EWS #100: The Destiny of the Body   + Q&A on Spiritual Life

8 January 2022

Topics:

Alina (0:00:40):
Namaste. Good evening, everyone. Welcome back to the continuing series, Evenings with Srarddhalu, part 100 today. We are happy to continue today the yoga of self-perfection and today's topic is, the destiny of the body. We have been exploring in the previous sessions, the first of the three perfections of the integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo. We will further continue on the fourth perfection of the body, but first we will answer a question of Kartik. Kartik is writing, “we live in the material world with its ranges of denseness of material things. There are subtle world, mental world, vital world, and other worlds. When we face psychological elements like fear, anxiety, we experience sensations in our body for which we may attribute reasons like adrenaline or cortisol secretions in our body. My question is, what links these two different worlds, the vital and material, here the body? What links the mental and the material world? And what links the subtle physical and the physical? Are mental and vital worlds connected? What is the stuff of the subtle physical world, the mental or the vital worlds. If lower feelings can influence the body, then the divine force should be able to influence the body too”. I invite Sraddhalu and I'm greeting Sraddhalu. Namaste.

Sraddhalu (0:02:47):
Namaste and happy to be here. It's an amazing question. It is one of my favorite questions which I have spent many decades thinking about, mulling, looking for answers and of course Sri Aurobindo gives you all the answers. What I found though is my understanding of that answer 30 years ago was different from my understanding of it 20 years ago and would be of course different today, always understanding more deeply what he's conveying. And one of the reasons why the answer feels so multi-dimensional or complex in some way is because the full sense of the answer belongs to a range of worlds where the experience of consciousness is different across the worlds. So you cannot give an answer which is understood only in the physical world and its values. You have to understand the full scope of it. And I will try to give a description of this in the perhaps the simplest and shortest form that would be complete enough for us to transition from this question to the theme itself of today's session, which is the destiny of the body. And the destiny of the body is precisely that the body is not just this gross physical substance. Our body is a repository of so many other gradations of substance all concentrating and I will use the word, condensing into material substance but maintaining a kind of a continuity across the different levels of substance. Sri Aurobindo uses this word substance. There are others who have taken these ideas from Sri Aurobindo and call it all matter because they come from a material world and they want to reduce everything to matter. So even Soul is a product of matter. So all these other gradations, they conceive of or rather they accept that there would be gradations, at least theoretically, but they call them matter. No, Sri Aurobindo makes a distinction. Material substance, vital substance, mental substance and still higher gradations, which we can call spiritual substance, but all is substance.

And what is substance? Essentially, he says, is consciousness meeting consciousness. When my awareness touches or becomes aware of another awareness and the two enter in contact, there is a transfer of qualities. The contact of qualities is what gives you substantiality. If there were no qualities, you would say there is nothing. So essentially all is the divine consciousness meeting itself in so many ways and each time it meets and there's a contact and there's exchange of qualities there is substantiality in the contact. Now all depends on the character of qualities which meet. So the finest grade of qualities when they meet, well they would tend to be fine and would tend to intersperse between each other. They would still be contact. It would be as if your hand entering a magnetic field or feeling as it enters water. You feel the resistance of the water and yet it yields. But it would be in three dimensions as if you're entering a field. You're feeling inside your tissue as you touch, as it happens when you meet with emotions; emotions interpenetrate. But in the physical world and therefore in the physical body, the substantiality has a rigidity and particularly a rigidity of form. So forms collide, they don't interpenetrate or only as gas they feel unsubstantial or less substantial. But in the vital world you could be as intense as physical contact, as violent in contact but interspersed. In the mental world similarly you can have completely opposing ideas and so on. But all this is to set the background to say all being finally consciousness meeting consciousness. In different qualities of substance there is a continuum.

Everything is one universe. Our idea of many different worlds is a way of categorizing to the mind. In reality everything is in touch with everything else. Everything without exception including the finest substance is right now in contact with your physical body, your dense physical body. But your subtle body which is of a finer grade is able to feel that contact because it is of a subtler grade. So that's what creates for us the sense of various worlds. Finer substance interacting with finer substance, less fine interacting with less fine, the most crude interacting with the most crude gives us the sense of a stratification of grades, grades of substantiality or of consciousness. In reality, everything is mixing or in contact with everything else right now right here. Once you think of it in this way, things begin to make sense. In our biology therefore there are parts which are more refined, they are therefore more susceptible to the nudges from the subtler parts, subtler ranges, including emotions and thoughts, which we say belong to the vital or mental world. But stop thinking of worlds, think of substance and interaction of substance and of grades of qualities that interact, that exchange. And then it becomes very simple. So we have in our bodies, physical body’s evolution, the development of a gradation of substance which is fine enough that there can be a nudge from the vital substance or mental substance and it can feel, it can respond, it can vibrate. Like, and I give this analogy because it is so appropriate, a tuning fork which is a hard physical substance, you sing a note which is a perfect pitch and the tuning fork starts vibrating. Okay, the physics is very simple as you do this perfect pitch. The air is vibrating but the air is almost unsubstantial to us and yet that fine vibration of air nudges this tuning fork just enough that it starts building oscillations of its frequency until the entire tuning fork begins to vibrate and gives off a sound. In other words, this is tuned to that frequency, sensitive to that frequency. But that could be so fine that you cannot see it, you cannot touch it. It's passing through the air as a sound. If you were deaf, you would see a miracle. Someone opens their mouth and suddenly the tuning fork starts vibrating because you can't hear the sound which is linking it.

Sraddhalu (0:10:02):

It's something like this. Within us are these molecular refinements of the body's evolution which are susceptible to resonance, to emotions, and different kinds of emotions. And those molecular patterns which have been refined sufficiently, tuned to different kinds of emotional energies or grades of vibration, well, we give to them all the necessary different words as you say cortisol, adrenaline, secretions. Interestingly none of these can last too long outside the body or in order to preserve them, you have to freeze them or there are some variations in molecular structure which rigidify them sufficiently as to be close enough to cortisol but somehow different from the biology's cortisol. You could inject it and get a similar result but the biological cortisol is more refined somehow, more subtle, more sensitive because there is a life component which is stronger. Similarly in our nervous system which is our finest grade of substance we have the resonance to thought and the domain of the human body in these terms, there is only one substance of multiple grades and that is the original substance but graded to different densities of rigidity depending on the qualities that it highlights or intensifies at different grades. And so what links the subtle physical and the physical is precisely this. There is a gross physical substance of which there's a refined grade which is close enough to another refined grade to influence close enough to another refined grade until you get to a subtle enough grade that you cannot see or touch. But because you've gone through these intermediate layers, you can influence it, it can influence you.

