For Newton Matter was “brute matter”. But then that Matter
also gave contents, gave meaning and stability to his great ideas. The firm
habits of matter made it possible to understand it to some extent; it is those
firm habits which made it dependable. It acquired prestige, and the quest of
knowledge of the objective material world became reassuring. The discoverer and
the researcher had the confidence that, mid-stream, it will not deceive him, will
not throw off the back. Physics became physics precisely because of this
property of matter. The building of gigantic machines as tools of study of
Matter,—with international participation and plowing in of massive resources,—is
a new phenomenon in the history of thought. In fact the investigation of matter
with mind as the tool of investigation proved immensely fruitful, vastly
rewarding, something that the centuries of philosophy or theology or spiritual
metaphysics could never conceive of, could never achieve. The behaviour of
matter and the formulation of rationalistic laws have become so convincing
today that, we begin to wonder if tomorrow’s technology will not change the
very course of evolution, will not prepare the new species as the next step in
the continuation of its progress.
But in the discovery of Matter as the Eternal, Annam Brahma, this is hardly the
first step taken, a beginning with the empirical-rationalistic mind made; Bhrigu
the ancient seeker of knowledge had to, at the instance of his guide, retire for
one year and do focused tapasya. There is the ascending scale of substance, and
each step demands its own tools of investigation and cognition. Will the modern
Brighu lend himself to climb this ascending series and come to know that Matter
really is Brahman? “In a certain sense Matter is unreal and non-existent; that
is to say, our present knowledge, idea and experience of Matter is not its
truth, but merely a phenomenon of particular relation between our senses and
the all-existence in which we move. When Science discovers that Matter resolves
itself into forms of Energy, it has hold of a universal and fundamental truth;
and when philosophy discovers that Matter only exists as substantial appearance
to the consciousness and that the one reality is Spirit or pure conscious
Being, it has hold of a greater and completer, a still more fundamental truth.
But still the question remains why Energy should take the form of Matter and
not of mere force-currents or why that which is really Spirit should admit the
phenomenon of Matter and not rest in states, velleities and joys of the
spirit.” (The Life Divine, p. 234)
Sri Aurobindo concludes this presentation with the following: “…we arrive at
this truth of Matter that there is a conceptive self-extension of being which
works itself out in the universe as substance or object of consciousness and
which cosmic Mind and Life in their creative action represent through atomic
division and aggregation as the thing we call Matter. But this Matter, like
Mind and Life, is still Being or Brahman in its self-creative action. It is a
form of the force of conscious Being, a form given by Mind and realised by
Life. It holds within it as its own reality consciousness concealed from
itself, involved and absorbed in the result of its own self-formation and therefore
self-oblivious. And, however brute and void of sense it seems to us, it is yet,
to the secret experience of the consciousness hidden within it, delight of
being offering itself to this secret consciousness as object of sensation in
order to tempt that hidden godhead out of its secrecy. Being manifest as
substance, force of Being cast into form, into a figured self-representation of
the secret self-consciousness, delight offering itself to its own consciousness
as an object,—what is this but Sachchidananda? Matter is Sachchidananda
represented to His own mental experience as a formal basis of objective
knowledge, action and delight of existence.” (p. 239)
Bhrigu’s first glance at Matter, Matter is Brahman, Sachchidananda seen through
the instrumentation of Mind, cannot be the final or decisive view of Matter,
certainly not in the context of the New Creation; in the House of the Spirit it
has a different quality. If Matter has to lend itself to the manifesting Spirit,
another consciousness must enter into it, the Supramental. How that is going to
happen, how that is to be brought about is another matter? But that precisely
is the avataric work involving the Avatar’s complete identification with it, he
without losing himself in it.
About the prospects of the new body and the senses for its functioning, let us
read some relevant texts from Sri Aurobindo’s writings:
Savitri, pp. 328-29
There Matter is the Spirit's firm density,
An artistry of glad outwardness of self,
A treasure-house of lasting images
Where sense can build a world of pure delight:
The home of a perpetual happiness,
It lodged the hours as in a pleasant inn.
The senses there were outlets of the soul;
Even the youngest child-thought of the mind
Incarnated some touch of highest things.
There substance was a resonant harp of self,
A net for the constant lightnings of the Spirit,
A magnet power of love's intensity
Whose yearning throb and adoration's cry
Drew God's approaches close, sweet, wonderful.
