The Destiny of the Body

Chapter V

The Evolution of Hunger

The law of Hunger must give place progressively to the law of Love, the law of Division to the law of Unity, the law of Death to the law of Immortality.

(Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 195)

Our life, a breath of force and movement and possession attached to a form of mind and body and restricted by the form, limited in its force, hampered in its movement, besieged in its possession and therefore a thing of discords at war with itself and its environment, hungering and unsatisfied, moving inconstantly from object to object and unable to embrace and retain their multiplicity, devouring its objects of enjoyment and therefore transient in its enjoyments is only a broken movement of the one, undivided, infinite Life which is all-possessing and ever satisfied because in all it enjoys its eternal self unimprisoned by the divisions of Space, unoccupied by the moments of Time, undeluded by the successions of cause and circumstance.

(Sri Aurobindo, Kena Upanishad, pp. 92-93)

What is desire here must there be self-existent Love; what

is hunger here must there be desireless satisfaction;

what is here enjoyment must there be self-existent delight.

(Ibid., p. 88)

We have seen that the bane of individual existence in its ordinary ignorant functioning is its false notion of itself being separate from others, separate too from the All-Existence that constitutes all that comes into form. But it is in reality the One that is all and is therefore secretly aware of its all-embracing and all-possessing infinity. Spurred by the 'lust of the embodied Self within every individual creature', the separative individual seeks to establish its empire of enjoyment over the whole of cosmic existence. But its means are wrong, the approach is crooked and the ego has lost its way in a blind alley. It looks upon the world as a means to sate awhile its lusts and desires and seeks

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...to conquer and have, to seize and keep,

To enlarge life's room and scope and pleasure's range,

To battle and overcome and make one's own.¹

But this predatory hunger brings its own retribution and the individual life organised in the body, that has cut itself off from All-Life and

...made a tiny circle of defence

Against the siege of the huge universe,²

is constantly exposed to the possibility of being broken up by the ceaseless hammering of the surrounding Life. As a matter of fact, "its devouring capacity being insufficient or not properly served or there being no right balance between the capacity of devouring and the capacity or necessity of providing food for the life outside, it is unable to protect itself and is devoured or is unable to renew itself and therefore wasted away and broken."³

In order to obviate the necessity of this Hunger that is Death, aśanāyā mṛtyuḥ, the individual existence has to annul its ego-isolation and rediscover and re-live its secret unity with all. But uniformity or an amorphous oneness is not the law of cosmic becoming; universal life exists by diversity and "insists that... every being shall be, even while one with all the rest in its universality, yet by some principle or ordered detail of variation unique."⁴ Thus the individual is called upon to preserve even while he seeks to universalise himself to the full "a mysterious transcendent something" of which his sense of separate personality conveys an obscure and egoistic representation. The individual existence has therefore to reconcile an apparently incompatible dual urge, the urge to strive for infinite self-expansion and possession of the world and the urge to seek an integral unity with others in a growing movement of self-giving. These two urges are indeed the two poles of the truth of all individual existence; and one of the essential purposes behind the colossal evolutionary movement, this dynamic world-play of Sachchidananda,

¹Savitri, Book II, Canto IV, pp. 139-40.

²Ibid., p. 144.

³ The Life Divine, p. 192.

⁴ Sri Aurobindo, The Ideal of Human Unity, p. 296.

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is to arrive at a supremely harmonious equation of Unity and Diversity, Freedom and Order, individual Growth and collective Cohesion.

Thus, unity being the very basis of existence, "the oneness that is secretly at the foundation of all things, the evolving spirit in Nature is moved to realise consciously at the top."¹ But "the evolution moves through diversity, from a simple to complex oneness."² And in this movement, the principle of hunger too metamorphoses and evolves from form to higher form till it reaches its culmination in the inalienable all-possessing delight of the Divine.

