Mysteries of Death, Fate, Karma and Rebirth

VIII

Some Knotty Problems of Rebirth

(In Questions and Answers)

The process of successive rebirths of an individual human soul in different physical bodies upon earth is not a simple affair. It is an issue bristling with many problems of understanding; man's rational mind becomes inquisitive to know more about many of the tricky factors involved in this mysterious phenomenon. We give below a representative list of questions which puzzles man's mind faced with the prospect of rebirths he may have to undergo in future. The questions have not been put here in any logical order; they have been mentioned pell-mell as they have been actually referred to the author by his students. Each question is followed by an answer or an explanation, short or long, depending on the complexity of the question but in all cases authoritatively based on the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's writings. Because of the disordered sequence of the questions, there may at times be some overlapping of the answers: readers are requested to ignore this unavoidable flaw in the style of composition. To impart a touch of authenticity, all the answers in this chapter have been given in Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's words.

(Question 1): Do animals incarnate in a human body?

(Answer 1): Not the animal soul as such, for there is a great difference in the development. But a very tiny part of the consciousness may enter a human body. This happens when the particular animal possesses a great aspiration. The Mother cites the case of a cat she knew, which had aspiration to become a human being. When it left its body, it entered a human body: this cat leaped over many births, so to say, to enter into contact with a human body. (CWM, Vol. 17, p. 100) [Adapted]

"Except for very rare cases, animals are not individualised and when

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they die they return to the spirit of the species." (CWM, Vol. 15, p. 137)

(Q. 2): When does the next rebirth occur, how much time after death?

(A. 2): "...no rule holds good for all cases. Some people are reborn almost immediately.... Some people, however, take centuries and even thousands of years to be reincarnated. They wait for the necessary conditions to mature which will provide them with a suitable milieu." (CWM, Vol. 3, p. 145)

"Every fully conscious and developed psychic being is free to choose what its next life will be and when that life will take place." (CWM, Vol. 15, p. 136)

(Q. 3): When does the soul enter the new body at rebirth?

(A. 3): "If one is yogically conscious, he can actually prepare the body of his next birth. Before the body is born, he shapes and moulds it, so that it is he who is the true maker of it while the parents of the new child are only the adventitious, purely physical agents." (CWM, Vol. 3, p. 145)

(Q. 4): Do men retain their identities after the dissolution of their bodies?

(A. 4): "Well, it depends. The ordinary mass of men are so closely identified with their bodies that nothing of them survives when the physical disintegrates.... What [little] survives has not the clear impress of the exterior personality because the latter was content to remain a jumble of impulses and desires, a temporary organic unity constituted by the cohesion and coordination of bodily functions, and when these functions cease, their pseudo-unity also naturally comes to an end." (CWM, Vol. 3, pp. 145-46)

"The outer form only dissolves; unless that too is made conscious and is organised round the divine centre. But the true mental, the true vital and even the true subtle physical persist: it is that which keeps all the impressions received in earthly life and builds

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the chain of Karma." (CWM, Vol. 15, p. 134)

(Q. 5): Does the old personality survive in rebirth?

(A. 5): "The condition of your being after death depends very much on whether the vital has been converted here or not. If you are only a medley of unorganised impulses, then at death, when the consciousness withdraws into the background, the different personalities in you fall apart, rush in hither and thither to seek their own suitable environments. One part may enter into another person who has an affinity for it, another may even enter an animal, while that which has been alive to the divine Presence, may remain attached to the central psychic being. But if you are fully organised and converted into a single individual, bent on reaching the goal of evolution, then you will be conscious after death and preserve a continuity. (CWM, Vol. 3, pp. 144-45)

(Q. 6): What happens to the mental personality in rebirth?

(A. 6): "As long as the mind is... fluid, unorganised, with no cohesive life of its own and without personality, it cannot survive. What made up the mental being dissolves in the mental region when the body, the substance which made up the body, dissolves in the physical substance.

"But as soon as the mental being is formed, organised, individualised, and has become a personality,... it no longer depends on the body for its existence, and it therefore survives the body. The earth's mental atmosphere is filled with beings, mental personalities which lead an entirely independent existence, even after the disappearance of the body; they can reincarnate in a new body when the soul, that is to say, the true Self, reincarnates, thus carrying with it the memory of its previous lives." (CWM, Vol. 10, pp. 27-28)

(Q. 7): What is reborn? Our total external personality?