So your body's evolution really is an evolution of finer gradations opening to all the higher and higher worlds in responsiveness. To receive by resonance but also to act by resonance. It goes both ways. You make a change in your body state and it will have an influence in the thought. You make a change in the thought patterns and it will have an influence in that part of your body state and then you have a whole gradation of series of substance to translate it down to the most material until your physical hand moves. Go backward to move the physical hand you need to move the bone, to which to need the bone to move the bone you need to move the muscle, to move the muscle you need an electrical impulse for which you need nervous system for which you need a connection to a substance in the brain with a very fine chemical balance that with a slight nudge would tip off a chain reaction to create a strong electric current and in that part where you can tip off, that part has to be sufficiently suggestible to a nudge from the mind. So now when you say I want to move my hand, you turn in intention, there's a tip off, there's a chain reaction, series of electrical pulses builds up which go through the electrical nervous system to trigger in the muscle a reaction, a molecular reaction which makes the muscle twitch, which moves the bone, which moves your hand. And at the same time from the hand movement there are sensors, sensations, which have to go all the way backward to electrical signal popping right back into your mind where you can sense what your hand is doing as it moves. Whole gradation of continuum of substances.

So into your question are the mental and vital worlds connected? I will put it another way. The substance, the original creative substance of all gradations are in a continuum. Those gradations we call worlds. Our body is the condensation not just of the most material part but as if through evolution and opening to all of the gradations at least in the mind. If that mental substance is dulled or vital substance is dulled or a link in between cut off then suddenly your physical body is becoming numb you say. I don't feel it anymore. That's what you do when you give an anaesthetic. You interfere with this connection. So where is the stuff of stuff of the physical, mental, vital words? Right here, but of different grades. Now, when you cease to identify with your gross physical body and are able to shift your awareness consciously to become aware of your subtle physical body for example, you feel it like a larger swollen awareness and you're able to feel in the subtle physical hand you can actually feel subtle physical things or if you shift sufficiently away you don't even have a hand sense you're just aware in your vital and mental bodies you sense things in the vital and mental world as presences, as influences, as impressions, as thoughts; you can feel, oh there's a persistent thought that's trying to enter, that's trying to convey. And you as if open out your mental awareness, what is it? And a thought imprint enters with a suggestion, depending on how well formed it is. If it is a very clearly formed idea, it's literally like a whole story unrolling out and a whole complex structure of thoughts.

Sraddhalu (0:15:37):

I can share a very interesting experience I once had. It was one of those rare gifts that one is given. I was in Orissa at that time and there was some discussion in a public function. They had put out all these complicated plans they wanted to create. It seemed artificial to me and I felt it was not the way to do things but it was very mechanised and I thought I would say something about it. But then as I got up to speak and it was as if from above I felt it like a piece of crystal breaking from above and falling clink clink clink clink and as it entered, I can only describe it as piece of jewel, crystalline jewel with encrusted finer jewels and it was complex thought within thought within thought of a precise plan and vision and it was as if I was shown as it unfolded the whole vision of what the Mother intended for the state of Orissa. It was so amazing, I just watched as it unfolded... and then I actually ended up speaking something about it, what I had planned to say completely dropped out. And instead I said, well, what Auroville is trying to do on the level of his township, Orissa is intended in the larger spiritual vision at least to accomplish at the level of a state. And the whole history, literally the history of Orissa and the Jagannath temple tradition, how that had formed the minds of the people and the hearts of the people and how that became a base for the future of the work to be done, its limitations, its trends, what had to be kept, what dropped, everything was as if woven into that single unfolding image or experience rather. And the most interesting thing was I saw what the existing efforts were doing, that if those efforts were not there, the work could not proceed, but the efforts themselves were not the thing. So it was as if there was no way for people to rise from here to here, except if they made an effort, but the only effort they could make was to go round and round in what they already knew, but if they made that effort, then she could nudge a little bit and pop you up and up and up. So I realised that that's what we are at as human beings. We can only act in the consciousness we live in, but she can add into it the little nudge that lifts you a step higher. But if you're not making that effort, if you stay in inertia, she cannot lift you. Because the movement, the kinesis is not there. It is not so important. The fact that you make an effort is important and through it she will work. But you should be open to whatever her overall plan is. Now all this is to say that the idea itself in its own domain has a solidity, a reality, and I use this crystalline feel of it. An idea can meet idea as objects literally in the substance of the mental world. And it's all here, in our mental body. If we had not evolved into a mental body, we don't have the material by which to experience things of the mental world.

So now think of the next step in evolution: our mentalized substance has to further refine and open to the ranges which belong to the grade that we call intuition and so on. Of course with each grade the quality of consciousness is different. Consciousness itself is wider, freer, lighter, transparent but also more and more infinite. So when you think about it in these terms, in a sense all evolution leans on the physical body. You can have growth on different planes, on different levels. But evolution, which is the emergence of something new out of what was not, needs the physical body as the base. Because it is in the physical body that all these gradations of substance are as if densified and bound and locked up in what we call unconscious, inconscient. And out of that, bit by bit, as they wake up, as they emerge, you have the evolution. The point of evolution is that from the most material, all the way to the highest spiritual, all the gradations are going to emerge in a continuum and form a link that goes across all these gradations of substance, all these gradations of words and literally we are that. And that's why the first experience of identification with the physical body and saying, ‘I am physical body’ was a necessary phase. And then emerging out of it into the vital body and the emotional life, ‘I am my emotions’ and then emergent into the mind which says ‘I am thought’ are necessary because they are the stages to build this continuum, but that was because nature was driving evolution. Now you're awake, so you can take charge and open to something higher and allow that process to happen faster. And then you realise I am not just mind, I am something greater and greater. I am not, there is only that of which I am a part. And in this way you are building like a pillar, a continuum of gradations, each developing organs of continuity of actions to be able to act on those domains and experience it, eventually all the way in the Supramental realisation and its influence pouring all the way down to the physical, opening fully the full access of the cosmos across all planes, across all gradations of substance, and to be able to be aware on all those levels and to be able to act on those levels. That would be the complete experience of the universe, isn't it?

Sraddhalu (0:21:46):

So yes, if lower feelings can influence body, divine force also can influence body, is influencing body, everything is influencing everything else. The question only is how much? Radio waves are influencing your body, how much? Too little for you to be able to feel, either because you don't have enough sensitivity or there is not enough evolved substance that resonates to that frequency. So Satchitananda is influencing you now but you are unable to receive a direct experience of Satchitananda because you've not evolved the sensitivity or the substantiality which is sufficiently refined. So It influences intuition, which influences thought which is what you pick up. You have an indirect relationship. I think once you get this idea, the whole sense of evolution becomes so clear. And then we come to this phrase Sri Aurobindo uses, the destiny of the body. And he says it in a way that is so amazing. He uses these words, I will read briefly from the text. “The destiny of the body has rarely in the past been envisaged, or else not for the body here upon earth”. So if you have envisaged a destiny, it is after. “For the body on earth, rarely in the past it has been envisaged”. Well, when he says rarely, then you know it is really, really rarely. And probably the only time we have really envisaged it, the closest we have is in the Vedic period. And that's why the rarely is justified. Sri Aurobindo is the first to pick up this challenge and not only envisage it but with a reason showing you the whole framework of evolution and how it leads to this and how it must inevitably lead to certain things and makes the body's awakening and participation and as foundation essential in the integral yoga, for the goals of the integral yoga which is to manifest the divine.

