern and master it. In the evolutionary emergence and development of life in material forms, it is true that as consciousness develops more and more, "as the light of its own being emerges from the inert darkness of the involutionary sleep, the individual existence becomes dimly aware of the power in it and seeks first nervously and then mentally to master, use and enjoy the play."4 But, even at our best, we mental beings are bound by a poor and limited life-power which is all that our body can bear or to which it can give scope. And "in the consequent interchange and balancing between the movement and interaction of the vital energies normally at work in the body and their interchange with those which act upon it from outside, whether the energies of others or of the general Pranic force variously active in the environment, there is a constant precarious balancing and adjustment which may at any moment go wrong."5
1Letters on Yoga, p. 1480.
2The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 507.
3 Nolini Kanta Gupta, The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo (Part Eight), p. 85.
4 The Life Divine, p. 191.
5 The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 509.
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Thus, in the very nature of things, our individualised life and force in the body cannot master the All-Force working in the world. On the contrary, the resistance which it offers through blind ignorance to the movement of the infinite universal Life "with whose total will and trend its own will and trend may not immediately agree",1 subjects it to the law of incapacity and fatigue, one of the basic characteristics of individualised and divided Life in the body.
Hence to cure our physical system of all liability to fatigue, the limitation of ego has to be totally abrogated not only in the inner parts of our being, but in the very physical consciousness and the material organisation of the body. Our body has to be brought into complete harmony with the demands of our own inner consciousness and with the infinite cosmic rhythm.
But "that means", in the words of the Mother, "a work in each cell of the body, in each small activity, in each movement of the organs .... You have to enter into the disposition of the cells, your inner physical organisation if the body is to answer to the Force that descends .... You must be conscious of your physical cells, you must know their different functions, the degrees of receptivity in each, which of them are in good condition and which are not."2
But this cannot be attempted with the help of the insufficient and inefficient light of mind-consciousness. It is only through the descent and concomitant emergence of the divine Gnosis, Supermind, here in the midst of the evolutionary Becoming, that Matter and material body can be rid of their inertia and inconscience and a proper equation established between the life-energy playing in an individual formation and the surges of the embracing All-Force. For in the Supermind "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."3
It is through the supramental transformation of our physical body, — that "is still a flower of the material Inconscience,"4 — down to its very cells and functionings that the law of incapacity and consequent fatigue will be finally abrogated and with it the
1 The Life Divine, p. 196.
2 Nolini Kanta Gupta, op. cit., p. 87.
3 The Life Divine, p. 215.
4 Sri Aurobindo, The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, p. 12.
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physiological compulsion for sleep.
But there remains a final hurdle, the occult-spiritual necessity of sleep, but that too will be completely annulled with the gnostic transformation of our waking existence.
Occult-spiritual precondition: We have seen that in its essential nature our body's sleep is the response to the demand of the individual consciousness to go inward and awake in planes of existence not at present accessible to the waking awareness which is still in the grip of an involutionary half-sleep. So, unless and until this spiritual slumber is totally eliminated from all parts of the being including our very physical consciousness, mother Nature will constrain our body to fall occasionally into the swoon of slumber so that the portals of the inner and higher life can open.
Now, as we have mentioned in Chapter V ("Evolutionary Waking"), when Supermind or Gnosis, the Truth-Consciousness of Sachchidananda, overtly emerges in the field of evolution to become the governing principle of our embodied material existence, the manifested being will be in secure possession of an integral Consciousness and an integral Sight, so that there will be no more a state of sleep in opposition to the state of permanent waking, nor for that matter a line of demarcation separating the inner and outer domains of existence. The evolving being will then be fully aroused from the self-oblivion of an involutionary sleep and, along with it, the spiritual compulsion behind the sleep of our body will altogether lose its occult support.
In that foreseeable Golden Dawn, the body will thrill with the fulfilment of its destiny, it will participate in full awareness in the glories of a divinised life upon earth and the law of the inexorable necessity of sleep will be for ever lifted from its head.
But in the meantime let us not forget even for a moment the great role that sleep can play in the present organisation of our life and being; for, does it not open to us the doors of the dream-land, the Yogic dream-world, if only we know how to put it to service?
And who can belittle the infinite charm and beauty and bliss that the Mother of Dreams may bestow upon us, if only we care to court Her favour?
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Appendix
THE MOTHER OF DREAMS*
Sri Aurobindo
Goddess supreme, Mother of Dream, by thy ivory doors when thou standest,
Who are they then that come down unto men in thy visions that troop, group upon group, down the path of the
shadows slanting ?
Dream after dream, they flash and they gleam with the flame of the stars still around them;
Shadows at thy side in a darkness ride where the wild fires dance, stars glow and glance and the random meteor glistens;
There are voices that cry to their kin who reply; voices sweet, at the heart they beat and ravish the soul as it listens.
What then are these lands and these golden sands and these seas more radiant than earth can imagine?
Who are those that pace by the purple waves that race to the cliff-bound floor of thy jasper shore under skies in which mystery muses,
Lapped in moonlight not of our night or plunged in sunshine that is not diurnal?
Who are they coming thy Oceans roaming with sails whose strands are not made by hands, an unearthly wind advances ?
Why do they join in a mystic line with those on the sands linking hands in strange and stately dances?
Thou in the air, with a flame in thy hair, the whirl of thy wonders watching,
Holdest the night in thy ancient right, Mother divine, hyacinthine, with a girdle of beauty defended.
Sworded with fire, attracting desire, thy tenebrous kingdom thou keepest,
Starry-sweet, with the moon at thy feet, now hidden now seen the clouds between in the gloom and the drift of thy tresses.
Only to those whom thy fancy chose, O thou heart-free, is it given to see thy witchcraft and feel thy caresses.
* Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems (Centenary Edition), Vol. 5, pp. 67-68.
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Open the gate where thy children wait in their world of a beauty undarkened.
High-throned on a cloud, victorious, proud I have espied Maghavan ride when the armies of wind are behind him;
Food has been given for my tasting from heaven and fruit of immortal sweetness;
I have drunk wine of the kingdoms divine and have heard the change of music strange from a lyre which our hands cannot master;
Doors have swung wide in the chambers of pride where the Gods reside and the Apsaras dance in their circles faster and faster.
For thou art she whom we first can see when we pass the bounds of the mortal,
There at the gates of the heavenly states thou hast planted thy wand enchanted over the head of the Yogin waving.
From thee are the dream and the shadows that seem and the fugitive lights that delude us;
Thine is the shade in which visions are made; sped by thy hands from celestial lands come the souls that rejoice for ever.
Into thy dream-worlds we pass or look in thy magic glass, then beyond thee we climb out of Space and
Time to the peak of divine endeavour.
End of Part Three
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