The Destiny of the Body

Chapter III

The Vision

"The Light now distant shall grow native here,

The Strength that visits us our comrade power;

The Ineffable shall find a secret voice,

The Imperishable burn through Matter's screen

Making this mortal body godhead's robe."

(Savitri, Book II, Canto II, p. IIO)

The Aitareya Upanishad opens with a semi-mythological narrative of the nature of a parable, the parable of the creation of more and more developed forms till one, namely, that of man, was formed that proved to be adequate and capable of housing a highly developed consciousness.

Atmā vā idameka evāgra āsit....sa īkṣata lokānnu sṛjā iti.¹ "In the beginning the Spirit was one and all this (universe) was the Spirit; there was nought else moving. The Spirit thought, 'Lo, I will make me worlds from out of my being.' "² He then created the upper and the lower worlds and the Spirit thought again, lokapālānnu srjā, "Now will I make me guardians for my worlds."³ And in due process the great Gods were created.⁴ These Gods wanted a habitat and sustenance: "Command unto us an habitation that we may dwell secure and eat of food."⁵ The Spirit first formed animal kinds and brought them unto the Gods, but these latter found them to be altogether insufficient vehicles, no'yamalam. The Spirit finally created the form of man upon which the great Gods exclaimed, "O well fashioned truly! Man indeed is well and beautifully made,"⁶ "sukṛtam...puruṣo vāva sukṛtam", and they entered the human frame to fulfil their cosmic functions.

Man thus became the habitat, the abode (āyatana), of the lords of the universe, the meeting point of their realms of activity and fields of enjoyment.

¹ Aitareya Upanishad, I. 1.

^{2 3 4} Sri Aurobindo's translations.

⁵ In the thought of the Upanishads the Gods represent powers of consciousness and powers of Nature.

⁶ Sri Aurobindo's translations.

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Indeed, from the point of view of organic evolution, the appearance of humanity in earth-nature marked a radical break with the past, signifying a crucial step, a decisive change in the course and process of evolution. The development of the highly complex and elaborate organisation that is the physical sheath, annamaya koṣa, of man, capacitated 'a reversal or turn-over of the consciousness, a reaching to a new height and a looking down from it at the lower stages',¹ also the development of greater and subtler powers proper to the new type of being: powers of complex observation and correlation of impressions, powers of reason and reflection, the evolution of systems of thought, and the invention of symbolic speech in which transmission is effected from 'speaker to speaker instead of through the germ line.'

And so far as the purely structural disposition of the human frame is concerned, it is by all accounts a marvel product of evolution. The anterior shifting of the eyes coupled with the adoption of the vertical station has freed man from the status of earth-gazing animals and enabled him to look upward and forward and round. The complete freeing of the hands from the task of locomotion and the possession of a fine array of ten wonderfully supple fingers with the added faculty of turning the hands, palms upward or palms downward, has enabled man to become a tool-making creature and wield an incalculable influence over his surroundings. Finally, the unique endowment of the human cerebrum, the greatest tool yet developed by Nature in her long course of organic evolution, has made it possible that man manifest the powers and potentialities of mind and thus truly become Man.

But who can affirm that the human body and man's physical being are in their actuality already an unalloyed boon and his physical organization a picture of perfection? For, are we not too poignantly aware of the grossness and limitation of our present physical life, the various inconveniences of our animal body, its unregenerate earth-nature and impulses and appetites that tend to drag down man's soaring spirit and frustrate the winged visions of his soul?

As a matter of fact, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out,² the material body of man confronts him with a dual difficulty, psychological and corporeal: psychological, because of its animal origin;

¹The Life Divine, p. 838.

²The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth (1952), pp. 43, 47.

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and corporeal, because of the particular type of structure and organic instrumentation that imposes its restrictions on the dynamism of man's higher nature. The human body even at its best brings "to the physical being...a bondage to the material instruments, to the brain and heart and senses,...to the bodily mechanism and its needs and obligations, to the imperative need of food and the preoccupation with the means of getting it and storing it as one of the besetting interests of life, to fatigue and sleep, to the satisfaction of bodily desire. The life-force in man also is tied down to these small things; it has to limit the scope of its larger ambitions and longings, its drive to rise beyond the pull of earth and follow the heavenlier intuitions of its psychic parts, the heart's ideal and the soul's yearnings. On the mind the body imposes the boundaries of the physical being and the physical life and the sense of the sole complete reality of physical things with the rest as a sort of brilliant fireworks of the imagination, of lights and glories that can only have their full play in heavens beyond, on higher planes of existence, but not here; it afflicts the idea and aspiration with the burden of doubt, the evidence of the subtle senses and the intuition with uncertainty and the vast field of supraphysical consciousness and experience with the imputation of unreality and clamps down to its earth-roots the growth of the spirit from its original limiting humanity into the supramental truth and the divine nature."¹

