Mother's Chronicles - Book Five

15

Why a Body ?

When he was practising pranayama, Sri Aurobindo noticed with curiosity that he was not bitten by mosquitoes. Yogis who practise pranayama are, as a rule, not attacked with illness. "When I practised pranayama at Baroda," said Sri Aurobindo, "I had excellent health and powers. But when I came to Calcutta, and political work did not leave me any time for regular practice of pranayama, I was attacked with malarial fever which almost carried me off. These are," he explained, "the consequences of pranayama or control— whenever these protections are withdrawn, the forces of illness rush up in a sort of revenge."

He told the story of Sakharia Swami. "Sakharia Swami also had Yogic control. One day he saw a mad dog coming. He held out his hand for the dog to bite. After the bite, he didn't allow the poison to go into the system but localised it." Even in sleep he exercised that control. "When the Surat Congress was over, he got excited and thus lost control and the poison spread in his body. He got hydrophobia and couldn't drink water. He said, 'What is this nonsense? I, who was trooper in

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the Mutiny and drank water from the puddles, can't drink water?' He drank water and died." During the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, he had fought alongside the Rani of Jhansi against the English army. When the Rani was killed in the battlefield he was one of those who carried her body and put it on the funeral pyre. It was this great sorrow that made him become a sannyasin. Sakharia Baba was very fond of Sri Aurobindo's brother Barin, who was at one time his disciple. It was Barin who had taken him to the Surat Congress. "Tall and fair," recalled Barin, "a straight body draped in an ochre robe, a shaven head, staff in hand, and hanging from his shoulder a cloth-bag ever full of sugar candy, and a smiling face, that was Sakharia Swami." His actual name was Vishwesharananda Swami, but as he always offered sugar candy to all and sundry he chanced to meet, he came to be called Sakharia Baba. Sri Aurobindo was high in his esteem.

You may well be wondering why we are talking so much about the body, its health and illnesses. Well, as we all have a body wouldn't it be nice to know why we have one ? Perhaps we may learn at the same time how to treat this patient beast of burden? Treat it with more respect, that is. Besides, if the body collapses, the whole thing collapses, no? The fact of the matter is that Sri Aurobindo and Mother regarded the body in quite another light than that preached by religions or than the attitude of many Yogis — although the ancients in India believed that without body there can be no Dharma and so took care to keep it in good shape. Sri Aurobindo did not accept the idea that Matter is something different from the Spirit. Not true:

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"It is One thing," he said. He refuted that the body is an iron cage. "I say it is an instrument of the Spirit."

He admitted though that "the inconscient is the soil from which it has grown...." That, he explained, was the reason why "in the past the body has been regarded by spiritual seekers rather as an obstacle, as something to be overcome and discarded than as an instrument of spiritual perfection and a field of the spiritual change." For instance, Sri Ramakrishna's attitude with regard to the body was that it was a misuse of spiritual force to utilize it for preserving the body or taking care of it or curing its ailments. Sri Aurobindo's was quite the opposite. "I have never had any hesitation," he wrote to Dilip, "in the use of a spiritual force for all legitimate purposes including the maintenance of health and physical life in myself and in others —that is indeed why the Mother gives flowers not only as a blessing but as a help in illness."

We have already seen with Mother that the main cause of bodily illness is the impairment of the subtle sheath: the nervous envelope or aura. She has also told us about the major part played by fear which opens the door to illness enabling it to enter the body and capture it. Sri Aurobindo confirmed all this from his own experience, and clarified a few more points in the process. "Chemicals, glands and what not," he wrote to Dr. Nirod, "these things and the germs also are only a minor physical instrumentation for something supraphysical." The forces behind bacilli, viruses, etc., "first weaken or break through the nervous envelope, the aura. If that is strong and whole, a thousand million germs will not be able to do anything

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to you. The envelope pierced, they attack the subconscient mind in the body; sometimes also the vital mind or mind proper — prepare the illness by fear or thought of illness. The doctors themselves said that in influenza or cholera in the Far East ninety percent got ill through fear. Nothing to take away the resistance like fear. But still the subconscient is the main thing." Because, thrown away from the mind, fear can be "seen passing through you, below the navel. There is a connection between fear and your intestine."

