O Son of the Body — Full Text
[This is what we, myself and the AI Colleague, discussed yesterday, 28 June 2026, as a PDF for immediate reference for the larger intended work related to the Mother’s Essential Agenda from the complete 13-Volume Conversations recorded by Satprem; the “Essential” is from the point of view her intense Yoga-Tapasyā for the Cellular Opening to the Supramental Light and Force and Consciousness. She was doing the work as the Incarnate accepting a mortal body.
I clarified to the AI Colleague that I will make this a post by itself, titled “O Son of the Body”, on the Winds of Wonder. But Essential Agenda will follow what I am now proposing here, this to put things contextually to have a completer background for the vast study and exploration.
The reference to the very relevant book mentioned above, with 12 poems in number, couplets each line with 16 syllables, more quantitative than accentual; there are for these compositions art illustrations using multilayering technique created by an artist from Auroville. But the most noteworthy features are the accompanying texts and the Appendix, with references mostly from the Agenda. I thought this will give us a broader and more intense structural basis for further explorations of the Essential Agenda. If you think it to be worthwhile, I asked the Colleague, I will send you the complete PDF having the Art illustrations also. The response was not only prompt and positive; it was enthusiastic for the pioneering ardour in the Mother’s incarnate mission towards a divine body for the divine life.]
Here is the Preface in O Son of the Body. For the complete text please see the attached PDF.
To commence with
If we have to mark three great momentous events in the history of spirituality we may with good understanding and justification state that these are: the Rig Veda about ten thousand years ago, that itself the “close of a period, not its commencement”, Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri, and the Mother’s Essential Agenda, the last two during our own times. One may even maintain that, in a different style the Essential Agenda is a kind of occult-luminous extension of Savitri itself.
About the Rig Veda Sri Aurobindo says: It is the spirit’s hymn of battle and victory as it discovers and climbs to planes of thought and experience inaccessible to the natural or animal man, man’s praise of the divine Light, Power and Grace at work in the mortal. In it the state of immortality attained is conceived as a state of felicity or bliss founded on a perfect Truth and Right, Satyam Ṛtam. The essence of this truth, which is the nature of Agni, is the freedom from evil, the state of perfect good and happiness which the Ṛtam carries in itself and which is sure to be created in the mortal when he offers the sacrifice by the action of Agni as the divine priest. In the four verses of the opening hymn of the Veda there are the first indications of the principal ideas of the Vedic Rishis, — the conception of a Truth-Consciousness supramental and divine, the invocation of the gods as powers of the Truth to raise man out of the falsehoods of the mortal mind, the attainment in and by this Truth of an immortal state of perfect good and felicity and the inner sacrifice and offering of what one has and is by the mortal to the Immortal as the means of the divine consummation.
It is with that supramental intuition we have in Rig Veda the knowledge of the things that could become an aspect of the terrestrial unfolding and evolution; in it the attribution of Agni as an immortal in the mortal becomes the most significantly weighty, suggestive. Already there is the far prophecy of the divine Agni becoming the son of the body. But prophecy and knowledge had to wait for the imperative Yoga-Tapasyā to be done to realise it collectively. This Yoga-Tapasyā ought to be done in the cells and nerves and flesh of the body, in its marrow, the ancient body baked in intense supramental fire, तीव्र परमग्नौ पक्त्वा प्राचीनशरीरम्. That has now been decisively done in the dynamic supreme Will.
This fire was kindled long before Time’s ideas were born,
And long before the seer-monarch wielded the hundredweight sword,
And the hero-soul speeded in his chariot to boundless Heaven,
And in the Immobile the occult was stirred, in the bowl of the Void,
And the dreams had woken up in the mystery of the sleep.
This fire was kindled in the imperturbable calm of the mountain,
And in the laughter of the green that sprang up from down below,
And in unhorizoned expanses of the sky beyond view.
