The Destiny of the Body

Chapter II

The Ineluctable Guest

I am a timeless Nothingness carrying all,

I am the Illimitable, the mute Alone.

I, Death, am He; there is no other God.

All from my depths are born, they live by death;

All to my depths return and are no more.

(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book IX, Canto II, pp. 592-93)

De quel nom te nommer, o fatale puissance ?

Qu'on t'appelle Destin, Nature, Providence,

Inconcevable loi,

Qu'on tremble sous ta main, ou bien qu'on te blasphème,

Soumis ou révolté", qu'on te craigne ou qu'on t'aime,

Toujours, c'est toujours toi!

(Lamartine, Medit. poetic, Le Désespoir)

We have seen in our introductory chapter that age-long has been the aspiration of man to discover the elixir of immortality or any other means, magical, alchemic or scientific, to conquer physically his body's death. But, alas, all his efforts have so far invariably ended in failure. Now for the first time in the long history of the race, the Supramental Yoga of Sri Aurobindo comes with the assurance of a physical conquest of death, the attainment of an earthly immortality.

But for the earth-bound mind and reason of man, does it not seem to be too heavenly a prospect to be at all true or endowed with any sense? In this essay, we propose to justify on metaphysical grounds the possibility of this victory over death and indicate the conditions — by no means intrinsically unrealizable by man — which would make this victory certain. We shall incidentally seek to find out any corroborative evidence gleaned from the field of biological evolution; for, after all, as we have pointed out once before, "evolution, being...continuous, must have at any given moment a past with its fundamental results still in evidence, a present in which the results it is labouring over are in process of becoming, a future in which still unevolved powers

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and forms of being must appear till there is the full and perfect manifestation."¹ And so Nature, the Great Mother of all, must have left her clues of approach even in the earlier phases of her grandiose World-Becoming that is being worked out through this process of organic evolution.

But before we consider the problem of the conquest of death, we have first of all to determine what its physiognomy is, what its character and form.

We may state at the outset that physiologically speaking there are three categories of death: (i) the apparent death, in which the organism does not show the least sign of the obvert manifestation of any of the essential vital functions although through proper procedures it may be resuscitated and brought back to active life; (ii) the relative death or clinical death involving a complete and prolonged suspension of circulation; and finally (iii) the absolute death, when any further possibility of the restoration of the vital functions becomes altogether abrogated.

From another point of view, we have to distinguish between what have been termed 'cellular death' and 'somatic death'. As a matter of fact, there is a continual change proceeding in every cell of any living organism and the cells are continually dying throughout the life-history of the living body. This cellular death may be either due to causes external to the organism or provoked by changes inherent in the cells themselves. In the second case the phenomenon is called necrobiosis or 'physiological death' of the cells while in the former this has been termed necrosis or 'pathological death'. The wholeness and viability of the body of the organism is not in the least affected by necrobiosis while necrosis may or may not affect the integrity of the body as a whole. Finally, death may involve the organism as a whole (somatic death) bringing to a permanent and irrevocable halt all metabolic activity in the entirety of the body which then degenerates into a lump of raw and inanimate matter governed from then onwards by the physico-chemical laws of the inorganic realm.

Now, from the biological point of view, this somatic death may be timely (kālamaraṇa) or untimely and premature (akālamṛtyu or antarāmṛtyu). Death may occur naturally as the final term of the gradual senile decay of the body or unnaturally as a consequence of the derangements and lesions of the vital organs caused

¹ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 707.

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by some disease or injury. In fact, the great majority of persons die prematurely, due to either some malady or some violence done to the body, and it may very well be, as Metchnikoff has suggested, that the universal dread of death felt by mankind is in a great measure occasioned by the fact that death intervenes mostly before its biologically appointed hour.

Be that as it may, we may thus distinguish three different kinds of somatic death:

(i)accidental violent death, when some external influence or agent, physical or chemical, shatters the organism;

(ii)microbic death, when some intruding micro-organisms manage to settle themselves in the body of an organism and bring about in the course of time the termination of the life of the host by causing some irreparable lesions or by producing fatal toxins;

(iii)natural death, which inexorably results, even when the body is not afflicted with any malady, through some invariable physiological breakdown in the correlation of vital processes, arising out of an "accumulation of physiologival arrears which eventually implies physiological insolvency".¹

In out present discussion we are primarily concerned with the inevitability or otherwise of this last category of death, the absolute and natural somatic death, which is indeed the most fundamental of the three. But what is the nature of this somatic death considered as a universally valid biological phenomenon for all multi-cellular organisms?

