The Destiny of the Body

Part Four

THE PROBLEM OF MATERIAL ALIMENTATION

Chapter I

The Problem

All that is Breath has its life in food.

(Aitareya Upanishad, I-3.10)

Life is established upon food.

(Maitri Upanishad, VI.11)

It is obvious...that so long as we depend, in order to live, upon material food, upon absorption of matter in such a gross form, we shall be an animal inferior enough and we shall not be able to divinise our life.

We must then conceive that this animality in the human being will be replaced by some other source of life-power. It is not only a conceivable, but already a partially realisable thing; and that is evidently the goal which we must set before us if we want to transform matter and make it capable of expressing divine qualities.

(The Mother, Bulletin, Vol. LX, No. 3, p. 123)

One of the most intractable difficulties that the transformation of the body has to face is "its dependence for its very existence upon food."¹ As a matter of fact, for the sheer maintenance and renewal of the physical substance and for the efficient and dynamic working of the bodily system, all forms of life, whether plant or animal, from the simple unicellular organism to the most complex multicellular one, require the incorporation of outside matter in the shape of food materials. Thus, in the words of Charles Elton, the primary driving force of all creatures is the necessity of finding the right kind of food and enough of it.²

Indeed, the proper type of material alimentation is so very imperative for the viability of physical life that in organisms other than man, that have not yet become 'reflectively' aware of the

¹ Sri Aurobindo, The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, p. SO.

² Cf. sarvāṇi ha vā imāni bhūtānyaharāhaḥ prapatantyannamabhijighṛkṣa-māṇdāni. (Maitri Upanishad, VI. 12) "All creatures are ever on the move in search of food."

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indispensability of food intake, Nature has contrived to employ biochemical determinism to provoke the sensations of hunger and thirst; and these sensations arising from the coupling of very complex physiological mechanisms culminate in the monitoring of an over-all drinking and devouring behaviour that prove to be highly effective in prompting these creatures lower in the evolutionary scale "to eat for the support of life at the time and to the degree that the body requires, and not leaving the 'when' and the 'how much' to be settled by rational calculation."¹

What is all the more striking is that, not only quantitatively but also qualitatively, the normal appetite of subhuman animals acts for them as an efficient governor of food intake, conferring upon them a subconscious ability to select the proper diet responding to their exact physiological needs. Thus the experimental studies of Kurt P. Richter have shown that "rats given a free choice of chemically pure food elements tend to make for themselves a diet that is physiologically optimal."² Not only that; animals suffering from deprivation of some body constituent display an uncanny ability to make good the deficiency, when offered an opportunity to select its diet from a large choice of substances. Thus, "the removal of the adrenal gland causes a fatal loss of sodium from the body, and it was found that the adrenal-ectomised rats chose sodium salts out of a number of alternative substances available and by this process outlived a control group of adrenal-ectomised rats to which sodium was not given. In another set of experiments, rats from which the parathyroid glands had been removed increased their intake of calcium lactate, and thereby prevented the fall in blood calcium which, accompanied by tetany, usually supervenes in parathyroid-ectomised animals."³

But this normal appetite that plays such a regulatory role in the lives of subhuman species has been unfortunately vitiated and perverted in the case of man. And the reason for this is not far to seek. It is the 'felicific' or pleasure-giving property associated with appetite and its satisfaction that tends to make voluptuaries of men and coarsens the body's need for food so easily into gluttony of the belly and the cravings of the palate.

¹ W. L. Davidson, "Appetite" in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. 1., p. 643.

² Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 7, p. 112B.

³ F. R. Winton & L. E. Bayliss, Human Physiology (1955), p. 225.