You will recall and so we'll come back to this whole question of the destiny of the body towards the end again. But to link it now to our discussions before, you will recall we discussed the amplification of the energies as one of the perfections and then we discussed last time the perfection of the higher ranges of consciousness, of opening to the Supramental consciousness and its influence beginning to work within us. And you will remember the importance given by Sri Aurobindo to the development of the intuition and so on. But all of this was because the divine consciousness needs an instrument of mind which is sufficiently capable of containing the divine action. So mind itself has to open to something higher but eventually the body itself has to open to something not just to the mind. So you can't say that supermind will nudge mind, mind will do what it can within its limitation and then nudge the body which will do what it can within its limitation, then you don't have a divine life, you have caricature of caricature of caricature of caricature of a divine life perhaps, not good enough. So what do you need to do? Well we saw the mind itself has to be divinised, we discussed that last time, but eventually this must come down all the way to the vital which must be divinised. It's not enough to have a vital energy which is massive which can open to the universal infinite vital energy. The body itself at some point has to open to the divine action directly on the body or the body must become plastic enough as an instrument that it can embody the divine will without limiting, distorting and so on. And it's not enough to say when the divine will wants my hand will move. The hand itself as it moves, if it collides with something, will break. So it should be strong enough not to break, right? Or if the divine afflatus is too strong, too much energy, the body starts destabilising. Oh, I'm feeling giddy. What happened to me?

This literally happened to me once. I was with a person who was so full of life force, so full of vitality, just pumping away like that. And I was barely, I was travelling with a friend, we were barely together for, I would say, 15 minutes. And then as we came out, I stopped briefly and I had to stabilise my body and I said, is the ground swinging? It felt as if the ground was swinging. The amount of vitality was so strong around that person that we were all a bit... but imagine if this is possible with just physical vitality. What happens when there's a too strong spiritual afflatus and you get overwhelmed. The body itself says, oh, it might even break down, can't contain. So the physical body must become not just strong enough to receive but also plastic enough to express the way the divine will wants, not with reduction to its own limitations.

Sraddhalu (0:27:29):

So now that brings us to the fourth perfection of the yoga, of the integral yoga, the yoga of self-perfection and this is the perfection of the body - Sharira chatushtaya. Again four subheads to the perfection itself. Sharira is body. These are in some, arogya which is health, which has three sub items, well I will touch upon them. The next is uttapana which is levity, freedom from heaviness and inertia. The third is Soundarya, that is beauty. And the fourth is delight. Now these are four aspects of the physical perfection. And the full scope of this we will get as we go a little further along the exploration. But that's not enough. That's not yet the complete transformation. And the aspect of the completer issues relating to transformation and the divinisation of the body itself, Sri Aurobindo finally shared. You see, even in the Synthesis of Yoga, he says this is to be discussed later. Finally, in his last few writings, which we have mentioned before, is in the heading of ‘The Supramental Manifestation’. And there he discusses this phrase which I read earlier, the destiny of the body. So this is the direction in which we are going to explore next.

So, when you have the physical body and its perfection, remember all this came from the sequence earlier, a preparatory purification, then the equality, then the perfection of the energies amplified to their maximum, the divine energy now filling everything and guiding everything, and then the opening to the supramental consciousness and by it a suitable process of transformation by which the Divine action can act freely without this reduction. But the basis of it all is the physical body. Without the physical body, all these higher portions could not exist together, bound to include everything in the universe. You could, for example, spend the whole of your existence living in one of these subtle worlds, vital, mental; you could merge spiritual, vital, mental into a being and then act there. And there are beings who are like that. Sometimes they are semi-divine beings. Sometimes they are human beings who have evolved to some extraordinary level of spiritual freedom. They live in the subtle body. They help human beings, but they don't want to take birth on earth and participate in the physical part of the evolution. They stay out of this last darkest densest layer of reality that we call physical matter or gross physical matter. But our goal being to bring all the way down to include all this and to transform all this, well we have to take birth then. And here we must bridge all these. First thing though, this body is your basis. If it is not strong enough, you can do nothing. There's one of the persons still alive today, one of the extraordinary persons in the ashram who is author of many compilations, very brilliantly done, and to whom Mother said, unfortunately, I think it was your nervous system or your vital is weak. Otherwise, I could have done far more work through you. And we can see the work she has done through him is extraordinary, but the biology is fragile.

Health is our first requirement. So Aarogyam, the first requirement is of health. The state of being healthy, Sri Aurobindo says, and this has three degrees. The first step is a general resilience that the body can stay healthy whatever happens and of course under extreme conditions it may break down. So extreme cold or extreme strain, these are the two things Sri Aurobindo points to. It's interesting, extreme heat is not such a big problem, extreme cold tends to weaken the body or extreme strain and the body's balance or ability to maintain balance breaks down, you lose health. So this is step one. It's already way beyond what most of us have. But the second step is that even under extreme provocation this resilience persists and the health does not break down. And this you see in a few people, quite extraordinary people. But this prepares the way because till now, how do you get to this? You cannot do it purely by physical training. It can only be done when there is an inrush of life force, prana. And the higher the grade of prana, the more free and resilient and plastic, the higher the balance that it can hold. So it all ties into all the previous chatushtayas, the previous stages of perfections. They all come to assist with this.

But the third step of health is what he calls immortality. Where now the health is so resilient that it can sustain itself irrespective of anything. If you observe the way the biology works, every cell has a lifetime. As the cell reaches its lifespan, it is automatically removed and another cell takes its place. So by a process of continuous replacement, you are able to maintain your health. Ageing happens when you are unable to replace fast enough. Death happens when your ability to replace is now so much slowed down that the functioning of the system itself now cannot hold and it breaks down. But if somehow you could maintain that capacity which we have in youth of regenerating the body cells regularly and each time with a fresh cell in principle you can live as long as you want, a practical physical immortality. It's not a divinised body but it's a practical immortality and in fact we know of many yogis who have been able to do that. Sri Aurobindo himself refers to I believe, it was one Swami Brahmananda who lived for many years, many centuries I believe and he was completely healthy looking very young. But and that's the problem of physical limitation; he stepped on a rusted nail, it poisoned his blood, he could not correct the body sufficiently for that injury and that was it, he died from that, otherwise there was no reason for him to die. He was a Hatha Yogi master. So this is to show you that biologically one can go quite far but if there is not something of a higher grade of consciousness which can adjust for these limitations of the biological rhythms, well you have certain flaws. So the immortality Sri Aurobindo is speaking of is not one of those just-of-life energy. It means a still higher consciousness takes up and brings a higher power and a higher principle of harmony by which even this should not have happened. This is just to give you a first sense of the goal of the integral yoga as regards the body and the perfection of health.

