The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 5

III

THE BODY NATURAL

With regard to the food that man takes, there are two factors that determine or prescribe it. First of all, the real need of the body, that is to say, what the body actually requires for its maintenance, the elements to meet the chemical changes happening in it, something quite material and very definite, viz., the kind of food and the quantity. But usually this real need of the body is obscured and submerged under the demands of another kind of agency, almost altogether foreign to it, (I) vital desire and (2) mental notions. Indeed, the menu of our table, at least 90% of it, is arranged so as to satisfy the demands of the second category, the consideration that should come first comes last in fact. The body is at present a slave of the mind and the vital; it is hardly given the freedom of choosing its own requirements in

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the right quantity and quality. That is why the body is seen to suffer everywhere and is normally sick for the greater part of its earthly existence. It has been compelled to occupy an anomalous position in the human organism between these two tyrants. The vital goes by its greed, its attraction and repulsion, its impulse to excess (sometimes to its opposite of deprivation); what it has been accustomed to, what it has taken a fancy for, to that it clings, and if the body has not what it prescribes, it throws the suggestion into the body that it will become sick. The same with the mental factor. The physical mind has its own notions and schemes, pet ideas and plans (perhaps from what has been read in books or heard from persons) in respect of the body's needs; it thinks that if a certain prescription is not followed, the body will surfer. The mind and the vital are thus close friends and accomplices in regimenting the body. They impose their own demands and prejudices upon the body which helplessly gets entangled in them and loses its native instinct. The body left to itself is marvellously self-conscious;

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it knows spontaneously and unfailingly what is good for its health and strength. The animals usually, especially those of the forest, maintain still the unspoilt body instinct; for they have no mind to tyrannise over the body nor is their vital of a kind to go against the normal demands of the body. The body, segregated from the mind and the vital, very easily can choose the right kind of food and the right quantity and even vary them according to the varying conditions of the body. Common sense is an inherent attribute of the body consciousness; it never errs on the side of excess and immoderation or perversity. The vital is dramatic, the mind is imaginative, but the body is sanity itself. And that is not a sign of its inconscience and inertia. The dull and dumb immobility of which it is sometimes accused is after all perhaps a mode of its self-defence against the wild vagaries of the mind and the vital to which it is so often called upon to lend support. Indeed it may very well be that the accusation against the flesh that it is weak is only an opinion or suggestion imposed on the body by the mental-vital who throw the

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whole blame upon the body just to escape from the blame due to themselves. The vital is impatient and clamorous, and if it is all push and drive—towards physical execution and fulfilment—it is normally clouded and troubled and obscured and doubly twisted when counselled and supported by a mind, narrow and superficial, not seeing beyond its nose, bound within a frame of incorrect and borrowed notions.

The body, precisely because of its negative nature—its dumb inertia, as it is called—precisely because it has no axe of its own to grind, that is to say, as it has no fancies and impulsions, plans and schemes upon which it can pride itself, precisely because of this childlike innocence, it has a wonderful plasticity and a calm stability, when it is not troubled by the mind or vital. Indeed the divine qualities that are secreted in the body, which the body seeks to conserve and express are a stable, harmony, a balance and equilibrium, capable of supporting the whole weight of all the levels of consciousness from the highest peak to the lowest abysses even as physically it bears the

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weight of the entire depth of the atmosphere so lightly as it were, without feeling the burden in the least.

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