Salvation is physical! The Body's quest for immortality

By Nilima Bhat

As an ardent student of Integral Yoga, I have spent many years absorbing the yogic experiences described by The Mother (Mirra Alfassa) to Satprem in his book Mind of the Cells.

“There is an ascending evolution in nature which goes from the stone to the plant, from the plant to the animal, from the animal to man. Because man is, for the moment, the last rung at the summit of the ascending evolution, he considers himself as the final stage in this ascension and believes there can be nothing on earth superior to him. In that he is mistaken..

In his physical nature he is yet almost wholly an animal, a thinking and speaking animal, but still animal in his material habits and instincts. Undoubtedly, nature cannot be satisfied with such an imperfect result; she endeavours to bring out a being who will be to man what man is to the animal, a being who will remain a man in its external form, and yet whose consciousness will rise far above the mental and its slavery to ignorance.

Sri Aurobindo came upon earth to teach this truth to men. He told them that man is only a transitional being living in a mental consciousness, but with the possibility of acquiring a new consciousness, the Truth-consciousness, and capable of living a life perfectly harmonious, good and beautiful, happy and fully conscious. During the whole of his life upon earth, Sri Aurobindo gave all his time to establish in himself this consciousness he called supramental, and to help those gathered around him to realise it.”

Sri Aurobindo and The Mother’s work was aimed at manifesting this new, higher, ‘supramental’ consciousness on the planet that would evolve Humanity to the next rung, a new species. According to them, this new consciousness will eventually be housed in an immortal body.

We know that evolution on earth thus far has occurred through mutations and that many small mutations are required before a quantum jump takes place. Interestingly, most of the early mutations prove to be aberrations, almost as if Nature is experimenting and just ‘missing the mark’. For example, it is surmised that there were as many as 13 ‘failed’ mutations before the first fully functioning eye was formed.

Eventually, there appears a mutation that is not an aberration but the arrival of something completely new, which expresses a higher, more complex and evolved form of embodiment and consciousness.

Here is my outrageous hypothesis, based on the observation that cancer is also about mutating cells.

In attempting to by-pass death and ‘forgetting to die’, could this cellular mutation be an aberration in Nature’s reaching toward immortality, an experiment which is somehow ‘missing the mark’?

Perhaps the cells are attempting to rise physically into immortal bodies without first raising their consciousness? Or perhaps there are forces acting upon the cells that distort their reaching for the newer, higher consciousness that would match the immortal body?

In ‘Yoga of the cells’, Mother describes her encounters with cells in her own body. She could talk to them and she found that while at the core, they were made of the same divine substance, each cell was entrapped by what she called its ‘physical mind’ which kept repeating the old memories and programs of birth-growth-decay-death.

Her yogic effort was to release the cells into their pure potentiality by dissolving the old habit pattern of the physical mind. According to her, this physical mind of the cell is like a vestigial organ, one that we humans have carried over from our animal origins, but which we can cast off after acquiring the higher consciousness. From that point onwards, the physical mind will not serve us anymore, in fact, it will only hold us back.

Using ‘symbolic sight’, which by now you are very familiar with, I hypothesize that the cancer cell’s drive towards immortality is in itself not wrong. We may have reached a point of inflection where natural evolution itself is prodding us to do so. However, we may still be in the early days of Nature’s grand experiment and therefore experiencing these aberrations, which we call cancer. The cell may also be ‘missing the mark’ because it is seeking immortality from a lower, egoic consciousness, which by its definition cannot and will not achieve the perfection of immortality.

To summarise, what if cancer is the unconscious/egoic yoga of the cells. What if the same cells learn to become conscious and self-surrender to the Deeper Self? Can those very cells become the means by which Man’s evolution to a higher species is accelerated?

Instead of pointing to Man’s mortality, what if cancer is a sign that Mankind is en-route to immortality, achieving a Divine Life in a Divine Body, right now, right here? Cancer can then be a path from unconscious to conscious evolution.

As someone who carries cancer in your body, you may well be a laboratory for natural evolution, to work out its greatest leap yet. If so, on behalf of all human-kind, I salute you for your effort and sacrifice.

Thank you for being the first wave, the pioneers of the new, immortal Human!

Nilima invites you to use the Cellular Healing Meditation that she developed based on Mother's Yoga of the Cells - click here.

The image used in the meditation, also shown above in the article, is the 'Truth Yantra' - this is the main key to shred and dissolve the out-dated physical mind with its disease/decay/death program and overwrite it with the 'mind of the cells' that will enable the Divine Life in a Divine Body.

This article is extracted from My Cancer is Me, published with the permission of Hay House Publishers India, New Delhi.

Nilima Bhat is a facilitator of personal transformation. As the founder-director of SAMPURNAH: The Wholeness Practice, she has developed a unique holistic and integrative medicine framework for chronic lifestyle diseases as outlined in her co-authored book, My Cancer Is Me. Her work is anchored around the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo & The Mother and she has evolved a cellular healing meditation for cancer patients based on their Yoga of the Cells. Currently based in Mumbai, India, Nilima is a trained dancer, yoga and meditation teacher and a sought-after speaker on Indian wisdom, culture and wellness traditions. She is also a corporate trainer for Women in Leadership and Self-awareness for work-life balance. She is currently co-authoring a book on Shakti Leadership. To visit Nilima's website, click here. To learn more about My Cancer Is Me, click here.

References
1. Sraddhalu Ranade, Auroville, Integral Yoga and the Future of Mankind, Wisdom-Splendour, Auroville, India, 2007.
2. Satprem, The Mind of the Cells (first published 1999, Paris, France, Institut de Recherches Evolutives, Paris, France), Mysore, India, Mira Aditi, Mysore and The Mother’s Institute of Research, New Delhi, 2002.