(A. 7): "... there is a common misconception about rebirth.

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People believe that it is they who are reincarnated, yet this is a palpable error, though it is true that parts of their being are amalgamated with others and so act through new bodies. Their whole being is not reborn, because of the simple fact that what they evidently mean by their 'self is not a real individualised entity but their exterior personality, the personality composed of the outward name and form.... what does remain constant is the psychic being which is not the outward personality at all, but something deep within, something which is not the exterior name and form." (CWM, Vol. 3, p. 145)

(Q. 8): Is it necessary to have knowledge of past lives?

(A. 8): "If it is necessary you will know it." (CWM, Vol. 15, p. 137)

"Knowledge of past lives is interesting for an understanding of one's nature and a mastery of one's imperfections. But to tell the truth, it is not of capital importance, and it is far more important to concentrate on the future, on the consciousness to be acquired and on the development of the nature, which is almost unlimited for those who know how to do it." (CWM, Vol. 16, p. 353)

(Q. 9): When one is reborn, is it always in a more advanced and in a more favourable state?

(A. 9): "[The] idea that if the body is changed the next one will necessarily be better, is also a mistake. It is only when one has profited fully and to the utmost by the opportunity for progress which life in a physical body represents, that one may hope to be reborn in a higher organism. All defection, on the contrary, naturally brings in a diminution of being." (CWM, Vol. 16, p. 164)

(Q. 10): Does the phenomenon of rebirth really exist? Is there any reality behind the idea?

(A. 10): "Those who have had the memory of past lives have declared the reality of rebirth.

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"There have been - and there still are - beings whose inner consciousness is sufficiently developed for them to know for certain that this consciousness has manifested in bodies other than their present one and that it will survive the disappearance of this body." (CWM, Vol. 16, p. 398)

(Q. 11): In our next life do we start from where we have left in our last life?

(A. 11): "... a new birth, a new life is not a taking up of the development exactly where it stopped in the last, it does not merely repeat and continue our past surface personality and formation of nature. There is an assimilation, a discarding and strengthening and rearrangement of the old characters and motives, a new ordering of the developments of the past and a selection for the purposes of the future without which the new start cannot be fruitful or carry forward the evolution. For each birth is a new start; it develops indeed from the past, but is not its mechanical continuation: rebirth is not a constant reiteration but a progression, it is the machinery of an evolutionary process." (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Cent. Ed., p. 802)

(Q. 12): Is not the absence of any memory of our past lives a clear disproof of the phenomenon of rebirth?

(A. 12): Not at all: A very wrong and ignorant fallacy is involved in this type of conclusion.

"...if even in this life it is difficult to keep all the memories of our past, if they often fade into the background or fade out altogether, if no recollection remains of our infancy, and yet with all this hiatus of memory we can grow and be, if the mind is even capable [in some critical cases] of total loss of memory of past events and its own identity and yet it is the same being who is there and the lost memory can one day be recovered, it is evident that so radical a change as a transition to other worlds followed by new birth in a new body ought normally to obliterate altogether the surface or mental memory, and yet that would not annul the identity

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of the soul or the growth of the nature. This obliteration of the surface mental memory is all the more certain and quite inevitable if there is a new personality of the same being, and a new instrumentation which takes the place of the old, a new mind, a new life, a new body..., (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, pp. 819-20)

(Q. 13): Is not the lack of memory of the events of the past life a serious handicap to the evolutionary growth of the being? Would not the retention of memories have helped the conscious development of the individual?

(A. 13): No, not at all. On the contrary, "if a constant development of being by a developing cosmic experience is the meaning and the building of a new personality in a new birth is the method, then any persistent or complete memory of the past life or lives might be a chain and a serious obstacle: it would be a force for prolonging the old temperament, character, preoccupations and a tremendous burden hampering the free development of the new personality and its formulation of new experience. A clear and detailed memory of past lives, hatreds, rancours, attachments, connections would be equally a stupendous inconvenience; for it would bind the reborn being to a useless repetition or a compulsory continuation of his surface past and stand heavily in the way of his bringing out new possibilities from the depths of the spirit.... The law that deprives us of the memory of past lives is a law of the cosmic wisdom and serves, not disserves, its evolutionary purpose." (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, pp. 818-19)

(Q. 14): Are there really other worlds besides our physical universe?