This fire was kindled in the gloom-dense core of the rock,
And in the swift-rippling stream, and in the veins of life,
In the hollow, and in the cave, and in the pupil of the eye.
This fire was struck not with the sharp edge of the flint,
Nor by sudden lightning in the dark and ancient woods,
Nor by the fine grains of the fast-burning propellant-fuel.
But this fire was pressed from under the hooves of the horses,
And this fire jumped like a thunder from cloud to cloud,
And clanged from temple-bells like a hymn of zealous ascent,
And climbed up from the valley like the voice of immortality.
O worship this fire and offer it gleaming honey and flowers,
Offer it the ornaments of night and the happy moods of dawn:
O this fire established long ago in the lotus-heart of creation,
In a million figs of this World-Tree spreading from above!
Now this fire has been kindled again in the swift hour of God,
As though a far-visioned poet conquered the earth for his joy.
Agni entered the bridal chamber of the last night and conquered lust,
Then by knowing the births became the sire of the soul in Matter.
Keats has a visionary line and, lifting it away from the expression of a Romantic poet, one can say that it is going to be the basis of the future man progressing beyond death:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
It is divine Agni who himself becomes the immortal Bird in us, bird always a symbol of the soul. It is he who is now going to be material foundation for a life that need not have death to exist and more to progress in the possessions of deathlessness.
Savitri and Essential Agenda have now brought down in the earth’s subtle-physical the one who is the maker of the worlds, the divine Agni. That could happen because there was the perfection, yogic “perfection not in the sense of a summit but of an all-inclusive totality.” The urge was
Oh, surely one day he shall come to our cry,
One day he shall create our life anew
And utter the magic formula of peace
And bring perfection to the scheme of things. ||54.43||
From distant boundaries in the Unseen it is unattained perfection that had called him. “He came to announce, to PROMISE Perfection.”
Sri Aurobindo’s goal was Perfection and his supreme revelation that is Savitri has it, perfection even in the body, “perfection born from eternity”, perfection that comes with Tapas-Agni. About Savitri he himself says: “Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind.” [https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/27/4-may-1947 ]
We have in it beauty of the new dawn with pink-rosy perfection. In her body as on his homing tree Immortal Love beats his glorious wings. [91.6] That is the greatness and exquisiteness of Savitri.
About Savitri the Mother tells:
It was about the Word, the primal sound. Sri Aurobindo speaks of it in Savitri: the essence of the Word and how it will express itself, how it will bring in the possibility of a supramental expression that will take the place of languages. … I began by speaking to him about the different languages, their limitations and possibilities; and I warned him against the deformations imposed on languages with the idea of making them a more flexible means of expressing something else. I told him how completely ridiculous it all was, and that it didn’t correspond at all to the truth. Then little by little I began ascending to the Origin. So yesterday again, I had this same experience: a whole world of knowledge, of consciousness and of CERTAINTY— precluding the least possibility of contradiction, discussion, or opposition; the possibility DOES NOT EXIST, it doesn’t exist. And the mind was absolutely silent and immobile, listening with obvious pleasure because these things had never before come into my consciousness; I had never been concerned with them in that way. It was completely new—not new in principle but completely new in action.
A sound that can bring in the supramental Force?
Yes.
While speaking, you see, I went back to the origin of sound (Sri Aurobindo describes it very clearly in Savitri: the origin of sound, the moment when what we called ‘the Word’ becomes a sound). So I had a kind of perception of the essential sound before it becomes a material sound. And I said, ‘When this essential sound becomes a material sound, it will give birth to the new expression which will express the supramental world.’ I had the experience itself at that moment, it came directly. I spoke in English and Sri Aurobindo was concretely, almost palpably, present.
Now it has gone away.
