The Destiny of the Body

Chapter VIII

The Vision of the Divine Body

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.

(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book II, Canto II, p. 110)

Past and gone are three mortal generations: the fourth and last

into the Sun will enter.

(Rig-Veda, VIII. 102. 14)

If the transformation of the body is complete, that means no

subjection to death — it does not mean that one will be bound

to keep the same body for all time. One creates a new body for

oneself when one wants to change...

(Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 11)

The Integral Yoga of Self-Transformation as revealed to man by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother has for its aim, in contradistinction to the attempts mentioned in the foregoing chapter, the creation of a divine body, here in the conditions of earth and matter. It does not want to be contented with a cinmaya deha, or transcendental body, as in the case of the Vaishnavas, nor with the possession of a post-mortem 'pneumatic' body of Pauline conception.

For, this Yoga aims not at a release from embodied existence (as even the Tantra and Vaishnavism do at the end), at a departure out of the world into some supraterrestrial world of bliss and spiritual enjoyment, but at a change of earthly life and existence, at a divine fulfilment of life here upon earth, and that too "not as something subordinate or incidental, but as a distinct and central object".¹ Also, "the object sought after [in this Yoga] is not an individual achievement of divine realisation for the sake of the individual, but something to be gained for the earth-consciousness here." ²

¹ Sri Aurobindo on Himself, p. 109.

² Ibid., p. 167.

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Now, in this framework of the goal of a divine fulfilment of terrestrial life, the importance of the body is indeed obvious. For, as Sri Aurobindo himself has declared:

"A total perfection is the ultimate aim which we set before us, for our ideal is the Divine Life which we wish to create here, the life of the Spirit fulfilled on earth, life accomplishing its own spiritual transformation even here on earth in the conditions of the material universe. That cannot be unless the body too undergoes a transformation, unless its action and functioning attain to a supreme capacity"¹ and "the physical consciousness, and physical being, the body itself...be suffused with a light and beauty and bliss from the Beyond and the life divine assume a body divine."²

Elsewhere Sri Aurobindo sounds a note of warning: "It is because he has developed or been given a body and brain capable of receiving and serving a progressive mental illumination that man has risen above the animal. Equally, it can only be by developing a body or at least a functioning of the physical instrument capable of receiving and serving a still higher illumination that he will rise above himself and realise, not merely in thought and in his internal being but in life, a perfectly divine manhood. Otherwise either the promise of Life is cancelled, its meaning annulled and earthly being can only realise Sachchidananda by abolishing itself, by shedding from it mind, life and body and returning to the pure Infinite, or else man is not the divine instrument, there is a destined limit to the consciously progressive power which distinguishes him from all other terrestrial existences and as he has replaced them in the front of things, so another must eventually replace him and assume his heritage."³

But fortunately for earth-life and for man neither of these alternatives need be envisaged. For man has convincingly shown by his past achievement that he is capable in all parts of his being, of exceeding ad infinitum the bounds of his actuality. Thus there is no inevitability of logic why he himself should not arrive at the glorious prospect of divine manhood, by opening all his members, — his mentality, his life, and, the last but not the least, his body itself,—to the unveiled action of the Supermind and allowing them to be integrally moulded and transfigured by that 'greater term

¹ The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, pp. 8-9.

2 Ibid., p. 11.

³ The Life Divine, pp. 231-232.

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of the Spirit manifesting in Nature.'

For, it should be clearly borne in mind that the divine body thus envisaged can come into existence and its physical immortality be achieved and assured, not through the paltry efforts made by science, nor through the occult-spiritual influences that seek to act upon Matter through the sole agency of the powers of consciousness so far organised in earth-nature, but through the action of the Supramental Power, the power of "the full Truth-Consciousness of the Divine Nature".¹ This Truth-Consciousness, ṛta-cit, the Supermind as Sri Aurobindo terms it, is "a dynamic and not only a static Power, not only a Knowledge, but a Will according to Knowledge,"² that can "manifest direct its world of Light and Truth in which all is luminously based on the harmony and unity of the One, not disturbed by a veil of Ignorance."³

Also, when this Supramental Power overtly intervenes in the field of body and Matter, its working will be "not an influence on the physical giving it abnormal faculties, but an entrance and penetration changing it wholly into a supramentalised physical".⁴

Now, as regards the nature and character of this supramentalised physical making possible the appearance, here upon earth itself, of a wholly transfigured divine body, Sri Aurobindo has written in great detail in the penultimate chapter of The Life Divine and, more exhaustively, in his last work The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth.

The limited span of the present work does not permit us to discuss in full the nature of this apotheosis of the material body of man, as envisaged in the Yoga-Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, nor can we indicate how far and in what way the insistent problems of fatigue and inertia, disease and decay, un-regenerated impulses and appetites are going to be solved in the transformed divine body to appear in time. We content ourselves with picking up here one theme, the theme, we might as well say, of the Sphinx-like problem of death and dissolution of the individual's physical body.

For, we have been assured by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother that as a crowning achievement of the Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, there will come about 'the physical conquest of

¹ Letters on Yoga, p. 257.

^{2 3} Ibid., p. 264.

⁴Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother, p. 172.

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death, an earthly immortality',¹ — "in the sense not of attachment or of restriction to our present corporeal frame but an exceeding of the law of the physical body."² 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".³

And thus will be realised for man his age-old yearning, "the consummation of a triple immortality, — immortality of the nature completing the essential immortality of the Spirit and the psychic survival of death,"⁴ — which will be "the crown of rebirth and a momentous indication of the conquest of the material inconscience and Ignorance even in the very foundation of the reign of Matter,... a temporal sign of the spirit's victory here over Death and Matter".⁵

But before this vision of the conquest of Death, can be realised in the life of man, the metaphysical necessity for its existence and sway so far has to be adequately met and abrogated.

So our task now is to proceed to the study of the metaphysics of death and indicate the conditions necessary for the attainment of a physical immortality.

^{1 2 3} The Life Divine, p. 261.

^{4 5} Ibid., p. 823.

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