(A. 14): Yes, there are. The physical universe is not the sole manifested world.

"It is a fact that mankind almost from the beginning of its existence... has believed in the existence of other worlds and in the possibility of communication between their powers and beings and the human race." (Ibid., p. 771)

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"... the experiences there [in the other worlds] are organised as they are in our own world, but on a different plan, with a different process and law of action and in a substance which belongs to a supraphysical Nature. This organisation includes, as on our earth, the existence of beings who have or take forms... (Ibid., p. 775)

"These worlds are not evolutionary but typal..." (Ibid., p. 784)

"[Thus,]... premier importance cannot be given to our own plane of material being..." (Ibid., p. 780)

"Their [of the other worlds] existence and influence are a fact of primary importance for the possibility of an evolution here. (Ibid., p. 785) [Adapted]

(Q. 15): Do all the souls go to the other worlds in the internatal period between death and the next rebirth ?

(A. 15): "The necessity for an interregnum between birth and birth and a passage to other worlds arises from a double cause: there is an attraction of the other planes for the mental and the vital being in man's composite nature due to their affinity with these levels, and there is the utility or even the need of an interval for assimilation of the completed life-experience, a working out of what has to be discarded, a preparation for the new embodiment and the new terrestrial experience." (The Life Divine, Cent. Ed., p. 794)

"But this need of a period of assimilation and this attraction of other worlds for kindred parts of our being may become effective only when the mental and vital individuality has been sufficiently developed in the half-animal physical man; until then they might not exist or might not be active: the life-experiences would be too simple and elementary to need assimilation and the natural being too crude to be capable of a complex assimilative process; the higher parts would not be sufficiently developed to lift themselves to higher planes of existence." (Ibid.)

In such cases there would be immediate rebirth for the individual. "For the soul personality, as it develops, must get sufficient power over its own nature-formation and a sufficient self-expressive mental and vital individuality to persist without the

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support of the material body, as well as to overcome any excessive detaining attachment to the physical plane and the physical life. (Ibid., p. 797)

If the conditions are not fulfilled, there would be immediate rebirth and no sojourn in the other worlds in the intematal period.

(Q. 16): Does the soul remember the experiences of life even after the death of the body?

(A. 16): "Recollections last only for a time, not till rebirth -otherwise the stamp would be so strong that remembrance of past births, even after taking a new body, would be the rule rather than the exception." (Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 435)

(Q. 17): Do two departed souls retain the same relationship in successive rebirths?

(A. 17): "... possible, but not a law - as a rule the same relationship would not be constantly repeated - the same people often meet again and again on earth in different lives, but the relations are different. The purpose of rebirth would not be served if the same personality with the same relations and experiences are incessantly repeated." (Ibid.)

(Q. 18): What compels the soul to take birth in a body upon earth ?

(A. 18): "[It is the] psychic being that goes to the psychic plane to rest till it is called again to another life. There is, therefore, no need of a Force to compel it to take birth anew. It [the psychic being] is in its nature something that is put forth from the Divine to support the evolution and it must do so till the Divine's purpose in its evolution is accomplished." (Ibid., p. 439)

(Q. 19): What progresses from life to life?

(A. 19): "... within the individual, contained in each form, there

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is an organisation of consciousness which is closer to and more directly under the influence of the inner divine Presence,... [and] has a life independent of the physical form - this is what we generally call the 'soul' or the 'psychic being' - and since it is organised around the divine centre it partakes of the divine nature which is immortal, eternal. The outer body falls away, and this remains throughout every experience that it has in each life, and there is a progress from life to life, and it is the progress of the same individual." (CWM, Vol. 9, pp. 214-15)

(Q. 20): Does the soul, in its next rebirth, come back to the same place, in the same circumstances, or with the same relationship?

(A. 20): "No, it is not at all certain." (CWM, Vol. 17, p. 370) "The number of beings who consciously return to a place of

their choice is very small.

Those who have returned are mainly the beings who, before leaving their body, asked to return in a new one." (Ibid., pp. 370-71)

(Q. 21): After the dropping of his physical body, does a sadhaka come to the Mother?

(A. 21): "To say that it is your body which separates you from me is sheer stupidity.... To think that if you leave your body you will come closer to me is a big mistake; for the vital being remains what it is, whether the body be alive or dead, and if the vital being is, during one's life, incapable of feeling the nearness, the deep intimacy, how can one reasonably hope it will suddenly be able to do so just because it has left the body? It is ignorant childishness." (CWM, Vol. 16, pp. 163-64)

(Q. 22): Why does not rebirth immediately follow the death of the preceding body? Why is there an internatal interregnum, short or long?

