The Will to Endure and the Body’s Ability to Withstand Hardship and Suffering

While most people are quite insulated from direct confrontation with extremes which the body is asked to endure, our modern media makes it possible to see and relate to some of these extreme situations. Far beyond the pressure of training for and running in a marathon race, there are circumstances, some of them voluntary, many of them involuntary, which expose us to the powers of the body to withstand what can only be called extreme suffering with a will to live and endure that beggars the imagination. We see both the capacity of the physical body under severe pressures, as well as its enormous pliancy and goodwill to provide a solid base for the ‘will to live’ which inhabits every being.

When the concentration camps were opened up after the end of World War II, we witnessed many thousands of individuals emaciated to the point of starvation. When villages in Vietnam were bombed with napalm during the Vietnam war, we were able to view the extreme pain and suffering of people who had lived through that horrible experience of having their skin burned alive. We have heard the stories of survivors of the atomic blasts that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. When we observe the mass migrations, the droughts, the starvation and the ravages of disease and warfare in other parts of the world, we see that millions of people are subjected to extremes that cause excruciating pain and yet, they somehow survive and try to go on with their lives.

On a day to day level, we have been advised that the pain experienced by women in childbirth can be far higher than any other pain that we normally experience. This is part of our normal human life on a regular basis and for those who have not undergone this experience in all its intensity, it is truly impossible to imagine.

We may reflect on the body’s endurance to pain and suffering and ask how it is that it is able to take this on, survive and continue to desire to live and breathe!

The Taittiriya Upanishad provides us an enigmatic answer: “for who could labour to draw in the breath or who could have strength to breathe it out, if there were not that Bliss in the heaven of his heart, the ether within his being?”

It may not appear that there is any sense of that bliss about which the Upanishad speaks in any of the experiences related above. But somehow, deep within each being there is that secret space where bliss dwells, covered over by pain, covered over by suffering, covered over by all the stress of living, but nevertheless there, waiting to come forward and transform the life. The surface being may not consciously recognise or appreciate this hidden source of the will to live, but nevertheless, it endures. This is what keeps people alive and hoping to survive under extreme circumstances and in intense pain.

The Mother writes in ‘The Science of Living’ in On Education: “The body has a remarkable capacity of adaptation and endurance. It is fit to do so many more things than one can usually imagine. If instead of the ignorant and despotic masters that govern it, it is ruled by the central truth of the being, one will be surprised at what it is capable of doing.”

The Mother clarifies further: “During the last war, it was proved that the body was capable of enduring such suffering as is normally impossible to endure. You have surely read or heard these stories of war in which the body was made to suffer and endure terrible things, and it withstood all that, it proved that it had almost inexhaustible capacities of endurance. Some people happened to be under conditions that should have killed them; if they survived, it was because they had in them a very strong will to survive and the body obeyed that will.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter VII Attitude, pg. 68