The essence of hunger, of which 'a restless hungry energy of will',³ the strainings in 'echo caverns of desire',⁴ and finally 'the need called love'⁵ are but derivative-forms, is, as we have pointed out, widely pervasive and evident everywhere in Nature. In the very atomic existence there is something that corresponds to this hunger, and under its subterranean pressure the entelechy of union manifests in various ways in the atomic constituents uniting into atoms, atoms uniting into molecules, and the aperiodic organic molecules uniting to form unicellular living bodies. These are the first three levels of self-expansion in the elaboration of a cosmic evolutionary force. They represent the first status of Life in which the material substance infinitely divided seeks infinitely to aggregate itself.

The dumb but potent urge of physical energy governing the interchange between material aggregates and their environment is the form that hunger assumes in the inanimate world.

When Life reaches its second status in the subconscient animal existence, hunger takes the form of an aggressive vital craving, "a Beast grazing in its pasture, a force of devouring desire that feeds upon earth's growths, tears and ravages all upon which it feeds and leaves a black and charred line to mark its path where there was the joy and glory of earth's woodlands."⁶ Death and mutual devouring, an enjoyment that consumes the object enjoyed, an instinct of self-assertion and aggressive living, that struggles to expand, to conquer and to possess and, if need be, 'to swallow up entirely the egoism of the other in its own egoism': these then are

^{1 2} Sri Aurobindo, The Ideal of Human Unity, p. 296.

^{3 4 5} Expressions from Sri Aurobindo's Epic Poem Savitri.

⁶ Sri Aurobindo, On the Veda, p. 443.

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the traits of this second status of Life.

But this mutual destruction through mutual feeding, this fierce and battling play of energy in which 'every breath of life is a breath too of death'¹ cannot be the highest status of Life. So Life has to proceed on its path of ascension and Hunger to evolve into a more glorious form.

In the third status of Life, the status of developed mental life, we reach a condition where mutual devouring is more and more replaced by an urge to mutual help, mutual adaptation, conscious joining and interchange. Hunger changes into the principle of love, although at first love may be no more than an extended selfishness and, still obeying the law of hunger, may "enjoy the receiving and exacting from others rather than giving and surrendering to others",² the latter process being admitted and indulged in only as a necessary price for the fulfilment of the first.

But as love progresses and attains more and more its essential law, svadharma, it seeks "to establish an equal commerce in which the joy of giving is equal to the joy of receiving and tends in the end to become even greater."³ Indeed, in its life-origin, "the law of love is the impulse to realise and fulfil oneself in others and by others, to be enriched by enriching, to possess and be possessed because without being possessed one does not possess utterly."⁴ Ultimately all problems of life are problems of relations between self and not-self, and these problems can never be adequately solved unless and until one comes to experience the not-self as one's own self. And this is, in essence, what the evolutionary ascension of life is seeking to realise here upon earth: a simultaneous mutual possession of the self and the not-self.

But Mind in its nature being a separative consciousness cannot solve this problem within its own borders, and the solution has to be sought in a Power still beyond Mind. Indeed, "the end of the road, the goal itself can only be reached by Mind passing beyond itself into that which is beyond Mind, since of That the Mind is only an inferior term and an instrument.... Therefore the perfect solution of the problem of Life is not likely to be realised by association, interchange and accommodations of love alone or through the law of the mind and the heart alone. It must come

¹ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, p. 516.

²The Life Divine, p. 204.

^{3 4}Ibid., p, 205.

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by a fourth status of life in which the eternal unity of the many is realised through the spirit, and conscious foundation of all the operations of life is laid no longer in the divisions of body, nor in the passions and hungers of the vitality, nor in the...imperfect harmonies of the mind, nor in a combination of all these, but in the unity and freedom of the Spirit."¹

Thus if we would seek to be delivered from the delusion of separate existence and establish a sense of conscious oneness with all other existences in the universe, — a real oneness and not merely "a pluralistic unity, the drawing together of similar units resulting in a collectivity or solidarity,"² — we must enter spiritual consciousness. For when man identifies himself with the One inhabiting all bodies and manifesting Himself in everything, he sees oneness everywhere, ekatvamanupaśyataḥ, and becomes one with the cosmic and transcendent Self and therefore with all His becomings. The walls of ego crumble down, the external ceases to exist any more and all forms, all energies, all movements, even the whole world with all that it contains, become to his consciousness internal and intimate.