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But for a Sadhaka this sort of perversion can have no permissive sanction at all. For "a sadhak must eat because of his body's need of hunger and not because of the demands of his greed."¹ The intake of food should be regarded as only a physical necessity, a means for the maintenance of bodily life, prāṇasaṁdhāraṇārtham,² and for the upkeep of the physical instrument, bahiḥ svār-the.³

But at the same time the Sadhaka should guard against going to the other extreme and falling into the error of calculated negligence of the welfare of the body: we are referring to the exercises in fasting, prolonged or of short duration, undertaken for spiritual purposes. Indeed, faced with the discovery that "the mental or vital vigour does not or need not depend on the food,⁴ and that "the inner being...does not need any food,"⁵ the spiritual aspirant suffers from a sense of exasperation when he contemplates the absolute dependence of the body upon material aliments; and this relentless necessity of food intake is so very repugnant to the free spirit in man that the Sadhaka very often succumbs to the suggestion of not eating⁶ and "seeks refuge in long and frequent fasts which lift him temporarily at least out of the clutch of the body's demands and help him to feel in himself a pure vacancy of the wide rooms of the spirit."⁷

It is no doubt a fact that occasional periods of partial starvation prove to be beneficial to the organism both physiologically and spiritually. Thus experimental studies on various lower animals have indicated that partial starvation materially increases the maximum potential longevity. On the other side, "it is a fact that by fasting, if the mind and the nerves are solid or the will-force dynamic, one can get for a time into a state of inner energy and receptivity which is alluring to the mind and the usual reactions of hunger, weakness, intestinal disturbance, etc., can be wholly avoided."⁸

¹Words of the Mother (4th edition), p. 238.

²³ Bhikshukopanishad.

^{4 6} Letters on Yoga, p. 1472.

⁶Compare the following standing injunctions for a roving monk:

ekakālaṁ cared bhaikṣyam : "The monk should seek alms not more than once." (Manu Samhita, 55.6.)

ekavāraṁ dvivāraṁ vā bhuñjīta parahaṁsakaḥ: "The Paramahamsa should take a single meal or at the most a double." (Smriti Shastra)

⁷Sri Aurobindo, The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, p. 50.

⁸Letters on Yoga, p. 1471.

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But if the suggestion of fasting is given an inordinate stress, these advantages prove to be short-lived and illusive; for the benefits accruing on the mental or vital fronts are more than neutralised by the deleterious effects produced on the physical system. As a matter of fact, in the prevailing state of the material organisation of our body, its supporting energies have to be maintained by food, sleep and such other physical means; and if the body is left insufficiently nourished there can develop in the being an overstrained condition of imbalance or even a total breakdown of the system. Hence is the warning of Sri Aurobindo: "The first thing I tell people when they want not to eat or sleep is that no yoga can be done without sufficient food and sleep.... Fasting or sleeplessness make the nerves morbid and excited and weaken the brain and lead to delusions and fantasies. The Gita says, Yoga is not for one who eats too much or sleeps too much, neither is it for one who does not eat or does not sleep, but if one eats and sleeps suitably — yuktāhārī yuktanidraḥ — then one can do it best."¹

Of course, in the case of a Sadhaka, food should be taken in the right spirit and with the right consiousness,² and it is this inner attitude of total liberation from all vital attachment to food and from the desire of the palate, that is what is called for and not any undue diminution of the modicum taken or any process of self-starvation. "One must take sufficient food for the maintenance of the body and its strength and health but without attachment or desire."³

But even then the problem remains. For in our present investigation we are concerned with the divine destiny of the body, and even if the operation of food intake is absolutely freed from all accompanying reactions of greed or attachment, that cannot be a proper substitute for the achievement of a total victory over our need for material alimentation. So, "the question may be raised," as Sri Aurobindo has so trenchantly put it, "whether,

¹ Letters on Yoga, p. 1470.

²"When we eat, we should be conscious that we are giving our food to that Presence in us; it must be a sacred offering in a temple and the sense of a mere physical need or self-gratification must pass away from us." (Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 126).

Cf. "Brahman is the giving, Brahman is the food-offering, by Brahman it is offered into the Brahman-fire". (Gita, 4,24)

³Words of the Mother, p. 238.

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not only at first but always, the divine life also must submit to this necessity."¹

For as yet there has been no instance of any organism whatsoever which can live indefinitely without the help of any material sustenance gathered from outside: a total starvation is invariably followed, sooner or later, by the body's death. Of course the survival period varies widely with the species concerned. Thus, in general, the poikilothermic or so-called "cold-blooded" animals can manage to live without food for a few months or in some exceptional circumstances for more than two years. But the homothermic or "warm-blooded" animals can offer much less resistance to the disruptive effects of food privation. Thus a mouse succumbs to death at the end of three days of total starvation, a guinea-pig at the end of six days and a dog at the end of a month. In the case of man, the subject kept at basic metabolic repose may attain a maximum possible survival period of two to three months, if in the meanwhile no other secondary complications appear to cut short the life.