But the question is: Are the limitations imposed by man's body in its present state of development to be considered as something permanent and of the nature of insuperable impediments ? Cannot our physical being ever transcend its original earth-nature with its complement of unregenerate impulses and animal appetites? Will it "constantly oppose the call of the spirit and circumscribe the climb to higher things"?² Will our physical existence be for ever subject to the conditions of animal birth and life and death, of 'difficult alimentation' and facility of decay and disorder, disease and senescence, and a final dissolution in death? Will our mind and sense remain for ever shut up within the prison-"walls of the physical ego or limited to the poor basis of knowledge given by the physical organs of sense",³ and our life-force ever bound to its mortal inhibitions?

The Seer-Vision of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother assures us

^{1 2} The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, pp. 45-46.

³ The Life Divine, p. 261.

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that the disabilities of the human body and the animal frailties of man's physical nature will not be there for all time to come. These are in no way innate to animate Matter nor are they inexorable; they are rather of the nature of passing phenomena appearing in the as yet imperfect stages of the march of evolution and with the further elaboration of this evolutionary process leading to the descent and concomitant emergence in earth-nature, of a supreme power and light of the spirit, of what Sri Aurobindo calls Supermind or the divine Gnosis, these limitations and liabilities, 'obscurities and ambiguities' of the material body of man will be transcended, the animal propensities and cravings and drives overcome, the denials and resistances and the tardy responses of the physical being surmounted, even the inconscient and unregenerate parts illumined and transmuted into their divine counterparts.

Not only this: the supramental consciousness and light and force, once directly active in the field of earth-evolution, will in due course invade and take up the very substance of the body, transfigure its 'function and action', liberate the body from all possibility of disorders, derangements and maladies, "substitute subtler processes or draw in strength and substance from the universal life-force so that the body could maintain for a long time its own strength and substance without loss or waste, remaining thus with no need of sustenance by material aliments, and yet continue a strenuous action with no fatigue or pause for sleep or repose",¹ for the whole being will be flooded "with a supreme energy of Consciousness-Force which would meet, assimilate or harmonise with itself all the forces of existence, that surround and press upon the body".²

Also, "the present balance of interaction which allows physical Nature to veil the Spirit and affirm her own dominance"³ will be reversed and in "the changed communion of the Spirit with Matter"⁴, in the new relation between the Spirit and the body it inhabits, Matter will be seen and felt "to be the Brahman, a self-energy put forth by the Brahman, a form and substance of the Brahman" ⁵ In the supramental way of living and being, the body will discard its veil of apparent inconscience, its ignorant laws of mechanical movements and instead be luminously controlled and

¹ The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, pp. 68-69.

²The Life Divine, p. 988.

^{3 4 5} Ibid., p. 986.

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guided by the Truth-Will of the indwelling Spirit. Man's physical body will thus be turned by the power of the Supramental Consciousness into an entirely conscious, "a true and fit and perfectly responsive instrument of the Spirit".¹

As a result of this Gnostic evolution, a supreme power of self-protection will be brought into play, that will confer upon the body an absolute immunity and serenity of being and a total deliverance from all suffering and pain. "A spiritual Ananda [will] flow into the body and inundate cell and tissue; a luminous materialisation of this higher Ananda [would] of itself bring about a total transformation of the deficient or adverse sensibilities of physical Nature."²

The physical body of man will thus undergo a divine transfiguration and shine in the glories of "a pure and spiritualised physical existence".³

And finally, as if to crown all other achievements, there will come about for man the physical "conquest of death, an earthly immortality"⁴ - "in the sense not of attachment or of restriction to our present corporeal frame but an exceeding of the law of the physical body."⁵ For "from the divine Bliss, the original Delight of existence, the Lord of Immortality comes pouring the wine of that Bliss, the mystic Soma, into these jars of mentalised living matter; eternal and beautiful, he enters into these sheaths of substance for the integral transformation of the being and nature."⁶

¹ The Life Divine, p. 986.

² Ibid., p. 989.

³ Ibid., p. 991.

^{4 5 6} Ibid., p. 261.

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