The Destiny of the Body

Chapter V

The Double Denial

God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;

For man shall not know the coming till its hour

And belief shall be not till the work is done.

(Savitri, Book I, Canto IV, p. 55)

(A) The Materialist Negation

Matter on the firm earth sits strong and sure.

It is the first-born of created things,

It stands the last when mind and life are slain,

And if it ended all would cease to be.

All else is only its outcome or its phase...

If Matter fails, all crumbling cracks and falls.

All upon Matter stands as on a rock.

(Savitri, Book X, Canto II, p. 615)

The materialist comes with his dour denial and asserts on the basis of his monism of matter and material energy assumed to be the sole ultimate principle sufficing for the explanation of every conceivable phenomenon in the universe — that man's body and mind, as well as all other animal and plant organisms extant or extinct, are but the products of organic evolution brought about through the action of "an inconscient Energy which acts automatically by mechanical processes and can have no element of purpose in it."¹ Thus, according to the scientific materialist line of thought, no spiritual significance need be sought in this process of evolutionary elaboration or, for that matter, in the emergence of life in the initially inanimate universe. For, according to the materialist view, the phenomenon of "life is of profound unimportance. Among the infinite permutations and combinations through which matter has passed, one has supervened in which matter has achieved consciousness. This consciousness by matter of itself is life. Life, then, is a chance product of material forces and substances, evolved under certain conditions, and doomed to

¹ The Life Divine, p. 833.

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disappear when those conditions no longer obtain."¹

And so far as the evolutionary process itself is concerned, leading to the appearance of new species with novel life-characteristics, in order to account for it, we need not postulate or admit therein any sort of teleology or finalism nor any creative oestrus or any intervention of consciousness. For, the sole agency of random genetic mutation leading to chance variation and natural selection seem to afford an adequate explanation of the whole process.

Thus "the appearance of life upon the earth, the evolution of life through an infinite variety of forms, the whole of the process which begins with the amoeba and ends with man"² is sought to be "explained not in terms of the operation of some purposive force or spirit, but as the result of the action of purely haphazard external agencies."³ And in this connection it is important to note that in this view "changes which occur in living organisms never spring from within, but are always imposed from without. In order to account for them we need postulate no spiritual force or purposive will, whether operating within the organism or directing it from outside."⁴

And so it is asserted that the liberating and transmuting action of consciousness upon the material body is a sheer figment of imagination. For the conception of a consciousness as a separate unity functioning or even existing independently of the physical brain, seems to lack in validity. Is consciousness really anything more than an aspect of the brain's reaction to the events occurring within the body?

According to the adherents of various schools of metaphysical materialism, consciousness is either an attribute or property of matter (attributive materialism), or a product and effect of matter (causative materialism), or else conscious processes are in reality material in character (equative materialism).⁵ Indeed, recent findings of physiological, psychological and pathological researches bear evidence to the "concomitance of psychical processes with physical, their dependence on material phenomena such as the functioning of the brain, the correlation of mental development throughout the animal kingdom with organization of

¹ C. E. M. Joad, Guide to Philosophy, p. 525. (Italics ours)

^{2 3} Ibid., pp. 522-23.

⁴Ibid., pp. 522-23. (Italics ours)

⁵Kulpe, Introduction to Philosophy, p. 23.

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complexity of brain-structure, the effects upon mind of injury or disease in brain-tissue, and so forth " ¹ Do we not know that a very serious attempt has been and is still being made, both in the field of human psychology and in the domain of animal behaviour, to demonstrate that all modes of behaviour can be adequately explained in terms of adaptation and natural selection on the phylogenetic scale, also in terms of underlying physiological and physico-chemical operations in the individual body? Thus all the life-processes starting with those in a protozoan organism and ending with those in man, all the body-rhythms like feelings of hunger and thirst, sleep-cycles and the rise of sex-impulses, all behaviour- patterns such as the nest-building by birds or the manifestation of 'affection' by mother animals towards their offspring, have been sought to be accounted for in terms of biophysical determinism.

Two conclusions follow by implication: first, there can be no such thing as 'free will' since mind can never function independently of bodily causation and, thus, nothing can occur in consciousness unless its neural-cerebral counterpart has first occurred in the brain; secondly, consciousness being a mere function of the brain — almost an epiphenomenon — it can in no way influence a physical happening. So, given the existing physical organization of the human cerebrum, how can there develop in man a greater supramental consciousness and how can it — even if the possibility of its existence is at all admitted — act upon his body to effect therein any transfiguration of structure or of functioning? For, is not the material body something autonomous in its operations, independent of any consciousness appearing to inhabit it, and solely governed by an inexorable chain of physico-chemical processes?

In brief, if the tenets of materialistic determinism have to be seriously considered, "we have to suppose that the body is constructed by the agency of chemical elements building up atoms and molecules and cells and these again are the agents and only conductors at the basis of a complicated physical structure and instrumentation which is the sole mechanical cause of all our actions, thoughts, feelings, the soul a fiction and mind and life only a material and mechanical manifestation and appearance of this machine which is worked out and automatically driven with a

¹ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. VIII, p. 489.

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figment of consciousness in it by the forces inherent in inconscient matter."¹

(B) The Ascetic Refusal

How canst thou force to wed two eternal foes ?

How shall thy will make one the true and the false?...

The Real with the unreal cannot mate.

He who would turn to God, must leave the world;

He who would live in the Spirit must give up life...