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(A. 22): In the answer to Q. 11 above, we indicated that a new birth is a new start: there is an internatal reshuffling.

"Part of this rearrangement, the discarding especially of past strong vibrations of the personality, can only be effected by an exhaustion of the push of previous mental, vital, physical motives after death, and this internal liberation or lightening of impediments must be put through on the planes proper to the motives that are to be discarded or otherwise manipulated, those planes which are themselves of that nature; for it is only there that the soul can still continue the activities which have to be exhausted and rejected from the consciousness so that it can pass on to a new formation. It is probable also that the integrating positive preparation would be carried out and the character of the new life would be decided by the soul itself in a resort to its native habitat, a plane of psychic repose, where it would draw all back into itself and await its new stage in the evolution." (The Life Divine, p. 803)

"This would mean a passage of the soul progressively through subtle-physical, vital and mental worlds to the psychic dwelling-place from which it would return to its terrestrial pilgrimage." (Ibid., pp. 802-03)

"The terrestrial gathering up and development of the materials thus prepared, their working out in the earth-life would be the consequence of this internatal resort, and the new birth would be a field of the resultant activity, a new stadium or spiral curve in the individual evolution of the embodied Spirit." (Ibid., p. 803)

(Q. 23): What is the necessity of rebirth?

(A. 23): Not of any significance in the Adwaita Vedantism "but is an indispensable machinery for the working out of the spiritual evolution..." (The Life Divine,Cent. Ed., pp. 754-55)

(i)"...rebirth is an indispensable condition for any long duration and evolution of the individual being in the earth-existence." (The Life Divine, Cent. Ed., pp. 735-36)

(ii)"...[by it alone the ascent of the] individual soul-consciousness in the body... can... take place... within the ascending order..." (Ibid., p. 758)

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(iii) Necessity for a spiritual Person to manifest its stream of changing personality in the world of birth and death. (Ibid., p. 754) [Adapted]

(Q. 24): What is the place of personality in rebirth? Does it continue to be the same in successive lives?

(A. 24): "Personality is only a temporary mental, vital, physical formation which the being, the real Person, the psychic entity, puts forward on the surface, - it is not the self in its abiding reality. In each return to earth the Person, the Purusha, makes a new formation, builds a new personal quantum suitable for a new experience, for a new growth of its being. When it passes from its body, it keeps still the same vital and mental form for a time, but the forms or sheaths dissolve and what is kept is only the essential elements of the past quantum, of which some will but some may not be used in the next incarnation." (The Life Divine, Cent. Ed., pp.816-17)

(Q. 25): Does the soul progress continually from birth to birth; or can it suffer a retrograde movement?

(A. 25): "There may be what seems to be retrograde movements but these are only like zigzag movements, not a real falling back, but a return on something not worked out so as to go on better afterwards." (Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 434)

(Q. 26): Does the soul follow the same line of sex in successive lives?

(A. 26): "Usually, a soul follows continuously the same line of sex. If there are shiftings of sex, it is, as a rule, a matter of parts of the personality which are not central." (Ibid., p. 440).

"As far as I know, the births follow usually one line or the other and do not alterrnate.... If there is a change of sex, it is only part of the being that associates itself with the change, not the central being." (Ibid., p. 447)

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"But the altervation of sex cannot be declared impossible. There may be some who do alternate." (Ibid.)

(Q. 27): Is there any sex in the psychic being?

(A. 27): "Not sex exactly, but what might be called the masculine and feminine principles." (Ibid., pp. 447-48)

(Q. 28): Can the psychic being take up more than one body at the same time?

(A. 28): "No, the psychic being cannot take up more than one body. There is only one psychic being for each human being, but the beings of the higher planes, e.g., the Gods of the overmind can manifest in more than one human body at a time by sending different emanations into different bodies." (Ibid., p. 442)

(Q. 29): When and where is determined the personality, etc. of the soul for the next birth?

