In the Mother's Light

Physical Transformation

SRI Aurobindo insists so much on physical transformation, because without it the spiritual achievements of the human soul cannot be manifested in earthly life, individual and collective. It has been possible up to now to purify the mind and the heart to a certain extent and even to discipline and regulate (more by suppression or repression than otherwise) the life-parts of man, but the physical nature has been left almost unreclaimed. Its customary habits and tendencies, its crude appetites and impulses, its mechanical reactions and responses to outward impacts have always been the disgust and despair of even the greatest of spiritual men. Hathayoga, rightly practised, gives considerable control over the physical body, but not over the whole physical nature; and even the best control acquired by Rajayoga is neither conquest nor conversion.

The bitter truth has to be admitted that no amount of spiritual realisation has ever been able to overcome the inherent darkness and disabilities of the physical part of our human nature. Inertia, obscurity, disease, decrepitude and death, doubt, obstinacy in error, unwillingness to change, a helpless subjection to past associations, proneness, to suffering and a sharp sense of egoistic separation have been the invariable stamp of it and a constant goad to a resort to absorbed contemplation or trance. Truth is not known in the physical being, because it is gross and dense; peace cannot dwell securely in it, because it is turbid and restless; the soul's limpid joy cannot flow out of it, because it is choked with the fungus of pleasures and pains. Even when universal love floods within, little slimy swirls of hatred or anger or grief or jealousy may be detected on its outer fringes, perhaps more as lingering remnants of past habits than as any fresh movements; but they linger long and seem never to leave definitively. And to crown all this, one is often surprised by sudden blinding and convulsive raids from the subconscient. Movements and elements of nature which one would have thought dead,

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suddenly recur and recur again and seek to recover their lost empire. There are many such awkward and disturbing factors which hide behind the calm and imposing fa9ade of a Yogi's life, and betray themselves only to the eye that can probe below the surface.

Sri Aurobindo will have none of these ungainly sun-spots in the perfection of the Integral Yoga; for, the basic aim of his Yoga is a dynamic union with the Divine in life, in every movement of life, in the whole being, in the entire nature and in all its thoughts and feelings and actions; and a persistence of the obscure habits of the physical nature and the subconscient scum is absolutely incompatible with it. So long as a man is on earth, the terrestrial life is his field of achievement, and all that he gains by personal effort or by divine Grace must have a full and perfect expression in his life, whether the gain is physical, vital, mental or spiritual; and if any acquisition, however highly spiritual it may be, fails to manifest itself in his life, it means that it is still a potentiality and has to be realised in terms of the material existence. If the Upanishadic dictum is true that all that is here is there in the Beyond, and all that is there is also here, the only logical deduction can be that all that is there is latent here or only partly patent, and can manifest in its fullness; and that so to manifest is the sole reason of its being here.

Sri Aurobindo wrote in one of his letters to Barindra,

"What God wants from man is to manifest Him here, in the individual and the collectivity — to realise God in life. The ancient systems of Yoga failed to synthesise or mite spirituality and life; they have explained the world away as Maya (illusion) or a transient Lila (play). The result has been a dwindling of the life-force and the decline of India.”

In one of his letters to his disciples, he says, "Unless the external nature is transformed, one may go as high as possible and have the largest experiences,. .but the external mind remains an instrument of Ignorance.” In More Lights on Yoga,

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he remarks, "The whole physical life must be transformed. This material world does not want a mere change of consciousness in us. It says in effect, 'You retire into bliss, become luminous, have the divine knowledge, but that does not alter me. I still remain the hell I practically am ! The true change of consciousness is one that will change the physical conditions of the world and make it an entirely new creation.”

By transformation Sri Aurobindo does not mean mere purification, as we have already indicated. By physical trans- formation he means a reversal of the whole physical consciousness and a radical conversion of the very grain and gamut of its working—"...a spiritualising and illumination of the whole physical consciousness and a divinising of the law of the body.”¹ It is a long and difficult work, depending for its success on two indispensable factors : self-offering of the individual through every action of life done as an oblation to the Divine, and the bringing down of the Light-Force of the Vijnanamaya Purusha into the physical being. The Vijnanashakti or supramental Force descends and suffuses the physical being and awakens and activates the divine consciousness that is submerged in it. Purification can be done by the enlightened human intelligence, but it is only a partial and precarious purification that can be thus effected; for the reaches of our being where lie the roots of our earthly nature are sealed to our mental vision, and in our impatient ardour for purification, we often end by doing nothing better than maiming and crippling much of our nature and even hacking away some recalcitrant elements which, once conquered and converted, might have contributed to a substantial enrichment and perfection of our being. The human mind cannot evidently be a wise and efficient agent of purification. Itself a creation and sport of the lower nature of the three gunas, and incurably conditioned in all its ideas and principles and judgements by those gunas working in shifting combinations, it cannot, by itself, achieve the dynamic freedom necessary for purifying the nature. Besides, even its highest ideas and principles are nothing but an evolution out of a complex

¹ The Synthesis of Yoga by Sri Aurobindo.

