“A sound mind in a sound body” is an old axiom but, in spite of being old, it may not necessarily carry in it the old and possibly no longer acceptable axiomatic sense. In a newer and enlarged view the soundness of the body may even lead to the idea of the completest soundness of the soul itself. There is of course the ancient wisdom, as well as the ever-renewed experience, that the soul is deathless and birthless and is not affected by heat and cold and “weapons cleave it not, nor the fire burn, nor do the waters drench it, nor the winds dry.” Yet it is an entity which grows in divinity through the aliments drawn from the material world, like fire that blazes even as it is fed by the abundant fuel. It is a substantive agent through which the miraculous alchemy of transformation can be accomplished. In a much broader and more luminous sense than Milton’s, it turns the corporeal into incorporeal or ethereal. In Paradise Lost Raphael, the "sociable Spirit", explains to Adam the whole process of concoction-digestion-assimilation, leading to the change:

                                    … what he gives

(Whose praise be ever sung) to man in part

Spiritual, may of purest Spirits be found

No ingrateful food: and food like those pure

Intelligential substance require

As doth your Rational; and both contain

Within them every lower facultie

Of sense, whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste,

Tasting concoct, digest, assimilate,

And corporeal to incorporeal turn.

For know, whatever was created, needs

To be sustained and fed; of Elements

The grosser feeds the purer, Earth the Sea,

Earth and the Sea feed Air, Air those Fires

Ethereal, and as lowest first the Moon…[i]

The purpose of the Angel’s visit was primarily to warn Adam about the danger that might beset the well-thought heavenly plan for Man, thus thwarting the corporeal turning into the incorporeal. In Milton what we witness is a combination of theology and Platonic ideas which themselves seem to have travelled from the Indian Sankhya revelations to the ancient Greece. But there are ranges of spiritual consciousness which the soul has to climb in its evolutionary travail, but they may not have anything directly to do with the process corporeal becoming incorporeal. What has to happen is an occult-physical transmutation. The supreme consummation comes only when the body also becomes divinely glorious, making it an authentic instrument for manifestation of the Spirit’s infinite qualities, such as beauty, harmony, sweetness, power, the wondrous Truth-Consciousness of the Delight itself. The body is there not just to house mind; more significantly it enshrines the soul, the little deity that illumines it and endeavours to take it on the upward climb.

In the complex process of Nature is sought an integral fulfilment which is the fundamental issue of a creation having its beginning in the deep inconscient. If a spiritual seeker has a choice of abandoning the terrestrial existence and losing himself for ever in the beatitudes of heaven, nothing need prevent him doing so; but he can also turn his gaze bodyward and make it a perfect vehicle to bring that heaven itself to things gross and earthly, bring them here in the terrestrial possibilities. About this is shown pragmatic diffidence, that there are insurmountable difficulties because of which this cannot be, that all the past attempts proved frustrating; but that should not mean that it can never be done in future too. That would be rather convoluted if not defeatist logic, that because it was not done therefore it cannot be done. Basically, what is needed is to grasp and attend to the problem of the body proper, look into its deeper and occult origins, its very constitutionality which might also offer means and methods for its resolution. “A divine life in a divine body”—that ought to become a vigourous pursuit, a yogic commitment itself; it is in that pursuit that discovery must be made to give to the body enthusiastic joy of a wide-ranging creative unfoldment. In fact, there is present such a definite in-built ingrained possibility in the very nature of things and it is that which must be explored, the body as if flawlessly programmed to become an instrument for divine manifestation, as Sri Aurobindo would declare,

a conscious vessel of the Truth and part of the means of self-effectuation and a form of its self-aware existence.[ii]

Thus when triumphantly handled, Matter becomes Spirit’s opportunity. Was that not the intention behind this long-drawn scheme when the process of manifestation via the Inconscience was set into motion? Or else Inconscience would lose all its meaning and contents. After all, it was with that rationale that the Spirit had turned itself into evocative purposeful Matter holding in it these possibilities. Difficulties are there no doubt on the way, but they are not fundamental difficulties; they appear in the sequence of executing the programme. A divine body, dīvya śarīra, belongs to the Truth-Idea and it must appear here.

The problem of the body is actually the problem of matter which may be taken equivalent to the problem of the Inconscience itself. It looks as though in the arrangement of things there was a distinct possibility of the Divine emerging from its opposite, from the Inconscient. If it is such a definite possibility then it must be given a fair chance and it is that which is perhaps being given. Perhaps that is one mechanism by which such a manifestation could at all occur. The dazzling wonder is that the Inconscience’s instrumentation is functionally meant for the Superconscience’s purpose. Matter could be a resplendent foundation in this grand blueprint. When with this well-aimed perspective we look at the entire succession of becoming, then the universal substance turning into form to dynamically uphold specific divine qualities can be an amazing prospect in the creation’s inexplicable happenings. Which means, the body’s role becomes pivotal particularly when we recognise that it is a product of the void-like Inconscience, contentless and dark.

