Somebody wrote this down a very long time ago. Read it before you are told whose words they are, and read it slowly, because it is short and it is a list.
Eight things, in the order a body loses them.
सीदन्ति मम गात्राणि मुखं च परिशुष्यति।
वेपथुश्च शरीरे मे रोमहर्षश्च जायते॥
गाण्डीवं स्रंसते हस्तात्त्वक्चैव परिदह्यते।
न च शक्नोम्यवस्थातुं भ्रमतीव च मे मनः॥
sīdanti mama gātrāṇi mukhaṁ ca pariśuṣyati |
vepathuś ca śarīre me romaharṣaś ca jāyate ||
gāṇḍīvaṁ sraṁsate hastāt tvak caiva paridahyate |
na ca śaknomy avasthātuṁ bhramatīva ca me manaḥ ||
Bhagavad Gītā 1.29–30
What the verse says, said on the body
Touch a point, or wait, and it will go round on its own.
A man on his second morning without opium can read that list line by line and find nothing missing from it. The dry mouth. The shaking that starts somewhere under the ribs. The skin that will not be cooled. The thing falling out of the hand because the hand will not close. Not being able to stay on your feet. And then the last one, which is the worst and is never in the medical notes: the mind going round and round with nothing to hold.
It is the twenty-ninth and thirtieth verse of the Bhagavad Gītā, and it is the best man of his generation saying it out loud, in front of two armies, with everybody watching.
Now look at what the chapter is called. अर्जुनविषादयोग. The Yoga of Arjuna's Despondency. Not the prelude to the yoga. Not what has to be got out of the way first. Chapter one, named after the state he is in, and the word used for it is yoga.
And on this, Sri Aurobindo
Essays on the Gita will not let this be softened into a bad mood. It calls what happens to Arjuna here an inner bankruptcy that takes in the whole of him, thought and heart and desire together, so that he can find nowhere any law of action he still believes in. Everything he lived by stops working on the same morning.
And then the sentence that decides how this whole section is built:
He seizes him at a moment of his psychological development by egoistic action when all the mental, moral, emotional values of the ordinary egoistic and social life of man have collapsed in a sudden bankruptcy.Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Human Disciple
Seizes him. At that moment. Not once he is steady, not once he is worth teaching. The bottom is not the disqualification. The bottom is the appointment.
And the same essay is careful about who this man is. He is not a philosopher and not a seer. He is the man of action, and he comes to understand what he has been doing through his sensations before he understands it in any other way. The body knows first. It always did.
Which is why this site starts where it starts
Nothing on these pages asks you to think your way out of the first morning. The first thing we offer is ten minutes lying on the floor, because the body is where it is happening, and because a man in the twenty-ninth verse cannot be reached anywhere else yet.
There is a session about exactly what is going on in the body in those days, and why it is not a punishment and not a weakness, and it is written in plain words.
And one thing to carry off the page
He said it out loud. In front of everybody. That is the first thing the man in the chariot does, and nothing bad happens to him for doing it.