But the question is not of relatively long or short periods of starvation during which the organism can successfully battle against the onset of death. The basic problem that all embodied life has to face is its apparently ineluctable destiny of disruption and cessation whenever the body is deprived of all food intake. This fact has been noted by the thinker in man even in the earliest dawn of his contemplative career and he has recognised in full the primordial importance of material aliments. Thus one of the ancient Upanishads declares that "life dries up without food;"² another one affirms that "if one should not eat for ten days, even though he might live, yet verily he becomes a non-seer, a non-hearer, a non-thinker, a non-perceiver, a non-doer, a non-under-stander; but on the entrance of food he becomes a seer, he becomes a hearer, he becomes a thinker, he becomes a perceiver, he becomes a doer, he becomes an understander."³ Therefore the injunction is to "reverence food", annamupāssva⁴, for "verily, this food represents the world-sustaining figure of the great godhead Vishnu."⁵

¹ The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, pp. 50-51.

² Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad, 5.12.

^{3 4} Chhandogya Upanishad, 7.9.1.

⁵ Maitri Upanishad, VI. 13.

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But it is really intriguing to ponder over this capital importance of material alimentation. One cannot but wonder why embodied life should be so inexorably dependent for its very existence upon food intake, especially when yogic knowledge reveals that contrary to the common view of things the manifestation of life is not just a by-product of a particularly complex material organisation: the truth is rather the other way round. It is the universal Prana or Life-principle that is the sustainer of the bodily matrix, for, as the Taittiriya Upanishad affirms, "verily, Prana...is food, and the body is the eater; the body is established upon Prana."¹

Indeed, the material aspect of bodily life, of which alone we are normally aware, is no more than its outermost movement. In reality, the universal and immortal Life-Principle, anilam amṛtam, is superior to the principle of birth and death. Life does not come into play only with the formation of a viable body nor does it disappear with the latter's death and dissolution. As a matter of fact Prana or Life-energy represents in the phenomenal flux of things the active dynamis of the Master of the world and is thus present and operative in every atom and particle of the universe, in every formation apparently inanimate or not, and "active in every stirring and current of the constant flux and interchange which constitute the world."² Life and death as we know them are but two amongst many more modalities of the great Life that is all-pervading and "one in divided things" (avibhaktaṁ vibhak-teṣu), "imperishable in things perishable" (martyeṣu amṛtaḥ) and in which is established this universal Manifestation.³ Life, in essence, being the universal operation of the Consciousness-Force or Chit-Shakti of the Divine,⁴ is nothing but "the Force that builds and maintains and destroys forms in the world" and would thus "even if the whole figure of the universe were quite abolished,...itself still go on existing and be capable of producing a new universe in its place."⁵

Thus we see that all forms and formations in the universe

¹ III. 7.

²Sri Aurobindo: Kena Upanishad, p. 87.

³ Cf., "As the spokes meet in the nave of a wheel, so are all things in Life established." (Prashna Upanishad, II.6)

"All this universe... is subject to Life." (Ibid., II.13).

⁴ Cf. "Of the Spirit is the breath of Life bom." (Prashna Upanishad, III, 3). "Life derives from the Spirit." (Chhandogya Upanishad, IV.10.5)

⁵Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, pp. 176-77.

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are supported and occupied by the Life-Force and, what is more, "without it no physical form could have come into being or could remain in being...no material force could exist or act without it, for from it they derive their energy and movement and they are its vehicles."¹

Now, if this be a fact, as Sri Aurobindo has so forcefully put it, that it is "Life [that] forms body, it is not formed by it,"² its apparent dependence upon physical energy gathered in the shape of material aliments can at best be a provisional arrangement and by no means the inescapable condition for embodied existence. If so, the solution to the specific problem we are now dealing with must somehow and somewhere exist, although it is an undeniable fact that embodied life without food intake has not yet become feasible. What are then the impediments and how can they be possibly removed?

¹ Sri Aurobindo: Kena Upanishad, p. 84.

² Sri Aurobindo: Isha Upanishad, p. 145.

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