As Sri Aurobindo explains,

…the Inconscience is an appearance, a dwelling place, an instrument of a secret Consciousness or Superconscient which has created the miracle we call the universe. Matter is the field and the creation of the Inconscient and the perfection of the operations of inconscient Matter, their perfect adaptation of means to an aim and end, the wonders they perform and the marvels of beauty they create, testify, in spite of all the ignorant denial we can oppose, to the presence and power of consciousness of this Superconscience in every part and movement of the material universe. It 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.[iii]

Never was in the spiritual history such a reckoning of matter made, such a significant place given to the likelihood of a superconscient manifestation based on the physical. It appears that the “secret aim of evolution” had remained altogether unrecognized in the scheme of past things.

But the process is not a single-stranded process, of conventional or linear growth, running from lower stadia to higher stadia, from one unseen end to the other far-off invisible end. There is in fact a problem, a problem that has arisen in a most unexpected way, a peculiar problem that had no roots in life proper. It has arisen because of the higher entering into the formidable lower, life making matter its field of expression. Life accepts this material circumstance but pays price for it.

Indeed, when life adventured into the inconscient stuff there was at once forbidding opposition, an unanticipated stupendous and severe antagonism for its entry into it, a fearsome resistance. The new dynamism full of happy and joyous vigour was challenged and the power of annihilation, mutilating the fair face of the divine Angel, threw at her a negative response, of the sombre Self:

... while the magic breath was on its way,

Before her gifts could reach our prisoned hearts,

A dark ambiguous Presence questioned all.

The secret Will that robes itself with Night

And offers to spirit the ordeal of the flesh,

Imposed a mystic mask of death and pain.[iv]

Life succumbed and wore a gloomy face, became subject to decay, disintegration and death. But who or what was that “ambiguous Presence” and whence did it arise?

Presently, however, what we have is life that is distorted, disfigured, a disharmonious life, full of anguish and agony. And it is a life that is governed by death, imposing on it the indignity of mortality, that we ignorant and trapped in it question if it is God who at all made it that way. But the occult fact is, it is life who got stunned by the ambiguous Presence, who became helpless, who accepted death as the means for existence, perhaps even for spiritual growth. Since then poet after poet has bewailed about the sorry state of this living, this life under the yoke of misery and suffering, for instance à la Keats life has become a “nest of pain”; it is a “haunt of ignorance, a home of pain”. To escape it the ascetic takes up to harsh and difficult practices; the way out for him is to abandon this sphere of gloom, this life itself; he seeks solace in some distant paradise of everlasting happiness. The Vedantic bhakta finds this phenomenal illusory world full of sorrow, idi samsaram bahu duhkham he cries and yearns for union with the Lord of his adoration. On the soul of man is laid the gloom of discomforting humiliation and sadness and despair, of incapacity and transience, of helpless mortality. Such is the legacy handed over to the physical body, perishable, full of darkness, that darkness getting renewed only by gloomier and denser darkness, the body bound to the chain of Fate and Time. Does not this leaden norm then mean that there has to be a more responsive spiritual solution, that there has to be a greater action?

When the yogi probes deep into these aspects, he discovers that the solution lies only in seeing the basic rationale buried in the cavernous Inconscience. Meaningful and blissful glorious life in matter could become possible only if the cause of decay, disintegration and death can be eliminated. Sri Aurobindo in his epic Savitri describes how the divine Shakti took birth here in the mortal world, condescended to pass through its portals to vanquish the destroyer of the soul of the suffering creature. She accomplished the task, paved the path to make earthly life charged with the splendour of consciousness that is always in the awareness of the Truth. Her own divine birth was in response to the “world’s desire” which was lifted to the bright pinnacle of this creation and from where, like the answering grace, she consented to come into this mortality.

Sri Aurobindo’s own determined yoga-tapasya was to invoke that perfect, that surefire power by which the physical nature could be handled victoriously. This was one mission of the Avatarhood which he by first establishing the supramental light and force in his own person splendidly and successfully carried through. At the time of his passing away he gave to the Mother, as a parting gift, what he called the Mind of Light, the physical’s mind receiving the Supramental, something that had never happened in the long and zigzagging spiritual history of the world. From this point onward, with the Mind of Light operating in the evolutionary process, a new beginning was made. It marked the beginning of the Shakti Yoga and it is that which the Mother carried forward.

