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Insight

Body-Energy

Nolini Kanta Gupta

Abstract
Nolini Kanta Gupta was the foremost among Sri Aurobindo’s disciples who had been with him right
from the revolutionary days of the Indian Freedom Movement. A man of few words, he was a brilliant
and erudite scholar, a mystic poet and a yogi with seer vision. In this article, he shares some of his yogic
insights regarding the human body as seen from a consciousness and spiritual perspective. One can
clearly feel in his writings a depth and wideness not normally found in our surface look on things.

The Mother spoke once of the body being energy: it is tremendously concentrated and
like a fortress, a strong shelter protecting that is why it looks as though dead solidity.
you against enemy-attacks, the forces that are In reality its stilled high potency harbours
around roaming in the open spaces, the forces almost an immeasurable force of creation
of physical and even moral disruption. The and destruction.
ancients used to refer to the body as a walled
city the gates of which are to be carefully The release of energy, material energy, in
guarded. It is also compared to a temple, a matter, is the business of Science and the
firm structure wherein God is to dwell, which scientist; the release of consciousness, the
is to be kept always clean, trim and tidy. The energy of consciousness in matter is the
body itself was worshipped as a holy thing business of yoga and the yogi. The tantrik
almost as a Divinity by certain schools of discipline was in a large way occupied with
spiritual discipline. this mystery. It found and developed its own
method and process and its success in its own
These are, so to say various dimensions of field is also well recognised.
the body; one more, somewhat of a different
category, may be added. The body is a The body-content thus is essentially con-
battery, an accumulation of energy, of energy sciousness consolidated, crystallised. The
and consciousness, of energy-consciousness. problem then is how to release it. The first
We are all familiar with the modern concept thing is that you must be conscious, you, that
of the material particle being concentrated is to say, your body must be conscious, must

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