Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Himself and the Ashram
The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35
Therapeutic Force and Healing
Spiritual Force and the Body [2]
Perhaps I might say a word about Ramakrishna’s attitude
with regard to the body. He seems always to have regarded it as a misuse of
spiritual force to utilise it for preserving the body or curing its ailments or
taking care for it. Other Yogis — I do not speak of those who think it
justifiable to develop Yogic siddhis, but of those who think that that should be
avoided — have not had this complete disregard of the body: they have taken care
to maintain it in good health and condition as an instrument or a physical basis
for their development in Yoga. I have always been in agreement with this view:
moreover, I have never had any hesitation in the use of a spiritual force for
all legitimate purposes including the maintenance of health and physical life in
myself and in others — that is indeed why the Mother has given flowers, not only
as a blessing but as a help in illness. I put a value on the body first as an
instrument, dharmasādhana, or, more fully, as a
centre of manifested personality in action, a basis of spiritual life and 
activity as of all life and activity upon the earth, but also because
for me the body as well as the mind and life is a part of the divine whole, a
form of the Spirit and therefore not to be disregarded or despised as something
incurably gross and incapable of spiritual realisation or of spiritual use.
Matter itself is secretly a form of the Spirit and has to reveal itself as that,
can be made to wake to consciousness and evolve and realise the Spirit, the
Divine within it. In my view the body as well as the mind and life has to be
spiritualised or, one may say, divinised so as to be a fit instrument and
receptacle for the realisation and manifestation of the Divine. It has its part
in the divine Lila, even, according to the Vaishnava sadhana, in the joy and
beauty of Divine Love. That does not mean that the body has to be valued for its
own separate sake or that the creation of a divine body in a future evolution of
the whole being has to be contemplated as an end and not a means — that would be
a serious error which would not be admissible. In any case, my speculations
about an extreme form of divinisation are something in a far distance and are no
part of the preoccupations of the spiritual life in the near future.
7 December 1949