Sraddhalu (0:35:09):

The second sub-step is Uttapana, literally called lifting its literal translation would be, levity or levitation and Sri Aurobindo describes this as state of non-subjection to pressure of physical forces. It's very generic description and you must always watch carefully, Sri Aurobindo is very precise with his wording; ‘non-subjection to pressure of physical forces’ -  what kind of physical forces? All kinds. And we will see it's one of the implications of these that it goes into quite an amazing direction. So this is also three steps or three degrees. First he says is the increasing force of lightness and strength. Now all of us have had this experience when your body feels very young, fresh, energetic, you've just woken up from sleep, you've had a nice rest, you feel light, you feel strong, literally you can jump up and run. The days when you're tired, you are depressed, your body is heavy, you have to literally drag it. So increasing force of lightness and strength is our first sense of youth actually. With age that's what you tend to lose. First, and this is directly from above. Energy drawn from above, you can start with around which would be a lower grade of life energy. Pumping huge, but there's a higher grade of what Sri Aurobindo refers to as supramental prana which is drawn from above, it is not universal life force but it requires you already to have access to higher grades of consciousness. But the grade of energy one draws from there is of completely different kind in which this becomes almost natural as a first step. The second degree of it is no physical weariness, no exhaustion of brain or nervous system. That means as you work you can go on and on and on. At no point will it say, oh now I need rest. So if you've got the first step, the second step becomes a smooth extension from there. Again people who have done work, Hatha Yogis of a very high order have really taken those exercises to their limit and as a result have been able to build in their body a solid base that they can draw life energy. Of course they use pranayama and indirect techniques. They are able to reach to something like this and it's quite amazing to watch them. But they are dependent on their process. Stop the pranayama for a few days and they might fall sick immediately. When you draw the same energy by direct means, you are not dependent on processes. I'm making this indication to show you that the method of the integral yoga, the direct method, which we have spoken of many times before, is central. It's not by technical means. The technical means will assist you at best to get to some degree of a higher level of intensification, but then at some point you transition into the direct experience of drawing the energy of higher and higher grades. So no physical weariness, no exhaustion of brain or nervous system. And then the third degree of the Uttapana or levity is, he says, no necessary subjection to laws of gravity or other physical laws. No necessary subjection, meaning you can, of course, you can choose to be participating in the weight of the body and the pull of the earth, but you can choose to; Okay, I need to make my body light. You make it light. Now, this may sound unusual. It's in fact not difficult.

Sraddhalu (0:39:06)
And I will try to describe with a few examples, you will get the sense of it. First with an example of the Mother's which was narrated to us by Kumud Ben. She was Mother's personal attendant in her later years. Mother herself chose her I believe when she was barely 18 in this school. She was a student, she picked her and made her a personal attendant and prepared her for all the politics that would happen. She said, do not listen to anybody. Whatever they may say, you keep your focus on the work that I give you. And that's all. Of course, she suffered a lot because of jealousies. But she was in past incarnations in a similar role with the Mother many times. And therefore, that choice was already prepared. It was already known in advance. It was a choice of the soul really. And she narrated to us how the Mother took her around, showed her all the things in her rooms, and then suddenly she turned to Kumud and said, If I fall, will you be able to lift me? Kumud Ben was surprised, and before she could reply, the Mother herself replied, “I can make myself heavy as a stone or light as a feather." And of course, Kumud Ben had nothing to say, Mother herself answered.

There's another incident which I've mentioned. I think recently here that there was this packet which had to be sent by post, books of Sri Aurobindo to the King of Nepal and the post office said it's too big, it has to be split. And Mother said we can't do that. So she asked for the packet to be brought, asked what is the weight that the post office accepts. She concentrated on the packet, sent it back, and it now weighed exactly the limit of the post office. Now it's not just a question of being able to shift your own weight, but to be able to modify the weight of something else also by exactly the same process, by the infusion of life energy by which the concentrated life energy reduces the susceptibility to physical forces and physical forces of all kinds I said earlier. Weight is only one of them. So there are examples of people who had this ability they would stand on a weighing machine and literally with the life energy grip the physical body and as if pull it up. The feeling is like you're pulling yourself up. By what? You have to hook on to something by your life energy or subtle body. So if you think about it in this way, your physical body is surrounded by, held by the subtle body. As long as you live in the gross physical body or subtle body, that best a little bit around like an aura as you picture it. When you live in the subtle physical body or the subtle body generally, your physical body is inside it and your subtle body has no weight. If from this higher grade of consciousness you pull your physical body, well this weightlessness now acts on the physical. Logically, very simple, experientially also you could catch the feel of it. If you can feel your subtle body, you grip your physical body from it and as if lift it. Or reduce its weight. Or do the reverse. Will it, push it down, emphasize the downward gravitational push, I will say, or pull, and amplify the weight. And again, it does not require a spiritual consciousness. But the same thing now becomes spontaneous and natural and effortless when the higher grade of energy begins to work as the primary energy even in your physical body. And that's the true nature of this perfection.

So, ‘no necessary subjection to laws of gravitation or other physical laws’. What are those other physical laws? And I will just leave it as a hint. Sri Aurobindo himself, as you know, was testing these. If you someday take the trouble to read his Record of Yoga, you will find detailed explorations as he develops this power of uttapana and the freedom from inertia and gravity included. He is holding an arm up like this <<shows arm raised and stretched out>> for how long can you hold 10 minutes 15 minutes after that your arm will flag for a few hours at a time. He lifts a leg up holds it up for several hours at a time, I believe I have read this too long ago and only in parts, but eight or ten hours sometimes at a go.

And no tiredness of muscles! Literally keeping it up no tiredness. Take your arm up and keep it up for a few hours with no tiredness, and your blood will continue to pump normally, no heaviness, no loss of blood, no draining; your hand will become white normally. That's the nature of the Siddhi he was practising this, as noted in his diary notes. We had occasion to do an interview with a young man who was Mother's driver for a while. His name was Bala and his mother was a maid servant in the ashram main building in those days and this little child she locked him up one day to keep him away and Mother heard him crying and she took him out from that locked room and scolded his mother saying you should not lock him and then put him for training under Pavitra da. He then learned to repair the car and then drove for the Mother occasionally, etc. But his mother as a maid servant before the ashram became formally established, she would go into Sri Aurobindo's room also and clean. So what Bala narrated was his mother used to afterwards say, and she was a very simple-minded woman, she said, oh that man, he's a great magician, he's a great magician. And she asked him what? She said, I'm very afraid of him. Why?

