Part Two THE SPIRITUAL DESTINY OF THE WAKING STATE Chapter I THE BANE OF OSCILLATION Obviously if one has not the Brahmisthiti in the waking state, there is no completeness in the realisation. (Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 109) How is it, O Great One, that even we who have attained to Knowledge get at times blind and benighted"?* (Chandi Saptashati, I.30) ...Man evolving to divinest heights Colloques still with the animal and the Djinn; The human godhead with star-gazer eyes Lives still in one house with the primal beast. (Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Boo

Chapter III THE VISION "The Light now distant shall grow native here, The Strength that visits us our comrade power; The Ineffable shall find a secret voice, The Imperishable burn through Matter's screen Making this mortal body godhead's robe." (Savitri, Book II, Canto II, p. IIO) The Aitareya Upanishad opens with a semi-mythological narrative of the nature of a parable, the parable of the creation of more and more developed forms till one, namely, that of man, was formed that proved to be adequate and capable of housing a highly developed consciousness. Atmā vā idameka evāgra āsit....sa īkṣata lokānnu sṛjā iti.

Chapter XI THE PHYSIOLOGY OF SENESCENCE AND DEATH On life was laid the haunting finger of Death. (Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book II, Canto VII, p. 203) A breath of disillusion and decadence Corrupting watched for Life's maturity And made to rot the full grain of the soul: Progress became a purveyor of Death. (Ibid., Book II, Canto VII, p. 204) "This is the scientific view of death. But it leaves death with all its mystery, with all its sacredness; we are not in the least able to the present time to say what life is — still less, perhaps, what death is. We say of certain things — they are alive;

Chapter XV THE PHYSICAL CONQUEST OF DEATH The dire universal Shadow disappeared Vanishing into the Void from which it came. (Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book X, Canto TV, p. 668) The "yet unaccomplished journey" leading to the attainment of earthly immortality has already been undertaken and is being gradually worked out by the Divine Supermind, here in the very conditions of Matter itself. For in order to hasten the day of this glorious consummation of the destiny of embodied life, he about whom the Mother declared in far-off 1914 after her very first meeting with him — "It matters not if there are hundreds of beings

Chapter XIII CONCLUSION If the ways are crude, it is because the Manifestation itself is [as yet] very crude. And as it perfects itself, as it becomes more fit to manifest that which is eternally progressive, cruder means will be left behind for subtler means... (The Mother, Bulletin Vol. XIV, No. 3, p. 47) There are many, a very large number, who ask what the new life would be like and I answer to them: "There will be an interchange of forces, a circulating energy: the building of the body will be quite different, all these ungainly organs will disappear and be replaced by psychological functions; and the necessity of eating, eating always will

Chapter VII THE ISSUE: STATUS OR DYNAMIS I have met Spirit with spirit, Self with self, But I have loved too the body of my God. (Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book X, Canto IV, p. 649) Nature shall live to manifest secret God, The Spirit shall take up the human play, This earthly life become the life divine. (Ibid., Book XI, Canto I, p. 711) Eternal status and eternal dynamis are both true of the Reality which itself surpasses both status and dynamis; the immobile and the mobile Brahman are both the same Reality. (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 459) We have...to possess consciousl

Chapter VIII THE UNIVERSAL CHOICE The need to exist, the instinct to survive Engrossed the tense precarious moment's will And an unseeing desire felt out for food. (Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book II, Canto IV, p. 137) In this bound thinking's narrow leadership Tied to the soil, inspired by common things, Attached to a confined familiar world, Amid the multitude of her motived plots, Her changing actors and her million masks, Life was a play monotonously the same. (Ibid., p. 150) We have seen that food constitutes the only source of energy and material replenishment for a living body. But any

Part Five THE PHYSICAL CONQUEST OF DEATH Chapter I THE AGE-LONG QUEST (In Myths and Legends) Place me in the deathless, undecaying world. (Rig-Veda, IX. 113.7) Make me immortal (mām amṛtam kṛdhi). (Ibid., IX. 113.9) Fire of God, I passioned for life .... Life so that Death might die ... (Sri Aurobindo, More Poems, p. 41) And death prowls baying through the woods of life. (Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book IX, Canto II, p. 587) Our mortality is athirst for endless life. (Pliny) "...O grim cold death! But 1 will not like ordinary men Satiate thee with cries, and

Chapter XII THE MYSTERY OF MATTER "...The question may be raised whether, not only at first but always, the divine life must submit to this necessity [of material alimentation]. But it could only deliver itself from it altogether if it could find out the way so to draw upon the universal energy that the energy would sustain not only the vital parts of our physicality but its constituent matter with no need of aid for sustenance from any outside substance of Matter." (Sri Aurobindo, The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, pp. 50-51) "The material universe is only the facade of an immense building which has other structures behind it, an

Chapter IV THE EVOLUTIONARY DESTINY To minds bound to the present form of things the divine transfiguration of the human body, the golden dream of planting heaven here on the soil of Matter, may well appear as 'a senseless and impossible chimera'1, the 'bright hallucination'2 of an idealist's thoughts, a vain and ineffectual imagination and 'the noble fiction'3 of man's subconscious yearnings. For, the problem at the base is this: how, through what mechanism, and by following what definite process, can this vision of the emergence of the transfigured body, this 'corps glorieux that would be plastic enough to be constantly remodelled by th