The
Divine Body
Page 3
Still
the inconveniences of the animal body and its animal nature
and impulses and the limitations of the human body at its
best are there in the beginning and persist always so long
as there is not the full and fundamental liberation, and
its inconscience or half-conscience and its binding of the
soul and mind and life-force to Matter, to materiality of
all kinds, to the call of the unregenerated earth-nature
are there and constantly oppose the call of the spirit and
circumscribe the climb to higher things. To the physical
being it brings a bondage to the material instruments, to
the brain and heart and senses, wed to materiality and materialism
of all kinds, to the bodily mechanism and its needs and
obligations, to the imperative need of food and the preoccupation
with the means of getting it and storing it as one of the
besetting interests of life, to fatigue and sleep, to the
satisfaction of bodily desire. The life-force in man also
is tied down to these small things; it has to limit the
scope of its larger ambitions and longings, its drive to
rise beyond the pull of earth and follow the heavenlier
intuitions of its psychic parts, the heart's ideal and the
soul's yearnings. On the mind the body imposes the boundaries
of the physical being and the physical life and the sense
of the sole complete reality of physical things with the
rest as a sort of brilliant fireworks of the imagination,
of lights and glories that can only have their full play
in heavens beyond, on higher planes of existence, but not
here; it afflicts the idea and aspiration with the burden
of doubt, the evidence of the subtle senses and the intuition
with uncertainty and the vast field of supraphysical consciousness
and experience with the imputation of unreality and clamps
down to its earth-roots the growth of the spirit from its
original limiting humanity into the supramental truth and
the divine nature. These obstacles can be overcome, the
denials and resistance of the body surmounted, its transformation
is possible. Even the inconscient and animal part of us
can be illumined and made capable of manifesting the god-nature,
even as our mental
humanity can be made to manifest the superhumanity of the
supramental truth-consciousness and the divinity of what
is now superconscious to us, and the total transformation
made a reality here. But for this the obligations and compulsions
of its animality must cease to be obligatory and a purification
of its materiality effected by which that very materiality
can be turned into a material solidity of the manifestation
of the divine nature. For nothing essential must be left
out in the totality of the earth-change; Matter itself can
be turned into a means of revelation of the spiritual reality,
the Divine.
The
difficulty is dual, psychological and corporeal: the first
is the effect of the unregenerated animality upon the life,
especially by the insistence of the body's gross instincts,
impulses, desires; the second is the outcome of our corporeal
structure and organic instrumentation imposing its restrictions
on the dynamism of the higher divine nature. The first of
these two difficulties is easier to deal with and conquer;
for here the will can intervene and impose on the body the
power of the higher nature. Certain of these impulses and
instincts of the body have been found especially harmful
by the spiritual aspirant and weighed considerably in favour
of an ascetic rejection of the body. Sex and sexuality and
all that springs from sex and testifies to its existence
had to be banned and discarded from the spiritual life,
and this, though difficult, is not at all impossible and
can be made a cardinal condition for the spiritual seeker.
This is natural and unescapable in all ascetic practice
and the satisfaction of this condition, though not easy
at first to fulfil, becomes after a time quite feasible;
the overcoming of the sex instinct and impulse is indeed
binding on all who would attain to self-mastery and lead
the spiritual life. A total mastery over it is essential
for all spiritual seekers, the eradication of it for the
complete ascetic. This much has to be recognised and not
diminished in its obligatory importance and its principle.
But
all recognition of the sex principle, as apart from the
gross physical indulgence of the sex impulse, could not
be excluded from a divine life upon earth; it is there in
life, plays a large part and has to be dealt with, it cannot
simply be ignored, merely suppressed or held down or put
away out of sight. In the first place, it is in one of its
aspects a cosmic and even a divine principle: it takes the
spiritual form of the Ishwara and the Shakti and without
it there could be no world-creation or manifestation of
the world-principle of Purusha and Prakriti which are both
necessary for the creation, necessary too in their association
and interchange for the play of its psychological working
and in their manifestation as soul and Nature fundamental
to the whole process of the Lila. In the divine life itself
an incarnation or at least in some form a presence of the
two powers or their initiating influence through their embodiments
or representatives would be indispensable for making the
new creation possible. In its human action on the mental
and vital level sex is not altogether an undivine principle;
it has its nobler aspects and idealities and it has to be
seen in what way and to what extent these can be admitted
into the new and larger life. All gross animal indulgence
of sex desire and impulse would have to be eliminated; it
could only continue among those who are
not ready for the higher life or not yet ready for a complete
spiritual living. In all who aspired to it but could not
yet take it up in its fullness sex will have to be refined,
submit to the spiritual or psychic impulse and a control
by the higher mind and the higher vital and shed all its
lighter, frivolous or degraded forms and feel the touch
of the purity of the ideal. Love would remain, all forms
of the pure truth of love in higher and higher steps till
it realised its highest nature, widened into universal love,
merged into the love of the Divine. The love of man and
woman would also undergo that elevation and consummation;
for all that can feel a touch of the ideal and the spiritual
must follow the way of ascent till it reaches the divine
Reality. The body and its activities must be accepted as
part of the divine life and pass under this law; but, as
in the other evolutionary transitions, what cannot accept
the law of the divine life cannot be accepted and must fall
away from the ascending nature.