(A. 29): "The psychic being at the time of death chooses what it will work out in the next birth and determines the character and the conditions of the new personality." (Ibid., p. 443)

"The psychic being's choice at the time of death does not work out the next formations of personality, it fixes it. When it enters the psychic world, it begins to assimilate the essence of its experiences and by that assimilation is formed the future psychic personality in accordance with the fixation already made." (Ibid., p. 444)

"It should be noted that the conditions of the future birth are determined fundamentally not during the stay in the psychic world but at the time of death - the psychic being then chooses what it should work out in the next terrestrial appearance and the conditions arrange themselves accordingly." (Ibid., p. 441)

"After leaving the body, the soul, after certain experiences in other worlds, throws off its mental and vital personalities and goes into rest to assimilate the essence of its past and prepare for a new life. It is this preparation that determines the circumstances of the

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new birth and guides it in its reconstitution of a new personality and the choice of its materials." (Ibid., p. 434)

(Q. 30): Earthly existence, as it is, being so imperfect and almost incorrigible in nature, is it not advisable that one should try to adopt some spiritual means to end the cycle of rebirths and escape elsewhere?

(A. 30): "One is bound to the necessity of reincarnation as much by one's affections, by one's feelings, as by one's desires. However, in the matter of reincarnation as in all things, each case has its own solution, and it is certain that a constant aspiration for liberation from rebirth, together with a sustained effort towards the elevation and sublimation of the consciousness, should have the result of severing the chain of earthly existences, although it does not for all that put an end to individual existence, which is prolonged in another world. But why think that this existence in another, more ethereal world, should be the 'following state' which, relative to man, would be what man is to the animal?... a deeper knowledge confirms this certitude that the following state too will be a physical one,... [a] physical... magnified, transfigured by the descent, the infusion of Light and Truth.... now the time has come for its concrete and tangible realisation. That is the very essence of Sri Aurobindo's teaching...." (CWM, Vol. 15, pp. 263-64)

So why should the sadhaka seek to terminate the cycle of rebirths upon earth and spiritually escape to some celestial world or even to merge himself in the repose of the Transcendent?

(Q. 31): Does the soul never come to an end of its pilgrimage? Must it always take a physical body?

(A. 31): "Not necessarily; but the soul needs to have achieved a before it has the power to choose whether to return to the physical life or to rest outside the manifestation." (CWM, Vol. 17, p. 78)

"Other seekings also there are and these too find their means of self-fulfilment; a withdrawal into the supreme peace or ecstasy, a withdrawal into the bliss of the Divine Presence are open to the

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soul in earth-existence: for the Infinite in its manifestation has many possibilities and is not confined by its formulations. But neither of these withdrawals can be the fundamental intention in the Becoming itself here; for then an evolutionary progression would not have been undertaken, - such a progression here can only have for its aim a self-fulfilment here: a progressive manifestation of this kind can only have for its soul of significance the revelation of Being in a perfect Becoming." (The Life Divine, p. 682)

(Q. 32): At which stage does the soul enter the new body when it is reborn?

(A. 32): "As regards the stage at which the soul returning for rebirth enters the new body no rule can be laid down, for the circumstances vary with the individual. Some psychic beings get into relation with the birth-environment and the parents from the time of conception and determine the preparation of the personality and future in the embryo, others join only at the time of delivery, others even later on in the life and in these cases it is some emanation of the psychic being which upholds the life." (Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, pp. 440-41)

"... the psychic being coming down into the human consciousness and body ready for it; that descent might be at the time of birth or before or it may come down later and occupy the personality it has prepared for itself." (Ibid., p. 442)

(Q. 33): Is our old personality retained at rebirth?

(A. 33): "... common popular blunder about reincarnation. The popular idea is that Titus Balbus is reborn again as John Smith, a man with the same personality, character, attainments as he had in his former life with the sole difference that he wears coat and trousers instead of a toga and speaks in cockney English instead of popular Latin!

"That is not the case. What would be the earthly use of repeating the same personality or character a million times from the beginning of time till its end? The soul comes into birth for

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experience, for growth, for evolution till it can bring the Divine into Matter. It is the central being that incarnates, not the outer personality - the personality is simply a mould that it creates for its figures of experience in that one life. In another birth it will create for itself a different personality, different capacities, a different life and career.... the central being develops a new character, a new personality, grows, develops, passes through all kinds of terrestrial experience." (Letters on Yoga, p. 451)

"It is not the personality, the character that is of the first importance in rebirth - it is the psychic being who stands behind the evolution of the nature and evolves with it." (Ibid., p. 452)

"The psychic when it departs from the body, shedding even the mental and vital on its way to its resting place, carries with it the heart of its experiences, - not the physical events, not the vital movements, not the mental buildings, not the capacities or characters, but something essential that is gathered from them, what might be called the divine element for the sake of which the rest existed. That is the permanent addition, it is that that helps in the growth towards the Divine." (Ibid.)