(Savitri, Book X, Canto III, p. 635)

The denial of the exclusive spiritual seeker has been equally categorical. We have already had occasion to mention his scorn and disparagement of the body. In more moderate terms, in so far as the figured destiny of an evolutionary transformation of the human body is concerned, does there not exist — so he avers — a serious metaphysical objection to this notion of a teleological cosmos ? For, has not the Infinite and the Absolute everything in it already ? How, then, can it possibly have "something unaccomplished to accomplish, something to add to itself, to work out, to realise?"² Hence it follows that there cannot be in the so-termed evolutionary process any element of progress or for that matter any original or emergent purpose.

Also, even if we accept for the sake of discussion the dubious fact of a progressive evolution from type to higher type, then, man must be the last stage of this process, "because through him there can be the rejection of terrestrial or embodied life and an escape into some heaven or Nirvana."³ After all, as all evidence points out — so would the ascetic claim — that this manifested world is fundamentally and unchangeably a world of Ignorance, ajñānāt-maka visva, transient and full of suffering, anityam asukhaṁ lokam, devoid of any essential reality, saṁsārameva niḥsāram, the only sensible and legitimate task before man is to find out some way of escape from the discordant falsehood of this manifested world, saṁsāra, into the eternal bliss of some supraterrestrial heaven or in an eternal dissolution in Brahman or in Nirvana. And in the nature of things this spiritual evasion and escape must represent

¹The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, pp. 60-61.

²³ The Life Divine, p. 833.

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the only true end of the cycle of individual existence.

Indeed, throughout the ages, whether the spiritual seeker be an uncompromising absolutist who considers this manifested world to be an illusion, jaganmithyā, or an impermanence, sabbam aniccam, or he be a subscriber to some supraterrestrial view of existence, holding that the soul's true home lies beyond this terrestrial interlude, this latter representing no more than a spiritual fall and exile or a place of ordeal where to expiate the sins or at the best a temporary field of development of a single scene of the drama of soul's existence and experiences, his general verdict has been that this earth-life is a rather difficult liability for a spiritual being, full of obstinate and obscure resistances to the growth of the Spirit.

And thus a "war is declared between the spirit and its instruments and the victory of the spiritual Inhabitant is sought for in an evasion from its narrow residence, a rejection of mind, life and body and a withdrawal into its own infinitudes. The world is a discord and we shall best solve its perplexities by carrying the principle of discord itself to its extreme possibility, a cutting away and a final severance."¹

This 'revolt of Spirit against Matter', this metaphysical dualism, culminates in a second negation — at the other pole to the materialistic — of the eventual prospect of the divine transfiguration of the body and the physical existence of man. Indian thought, in particular, since the advent of Buddhism on the scene, has lived in the 'shadow of this great Refusal' and generally considered that the final end of life for all is the garb of the ascetic.² For "all voices are joined in one great consensus that not in this world of the dualities can there be our kingdom of heaven, but beyond, whether in the joys of the eternal Vrindavan³ or the high beatitude of Brahma-loka,⁴ beyond all manifestations in some ineffable Nirvana⁵ or

¹ The Life Divine, p. 233.

² Cf. Ekadanḍaṁ samgṛhya...sarvaṁ tyaktvā parivrajet (Vidyaranya Muni, Jīvanmukti Viveka): "Collecting a staff and renouncing everything, one should take the path of a wandering monk."

³ "Goloka, the Vaishnava heaven of eternal Beauty and Bliss." (Sri Aurobindo)

⁴ "The highest state of pure existence, consiousness and beatitude attainable by the soul without complete extinction in the Indefinable." (Sri Aurobindo)

⁶ "Extinction, not necessarily of all being, but of being as we know it..." (Sri Aurobindo)

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where all separate existence is lost in the featureless unity of the indefinable Existence."¹ After all,

...truth shines far from the falsehoods of the world;

How can the heavens come down to unhappy earth

Or the eternal lodge in drifting time?²

And the apparently indubitable evidence for this great denial lies in the fact that

The Avatars have lived and died in vain,

Vain was the sage's thought, the prophet's voice;

In vain is seen the shining upward Way.

Earth lies unchanged beneath the circling sun;

She loves her fall and no omnipotence

Her mortal imperfections can erase,

Force on man's crooked ignorance Heaven's straight line

Or colonise a world of death with gods.³

And hence goes the 'lofty and distant appeal' to renounce all 'longing to build heaven on earth' and accept the stern and dour message of "renunciation [as being] the sole path of knowledge, acceptation of physical life the act of the ignorant, cessation from birth the right use of human birth, the call of the Spirit, the recoil from Matter."⁴

These, then, are the two great denials — the materialist's negation and the refusal of the ascetic — and it is obvious that if either of these represented the true truth of existence, then "any divini-sation or transformation of the body or of anything else would be nothing but an illusion, a senseless and impossible chimera."⁵

But, as a matter of fact, this is not so. These views represent indeed aspects of the Truth but in no way the whole of the Truth nor the liberating integral Knowledge that would harmonise all

¹ The Life Divine, p. 23.

²Savitri, Book X, Canto II, p. 609.

³Ibid., pp. 609-10.

⁴The Life Divine, p. 23.

⁵ The Supramental Manifestation Upon Earth, p. 61.

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partial and segmented views of existence and at the same time transcend them.

We shall endeavour to meet the arguments leading to these two great Negations and show in the light of the Integral Yoga-Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo that, although some of the propositions held by the materialist and the exclusive spiritual seeker are indeed valid in their own way, their total view of things as well as the negating inferences they profess to arrive at lack altogether in conclusive cogency.

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