Sraddhalu (0:45:25):
She said, “I would see him sitting on his chair and sometimes with his arm up and his leg up or both his arm and leg up for hours together and then I'm sweeping the floor and I look behind and he is gone and I don't know how he vanished and then I am sweeping again I look around and he's back on the chair. Oh he was a great magician and she was scared of him”. It's the only recorded description we have of Sri Aurobindo in this what he has described in his own notes but there's an element there which is not described in the notes or at least I don't know the keywords you would have used to describe it: is this ability to literally become almost invisible. And it's exactly the same process - from the subtle body to the physical body gripping, changing, infusing itself in a way that there is a shift in the molecular content. Now this is not just what we are discussing. It is also part of the eight siddhis, if you recall last time. Siddhi of being allows you to, it is I believe the Laghima, which allows you also to become as if small or transparent or semi-transparent or invisible. And these were things which were part of the perfection that Sri Aurobindo was working upon. There is another variation to this phoenix or other physical laws it includes other laws including inertia so there is also another law which is very specific to the physical world, I told you. Two objects collide, well if this subtle body grips the physical sufficiently, you could make the physical body sufficiently graded that it could pass through literally another physical object. And these are known siddhis. Under certain kinds of training of martial arts, people have demonstrated, masters have demonstrated as siddhis of the vital energy. But here the idea is the same thing done through spiritual liberation rather than merely conquest in a temporary power. The physical consciousness now has access to these capacities because it has changed fundamentally. So this was the second sub-step of this perfection.

Sraddhalu (0:47:48):

The third is Soundarya, that is beauty. Sri Aurobindo writes state of being beautiful and what does that mean? This again has three further degrees. First he uses this phrase brightness in body, sweetness of voice, charm of expression. Now you see the common feature in all these is the way it appears to others, the way it expresses. Now whether there are others or not is irrelevant. The way it expresses itself but objectively the way it would appear to others on three different characteristics. The body is brighter. What does that mean? Is it giving off light? Yes, literally. If you could see with a more subtle sight, the aura itself would become more brilliant, more intense and this increasing brightness of the aura is what people register as charisma. I'm going to give examples which are much more mundane but they point in this direction. So don't treat them to be an actual identity but they point, they allow us to understand what this means. There's an example which comes from the life of Marilyn Monroe. She had this extraordinary power of charisma, as you know, as a film actress. Amazing ability to seduce, to attract people or to influence with her charisma. And yet, she is going with her friend, she is going to a shop, wearing normal clothes, nobody notices her. And then, as a mischievous demonstration, she tells her friend, now watch what I do. And then she did something as if shook herself a little bit and literally all her energy is opened out. Instantly everybody around turned and said, oh look, it's Marilyn Monroe. What did she do? All her energies which should have been normally turned out in this like a lighthouse, beaming out an energy had turned in, closed and so nobody sensed it. The energy is closed upon themselves like most human beings. When she decided she wanted to activate her charisma, she opened out and energy turned out and literally if you had subtle sight you would see radiance, brilliance and people immediately are attracted by that light and they turn, oh, and if they didn't know if she was not a famous person, they would still turn and say, oh, what an unusual person. And this is the power that a lot of charismatic people tend to have. They don't know what it is. Generally, it is of a grade which is very vital. Some of them are very crude vital charisma and some have a more refined or even higher mentalized light of charisma. It all depends on the grade.

But literally a spiritual consciousness would have a similar effect, but of a completely different grade in consciousness. And so this is the brightness in body. In the physical consciousness itself, the spiritual light suffused, lights up and glows out. The Mother once describes how there was a special darshan and she said the divine presence was so condensed on such a material level that it became like a fog. And she said that if the physical conditions were right, people would have seen light radiating from her physical body. And as you know, we have so many images, descriptions of light around saintly beings and they are generally a sense of this. They could be purely vital or they could be spiritual or a blend of both. Very rare to find a spiritual person who is effective in a large way without a strong vital also. So in a sense they tend to blend these two things. But here it is the brightness in the physical itself of a spiritual light radiating in physical substance. This is the true sense of this. Soundarya. First step only.

Second step, sweetness, oh no, it's still the first step, which has three more qualities. So brightness in the body, sweetness of voice and then charm of expression. So physical body is light, sweetness of voice is the mind turning to speech in physical vibrations. Right? Mind expressing itself through the body in the physical world. And when he has used this word sweetness of voice, what would it be like? What would be sweetness of voice like, really? I have heard this description from one of the very old sadhakas, who in the 40s, 30s, 40s, not so much later in the 50s, but they would be walking under Sri Aurobindo's room outside on the road or sometimes in the ashram main building. But this is from the earlier phase when sometimes they heard Sri Aurobindo’s voice and he describes, he's described it as when Sri Aurobindo laughed it was like the tinkling of bells. Very beautiful, like the tinkling of bells, when he laughed. What is that like and of course we know his voice was with a British accent when he spoke English, but it's not the accent, it's not the force in the voice, but the sweetness of the voice, like tinkling of bells.

And then charm of expression. So here the expression is of course the way the body expresses itself, which would include the physical expression, but also general movement of expression of the body itself would have a charm. And the sense of beauty you can see here is in the movement. What glows out is beautiful. And it is not just about shape. It's about the movement and the action in the shape also. The second degree of this is continual youth. When this sweetness of voice, brightness of body, charm of expression are constant, well, you are looking young. And this is naturally true in the subtle body always because there we don't age. The form being plastic can keep its shape. It is in the gross body that we tend to age because the form cannot retain shape. It is not plastic enough, tends to be rigid. If your physical body could change shape at every moment to keep up with the soul, well, it would be young always, isn't it? It cannot and so it ages, it lags behind until the soul progresses enough that it says, ah, the body is not able to keep up, I drop, take a new body and start again. But if you could keep this plasticity, well, you have continual youth. Again, youth is not a point, it's a state of continual renewal. It means as you grow in consciousness, your body has to keep up. You could look young now, but ten years from now, if the body has not kept up with your change in consciousness, it will get aged. Now, you will remember, you can see the evidence of this in the photographs of the Mother. Until the age of almost 89-90, you will see she does not look at all that age. She looks like someone 20 or 30 years younger at least. And physically fit, she is playing tennis and defeating the young people. Of course, she stopped playing tennis around the age of 80 because she did not have time, too much work pressure and occupation but at the age of 80 she was defeating young people and that shows you what is possible in terms of physical health as well as beauty.

And there's this incident where it was somebody who came from outside India and he was taken to the darshan of the Mother and afterwards he said, ‘I saw this incredibly beautiful young woman, I don't recognize the photo which you're showing me, what I saw was much younger’, and it was reported to the Mother and Mother said, yes he saw my subtle physical body. But the subtle physical body sufficiently densified already, that was the natural shape, that was a natural form. the gross physical was barely keeping up but still you saw incredible beauty there. And so the continual youth, not just in sense of beauty, but also in sense of capacities of what she could do, and the ability to adapt, to learn, to adjust to anything.