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of sense-data, inference, imagination, reasoning and the prevailing bent and bias of the whole being—they are not facets and formations of Truth received undiminished and undeformed from their authentic origin. To meet Truth face to face, we have to go beyond our mind of dividing ignorance; and it is only when, transcending the mind, we have climbed to the Truth in its own domain, that we can bring down its authentic omnipotent Force to purify and transform our nature, mental, vital and physical. This Force is not only omnipotent, it is also omniscient, being the luminous Force of the Supreme, and it knows best how to grapple with the tangled skein of our nature and weave out of it a flawless divine Supernature, a miracle of transfiguration.

But action is the indispensable means, and without it the transformation of the physical nature is out of the question. It is not only a state of passive peace and purity that is sought for in the Integral Yoga, but a free and unhampered expression of the divine Will and a fulfilment of the divine purpose in a life of God-guided action.

"Even for those whose first natural movement is a consecration, a surrender and a resultant entire transformation of the thinking mind and its knowledge, or a total consecration, surrender and transformation of the heart and its emotions, the consecration of works is a needed element in that change.... It is possible, indeed, to begin with knowledge or Godward emotion solely or with both together and to leave works for the final movement of the Yoga. But there is then this disadvantage that we may tend to live too exclusively within, subtilised in subjective experience, shut off in our isolated inner parts; there we may get incrusted in our spiritual seclusion and find it difficult later on to pour ourselves triumphantly outwards and apply to life our gains in the higher Nature. When we turn to add this external kingdom also to our inner conquests, "we shall find ourselves too much accustomed to an activity purely subjective and ineffective on the material plane. There will be an immense difficulty in transforming the outer life and the body. Or we shall find that our, action does not correspond with the

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inner light: it still follows the old accustomed mistaken paths, still obeys the old normal imperfect influences; the Truth within us continues to be separated by a painful gulf from the ignorant mechanism of our external nature.”¹

Having dwelt at some length on the question of the transformation of the physical consciousness and being of man, as envisaged by Sri Aurobindo, we turn now to the Mother's conception of it, as expressed by her before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo. It is here, on the question of the transformation of the physical being, that the identity of their views seems to be all the more striking; for, the subject with all its far-reaching implications is almost a new one, hardly ever treated in a complete and comprehensive way by any of the Yogis and mystics of the past, and yet all-important to the future of humanity. The divine fulfilment aimed at by the Integral Yoga pivots upon the perfection of the physical transformation. If homo sapiens cannot be transformed out of his normal animality into a dynamic divinity, there can be no divine life upon earth. And yet, Sri Aurobindo affirms, the establishment of the divine life is inevitable, as it is the logical culmination of the process of evolution which brings out from the indeterminate inconscience the fundamental principles of existence involved there. As Matter has evolved, and life and mind, so the other principles must also evolve. Therefore the divine life on earth is a destiny which cannot be reversed, and of which the achievement of the physical transformation is an inescapable pre-condition.

In 1912 the Mother wrote : "The terrestrial transformation and harmonisation can be brought about by two processes which, though opposite in appearance, must combine,—must act upon each other and complete each other :

(1) Individual transformation, an inner development leading to the union with the Divine Presence.

(2) Social transformation, the establishment of an environment favourable to the flowering and growth of the individual.”

This terrestrial transformation of which the Mother speaks

¹ The Synthesis of Yoga, Book I., Part I, Ch. 3

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can be nothing else than the physical transformation of man, individual and collective, leading to the establishment of the divine life on earth. On more or less the same subject, the Mother says in The Supreme Discovery: "Let us allow ourselves to be penetrated and transformed by this Divine Love and give up to Him, without reservation, this marvellous instrument, our material organism. He will make it produce its maximum on every plane of activity.” The stress is, as always, on the physical being of man and its radical change, so that the spiritual wealth may be poured out in terms of material facts.

Those who have read the Mother's Prayers and Meditations know how, practically through the whole book of over 350 Prayers, the recurring theme is the same : the transformation of Matter, the transmutation of the physical being of man. But this is not a theme that originated with the Prayers and Meditations, but had its birth in the Mother's consciousness very early in her life, and has been ever since the one out-standing mission of her life. She too felt like Sri Aurobindo that divine perfection could only be attained in earthly life by conquering and converting Matter, and not before that. In a speech delivered in 1912 in France, she said, "Built as we are out of an imperfect substance, we cannot but share in this imperfection.” "Whatever therefore may be the possible degree of perfection, consciousness and knowledge that our deeper being possesses, the simple fact that it incarnates in a physical body gives rise to obstacles to the purity of its manifestation. And yet, the incarnation has for its goal precisely the victory over these obstacles, the transformation of Matter.”¹ The perception of the inherent imperfection of Matter, which could very well have, as it almost always has in other cases, led to a world-shunning spirituality, sublime in its islanded grandeur, turned the Mother's whole being towards the conquest of that very imperfection and a definitive victory over Matter. And she has expressed in unmistakable terms the object of our birth or incarnation here, the ultimate goal of our earthly life, as "the transformation of Matter" which is, as is well known, the

¹ Words of Long Ago by the Mother.

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central aim of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and philosophy.

