The
Divine Body
Page 6
This
would be a first potent change, but not by any means all
that is possible or desirable. For it may well be that the
evolutionary urge would proceed to a change of the organs
themselves in their material working and use and diminish
greatly the need of their instrumentation and even of their
existence. The centres in the subtle body, süksma
sarïra, of which one would become conscious and
aware of all going on in it, would pour their energies into
material nerve and plexus and tissue and radiate them through
the whole material body; all the physical life and its necessary
activities in this new existence could be maintained and
operated by these higher agencies in a freer and ampler
way and by a less burdensome and restricting method. This
might go so far that these organs might cease to be indispensable
and even be felt as too obstructive: the central force might
use them less and less and finally throw aside their use
altogether. If that happened they might waste by atrophy,
be reduced to an insignificant minimum or even disappear.
The central force might substitute for them subtle organs
of a very different character or, if anything material was
needed, instruments that would be forms of dynamism or plastic
transmitters rather than what we know as organs. This might
well be part of a supreme total transformation of the body,
though this too might not be final. To envisage such changes
is to look far ahead and minds attached to the present form
of things may be unable to give credence to their possibility.
No such limits and no such impossibility of any necessary
change can be imposed on the evolutionary urge. All has
not to be fundamentally changed: on the contrary, all has
to be preserved that is still needed in the totality, but
all has to be perfected. Whatever is necessary for the evolutionary
purpose for the increasing, enlarging, heightening of the
consciousness, which seems to be its central will and aim
here, or the progression of its enabling means and preserving
environment, has to be kept and furthered; but what has
to be overpassed, whatever has no longer a use or is degraded,
what has become unhelpful or retarding, can be discarded
and dropped on the way. That has been evident in the history
of the evolution of the body from its beginning in elementary
forms to its most developed type, the human;
there is no reason why this process should not intervene
in the transition from the human into the divine body. For
the manifestation or building of a divine body on earth
there must be an initial transformation, the appearance
of a new, a greater and more developed type, not a continuance
with little modifications of the present physical form and
its limited possibilities. What has to be preserved must
indeed be preserved and that means whatever is necessary
or thoroughly serviceable for the uses of the new life on
earth; whatever is still needed and will serve its purpose
but is imperfect, will have to be retained but developed
and perfected; whatever is no longer of use for new aims
or is a disability must be thrown aside. The necessary forms
and instrumentations of Matter must remain since it is in
a world of Matter that the divine life has to manifest,
but their materiality must be refined, uplifted, ennobled,
illumined, since Matter and the world of Matter have increasingly
to manifest the indwelling Spirit.
The
new type, the divine body, must continue the already developed
evolutionary form; there must be a continuation from the
type Nature has all along been developing, a continuity
from the human to the divine body, no breaking away to something
unrecognisable but a high sequel to what has already been
achieved and in part perfected. The human body has in it
parts and instruments that have been sufficiently evolved
to serve the divine life; these have to survive in their
form, though they must be still further perfected, their
limitations of range and use removed, their liability to
defect and malady and impairment eliminated, their capacities
of cognition and dynamic action carried beyond the present
limits. New powers have to be acquired by the body which
our present humanity could not hope to realise, could not
even dream of or could only imagine. Much that can now only
be known, worked out or created by the use of invented tools
and machinery might be achieved by the new body in its own
power or by the inhabitant spirit through its own direct
spiritual force. The body itself might acquire new means
and ranges of communication with other bodies, new processes
of acquiring knowledge, a new aesthesis, new potencies of
manipulation of itself and objects. It might not be impossible
for it to possess or disclose means native to its own constitution,
substance or natural instrumentation for making the far
near and annulling distance, cognising what is now beyond
the body's cognisance, acting where action is now out of
its reach or its domain, developing subtleties and plasticities
which could not be permitted under present conditions to
the needed fixity of a material frame. These and other numerous
potentialities might appear and the body become an instrument
immeasurably superior to what we can now imagine as possible.
There could be an evolution from a first apprehending truth-consciousness
to the utmost heights of the ascending ranges of supermind
and it may pass the borders of the supermind proper itself
where it begins to shadow out, develop, delineate expressive
forms of life touched by a supreme pure existence, consciousness
and bliss which constitute the worlds of a highest truth
of existence, dynamism of tapas, glory and sweetness of
bliss, the absolute essence and pitch of the all-creating
Ananda. The transformation of the physical being might follow
this incessant line of progression and the divine body reflect
or reproduce here in a divine life on the earth something
of this highest greatness and glory of the self-manifesting
Spirit.
-
Sri Aurobindo