Sraddhalu (0:57:05):

The biggest difficulty you have as you grow older is you can't learn new things. And it's not just about physical skills, it's also the mental skills because the biology is limiting the mental consciousness. If you can keep the physical consciousness sufficiently plastic you can be learning all the time and that's one of the aspects of continual youth. Measure it in that way practically. How easily can you learn something new? And then the third degree of this Saundarya, of beauty, is features and figure can be changed to a form of perfect beauty, that is the shape of features and overall figure can be shaped, reshaped literally to a form of perfect beauty. I have given the Mother's example. I will give you one more example of the Mother. This is narrated to us by a teacher in the school by the name of Tanmaya. He was a Frenchman and he was a very close friend of Pavitrada who was also a Frenchman, who was at that time the director of the school. Pavitrada had just passed away. This was I think late 60s or something. And Tanmaya was in depression, severely depressed; his friend had just passed away. And he went to the Mother weeping. So Mother is trying to pacify him. And then she told him how, you know, when Pavitra left his body, he had this capacity from some prior life that part by part he took himself out of the body and transferred himself into me, she said, and he is fused into me now. He said yeah, Pavitra says, Tanmay says yeah, yeah I know but I am missing him. And Mother says why are you crying? He is here in me. He says okay, okay, yes I understand Mother, but I miss him. So finally he narrated this to us and I heard it from him directly. He said at some point Mother suddenly said to me, ‘do you want to see him?’. So he was surprised he looks up at the Mother in surprise and he said the Mother's face changed form and became the appearance of Pavitra-da smiling at him and of course as he narrated it, he broke into tears and Mother's face came back to its normal form.

There is a letter in fact, or perhaps a couple of letters, where people write to Sri Aurobindo saying, we see the mother in the morning, we see her in the afternoon and evening, and she looks completely different. Is that possible or is it our imagination? And Sri Aurobindo says, yes, it is true. Her body is sufficiently plastic that the physical form can change to reflect the state of consciousness in which she is. To this degree that she could actually allow the full expression of the physical form of Pavitra to come like a mould into her physical body. This gives you a sense of features and figure can be changed to a form of, well, perfect beauty. If your consciousness within then is perfectly harmonious and therefore beautiful, well, the shape of the body made sufficiently plastic should express that beauty, that harmony at all times. And depending on the need of the moment, of the quality of consciousness expressed, the form changes to adapt to express most perfectly, most beautifully that state of consciousness. Such would be the extent of this aspect of Soundarya, state of being beautiful as Sri Aurobindo defines it.

So in the perfection of the body we have seen health, levity, freedom from subjection of physical forces, third was is Saundarya, beauty and the fourth is ananda or Sri Aurobindo uses the phrase vivida ananda - delight in the experiences of things in the variety of experiences of things, but also it suggests varieties of delight in the experiences of things. Sri Aurobindo does not elaborate too much. Just a few indications he says is the physical body itself experiencing delight. You see, when we have an experience of delight, normally it is in the mind or in the part of the emotions, which is also in the mental body primarily. It really goes beyond that. Our physical body receives by reflection the thrill of this, wow what a wonderful experience, what a wonderful feeling, but the physical body gets it by reflection. For the body itself to be able to experience delight, and delight is not pleasure, delight is not pleasure pleasure multiplied by a hundred. Always pleasure is followed by pain because it is in the nature of duality. If you increase pleasure beyond a point it becomes painful. You take pain and reduce it, it becomes pleasurable. It's actually a dividing line in between of your capacity to manage which decides whether it is painful when it's too strong or pleasurable when it's too little. So it is finite consciousness meeting something which is beyond itself. But the true nature of the Ananda can be only known in a consciousness which is not divisible or which cannot be divided but which is also infinite because you experience the fullness of the divine range as a spectrum in a quality a single quality a single experience but you experience infinity or at least you are able to hold infinity without cutting it up, then you experience the true sense of Ananda. Ananda does not have opposites, it is not a duality of pleasure and pain; the Ananda can be behind both. While you have pain, while you have pleasure, while we have any other kind of sensation, the ananda can be behind all these and say, ah yes, these are colours of myself. It fundamentally transcends both pain and pleasure.

So ananda in the body of various kinds, Sri Aurobindo says. Now, we can see a few indications. The most easy, the most simple of these would be the contact. You touch and what is it that is the experience in the contact? I felt hot, I felt cold, I felt pleasant, I felt unpleasant. It was sharp, it was soft. But behind these, in the consciousness of the divine in your hand, meeting consciousness of the divine in the other object. Remember we started with the definition of substance as consciousness meeting consciousness, throwing forward a certain pattern of qualities. The delight of the divine consciousness in your body meeting the divine consciousness in the other and the play of that delight or the variations of ananda, that would be the sense of this vivida ananda, the multiplicity of the delight through the physical senses, through all your, through your sight, through your hearing, through your smell, taste, touch. But in the body in its very sense of existence, what am I?, what do you feel? I am comfortable, I am hot, I am uncomfortable, I am agitated, I am relaxed or delight and variations of states of delight. That would be the experience for the physical body itself in what it feels to exist. And this gives you a sense of what the experience would be like. Naturally, if this extends through the senses, you are meeting through the senses also the divine and this would open you to the next two chatushtayas or perfections which I will briefly touch upon because I don't want to spend an entire session on them.

Sraddhalu (1:05:50):

The next one is the karma chatushtaya, which has four components - Krishna, Kali, karma and kama. And it is the experience that my consciousness is one with the divine consciousness as the Lord; My nature is one with the nature of the energy of the Lord Kali; And all action that is taking place through this instrument is their play unfolding in the play of the world which is their play. I will read from Savitri a few lines which capture something of this mode. And the fourth element of this is kama which is the the enjoyment of this whole play of the delight of the Lord and the Beloved in every experience and through every experience in us and in everything. So that's the nature of the karma chatushtaya. All is seen as the work and action of the Lord and we participate in His play and His delight.

So I'll read from Savitri a few lines. Sri Aurobindo says,

“

This whole wide world is only he and she.

This is the knot that ties together the stars:

The Two who are one are the secret of all power,

The Two who are one are the might and right in things.

His soul, silent, supports the world and her”

She is the world after all!

“His acts are her commandment’s registers.

Happy, inert, he lies beneath her feet:

His breast he offers for her cosmic dance,

Of which our lives are the quivering theatre,

And none could bear but for his strength within.”

You can bear this dance because of his strength within you,

“Yet none would leave because of his delight.”.

It's too intense to bear but his strength is within you. On the other hand, because of his delight, you'll never say I want to get out of this game. I want to live, I want to enjoy, I want to learn, I want to experience, I want to grow, I want to participate. Of course our initial wants are all confused, clouded, mixed, smoky but this is the deepest urge within us because none would leave because of his delight. And here you get a first tiny glimpse of what it's like to be participating consciously in this perfection of the participation.

