Understanding the Consciousness of the Body

If we reflect on how many actions or operations of the physical body take place without our mental intervention, it becomes clear that the body has its own highly developed, and essential, form of consciousness that operates independently of the mind. One common example is widely experienced. An individual is walking across ice or some other slippery surface and suddenly starts to lose his balance. Before the mind can react, the body sets in motion a balancing routine and in many cases can prevent an outright fall to the ground. Other examples get into the entire complex mechanism of how the body’s organs and internal functions occur. When placed under some kind of threat, the body reacts with a “fight or flight” response, secreting adrenalin to activate the sense organs and the organs of action to prepare for some kind of emergency response. Cellular energy production, the functioning of the digestive system, the detoxifying system of the kidneys, the blood sugar regulating action of the pancreas, the multiple actions of the liver, the metabolism-regulating action of the thyroid, the responses of the body’s immune systems, the master control of various glands through the pituitary, the chemistry underlying the need for sleep, the call of hunger and thirst, the method for carrying sense impressions along nervous pathways and the function of neurotransmitters all represent bodily functionality that is not controlled or driven by the mental awareness directly.

When something malfunctions at the level of the body consciousness, the mind frequently has no idea of the underlying cause or how to address the issue. This has led to the development of an enormous proliferation of specialized doctors, medical researchers and extensive and highly detailed tests to try to figure out what is not working as expected in the ‘automatic’ bodily metabolic systems and thereby to try to intervene to help restore the balance, if possible.

While it is true that the mind and the vital can have impact on these bodily functions, it remains an ‘indirect’ influence that does not entirely override or control the native function of the body. To the extent also that the bodily has undergone changes through a disease process, the support or pressure applied by the mind or the vital is not immediate but must work through the body and its functions in a process that takes time.

The body’s consciousness is based on developments that have evolved through many millennia and which may have their roots in the original stirrings of Life in Matter. For that to occur, changes in the physical substance of Matter were required that developed into a physical consciousness that could support the movement of the life energy in Matter. The relationships between systems, organs, functions have been replicated and refined as life-forms became more complex and eventually began to adapt to the evolution of the mental consciousness and the additional needs that were recognised to create these support structures for life and mind in matter.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “The body… has its own consciousness and acts from it, even without any mental will of our own or even against that will, and our surface mind knows very little about this body-consciousness, feels it only in an imperfect way, sees only its results and has the greatest difficulty in finding out their causes. It is part of the yoga to become aware of this separate consciousness of the body, to see and feel its movements and the forces that act upon it from inside or outside and to learn how to control and direct it even in its most hidden and (to us) subconscient processes. But the body-consciousness itself is only part of the individualised physical consciousness in us which we gather and build out of the secretly conscious forces of universal physical Nature.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 2, Planes and Parts of the Being, pp. 20-21