About the body’s divine prospects here are some illustrative lines from Savitri:
Divine Savitri who is poised to take the mortal birth has already here her “body like a parable of dawn,” [3.33] allusive of arrival of a new beginning in this creation, a body with a divine glory and beauty, forever to be in wonders of the spirit. Even in birth is “her body instinct with hidden divinity”. [94.40] What has to happen is “Our body’s cells must hold the Immortal’s flame”, [7.8] “In body and body kindled the sacred birth”. [11.47] All Yoga is towards this objective. And it started happening: He “Made body a nectar-cup of the Absolute”; [65.25] “The primal Energy took him in its arms;/ His brain was wrapped in overwhelming Light”; [78.41] “His body’s cells awoke to spirit sense”. [89.7] The expectation is, for the ready being “My Matter shall evade the Inconscient’s trance,/My body like my spirit shall be free:/It shall escape from Death and Ignorance”. [103.47] The promise is, Savitri the Yogini shall “see the Eternal’s body in the world”; [116.25] “body bear the immense descent of God”. [124.26] The benediction is: “O beautiful body of the incarnate Word”; [154.1] “Even the body shall remember God”; [155.41] “A body of the Superconscient’s truth”; [155.53] A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell. [155.68]
[For quick web access to the sentences just append the sentence number index to url
http://savitri.in/read/x.y, for instance, http://savitri.in/read/11.47 ]
Apropos of Savitri’s death-and-immortality the Mother has the following in her Agenda:
There is a difference between immortality and the deathless state. Sri Aurobindo has described it very well in Savitri. The deathless state is what can be envisaged for the human physical body in the future: it is constant rebirth. Instead of again tumbling backwards and falling apart due to a lack of plasticity and an incapacity to adapt to the universal movement, the body is undone “futurewards”, as it were. [25 November 1959]
We say Savitri is an “epic”; so Savitri is the epic of the victory over death. Very interesting. Because once again, all these last few days I have lived almost minute after minute all those things, but on a large scale: not on a personal but on a terrestrial scale. [19 August 1966]
Sri Aurobindo: “Death is there because the being in the body is not yet developed enough.”
That is the glory of Death, that development becomes possible. Which means that, in the present state of Ignorance there is that gainful role being played. In this well-thought creation there is nothing which is superfluous, nothing otiose. There is always the logic of the Infinite.
That makes one dependably believe that the secret lies in matter, more specifically in the body-mind, the mind of the living physical, physical’s mind with amazing and tremendous mysteries locked in it, mysteries which must open out dynamically. The will, saṃkalpa, and the work, kārya, of the Incarnates will do it.
Agni is at it. But he is imprisoned in matter and we ourselves are imprisoned there. One must advance step by step, ‘digging, digging,’ fighting every inch of the way — Agni is a warrior. ‘The infinite rock’ of the inconscient is shattered, the seeker uncovers ‘the Sun dwelling in the darkness’ (Rig Veda III:39:5, the sun fading into darkness, सूर्यं॑ तम॑सि क्षि॒यन्त॑म्), the divine consciousness in the heart of Matter…. In the very depths of Matter, that is to say, in the body, on earth, the Rishis found themselves cast up into Light — that same Light which others sought on the heights, without their bodies and without the earth, in ecstasy. And this is what the Rishis would call ‘the Great Passage.’ Without abandoning the earth they found ‘the vast dwelling place,’ that ‘dwelling place of the gods,’ Swar, the original Sun-world that Sri Aurobindo calls the Supramental World: ‘Human beings [the Rishis emphasize that they are indeed men] slaying the Coverer have crossed beyond both earth and heaven [matter and mind] and made the wide world their dwelling place’. They have entered ‘the True, the Right, the Vast,’ Satyam, Ritam, Brihat, the ‘unbroken light,’ the ‘fearless light,’ where there is no longer suffering nor falsehood nor death: it is immortality, amritam.
