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Inner liberation and the change of consciousness*

“It is indeed possible even while fasting for very long periods to maintain the full energies
and activities of the soul and mind and life, even those of the body, to remain wakeful but
concentrated in Yoga all the time, or to think deeply and write day and night, to dispense with
sleep, to walk eight hours a day, maintaining all these activities separately or together and not
feel any loss of strength, any fatigue, any kind of failure or decadence. At the end of the fast
one can even resume at once taking the normal or even a greater than the normal amount of
nourishment without any transition or precaution such as medical science enjoins, as if both
the complete fasting and the feasting were natural conditions, alternating by an immediate and
easy passage from one to the other, of a body already trained by a sort of initial transformation
to be an instrument of the powers and activities of Yoga. But one thing one does not escape
and that is the wasting of the material tissues of the body, its flesh and substance. Conceivably,
if a practicable way and means could only be found, this last invincible obstacle too might be
overcome and the body maintained by an interchange of its forces with the forces of material
Nature, giving to her her need from the individual and taking from her directly the sustaining
energies of her universal existence. Conceivably, one might rediscover and re-establish at the
summit of the evolution of life the phenomenon we see at its base, the power to draw from all
around it the means of sustenance and self-renewal. Or else the evolved being might acquire the
greater power to draw down those means from above rather than draw them up or pull them in
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from the environment around, all about it and below it.”

The description Sri Aurobindo gives here of the possibility of a prolonged fast while
maintaining all activities, is a description of his own experience.

He is not speaking of a possibility but of something he has done. But it would be
a great mistake to believe that it is an experience that can be imitated in its outer
appearance; and even if one managed to do it by an effort of will, it would be perfectly
useless from the spiritual point of view, if the experience has not been preceded by a
change of consciousness which would be a preliminary liberation.

It is not by abstaining from food that you can make a spiritual progress. It is by being
free, not only from all attachment and all desire and preoccupation with food, but even
from all need for it; by being in the state in which all these things are so foreign to your
consciousness that they have no place there. Only then, as a spontaneous, natural result,
can one usefully stop eating. It could be said that the essential condition is to forget to

*Heading provided by the Editor.
1 Sri Aurobindo. Birth Centenary Library, Volume 16. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust;
1970, pp. 28-9.

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