Another
difficulty that the transformation of the body has to face
is its dependence for its very existence upon food, and
here too are involved the gross physical instincts, impulses,
desires that are associated with this difficult factor,
the essential cravings of the palate, the greed of food
and animal gluttony of the belly, the coarsening of the
mind when it grovels in the mud of sense, obeys a servitude
to its mere animal part and hugs its bondage to Matter.
The higher human in us seeks refuge in a temperate moderation,
in abstemiousness and abstinence or in carelessness about
the body and its wants and in an absorption in higher things.
The spiritual seeker often, like the Jain ascetics, seeks
refuge in long and frequent fasts which lift him temporarily
at least out of the clutch of the body's demands and help
him to feel in himself a pure vacancy of the wide rooms
of the spirit. But all this is not liberation and the question
may be raised whether, not only at first but always, the
divine life also must submit to this necessity. But it could
only deliver itself from it altogether if it could find
out the way so to draw upon the universal energy that the
energy would sustain not only the vital parts of our physicality
but its constituent matter with no need of aid for sustenance
from any outside substance of Matter. It is indeed possible
even while fasting for very long periods to maintain the
full energies and activities of the soul and mind and life,
even those of the body, to remain wakeful but concentrated
in Yoga all the time, or to think deeply and write day and
night, to dispense with sleep, to walk eight hours a day,
maintaining all these activities separately or together,
and not feel any loss of strength, any fatigue, any kind
of failure or decadence. At the end of the fast one can
even resume at once taking the normal or even a greater
than the normal amount of nourishment without any transition
or precaution such as medical science enjoins, as if both
the complete fasting and the feasting were natural conditions,
alternating by an immediate and easy passage from one to
the other, of a body already trained by a sort of initial
transformation to be an instrument of the powers and activities
of Yoga. But one thing one does not escape and that is the
wasting of the material tissues of the body, its flesh and
substance. Conceivably, if a practicable way and means could
only be found, this last invincible obstacle too might be
overcome and the body maintained by an interchange of its
forces with the forces of material Nature, giving to her
her need from the individual and taking from her directly
the sustaining energies of her universal existence. Conceivably,
one might rediscover and re-establish at the summit of the
evolution of life the phenomenon we see at its base, the
power to draw from all around it the means of sustenance
and self-renewal. Or else the evolved being might acquire
the greater power to draw down those means from above rather
than draw them up or pull them in from the environment around,
all about it and below it. But until something like this
is achieved or made possible we have to go back to food
and the established material forces of Nature.
In
fact we do, however unconsciously, draw constantly upon
the universal energy, the force in Matter to replenish our
material existence and the mental, vital and other potencies
in the body: we do it directly in the invisible processes
of interchange constantly kept up by Nature and by special
means devised by her; breathing is one of these, sleep also
and repose. But as her basic means for maintaining and renewing
the gross physical body and its workings and inner potencies
Nature has selected the taking in of outside matter in the
shape of food, its digestion, assimilation of what is assimilable
and elimination of what cannot or ought not to be assimilated;
this by itself is sufficient for mere maintenance, but for
assuring health and strength in the body so maintained it
has added the impulse towards physical exercise and play
of many kinds, ways for the expenditure and renewal of energy,
the choice or the necessity of manifold action and labour.
In the new life, in its beginnings at least, it would not
be necessary or advisable to make any call for an extreme
or precipitate rejection of the need of food or the established
natural method for the maintenance of the still imperfectly
transformed body. If or when these things have to be transcended
it must come as a result of the awakened will of the spirit,
a will also in Matter itself, an imperative evolutionary
urge, an act of the creative transmutations of Time or a
descent from the transcendence. Meanwhile the drawing in
of the universal energy by a conscious action of the higher
powers of the being from around or from above, by a call
to what is still to us a transcending consciousness or by
an invasion or descent from the Transcendence itself, may
well become an occasional, a frequent or a constant phenomenon
and even reduce the part played by food and its need to
an incidence no longer preoccupying, a necessity minor and
less and less imperative. Meanwhile food and the ordinary
process of Nature can be accepted, although its use has
to be liberated from attachment and desire and the grosser
undiscriminating appetites and clutch at the pleasures of
the flesh which is the way of the Ignorance; the physical
processes have to be subtilised and the grossest may have
to be eliminated and new processes found or new instrumentalities
emerge. So long as it is accepted, a refined pleasure in
it may be permitted and even a desireless ananda of taste
take the place of the physical relish and the human selection
by likings and dislikings which is our present imperfect
response to what is offered to us by Nature. It must be
remembered that for the divine life on earth, earth and
Matter have not to be and cannot be rejected but have only
to be sublimated and to reveal
in themselves the possibilities of the spirit, serve the
spirit's highest uses and be transformed into instruments
of a
greater living.
The
divine life must always be actuated by the push towards
perfection; a perfection of the joy of life is part and
an essential part of it, the body's delight in things and
the body's joy of life are not excluded from it; they too
have to be made perfect. A large totality is the very nature
of this new and growing way of existence, a fullness of
the possibilities of the mind transmuted into a thing of
light, of the life converted into a force of spiritual power
and joy, of the body transformed into an instrument of a
divine action, divine knowledge, divine bliss. All can be
taken into its scope that is capable of transforming itself,
all that can be an instrument, a vessel, an opportunity
for the expression of this totality of the self-manifesting
Spirit.
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Sri Aurobindo