And the final sixth perfection is Brahma Chatustaya, where you live in the oneness of the divine in everyway of which the fist is Sarvam Brahma, is recognizing the divine as everything, the whole universe is the divine himself manifesting and each thing each object is the divine himself entirely and the same oneness of the divine holding it all together. Anantam Brahma is the a sub-step where you experience the infinite quality and infinite force in everything and from everything. You look at a flower, infinite quality is radiating uniquely out of it. But also infinite forces, every single force, even a small nudge. I've given this example before and it really helps to put this in context. If you take a sheet of paper, I blow on it. What was the force? You say, oh there's so many 20 grams perhaps of air flow pushing it. Otherwise there's nothing, no force, because air is everywhere equally. No, the truth is this. Right now from the weight of the atmosphere above every square centimetre is receiving a force of one kilogram. So if I look at this sheet of paper maybe roughly it will be about at least 20 or 30 kilograms of pressure of air on this side exactly matched by the pressure of air on the other side. 30 kilograms here, 30 kilograms here, which effectively gives you the illusion that there's no pressure. And so my breath is only a tiny nudge in that 30 kilogram pressure on both sides. And that's all you see. The reality is, this is the air pressure, the reality is pressure of divine consciousness according to current physics is what they call zero point energy. One tiny cubic centimetre of empty space has enough etheric pressure to evaporate all the oceans of the world instantly. That's the humongous pressure right now which is on empty space, on everything, on your fingertip right now. Do you feel it? No, because everywhere it is equally balancing itself out. To be able to perceive that infinity in the finite play of appearances. We are obsessed only with the superficial appearance of finiteness. We say, oh this is so small. No, it's not. It is infinity coming as an appearance.

So Anantam Brahma is the seeing of infinity in everything and the play of infinite forces behind the finite appearances. Jnanam Brahma is the third of these steps which is recognizing the consciousness, the divine consciousness in everything, as everything, awake in everything, seeing it, feeling it, relating to it. And the fourth of these sub-steps is Anandam Brahma, the delight which is the consciousness. You look at the world, you look at an object and everywhere you see this infinity of consciousness, of delight playing through all these forms and you enjoy this and of course you experience it as infinite love and delight pouring from every object into you and from you into every object and all is a play of this blissfulness of the divine, infinitely varied, never repeating and infinitely intense in its powers. That would complete the sixth perfection. And so the fourth perfection brings us all the way down to the most physical part of our consciousness, the physical body participating. And the fifth perfection makes us participants, active participants and the sixth perfection makes us participants in the blissfulness which is infinite and yet one, indivisible, utterly conscious,  whole. And so such is the summary now of the six perfections of the integral yoga of which the physical body is in some sense the most significant. And so I'm going to dwell a little bit on this now, and we will close with this part of the discussion.

Sraddhalu (1:13:23):
In all that we discussed regarding the physical body's perfection, we saw health, levity, levitation, beauty, and delight of participation. How do you put it into practice? You don't have to wait for the supramental consciousness. Remember one thing, all these perfections start where you are as you are today. They are all accessible to you as you are today, as a first step. And that's all we take. We take our first step and when that first step becomes sufficiently complete, we take a second step and a third step and we just go on simultaneously. Each will assist the others. So what do you do with your health? Well, start in whatever way you can to make yourself healthy. But I'm not saying merely through exercise. Remember this is a spiritual effort primarily and link it to the previous two perfections. Do you recall the description we had of the divine energy working through us? Let that be your starting point for rebuilding your health. And a key component of that remember was Shraddha, the faith. The faith in the body of its own capacity to heal, to recover. Those of you who have seen some of the recent literature on health and healing will perhaps know or have heard of a very famous doctor by the name of Dr. Joe Dispenza who has been writing some quite amazing books. One of his theme of the book is that the body has its innate capacity to heal if the mind collaborates. And so he goes through various kinds of affirmations and treatments starting from an affirmation and conviction in the mind all the way down to the body and thus healing even incurable diseases and one of his famous books which documents some of these things is called, ‘You Are The Placebo’, I'm not recommending you need to read the whole book or to believe everything because they have to reduce everything down to biology and biological processes when in fact essentially it's a psychological thing. But by using technical terms of biology and certain chemicals and peptides and so on in the cellular functioning they make it sound scientific which is convincing to the modern mind, ‘ah yes this is scientific, you just said this molecule does that, thanks’. It has nothing to do the molecule, it's your thought pushing your life force which does the thing. The molecule is only vibrating in the process but if you can you can skim through the book, look at the examples and understand that the processes we have been discussing from a yoga point of view are really at the core of all that he describes.

Stay with the process, look at the truth of behind which is your body's conviction and faith in the divine. Will it live by its old habits and false values which have been programmed in the mind or in the body? Or will it live by something higher? Well that's really the true sense of health that you have to bring into, the true sense of the levitation, the true sense of the beauty, by the inner shift in consciousness. And every time we use this word supramental, many minds switch off - ‘ah, that will come one day’. No, it's right now. You don't have what it takes to experience the supramental directly, but you have what it takes to experience your mind, which is a derivation of the intuition, which is a derivation of supermind. So turn your mind towards the supermind as an idea, but aim at the first opening to an intuitive consciousness, which is your beginning of contact with supermind. So everything described in terms of supermind, you now begin by an opening to the intuition. That's immediately accessible to you. Start here now. Know that it's still a path to the supermind. And when you experience it, you will know it. Right now you will experience only its derivation and derivation of derivation. Two levels of derivation. But you have that. Start with that. Know that behind that is the supramental which is secret. Behind it is waiting to reveal itself. But it must prepare you to become capable of embracing the infinite.

So do not fear this word supramental. That's the nature of the yoga. It is supramental yoga first. But the supramental comes later in terms of direct experience. Right now it's only the direction, the aspiration and intuition is our first big step. So Sri Aurobindo describes in those later writings, the nature of this physical transformation. And I won't go into details but just in summary. He says, “It's not enough that the biology is responsive to your mind's will”, that you can shape the physical body even in its functions to do exactly what you want. That's not enough. The substance itself has to eventually undergo a change. Its processes have to undergo a change and he explains this in a very interesting way. He says, “Finally, what makes the physical action possible is the energy working behind the physical process and the consciousness which is working behind the energy”. So as these become more and more lit up, as they become more and more supramental, well intuitive first and then supramental, the process itself changes and the limits of those processes expand to become almost potentially unlimited. And then he says, “From the subtler part of the body, the subtler ranges from above, there is the infusion of these forces directly in the biological organs, sometimes bypassing the biological organs to do their work directly”. And the biological organs become less and less important until he says, “from disuse they begin to atrophy but are replaced by direct working of the higher ranges of consciousness but in the physical substance”, and that's how the change takes place in the very physical body and a physical transformation begins and may go through degrees, stages as may have happened in earlier stages of physical change from the ape to the human. Until at some point even the full form of the body would be able to be drawn out as if to give birth to a new body by direct transfer of consciousness or substance of the subtle energy now forming, materialising and giving a new body directly. And as a result bypassing all the limitations of the biological process of birth.