In her Prayer of the 26th November, 1912, the Mother, addressing the Divine, says, "...Thou who everywhere raisest up Matter in this ardent and wonderful aspiration, in this sublime thirst for Eternity.” These ideas of "raising up Matter," the "aspiration of Matter" and its "thirst for Eternity" are so very new to the philosophico-spiritual concepts of the West and so very fundamental to the teaching of Sri Aurobindo that the identity we have been studying becomes apparent even to a cursory glance, and has not to be laboured into recognition.

Dwelling on the same subject in her Prayer of the 15th June, 1913, the Mother says that to know that a part of our being is perfectly pure and to commune and identify ourselves with that part is very helpful, but this knowledge and communion must be utilised for "hastening the earthly transfiguration," for that is, indeed, "the sublime work" of the Divine in the material world. To be identified only with the immaculate soul and commune with it in the silence of the depths is not the ultimate object of human birth. This identification must be extended and reproduced in every part of our composite being, and utilised as a unifying and integrating force working at the same time as a potent leverage of our ascent to the Divine. It must be translated into the terms of the physical being for the "earthly transfiguration."

This work of physical transformation is no morbid obsession with the body. It is, in fact, only when one rises far above the body-consciousness that one gains the power to transform the body. Deploring the engrossing care for the preservation of the body, which is almost universal in men, the Mother says, "Nothing can be more humiliating, nothing more depressing than these thoughts turned always towards the preservation of the body, this preoccupation with health, with our subsistence, with the frame-work of our life. How trivial are these things, a thin smoke dissolved by a simple breath, vanishing like mirage before a single thought turned towards Thee (the Divine).”¹ And yet it is not a

¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, August 17, 1913.

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neglect of the body that the Mother teaches, for she knows that "the body is a marvellous instrument” and that "there is... no limit to its growth in capacities and to its progress.” We are reminded of what Sri Aurobindo says in this connection in his Bases of Yoga : "There should be no attachment to it (the body), but no contempt or neglect either of the material part of our nature.” In his Letters, Vol. IV, he says, "Matter itself is secretly a form of Spirit and has to reveal itself as that, can be made to wake to consciousness and evolve and realise the Spirit, the Divine within it...That does not mean that the body has to be valued for its own sake or that the creation of a divine body in a future evolution of the whole being has to be contemplated as an end and not as a means...”

Regarding the indispensability of the active service of the Divine in an integral surrender, the Mother is as definite as Sri Aurobindo, and as uncompromising. This service is not a routine round of rituals which the religions prescribe, nor is it philanthropy, humanitarianism or altruism which pass by that name and usually constitute the active life of spiritual men. By service of the Divine the Mother means the constant and conscious offering of each movement of one's nature- physical, vital, psychic, mental and spiritual—to the Divine and to none and nothing but the Divine. All actions of life are accepted and turned towards the Divine except those which are tainted with desire or clearly detrimental to spiritual growth. This wholesale offering of all work is the only means of dedicating all our faculties and their functions, all our energies and their hidden or apparent motives to the Mother, the supreme Force of the Divine, so that they may all be purified, illumined and transfigured for the very purpose for which they have been created—the perfect manifestation of the Divine. Service has, therefore, two stages: one, in which, casting away all our de- sires and self-interest, we offer all our actions to the Divine, and through this integral self-consecration attain to release from the ego and its separative ignorance; and the other, in I which, liberated and transfigured in all our parts, we become luminous instruments of the unveiled Divine,

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Sri Aurobindo's views on this point are much too well- known to need recapitulation here. We shall only quote a few lines from the Mother's writings to show how her thought and practice have moved on identical lines since the beginning of her spiritual life.

The Mother regards the daily activity of life as the anvil on which all the elements of our being must pass and repass in order to be "purified, refined, made supple and ripe for the illumination which contemplation gives to them.”¹ If one gives up the daily activity, one gives up the very process by which, and by which alone, the elements and energies of one's being can be purified and transformed. But, it must be carefully noted, the work of the transformation of the physical being is neither an easy nor a short work; for, each element of our physical personality has to be, not only purified and illumined, but impersonalised and taught "forgetfulness of self and self-abnegation." It is not enough to dislodge the ego from the centre of one's being,—that might be deemed enough by those who seek their spiritual fulfilment elsewhere than on earth—it must be dislodged from every element of one's being, every fibre of one's nature. That is why even for the best of sadhakas sudden and "striking conversions cannot be integral." "Truly to attain the goal, none can escape the need of innumerable experiences of every kind and every instant.”²

The secret of success in this uphill work of physical transformation is, according to the Mother, "Living Thee (the Divine) alone in the act whatever it may be, ever and always Thee.” Divine union through integral self-offering, and transformation and divine fulfilment through integral dynamic union, is the formula of the life of service as conceived and taught by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

In Matter itself, and not elsewhere, lies "the seed of its own salvation." Therefore, not by renouncing the material life and its activities—a renunciation which the Mother calls "a struggle useless and pernicious"—but by recognising in

¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, November 28, 1912.

².ibid

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each atom of Matter "the Will of God who inhabits it" and identifying oneself with it, that "the promised day, the day of great transformation will be near.”¹

¹ The Supreme Discovery by the Mother.

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