The Initial Liberation of the Mental Being from Servitude to the Physical Body

We can learn much from the quite commonly related phenomenon called the ‘out of body’ experience. Many people have had such an experience where they resided in their awareness outside the body, in some cases from above the body and from that vantage point could observe the body as different and separated from the awareness with which they identified. Many of these cases occur during traumatic events such as an accident or an extreme onset of an illness. The observing consciousness does not experience the trauma or pain of the body as its own; rather, it is detached and free from that identification that bears the burden of the suffering the body is undergoing during that trauma. When the awareness returns to the body, the individual is able to recount what others were doing to try to aid the body and help it survive and recover. It is clear, from such accounts, that the body is not the “I” that we otherwise are trained to associate with our individuality.

Of course, the awareness, once it exits its temporary home in the body, can travel to distant areas and view things far away. It is, however, easier for skeptics to call this a case of ‘imagination’ or ‘dream’ than those instances that involve the awareness nearby and able to relate specific circumstances under trauma scenarios.

The body acts as a vehicle and nexus for the consciousness in the exte
al world, but the consciousness is not ultimately bound to the body. This also has implications for the status of consciousness after the death of the body. Understanding that the conscious awareness can move outside the body, independent from the body, during life, it clarifies the transcendence of death by that same consciousness when the body has completed its usefulness and is being discarded.

Once we recognise this inherent separation of the consciousness from the physical form, it is a much simpler matter to realize that even when the awareness has positioned itself in the body, it still remains separate and distinct and the only thing that has changed is the experience of its current location.

What is possible under extreme and uncontrolled circumstances can be made possible through concentration and repeated conscious effort. It is thus feasible to position oneself in the mental awareness and experience the body as something separate and distinct.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “Secondly, with regard to the movements and experiences of the body, the mind will come to know the Purusha seated within it as, first, the witness or observer of the movements and, secondly, the knower or perceiver of the experiences. It will cease to consider in thought or feel in sensation these movements and experiences as its own but rather consider and feel them as not its own, as operations of Nature governed by the qualities of Nature and their interaction upon each other. This detachment can be made so normal and carried so far that there will be a kind of division between the mind and the body and the former will observe and experience the hunger, thirst, pain, fatigue, depression, etc. of the physical being as if they were experiences of some other person with whom it has so close a rapport as to be aware of all that is going on within him. This division is a great means, a great step towards mastery; for the mind comes to observe these things first without being overpowered and finally without being at all affected by them, dispassionately, with clear understanding but with perfect detachment. This is the initial liberation of the mental being from servitude to the body; for by right knowledge put steadily into practice, liberation becoes inevitably.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 5, Attitudes on the Path, pp. 163-164