Sraddhalu (1:20:02):

And I'm going to touch upon this briefly. When you have to take birth through a physical mother, one of the biggest problem nature has is she's trying to push our mind's capacity and for that the brain organ has to be sufficiently well developed. But for the head to come out of the human body is almost impossible if it's fully grown. So the head has to be small which means the brain and mind have to be dulled in order to take birth and then later they have to catch up very quickly. That's why you'll see in the babies the head grows very quickly. But if the head was already large, then the mother's body is already being shaped so that her entire structure of the bones of hips widen out to almost twice their size to give birth and then they come back to normal. This is an amazing capacity, but still it's a limit of what the biology can do. If somehow this body could be drawn out, so to say cast out and formed directly, it would come with, well the capacities needed without having to go through the loss and then the rebuilding. These would be one of the implications of such a form of birth which Sri Aurobindo actually describes and envisages and then he says things which are so far ahead that they wouldn't make sense to us but I'm going to read the part just as a hint. He says, “The body 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”. What do you do with tools, like lenses amplify, microscopes amplify, telescopes amplify. Well the subtle sight working through the physical can amplify at will. It's one of the siddhis. You can take an object and zoom in, zoom out. See, little children, it's a fact, little children take books, newspapers. They're played with the iPad, with the tablet for many years. Now they come to the school textbook and they try to enlarge the text. It's not enlarging, the baby says. It's not enlarging. Well, the instinct in us is that we should be able to zoom in, zoom out at will, isn't it? With the subtle sight, it's possible. It's almost effortless. And so he says, the body will be able to do these things without needing the external tools of manipulation. It also means holding. You could hold an object with your fingers, but you could also hold it directly by the power of your energy. And then he says, “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, cognizing what is now beyond the body's cognizance, 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”. 

So let your imagination go wild to the maximum and this is immeasurably superior to that. Naturally, human imagination is attempting to visualise these things with all these X-Men and all those kinds of movies Superman and Batman. And one of the most interesting movies I had once seen which is called, where they literally conceive of a human being whose body is made of energy, pure energy. And I forget the name now, but all these are human attempts to perceive what could be a potential future. In fact, it will not be purely energetic. It will be a physical body, but with material divinised and therefore able to participate in this way. But that's not the point of it. It's not these capacities and skills but the ability to participate in the all-creating divine Ananda in the physical life and if I read the last part of this, the divine body will reflect or reproduce here in a divine life on earth something of this highest greatness and glory of the self-manifesting spirit. And what would that glory be like? He says, “Consciousness and bliss which constitute the worlds of the highest truth of existence, dynamism of tapas, glory and sweetness of bliss, the absolute essence and pitch of the all-creating Ananda”. All these the body is meant to inhabit. What is the highest sacchidananda now all the way down bridge to the physical body, you as a consciousness living across all these domains of consciousness and acting through the physical body while still acting on other planes equally.

Sraddhalu (1:25:30):

The Mother has, and I'll end with this last example, the Mother has something quite amazing she mentions in the Agenda. She says, one day she had this experience in which she felt in the physical body multiple experiences simultaneously. And then she says, if this is the intended capacity of the physical body as it evolves then it is going to be the single greatest instrument ever created in the whole of evolution of the universe. What does it mean? And I'm going to put it, I'll explain this a little bit. When you're in a certain emotional state, well you have an emotional state. In your subtle body that's your state, that's your existence. If you have another emotional state, well you switch states. But at any given time you're in a state. A state could be composed of a mixture of many but it's still a state. Because in the vital body, your emotional state is your body, is your substance; but in the physical body form binds everything which is the problem of the body right now, the very thing which is the problem of the body that the form is binding and limiting allows all levels of consciousness to be simultaneously present in a single form and if the body's evolution allows it to experience simultaneously multiple of these experiences of consciousness bound in the same form, it allows you to have multiple experiences of multiple grades in a single form, in a single identity. See, the thing which is the limitation of the body becomes its strength when divinised and awakened to divine potential and it cannot be had in the subtler bodies. It can only be had in the physical body. This is the greatness of the physical body, the extreme importance of the physical evolution, the reason why we all took birth on earth in a physical body in the material world and not some intermediate subtle vital or even subtle physical worlds, which are so beautiful and wonderful and plastic. Why would you suffer in this? Because something so extraordinary is possible here which is not possible on any other plane. But of which our physical body is just a very early stage model precursor, building towards that capacity. And Sri Aurobindo's observation that all the suffering of millions of years to bring us to this point of evolution should be justified only if the future is so extraordinary that all that suffering was worth it and that's a glimpse of what the physical body might be able to do. I have not read that whole paragraph, you can read that chapter yourself. It is titled, ‘The divine body’. But you have to pause and really think and introspect to see what he is hinting at, because he doesn't say it explicitly. But this is to say that our physical body is the most valuable instrument we have been given and this body may be one of many that we have incarnated in. But all these years, all these lives, we have only been neglecting the body. Or using it as a temporary support for our other priorities. This is the first time that the very nature of the yoga reminds you that the body is your key. It is the key to immortality, not living forever, that you could do with or without body. It is the immortality of the Satchitananda, the inhabitation of Satchitananda in the material plane, in material form, in an objectivized world experience of Ananda. That's the immortality that this body can give or is intended to grow into. And for the first time you're being told that this body is not only precious, not only as a divine gift for a temporary passage which many religions have said, but as the very goal of this physical incarnation to divinize in your spiritual evolution. It's a very big contrast from what it is to what it should become. But if we can begin to recognize now what's happening behind the scenes, what is the intention of the Divine Mother in her creative process to form this body and to awaken our consciousness and to work on all this, then we can begin to give it the value that it deserves.

Sraddhalu (1:30:18):
And to say it is sacred is too superficial. Again many religions have said your body is sacred but as a temporary passage. It is the vehicle in which the highest divine Ananda and all the possibilities of its multiple experiences can be simultaneously held Amritam which was poured from above and held here in physical form and manifested radiated out into the physical world. But the jar has to be baked the way the Vedas says, otherwise the Soma the divine delight pouring in will break the jar and the baking tapas concentrated Tapas, concentrated intense focus of our consciousness to shape this jar, to make it a worthy vehicle is necessary and that is the yoga. Working on the physical body for us is as important as the working on the other planes of consciousness and just as opening your mind and heart to the divine Shakti and her love. So to your physical body, eventually must consciously open and receive her love and soak it in. And he says all the way down to the cells, so that even the cells begin to wake up by the call of the divine love and say, here, I too want to participate, I too want to serve and manifest it here on earth. And all this is within our reach to take the first step and second steps. None of what we have discussed is beyond your reach as you are today. Let's start taking those first few steps. Whatever our current capacity is does not matter. It is her capacity on which we rely. Open your mind, open your heart and feeling with your body, let your body awareness open to her. Invoking to receive, to soak in and to give yourself and that would be your starting point. All else will follow. We can take a moment to concentrate on this and the importance of the place of our body and the value we must now start giving to it, from here on.

Okay. Namaste.

[Alina] Namaste. Thank you very much.