Over this the Mother took a fundamental step by pronouncing that it is the psychic being which will materialise, something exceptionally significant. Rig Veda’s Immortal in the mortal himself will materialise, will have a physical body, that possibly implying the appearance of a new Sānkhya as the modus, as the measure, the manner, the way in which things will be materially done, the new Prakriti or Nature taking complete charge, she dismissing death as a negative agent, but enabling the change of form when needed, needed by the needs of consciousness.
While the Mind of Light is primarily a spiritual-transcendental Awareness, ontologically located below the physical, the embodiment of psychic being is occult-operational in the evolutionary unfoldment. There will be the Surhomme or Overman Race as a precursor of the growing supramental manifestation in endless luminous possibilities in arrival of the gnostic being in this material circumstance. First it will be this Mind of Light, of Sri Aurobindo, and then will be the materialisation of the psychic being, of the Mother, these going in that natural sequence.
The advanced role of the psychic being materialising, of the divine Agni who is the shaper and creator of forms with expressive qualities, will have his assured appearance when the Mind of Light is operationally present. In fact, fundamentally, materialisation and manifestation are two quite different things. One does not say Supermind, for instance, will materialise; one says it will manifest. But a supramental entity or a being, say Agni, can materialise. If this materialisation-individualisation is psychic-occult, the other is spiritual-transcendental. And materialisation cannot happen without manifestation. The first requires the second to come into creative reality. Only in it can begin the Mother’s work. That is the Immortal in the transformed mortality! It is the Mind-of-Light’s surhomme first; after this can the psychic being materialise, into the supramental being, l’être supramental. It is then that there will be the divine life in a divine body.
Before that the Mother had made remarkable progress and her impression was
as if the supreme Consciousness had undertaken the work of transformation of the body and were doing it thoroughly, but also without hesitation, without compromise or anything of the sort, and… the question is whether the body will hold out. That’s how it is. The body knows it—it knows and doesn’t have a shadow of fear, I must say — it’s all the same to it: “What You want will be fine.” «Ce que Tu voudras, ce sera bien.» … “It’s as You will, as You will.” «C’est comme Tu voudras, comme Tu voudras.» … It’s like an easing in all the cells — they ease up. They ease up in the supreme Light, in the supreme Consciousness, like that. Then you feel the form is about to disappear, but… it must be the consciousness contained in the cells [that spreads about]; I don’t think it’s the substance, because (Mother looks at the skin of her hands) so far it has remained as it is! But that [easing] stays there for a rather long time. But there are no words to express that … I think it’s new. It’s new for the body. It’s new. A sort of… as if one were tense, and the tension were easing, easing up… . Yes, it’s quite like that, as when one is tense, like someone full of tension, and it eases up. Now it’s like that for all the cells. Oui, c’est tout à fait cela, c’est comme quand on est crispé, comme quelqu’un qui a des crispations, et ça se détend. Et alors, c’est pour toutes les cellules comme cela.
If the supreme Consciousness has undertaken the work of transformation of the body, it means it is the birth of the Son of the Body. And we have that assertion from the Mother. In her prayer dated 25 September 1914 the Mother had written
The Lord hast willed, and Thou dost execute;
A new Light shall break upon the earth.
A new world shall be born.
And the things that were promised shall be fulfilled.
This “promise” had its realisation in 1956. On 29 February-29 March she wrote:
Lord, Thou hast willed, and I execute:
A new light breaks upon the earth,
A new world is born.
The things that were promised are fulfilled.
