Perfection
of the Body
Page 1
The
perfection of the body, as great a perfection as we can
bring about by the means at our disposal, must be the ultimate
aim of physical culture. Perfection is the true aim of all
culture, the spiritual and psychic, the mental, the vital
and it must be the aim of our physical culture also. If
our seeking is for a total perfection of the being, the
physical part of it cannot be left aside; for the body is
the material basis, the body is the instrument which we
have to use. Sarïram khalu dharmasädhanam,
says the old Sanskrit adage,—the body is the means
of fulfilment of dharma, and dharma means every ideal which
we can propose to ourselves and the law of its working out
and its action. A total perfection is the ultimate aim which
we set before us, for our ideal is the Divine Life which
we wish to create here, the life of the Spirit fulfilled
on earth, life accomplishing its own spiritual transformation
even here on earth in the conditions of the material universe.
That cannot be unless the body too undergoes a transformation,
unless its action and functioning attain to a supreme capacity
and the perfection which is possible to it or which can
be made possible.
I
have already indicated in a previous message a relative
perfection of the physical consciousness in the body and
of the mind, the life, the character which it houses as,
no less than an awakening and development of the body's
own native capacities, a desirable outcome of the exercises
and practices of the physical culture to which we have commenced
to give in this Ashram a special attention and scope. A
development of the physical consciousness must always be
a considerable part of our aim, but for that the right development
of the body itself is an essential element; health, strength,
fitness are the first needs, but the physical frame itself
must be the best possible. A divine life in a material world
implies necessarily a union of the two ends of existence,
the spiritual summit and the material base. The soul with
the basis of its life established in Matter ascends to the
heights of the Spirit but does not cast away its base, it
joins the heights and the depths together. The Spirit descends
into Matter and the material world with all its lights and
glories and powers and with them fills and transforms life
in the material world so that it becomes more and more divine.
The transformation is not a change into something purely
subtle and spiritual to which Matter is in its nature repugnant
and by which it is felt as an obstacle or as a shackle binding
the Spirit; it takes up Matter as a form of the Spirit though
now a form which conceals and turns it into a revealing
instrument, it does not cast away the energies of Matter,
its capacities, its methods; it brings out their hidden
possibilities, uplifts, sublimates, discloses their innate
divinity. The divine life will reject nothing that is capable
of divinisation; all is to be seized, exalted, made utterly
perfect. The mind now still ignorant, though struggling
towards knowledge, has to rise towards and into the supramental
light and truth and bring it down so that it shall suffuse
our thinking and perception and insight and all our means
of knowing till they become radiant with the highest truth
in their inmost and outermost movements. Our life, still
full of obscurity and confusion and occupied with so many
dull and lower aims, must feel all its urges and instincts
exalted and irradiated and become a glorious counterpart
of the supramental super-life above. The physical consciousness
and physical being, the body itself must reach a perfection
in all that it is and does which now we can hardly conceive.
It may even in the end be suffused with a light and beauty
and bliss from the Beyond and the life divine assume a body
divine.
But
first the evolution of the nature must have reached a point
at which it can meet the Spirit direct, feel the aspiration
towards the spiritual change and open itself to the workings
of the Power which shall transform it. A supreme perfection,
a total perfection is possible only by a transformation
of our lower or human nature, a transformation of the mind
into a thing of light, our life into a thing of power, an
instrument of right action, right use for all its forces,
of a happy elevation of its being lifting it beyond its
present comparatively narrow potentiality for a self-fulfilling
force of action and joy of life. There must be equally a
transforming change of the body by a conversion of its action,
its functioning, its capacities as an instrument beyond
the limitations by which it is clogged and hampered even
in its greatest present human attainment. In the totality
of the change we have to achieve, human means and forces
too have to be taken up, not dropped but used and magnified
to their utmost possibility as part of the new life. Such
a sublimation of our present human powers of mind and life
into elements of a divine life on earth can be conceived
without much difficulty; but in what figure shall we conceive
the perfection of the body?
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. It has been condemned as a grossness
of Matter, as an insuperable impediment and the limitations
of the body as something unchangeable making transformation
impossible. This is because the human body even at its best
seems only to be driven by an energy of life which has its
own limits and is debased in its smaller physical activities
by much that is petty or coarse or evil; the body in itself
is burdened with the inertia and inconscience of Matter,
only partly awake and, although quickened and animated by
a nervous activity, subconscient in the fundamental action
of its constituent cells and tissues and their secret workings.
Even in its fullest strength and force and greatest glory
of beauty, it is still a flower of the material Inconscience;
the inconscient is the soil from which it has grown and
at every point opposes a narrow boundary to the extension
of its powers and to any effort of radical self-exceeding.
But if a divine life is possible on earth, then this self-exceeding
must also be possible.
-
Sri Aurobindo
