The
Divine Body
Page 5
But
what would be the result of the emergence of these forces
and their liberated and diviner action on the body itself,
what their dynamic connection with it and their transforming
operation on the still existing animal nature and its animal
impulses and gross material procedure? It might be held
that the first necessary change would be the liberation
of the mind, the life-force, the subtle physical agencies
and the physical consciousness into a freer and a diviner
activity, a many-dimensioned and unlimited operation of
their consciousness, a large outbreak of higher powers and
the sublimation of the bodily consciousness itself, of its
instrumentation, capacity, capability for the manifestation
of the soul in the world of Matter. The subtle senses now
concealed in us might come forward into a free action and
the material senses themselves become means or channels
for the vision of what is now invisible to us or the discovery
of things surrounding us but at present unseizable and held
back from our knowledge. A firm check might be put on the
impulses of the animal nature or they might be purified
and subtilised so as to become assets and not liabilities
and so transformed as to be parts and processes of a diviner
life. But even these changes would still leave a residue
of material processes keeping the old way and not amenable
to the higher control and, if this could not be changed,
the rest of the transformation might itself be checked and
incomplete. A total transformation of the body would demand
a sufficient change of the most material part of the organism,
its constitution, its processes and its set-up of nature.
Again,
it might be thought that a full control would be sufficient,
a knowledge and a vision of this organism and its unseen
action and an effective control determining its operations
according to the conscious will; this possibility has been
affirmed as something already achieved and a part of the
development of the inner powers in some. The cessation of
the breathing while still the life of the body remained
stable, the hermetic sealing up at will not only of the
breath but of all the vital manifestations for long periods,
the stoppage of the heart similarly at will while thought
and speech and other mental workings continued unabated,
these and other phenomena of the power of the will over
the body are known and well-attested examples of this kind
of mastery. But these are occasional or sporadic successes
and do not amount to transformation; a total control is
necessary and an established and customary and, indeed,
a natural mastery. Even with that achieved something more
fundamental might have to be demanded for the complete liberation
and change into a divine body.
Again,
it might be urged that the organic structure of the body
no less than its basic outer form would have to be retained
as a necessary material foundation for the retention of
the earth-nature, the connection of the divine life with
the life of earth and a continuance of the evolutionary
process so as to prevent a breaking upward out of and away
from it into a state of being which would properly belong
to a higher plane and notto a terrestrial divine fulfilment.
The prolonged existence of the animal itself in our nature,
if sufficiently transformed to be an instrument of manifestation
and not an obstacle, would be necessary to preserve the
continuity, the evolutionary total; it would be needed as
the living vehicle, v\=ahana, of the emergent god in the
material world where he would have to act and achieve the
works and wonders of the new life. It is certain that a
form of body making this connection and a bodily action
containing the earth-dynamism and its fundamental activities
must be there, but the connection should not be a bond or
a confining limitation or a contradiction of the totality
of the change. The maintenance of the present organism without
any transformation of it would not but act as such a bond
and confinement within the old nature. There would be a
material base but it would be of the earth earthy, an old
and not a new earth with a diviner psychological structure;
for with that structure the old system would be out of harmony
and it would be unable to serve its further evolution or
even to uphold it as a base in Matter. It would bind part
of the being, a lower part to an untransformed humanity
and unchanged animal functioning and prevent its liberation
into the superhumanity of the supramental nature. A change
is then necessary here too, a necessary part of the total
bodily transformation, which would divinise the whole man,
at least in the ultimate result, and not leave hisevolution
incomplete.
This
aim, it might be said, would be sufficiently served if the
instrumentation of the centres and their forces reigned
over all the activities of the nature with an entire domination
of the body and made it both in its structural form and
its organic workings a free channel and means of communication
and a plastic instrument of cognition and dynamic action
for all that they had to do in the material life, in the
world of Matter. There would have to be a change in the
operative processes of the material organs themselves and,
it may well be, in their very constitution and their importance;
they could not be allowed to impose their limitations imperatively
on the new physical life. To begin with, they might become
more clearly outer ends of the channels of communication
and action, more serviceable for the psychological purposes
of the inhabitant, less blindly material in their responses,
more conscious of the act and aim of the inner movements
and powers which use them and which they are wrongly supposed
by the material man in us to generate and to use. The brain
would be a channel of communication of the form of the thoughts
and a battery of their insistence on the body and the outside
world where they could then become effective directly, communicating
themselves without physical means from mind to mind, producing
with a similar directness effects on the thoughts, actions
and lives of others or even upon material things. The heart
would equally be a direct communicant and medium of interchange
for the feelings and emotions thrown outward upon the world
by the forces of the psychic centre. Heart could reply directly
to heart, the life-force come to the help of other lives
and answer their call in spite of strangeness and distance,
many beings without any external communication thrill with
the message and meet in the secret light from one divine
centre. The will might control the organs that deal with
food, safeguard automatically the health, eliminate greed
and desire, substitute subtler processes or draw in strength
and substance from the universal life-force so that the
body could maintain for a long time its own strength and
substance without loss or waste, remaining thus with no
need of sustenance by material aliments, and yet continue
a strenuous action with no fatigue or pause for sleep or
repose. The soul's will or the mind's could act from higher
sources upon the sex centre and the sex organs so as to
check firmly or even banish the grosser sexual impulse or
stimulus and instead of serving an animal excitation or
crude drive or desire turn their use to the storing, production
and direction towards brain and heart and life-force of
the essential energy, ojas, of which this region is the
factory so as to support the works of the mind and soul
and spirit and the higher life-powers and limit the expenditure
of the energy on lower things. The soul, the psychic being,
could more easily fill all with the light and turn the very
matter of the body to higher uses for its own greater purpose.
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Sri Aurobindo
