The Role and Benefit of the Physical Body

Spiritual aspirants frequently complain about the obstructions provided by the physical body. There is a need to eat, a need to sleep, the constant pressure of physical existence, the wear and tear of the aging process, the potential for illness or injury, and the eventual breakdown and dissolution of the body and the attendant needs of caring for and addressing the circumstances of the body. As they focus on the vital, mental and spiritual aspects of their existence, seekers frequently begrudge the role the body plays and the need to address its requirements. This has led seekers to try to starve, torture and discipline the body with extreme means in some cases, as the perceived obstructions of the body to the spiritual practice have caused them to find ways to minimize, or even remove, the bodily limitations.

If we shift our focus, instead, to the role and advantages provided by having a physical body, we can see that there is a real, and substantial, purpose in the creation for such a development to have occurred. In order to create a node, or nexus, of action, a focus for the flow of consciousness and the creation of multiple separate viewpoints, a physical form is helpful. The fluidity found in the mental and vital planes is not conducive to this type of fixity, and thus, has its difficulties in terms of a systematic development through time, of a particular focused line of development.

The physical body also provides a form of protection from attack by forces of the vital plane. The very existence of the physical level implies that change has to follow a process and takes time and effort, and thus slows down, disrupts or even in many cases prevents vital forces from intervening and destroying the focus of the life.

The Mother writes: “If your body were not made in the rigid form it is — for it is terribly rigid, isn’t it? — well, if all that were not so fixed, if you had no skin, here, like this, solid, if externally you were the reflection of what you are in the vital and mental fields, it would be worse than being a jelly-fish! Everything would fuse into everything else, like this…. Oh, what a mess it would be! That is why it was at first necessary to give a very rigid form. Afterwards we complain about it. We say, ‘The physical is fixed, it is a nuisance; it lacks plasticity, it lacks suppleness, it hasn’t that fluidity which can enable us to merge into the Divine.’ But this was absolutely necessary, for without this… if you simply went out of your body (most of you can’t do it because the vital being is hardly more individualised than the physical), if you came out of your body and went into the vital world, you would see that all things there intermingle, they are mixed, they divide; all kinds of vibrations, currents of forces come and go, struggle, try to destroy one another, take possession of each other, absorb each other, throw each other out… and so it goes on! But it is very difficult to find a real personality in all this. These are forces, movements, desires, vibrations.”

“There are individualities, there are personalities! But these are powers. People who are individualised in that world are either heroes or devils!”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 3, Becoming an Individual, pp. 110-111