Balancing Detachment, Indifference and Caretaking of the Body

When we hear that we must cultivate detachment and indifference to the physical body as the instrument of our exte
al interactions in the world, we tend to immediately jump to the idea that we must renounce everything and simply let the body do whatever happens without any care or conce
for its fate. This is due to the nature of our minds that want simple ‘black and white’ answers without any form of ‘nuance’ involved.

It is much more difficult to follow a more subtle understanding and achieve detachment and indifference without moving toward neglect and disintegration of the body. The balance to be achieved requires proper care to be taken for the instrument, even while we are willing to accept with equanimity and a peaceful poise, all the body’s various situations.

The key to this more nuanced approach is similar to the way we may handle a delicate musical instrument or a tool. We care for it, ensure that it is maintained in proper working order and good condition and ready for use when it is called into action. Whether that instrument or tool stays with one or departs, or somehow becomes damaged independent of our caretaking activity, should be the place where we exercise detachment, as we realise that we do not ‘own’ anything; rather, we act more or less as trustees for a time. When it is time for the body to go, we let it go. Until that time, we accept it for what it is, and care for it in a responsible way.

Sri Aurobindo mentions the fact that much of what we believe are necessities for the body are simply long-embedded habits. Relying on food for providing energy to the body is one such habit. It is interesting to note that in his book Autobiography of a Yogi, Parmahamsa Yogananda describes a meeting with an individual who did not eat food regularly, but had extraordinary vitality and energy, and who obviously was able to obtain energy from the universal force that is always circulating around us. Other such instances have also been reported elsewhere. Whether we are in a position to change this habit in our own lifetime, it is good to reflect on the fact that this is not a universal requirement for the manifestation, but simply a way of interaction that has acquired a substantial fixed pattern.

Sri Aurobindo observes: “We say then to the mind ‘This is a working of Prakriti, this is neither thyself nor myself; stand back from it.’ We shall find, if we try, that the mind has this power of detachment and can stand back from the body not only in idea, but in act and as it were physically or rather vitally. This detachment of the mind must be strengthened by a certain attitude of indifference to the things of the body; we must not care essentially about its sleep or its waking, its movement or its rest, its pain or its pleasure, its health or ill-health, its vigour or its fatigue, its comfort or its discomfort, or what it eats or drinks. This does not mean that we shall not keep the body in right order so far as we can; we have not to fall into violent asceticisms or a positive neglect of the physical frame. But we have not either to be affected in mind by hunger or thirst or discomfort or ill-health or attach the importance which the physical and vital man attaches to the things of the body, or indeed any but a quite subordinate and purely instrumental importance. Nor must this instrumental importance be allowed to assume the proportions of a necessity; we must not for instance imagine that the purity of the mind depends on the things we eat or drink, although during a certain stage restrictions in eating and drinking are useful to our inner progress; nor on the other hand must we continue to think that the dependence of the mind or even the life on food and drink is anything more than a habit, a customary relation which Nature has set up between these principles. As a matter of fact the food we take can be reduced by contrary habit and new relation to a minimum without the mental or vital vigour being in any way reduced; even on the contrary with a judicious development they can be trained to a greater potentiality of vigour by learning to rely on the secret fountains of mental and vital energy with which they are connected more than upon the minor aid of physical aliments. This aspect of self-discipline is however more important in the Yoga of self-perfection than here; for our present purpose the important point is the renunciation by the mind of attachment to or dependence on the things of the body.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 5, Attitudes on the Path, pp. 161-163