The life-cycle of an individual organism is typically divisible into five biologically differentiated phases as follows:

(a)the formation of the zygote, produced by the union of an ovum and a spermatozoon in the process called fertilization (the life-history of the individual, as a distinct biological entity, begins with this event);

(b)the period of development and growth, which has two sub-phases: embryonic or foetal, and post-embryonic or post-natal; this phase is succeeded by

(c)the phase of adult stability, in which no marked changes are observable either in the direction of growth or degeneration; after this sooner or later the individual can be observed to have definitely passed into the next phase of life-cycle.

¹ J. A. Thomson, "Life and Death" in The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (Ed. Hastings), Vol. 8, p. 4.

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(d)The period of senescence, characterized by a progressive waning in the intensity of the vital processes, accompanied by regressive and degenerative changes in the structures of the body. Ultimately, the life of the individual as such comes to an end with the terminal event of the cycle,

(e)death, the cessation of all vital metabolism.¹

Such, then, is death, the universal godhead, whose voice cries forth in ringing notes of awe:

"My force is Nature that creates and slays ...

I have made man her instrument and slave,

His body I made my banquet, his life my food ...

I am the Immobile in which all things move,

I am the nude Inane in which they cease."²

But when is this sombre messenger, the event of natural somatic death, apprehended to make its inevitable appearance? Cannot its visit be postponed, if not for all time, at least indefinitely? Or, is it rather fixed in the scale of time for man as well as for any other species ?

As a result of investigations in the special field of general biology, certain significant generalisations are now available. The more important of these from the point of view of our present discussion are as follows:

(i) For the members of a given species there exists a characteristic biologically determined life span or maximum age limit which appears to be absolutely binding on the species concerned. Thus, for man, the development of medical science and the widespread institution of hygienic measures have for their limited though highly laudable aim the increase in the average life-expectancy; but they cannot in any way push back what the French would call durée-limite. As Dr. Maurice Verner has pointed out:

"If more and more men are nowadays becoming old, that does not imply that the extreme limit has changed at all. We cannot repeat it too much that for a given species the limiting time-interval of life is an invariable constant."³

¹ This statement of the phases of the life-cycle of an individual multicellular organism is an adaptation from The Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 7, p. 110.

² Savitri, Book IX, Canto II, p. 593.

³ M. Vernet, La Vie et la Mort (Flammarion), p. 221.

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(ii) This maximum possible duration of the entire individual life-cycle varies enormously with the different forms of life, species, genera, families, etc. As a matter of information we append below tables¹ showing the life-spans of some biological organisms.

Longevity of mammals

Longevity of birds

Longevity of reptiles, etc.

¹See Ed. Retterer, De la durée des êtrés vivants, p. 119.

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(iii) These differences in characteristic life-spans of different species seem not to be related to any other so far recognisable factor of variability in their structure or life-history. Though many attempts have been made to establish such relationships (longevity correlated with the size, with the period of development towards maturity, the fecundity, the rate of physiological functioning, etc., of the animal), each one so far suggested has been contradicted by well-attested facts of natural history.¹

But whatever the underlying determining factor, the fact remains that all multicellular organisms possess an ageing mechanism embedded in the profundity of their physiological functionings, which automatically brings life to a gradual end when the biologically useful period is over. In the words of Dr. J. A. V. Butler, this ageing mechanism is 'built in' to the cells as an essential feature of their construction, a kind of biological clock with a time scale which is characteristic of each species."²

Biologically considered, such then is the ineluctability of natural death and in our attempt at seeking for the physical conquest of death, we have to contend with the stark fact that however favourable the conditions of living, however immune from any foreign invasion, a man's body as constituted at present cannot remain viable beyond the fixed limit of a hundred and fifty years or so.

¹ See Ed. Retterer, op. cit., pp. 117-22; S. Metalnikov, op. cit., pp. 155-68.

² J. A. V. Butler, op. cit., p. 153.

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