The
Divine Body
Page 4
There
is one problem raised by sex for those who would reject
in toto the obligations imposed by the animality of the
body and put forward by it as an insistent opposition in
the way of the aspirant to a higher life: it is the necessity
of the prolongation of the race for which the sex activity
is the only means already provided by Nature for living
beings and inevitably imposed upon the race. It is not indeed
necessary for the individual seeker after a divine life
to take up this problem or even for a group who do not seek
after it for themselves alone but desire a wide acceptance
of it by mankind as at least an ideal. There will always
be the multitude who do not concern themselves with it or
are not ready for its complete practice and to these can
be left the care for the prolongation of the race. The number
of those who lead the divine life can be maintained and
increased, as the ideal extends itself, by the voluntary
adhesion of those who are touched by the aspiration and
there need be no resort to physical means for this purpose,
no deviation from the rule of a strict sexual abstinence.
But yet there may be circumstances in which, from another
standpoint, a voluntary creation of bodies for souls that
seek to enter the earth-life to help in the creation and
extension of the divine life upon earth might be found to
be desirable. Then the necessity of a physical procreation
for this purpose could only be avoided if new means of a
supraphysical kind were evolved and made available. A development
of this kind must necessarily belong to what is now considered
as the sphere of the occult and the use of concealed powers
of action or creation not known or possessed by the common
mind of the race. Occultism means rightly the use of the
higher powers of our nature, soul, mind, life-force and
the faculties of the subtle physical consciousness to bring
about results on their own or on the material plane by some
pressure of their own secret law and its potentialities,
for manifestation and result in human or earthly mind and
life and body or in objects and events in the world of Matter.
A discovery or an extension of these little known or yet
undeveloped powers is now envisaged by some well-known thinkers
as a next step to be taken by mankind in its immediate evolution;
the kind of creation spoken of has not been included among
these developments, but it could well be considered as one
of the new possibilities. Even physical science is trying
to find physical means for passing beyond the ordinary instrumentation
or procedure of Nature in this matter of propagation or
the renewal of the physical life-force in human or animal
beings; but the resort to occult means and the intervention
of subtle physical processes, if it could be made possible,
would be a greater way which could avoid the limitations,
degradations, incompleteness and heavy imperfection of the
means and results solely available to the law of material
force. In India there has been always from the earliest
times a widely spread belief in the possibility and reality
of the use of these powers by men with an advanced knowledge
of these secret things or with a developed spiritual knowledge
and experience and dynamic force and even, in the Tantras,
an organised system of their method and practice. The intervention
of the Yogi in bringing about a desired birth of offspring
is also generally believed in and often appealed to and
the bestowal on the
child so obtained of a spiritual attainment or destiny by
his will or his blessing is sometimes asked for and such
a result is recorded not only in the tradition of the past
but maintained by the witness of the present. But there
is here still the necessity of a resort to the normal means
of propagation and the gross method of physical Nature.
A purely occult method, a resort to supraphysical processes
acting by supraphysical means for a physical result would
have to be possible if we are to avoid this necessity: the
resort to the sex impulse and its animal process could not
be transcended otherwise. If there is some reality inthe
phenomenon of materialisation and dematerialisation claimed
to be possible by occultists and evidenced by occurrences
many of us have witnessed, a method of this kind would not
be out of the range of possibility. For in the theory of
the occultists and in the gradation of the ranges and planes
of our being which Yoga-knowledge outlines for us there
is not only a subtle physical force but a subtle physical
Matter intervening between life and gross Matter, and to
create in this subtle physical substance and precipitate
the forms thus made into our grosser materiality is feasible.
It should be possible and it is believed to be possible
for an object formed in this subtle physical substance to
make a transit from its subtlety into the state of gross
Matter directly by the intervention of an occult force and
process, whether with or even without the assistance or
intervention of some gross material procedure. A soul wishing
to enter into a body or form for itself a body and take
part in a divine life upon earth might be assisted to do
so or even provided with such a form by this method of direct
transmutation, without passing through birth by the sex
process or undergoing any degradation or any of the heavy
limitations in the growth and development of its mind and
material body inevitable to our present way of existence.
It might then assume at once the structure and greater powers
and functionings of the truly divine material body which
must one day emerge in a progressive evolution to a totally
transformed existence both of life and form in a divinised
earth-nature.
But
what would be the internal or external form and structure
and what the instrumentation of this divine body? The material
history of the development of the animal and human body
has left it bound to a minutely constructed and elaborated
system of organs and a precarious order of their functioning
which can easily become a disorder, open to a general or
local disorganisation, dependent on an easily disturbed
nervous system and commanded by a brain whose vibrations
are supposed to be mechanical and automatic and not under
our conscious control. According to the materialist all
this is a functioning of Matter alone whose fundamental
reality is chemical. We have to suppose that the body is
constructed by the agency of chemical elements building
up atoms and molecules and cells and these again are the
agents and only conductors at the basis of a complicated
physical structure and instrumentation which is the sole
mechanical cause of all our actions, thoughts, feelings,
the soul a fiction and mind and life only a material and
mechanical manifestation and appearance of this machine
which is worked out and automatically driven with a figment
of consciousness in it by the forces inherent in inconscient
Matter. If that were the truth it is obvious that any divinisation
or divine transformation of the body or of anything else
would be nothing but an illusion, an imagination, a senseless
and impossible chimera. But even if we suppose a soul, a
conscious will at work in this body it could not arrive
at a divine transformation if there were no radical change
in the bodily instrument itself and in the organisation
of its material workings. The transforming agent will be
bound and stopped in its work by the physical organism's
unalterable limitations and held up by the unmodified or
imperfectly modified original animal in us. The possibility
of the disorders, derangements, maladies native to these
physical arrangements would still be there and could only
be shut out by a constant vigilance or perpetual control
obligatory on the corporeal instrument's spiritual inhabitant
and master. This could not be called a truly divine body;
for in a divine body an inherent freedom from all these
things would be natural and perpetual; this freedom would
be a normal and native truth of its being and therefore
inevitable and unalterable. A radical transformation of
the functioning and, it may well be, of the structure and
certainly of the too mechanical and material impulses and
driving forces of the bodily system would be imperative.
What agency could we find which we could make the means
of this all-important liberation and change? Something there
is in us or something has to be developed, perhaps a central
and still occult part of our being containing forces whose
powers in our actual and present make-up are only a fraction
of what could be, but if they became complete and dominant
would be truly able to bring about with the help of the
light and force of the soul and the supramental truth-consciousness
the necessary physical transformation and its consequences.
This might be found in the system of Chakras revealed by
Tantric knowledge and accepted in the systems of Yoga, conscious
centres and sources of all the dynamic powers of our being
organising their action through the plexuses and arranged
in an ascending series from the lowest physical to the highest
mind centre and spiritual centre called the thousand-petalled
lotus where ascending Nature, the Serpent Power of the Tantrics,
meets the Brahman and is liberated into the Divine Being.
These centres are closed or half-closed within us and have
to be opened before their full potentiality can be manifested
in our physical nature: but once they are opened and completely
active, no limit can easily be set to the development of
their potencies and the total transformation to be possible.
-
Sri Aurobindo