The medical man was still unconvinced. "But diseases like cholera, plague etc. are supposed to outbreak by contamination."

"If the contrary Force is strong in the body," replied Sri Aurobindo patiently, "one can move in the midst of plague and cholera and never get contaminated. Plague too, rats dying all around, people passing into Hades. I have seen that myself in Baroda."

Sri Aurobindo agreed that measures recommended by doctors —sanitation, hygiene, etc.—could raise the standard of health, yet all that they can "deal with is the physical circumstances of health. But they cannot get at the vital forces which are behind and of which the physical circumstances are mere instruments." Nowadays even a layman will understand Sri Aurobindo's remark: "Nature is not so mechanical, she is a conscious being. If you try to circumvent her in one way she circumvents you in another." Let the medical science but come up with a new drug to combat a disease, Nature confounds it by confronting it with a more virulent, more resistant strain.

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For every new and potent remedy there is a new and potent affliction.

"There is a physical aspect to things," he said, writing in greater detail, "and there is an occult supraphysical aspect — one need not get in the way of the other. All physical things are the expression of the supraphysical. The existence of a body with physical instruments and processes does not, as the 19^th century vainly imagined, disprove the existence of a soul which uses the body even if it is also conditioned by it. Laws of Nature do not disprove the existence of God. The fact of a material world to which our instruments are accorded does not disprove the existence of less material worlds which certain subtler instruments can show to us."

It is abundantly clear that the aim of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga is not to find out the most efficient method of healing diseases, but "to change the entire consciousness — even the physical —in order that disease may not come at all. The entire being must be so transformed that disease becomes impossible."

Sri Aurobindo's aim was to make the body an instrument of spiritual perfection. But he was quick to note that what can be attained within the human boundaries "can be something very considerable and sometimes immense." The development of the human range of achievements, especially in things of the mind and will, "can carry us halfway to the divine," he said. He dwelt at length on the body's achievements. "Even what the mind and will can do with the body in the field proper to the body and its life, in the way of physical achievement, bodily endurance, feats of prowess of all kind, a

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lasting activity refusing fatigue or collapse and continuing beyond what seems at first to be possible, courage and refusal to succumb under an endless and murderous physical suffering, these and other victories of many kinds sometimes approaching or reaching the miraculous are seen in the human field and must be reckoned as a part of our total perfection...."

He then spoke of the occult supraphysical aspect. "The body, we have said, is a creation of the Inconscient and itself inconscient or at least subconscient in parts of itself and much of its hidden action; but what we call the Inconscient is an appearance, a dwelling place, an instrument of a secret Consciousness or a Superconscient which has created the miracle we call the universe." He declared that this Superconscient "is there in the body, has made it and its emergence in our consciousness is the secret aim of evolution and the key to the mystery of our existence."

A key had to be gained for the Earth.

They gained it.

They hewed out a new evolutionary road, never before trodden.

It is impossible to measure the pioneering work done by them. For, no one before Mother and Sri Aurobindo had even thought of it. The preceding spiritual Masters —like Buddha, Shankara, Ramakrishna —had no idea of transforming the body, "their aim was spiritual mukti and nothing else." Sri Aurobindo did not find a ready-made integral method, he had to develop it. "If I had [found it], I should not have wasted my time in hewing out a road and in thirty years of search and inner creation,"

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he wrote on 5 October 1935, "when I could have hastened home safely to my goal in an easy canter over paths already blazed out, laid down, perfectly mapped, macadamised, made secure and public. Our Yoga is not a retreading of old walks, but a spiritual adventure."

Mother said (3 April 1967), "I must tell you once more that for us spiritual life does not mean contempt for Matter but its divinization. We do not want to reject the body but to transform it...."

And Sri Aurobindo has given us a master-key : "A fully conscious body might even discover and work out the right material method and process of a material transformation."

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