Mother and Me

The Mother and Her Physical Body

So much has been ascribed to a divine life in a divine body that one often gets utterly confused. And that includes me! Even the word ‘Divine’ has different connotations for different people — God, the gods, godly or a thing of beauty, truth, absolute truth, universal consciousness, etc. I am not going to venture into the different aspects of a divine life or a divine body. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have written enough. Many sadhaks have further explained what they have written. I believe that all of us have a little bit of that ‘Divine’ in us which sometimes sparkles and gives a mild shock. Some pick the thread and delve deeper; others just leave it at that and in the course of time, forget it altogether.

Here, I am not going to refer to that divine body or even an astral body.

Instead, I want to focus on a body which has physical and vital forces arranged in a systemic manner and makes our body function; the so-called Panchbhautik Shareer, with its well-defined anatomy and partly-understood physiology

.

One evening when we were sitting in the Mother’s room, she told me she wanted her spine to be straight! What did I think? This was a simple question being asked to a simple physician with limited knowledge.

As you know, the Mother had developed kyphosis in her later years, which is a result of the natural aging process due to osteoarthritis of the bones and joints with degeneration of the cartilages and the matrix of the bone. This had restricted her physical activities to a very large extent.

I told the Mother the plain truth as I understood it. I said, “Mother, I do not know about different types of bodies, but this physical body has reached a stage when it will not be able to straighten itself. On the contrary, it is likely to get worse. The only way to delay this degenerative process is to continue to do physical movements since the joints are like flowing water. The water remains pure as long as it flows. Once it stagnates, it deteriorates in quality.”

The Mother nodded her head and went into a trance (she usually contemplated that way) and a little later just nodded her head; perhaps accepting what I had mentioned, and did not have an iota of gloom in her countenance. For me the “truth” was (and still is) that the physical and biological body will have to undergo change. An organ that is born must die; or, it should transform — nothing can be static in time and space.

I do not know when an immortal, disease-free, divine body will appear, but even if it did, it will have to transform. Yet Hindus have always prayed to God to lead us from mortality to immortality! Is “death” an end? Or the beginning? This is an unsolved mystery of humankind.