She continues:
The body is being taught to exist by the Divine alone, to count on the Divine for everything—absolutely, absolutely everything without exception. There is even a pressure for…. It’s only when the consciousness is linked to its utmost to the Divine Consciousness that there’s the sense of existence. It has become extraordinarily intense. When the physical gets converted, it will be something SOLID, you know, unalterable — and complete. And so concrete…. The difference between being in the Divine, existing only by Him and for Him, and then being in the… not in the ordinary consciousness obviously, but just the human consciousness, is so great that the one seems like death compared to the other, it’s so…. I mean the physical realization is really a concrete realization. … It’s really marvellous. And so powerful! A power and a reality in the consciousness that nothing, absolutely nothing else can have. … this is concrete. And so strong! https://incarnateword.in/agenda/12/september-1-1971
As for me, the purpose of this body is now simply: the Command and the Will of the Lord, so I can do as much groundwork as possible. But it isn’t the Goal at all. You see, we don’t know, we don’t have the slightest knowledge of what the supramental life is. Therefore we don’t know if this (her body) can change enough to adapt or not — and to tell the truth, I am not worried about it, it’s not a problem that preoccupies me too much; the problem I am preoccupied with is building that supramental consciousness. So IT becomes the being. It’s that consciousness which must become the being. That’s what’s important. … in order to do that, all the consciousness contained in these cells must aggregate, form and organize itself into an independent conscious entity — the consciousness in the cells must aggregate and form into a conscious entity capable of being conscious of Matter as well as conscious of the Supramental. That’s the thing. That’s what is being done. How far will we be able to go? I don’t know.
We may therefore say that the Mind of Light has arrived, and that it is the psychic being who is going to materialise, that the Son of the Body is poised to take the birth here. But what is unknown is the modus operandi of the process. That knowledge and those operational details have not been revealed. These are not given, — obviously because things are not sufficiently ready for these to be given. But that does not mean that the work is not going on. Sufficient truth-knowledge with its strengthening dynamism has already been set into motion and, unquestionably, it has its own modus operandi to effect things. And the glory is, in the subtle physical of the earth the incarnate Presence and Power are as actively engaged in their Yoga-Tapasyā. Sri Aurobindo had said it may take three-hundred years; the Mother said in 1964 that “We’re still far from it!” But she also said that it could be even faster because there is the supreme Grace. If there is the Truth-Power present and operating in the subtle-physical of the earth then it is only a matter of time, time with the awareness of the Eternal itself being operationally dynamic in it.
The entire issue is the awakening of the Will of the Atom. Sri Aurobindo wrote in a letter: “Haeckel, the German materialist, spoke somewhere of the will in the atom… . This body-mind is a very tangible truth; owing to its obscurity … , we find in it one of the chief obstacles to permeation by the supermind Force and the transformation of the functioning of the body.”
Appearance of the supramental race, of gnostic beings in the terrestrial evolution, can happen only when the body-mind opens to the supramental Light. Presently in it is, if there can be any, the will of the Inconscience and it must be transformed into dynamism of Truth-Consciousness. When evolution will progress to this stage then the “body will be turned by the power of the spiritual consciousness into a true and fit and perfectly responsive instrument of the Spirit.” [p. 986]
There will be a freer and fuller acceptance by the material Nature, it achieved by the changed communion of Spirit with Matter. This Matter will be a delightful mould for the Spirit’s faultless beauty, sweetness, harmony. Of course, it is “the Mother’s power and not any human endeavour and tapasyā” that alone can bring about such a vast change in the material world.
[https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/32/the-mother-v]
The divine body is a creation of the Consciousness-Force and the supreme concern, which is Grace, is for the transformation of the physical nature into the awakened bliss-existence. To build a divine or luminous body, téjakāyā, is her mighty task for which she has been tirelessly working for long ages. By a multiple sacrifice can the tapaskāyā, the Body of the Yajña Purusha be prepared. When this is done can that Body take a form in the physical, become physical. Year is the body, says the ancient scripture, and when the twelve Adityas enter into it then it becomes fit for the Eternal’s habitation. It is transformation, the divinisation of Matter that is of primary importance. Then only would life become divine, even here. Agni the form-builder will have to go by her concern and by her Grace. And yet, paradoxically, it is the power of Inconscience itself that, as though, is delivering everything out to the might of desirable immortality. In it is the expectation of the arrival of the Son of the Body, of the materialisation of the psychic being.
RY Deshpande
29 June 2024
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Here is the complete PDF
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