Aurobindo detach

 

This detachment of the mind must be strengthened by 

a certain attitude of indifference to the things of the 

body; we must not care essentially about its sleep or its 

waking, its movement or its rest, its pain or its pleasure, 

its health or ill-health, its vigour or its fatigue, its comfort 

or its discomfort, or what it eats or drinks. 

This does not mean that we shall not keep the body in 

right order so far as we can; we have not to fall into 

violent asceticisms or a positive neglect of the physical 

frame. But we have not either to be affected in mind by 

hunger or thirst or discomfort or ill-health or attach the 

importance which the physical and vital man attaches 

to the things of the body, or indeed any but a quite 

subordinate and purely instrumental importance. Nor 

must this instrumental importance be allowed to 

assume the proportions of a necessity; we must not for 

instance imagine that the purity of the mind depends on 

the things we eat or drink, although during a certain 

stage restrictions in eating and drinking are useful to

our inner progress; nor on the other hand must we 

continue to think that the dependence of the mind or 

even of the life on food and drink is anything more than 

a habit, a customary relation which Nature has set up 

between these principles.

As a matter of fact the food we take can be reduced 

by contrary habit and new relation to a minimum 

without the mental or vital vigour being in any way

reduced; even on the contrary with a judicious 

development they can be trained to a greater 

potentiality of vigour by learning to rely on the secret 

fountains of mental and vital energy with which they are 

connected more than upon the minor aid of physical 

aliments. This aspect of self-discipline is however more 

important in the Yoga of self-perfection than here;for 

our present purpose the important point is the 

renunciation

by the mind of attachment to or dependence on the 

things of the body