Its solidity was a mass of heavenly make;
Its fixity and sweet permanence of charm
Made a bright pedestal for felicity.
Its bodies woven by a divine sense
Prolonged the nearness of soul's clasp with soul;
Its warm play of external sight and touch
Reflected the glow and thrill of the heart's joy,
Mind's climbing brilliant thoughts, the spirit's bliss;
Life's rapture kept for ever its flame and cry.
All that now passes lived immortal there
In the proud beauty and fine harmony
Of Matter plastic to spiritual light.
Its ordered hours proclaimed the eternal Law;
Vision reposed on a safety of deathless forms;
Time was Eternity's transparent robe.
An architect hewing out self's living rock,
Phenomenon built Reality's summer-house
On the beaches of the
The Life Divine, pp.985-88
In our present way of living the soul expresses itself,
as best it can or as badly as it must, through the mind and the vitality, or,
more often, allows the mind and the vitality to act with its support: the body
is the instrument of this action. But the body, even in obeying, limits and
determines the mind’s and the life’s self-expression by the limited
possibilities and acquired character of its own physical instrumentation; it
has besides a law of its own action, a movement and will or force or urge of
movement of its own subconscious or half-emerged conscious power of being which
they can only partially,—and even in that part more by an indirect than by a
direct or, if direct, then more by a subconscious than a willed and conscious
action,—influence or alter. But in the gnostic way of being and living the will
of the Spirit must directly control and determine the movements and law of the
body. For the law of the body arises from the subconscient or inconscient: but
in the gnostic being the subconscient will have become conscious and subject to
the supramental control, penetrated with its light and action; the basis of
inconscience with its obscurity and ambiguity, its obstruction or tardy
responses will have been transformed into a lower or supporting superconscience
by the supramental emergence… The body will be turned by the power of the
spiritual consciousness into a true and fit and perfectly responsive instrument
of the Spirit. This new relation of the Spirit and the body assumes,—and makes
possible,—a free acceptance of the whole of material Nature in place of a
rejection; the drawing back from her, the refusal of all identification or
acceptance, which is the first normal necessity of the spiritual consciousness
for its liberation, is no longer imperative… A certain reverence, even, for
Matter and a sacramental attitude in all dealings with it is possible… As a
result of this new relation between the Spirit and the body, the gnostic
evolution will effectuate the spiritualisation, perfection and fulfilment of
the physical being; it will do for the body as for the mind and life… A
supramental self-acting self-effectuating awareness and knowledge, replacing
this ignorance, will liberate and restore the obscured and spoiled intuitive
instincts in the body and enlighten and supplement them with a greater
conscious action. This change would institute and maintain a right physical
perception of things, a right relation and right reaction to objects and
energies, a right rhythm of mind, nerve and organism. It would bring into the
body a higher spiritual power and a greater life-force unified with the
universal life-force and able to draw on it, a luminous harmony with material
Nature and the vast and calm touch of the eternal repose which can give to it
its diviner strength and ease. Above all,—for this is the most needed and
fundamental change,—it will flood the whole being with a supreme energy of
Consciousness-Force which would meet, assimilate or harmonise with itself all
the forces of existence that surround and press upon the body.
Essays
in Philosophy and Yoga: The Divine
Body
A divine life in a divine body is the formula of the
ideal that we envisage. But what will be the divine body? What will be the
nature of this body, its structure, the principle of its activity, the
perfection that distinguishes it from the limited and imperfect physicality
within which we are now bound? What will be the conditions and operations of
its life, still physical in its base upon the earth, by which it can be known
as divine? If it is to be the product of an evolution, and it is so that we
must envisage it, an evolution out of our human imperfection and ignorance into
a greater truth of spirit and nature, by what process or stages can it grow
into manifestation or rapidly arrive?...
This destiny of the body has rarely in the past been envisaged or else not for
the body here upon earth; such forms would rather be imagined or visioned as
the privilege of celestial beings and not possible as the physical residence of
a soul still bound to terrestrial nature… The body, as we have seen, is an
offspring and creation of the Inconscient, itself inconscient or only
half-conscious; it began as a form of unconscious Matter, developed life and
from a material object became a living growth, developed mind and from the
subconsciousness of the plant and the initial rudimentary mind or incomplete
intelligence of the animal developed the intellectual mind and more complete
intelligence of man and now serves as the physical base, container and
instrumental means of our total spiritual endeavour…
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…
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…
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 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…
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.
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, suksma sarira, 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…
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.