Indeed, the “strategic sacrifice” made by Sri Aurobindo on 5 December 1950 for the earth’s sake, a sacrifice by which he occultly fixed the Supermind in his own physical body, hastened, even as the Mother’s yoga-tapasya rapidly progressed towards unparalleled realizations, realization after realization. In that act what he attempted he universally achieved. That indeed marked globally the marvellous advent, the descent of the Supermind with its active play in the subtle-physical, rather the supramental manifestation, as a swift necessary step in the Divineward endeavour, a most significant realization, and triumph, hastening the integral transformation. Immortality in an immortal body has therefore arrived at our doorsteps and we should be ready to welcome it.

The Mother, with this new possibility opened out to her, and having completed Sri Aurobindo’s immediate work began to explore, if we may say so, the most difficult job of body-consciousness awaking to the new Light. However, this should not negatively imply that Sri Aurobindo’s agenda did not include it; in fact, his body's cells were even before this immortally luminous. In this context we may therefore understand why he had earlier emphasized, and emphasized any number of times, that his immediate concern was to permanently bring the Supermind down here in the physical. He wanted the Supermind to decide and take up whatever was to be taken up in its awakened dynamism here. If so, if the Supermind was going to do all that, was then the Mother, after the descent of the Supermind in 1956, overreaching her brief? Certainly not. She was rather engaged in making the material Nature more and more open to the divine’s prospects for manifestation, prospects which were disclosed in the wake of this Event.

As early as in 1915 the Mother, when she was in Japan, had written to Sri Aurobindo as how her consciousness was immersed in divine contemplation and how even the physical experienced identity with the vast and radiant universal Being:

Then was the physical body seized, first in its lower members and next the whole of it, by a sacred trembling which made all personal limits fall away little by little in the most material sensation. The whole being grew in greatness progressively, methodically, breaking every barrier, shattering every obstacle, that it might contain and manifest a force and a power which increased ceaselessly in immensity and intensity. It was a progressive dilatation of the cells until there was a complete identification with the earth: The body of the awakened consciousness was the terrestrial globe moving harmoniously in ethereal space. And the consciousness knew that its global body was moving in arms of the universal Being, and it gave itself, it abandoned itself to It in an ecstasy of peaceful bliss. Then it felt that its body was absorbed in the body of the universe, immobile in its totality, moving infinitely in its internal complexity. The consciousness sprang towards the Divine in an ardent aspiration, a perfect surrender, and it saw the splendour of the immaculate Light the radiant Being standing on a many-headed serpent whose body coiled infinitely around the universe. The Being in an eternal gesture of triumph mastered and created at one and the same time the serpent and the universe that issued from him; erect on the hydra he dominated it with all his victorious might, and the same gesture that crushed the hydra enveloping the universe gave it eternal birth.[v]

This “material union with the Divine”, as Sri Aurobindo called it, was the seed-experience of much that was to follow in later years.

The difficulties of the physical are not only disquieting and daunting; they are insurmountable when the clue is absent. In ancient times Rishi Agastya suffered the horror of Inconscience and abandoned the attempt to spiritualise the body-consciousness proper. The right clue was not available. A slow preparatory evolution taking care of every aspect and every detail was needed. But now, on the rapid wings, the spirit can majestically go ahead to give a divine dimension, a divine amplitude to the attempt. That is not to say that the process is facile, that the flight is effortless and unconstrained, without obstacles. Actually, the fight against the ancient Adversary is grim and strenuous of which we have the least idea. Sri Aurobindo mentions of the silent desperate brink on which the Mother would have to stand without help, stand alone while dealing with Death and Night, with the Spirit of Negation opposing God’s entry into this world.

A day may come when she must stand unhelped

On a dangerous brink of the world's doom and hers,

Carrying the world's future on her lonely breast,

Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole

To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge.[vi]

All this for the sake of man, for the sake of the earth which is her chief concern. She may win or she may lose everything in that hour of trial. But she will go only by the divine Command.

Yes, the tremendous hour must arrive. The Mother’s own yoga-tapasya bearing the agony and ecstasy in the process of bringing to the gross earth-consciousness the supreme Beatitude got more and more intensified in the course of swift time. Her way to meet the grim hour lay in complete surrender to the Divine: “What Thou willest, what Thou willest” became her solicitous and powerful mantra for the physical transformation. Therein indeed is the true remedy for the body-problem. The Mother describes, as follows, the triumph in what she calls the descent of the superman consciousness, her experience of 1 January 1969:

In the night it came slowly and waking up this morning, there was as though a golden dawn, and the atmosphere was so light. The body felt: ‘Well, it is truly, truly new.’ A golden light, transparent and...  benevolent. ‘Benevolent’ in the sense of a certainty—a harmonious certainty. It was new.[vii]

How wonderful, this Divine work in the earth-consciousness!

N.B.: This article has been taken from the author’s Sri Aurobindo and the New Millennium published in December 1999. It has been revised at places before the present posting is made.

References