And he, who sees his true self everywhere in all existences and all existences in his true self,³ transcends at last the law of ravenous hunger; for, as we have seen in the course of our study, the genesis of hunger with all its derivative forms such as desire and lust lies in the sense of not being this or not having that, this latter sense of non-possession arising in its turn from the incommensurability of the ego's impulse to possess and enjoy infinitely and its limited force and capacity for seizure. That which is free, One and Lord, which is all the time all-possessor, samrāṭ, and therefore all-enjoyer, sarva-bhuk, need not and does not hunger or strain, but inalienably contains, possesses and enjoys. We, too, by establishing a conscious unity and union with the Cosmic Enjoyer, will become in our turn possessors and enjoyers of the universe and our hunger and thirst will be replaced by the active beatitude, the free and 'causeless' delight of existence. And since this delight is in its essence the delight of the One in His own existence, it is by its very nature infinite and

¹ The Life Divine, p. 206.

² Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, p. 62.

³ Yastu sarvāṇi bhūtāni ātmanyevānupaśyati. Sarvabhūteṣu cātmānam. (Isha Upanishad 6)

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inalienable and there is nothing whatsoever in the world that can diminish or hurt or hedge it in. In Sri Aurobindo's luminous words:

"By transcending Ego and realising the one Self, we possess the whole universe in the one cosmic consciousness and do not need to possess physically.

"Having by oneness with the Lord the possibility of an infinite free delight in all things, we do not need to desire.

"Being one with all beings, we possess, in their enjoyment, in ours and in the cosmic Being's, delight of universal self-expression."¹

Delivered from Hunger, the spiritual man will at the same time overcome the law of Mortality. For as he does not seek to devour or disrupt anything, na tadaśnāti kiñcana, nothing can devour or disrupt him too, na tadaśnāti kaścana.² By finding at last the clue to the establishment of a free play of commerce, uninterrupted and harmonious, with the Universal Life all around, the individual succeeds in absorbing and assimilating all the currents and crosscurrents of life and never again becomes a helpless food for others, with the attendant doom of death and dissolution, annatvaṃ na punarupaiti.

But by renouncing all motions of hunger and lust one does not or need not withdraw from existence; rather he becomes the sharer in the divine and integral enjoyment of "the entire sweetness of existence, the honey, the delight that is the food of the soul. Sukṛttamā madhuno bhakṣam āśata."³ For the secret of real and integral enjoyment in its truth and in its infinity lies in the process of utter renunciation; 'by that renounced thou shouldst enjoy', tena tyaktena bhunjīthā, is the injunction of the Isha Upanishad. And when the individual attains to this status of enjoyment of all by renunciation of all through the total extirpation of hunger, he 'becomes the master of food and its eater', annavānannādo bhavati⁴, 'enjoys all desire', so'śnute sarvān kāmān,⁵ 'eats what he

¹ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, pp. 28-29.

² Cf. Katha Upanishad, II.3.14: "When every desire that finds lodging in the heart of man, has been loosened from its moorings, then this mortal puts on immortality." (Sri Aurobindo's translation)

³Sri Aurobindo, On the Veda, pp. 410-11.

⁴Taittiriya Upanishad, III.9. ⁵ Ibid., II.l.l.

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wills', kāmānnaḥ, but still remains a non-eater, anaśnan¹, although 'eating' all the time.

Have we then come to the solution of the problem that has been the theme of our present essay? When the individual being through a process of spiritual transformation gets subjectively established in the unitary consciousness of the Spirit and thus transcends the law of hunger and therefore the law of death, does his body too, as a necessary consequence, become delivered from the compulsion of food-intake ?

Unfortunately it is not so. For the subjective liberation from the rapacity of hunger is no doubt an all-important necessary prerequisite but by no means a sufficient condition for the ultimate cancellation of the body's material needs. Let us see why.

¹ Mundaka Upanishad, III.

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