(Q. 34): Have we passed through many forms before being born as human beings?

(A. 34): "If we go a little way within ourselves, we shall discover that there is in each of us a consciousness that has been living throughout the ages and manifesting in a multitude of forms." (CWM, Vol. 15, p. 134)

"What we see of Nature and of human nature justifies this view of a birth of the individual soul from form to form until it reaches the human level of manifested consciousness which is its instrument for rising to yet higher levels. We see that Nature develops from stage to stage and in each stage takes up its past and transforms it into stuff of its new development. We see too that human nature is of the same make; all the earth-past is there in it. It has an element of matter taken up by life, an element of life taken up by mind, an element of mind which is being taken up by spirit: the animal is still present in its humanity; the very nature of the human

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being presupposes a material and a vital stage which prepared his emergence into mind and an animal past which moulded a first element of his complex humanity....

"We arrive then necessarily at this conclusion that human birth is a term at which the soul must arrive in a long succession of rebirths and that it has had for its previous and preparatory terms in the succession the lower forms of life upon earth; it has passed through the whole chain that life has strung in the physical universe on the basis of the body, the physical principle." (The Life Divine, p. 761)

"... certainly, this inner divine spark has passed through successive forms in order to become more and more conscious of itself... . before becoming a psychic being as it is found in the human form..." (CWM, Vol. 9, p. 215)

(Q. 35): Can the soul, having once arrived at humanity, go back to the animal life and body, which will be a retrogression?

(A. 35): "It seems impossible that it should so go back with any entirety, and for this reason that the transit from animal to human life means a decisive conversion of consciousness,... It is surely impossible that a conversion so decisive made by Nature should be reversed by the soul..." (The Life Divine, p. 762)

"It could only be possible for human souls,... in whom the conversion was not decisive... to ensure the safety of this assumption [of a human body]... at most there might be, supposing certain animal propensities to be vehement enough to demand a separate satisfaction quite of their own kind, a sort of partial rebirth, a loose holding of an animal form by a human soul, with an immediate subsequent reversion to its normal progression." (Ibid.)

"But the soul, the psychic being, once having reached the human consciousness cannot go back to the inferior animal consciousness any more than it can go back into a tree or an ephemeral insect. What is true is that some part of the vital energy or the formed instrumental consciousness or nature can and very frequently does so, if it is strongly attached to anything in the earth life.

"It is when the vital gets broken up, some strong movements

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of it, desires, greeds, may precipitate themselves into animal forms,... The animals represent the vital consciousness with mind involved in the vital, so that it is naturally there that such things would gravitate for satisfaction. (Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, pp. 445-46)

"...these formations [vital fragments of a dead person]... are things that do not leave the earth and... simply attach themselves to some human rebirth... which has some affinity and therefore does not object to or resist their inclusion." (Ibid., p. 446)

"The soul does not go back to the animal condition; but a part of the vital personality may disjoin itself and join an animal birth to work out its animal propensities there." (Ibid., p. 434)

"It is not the soul (the psychic being) that takes a lesser form, it is some part of the manifested being, usually some part of the vital that does it, owing to some desire, affinity, need of particular experience. This happens fairly often to the ordinary man." (Ibid., pp. 434-35)

(Q. 36): In the act of rebirth, what exactly is reborn: the Spirit, the psychic being or the frontal natural personality? Can this confusion be cleared?

(A. 36): "It is necessary to understand clearly the difference between the evolving soul (psychic being) and the pure Atman, self or spirit. The pure self is unborn, does not pass through death or birth, is independent of birth or body, mind or life or this manifested Nature. It is not bound by these things, not limited, not affected, even though it assumes and supports them. The soul, on the contrary, is something that comes down into birth and passes through death - although it does not itself die, for it is immortal -from one state to another, from the earth plane to other planes and back again to the earth-existence. It goes on with this progression from life to life through an evolution which leads it up to the human state and evolves through it all a being of itself which we call the psychic being that supports the evolution and develops a physical, a vital, a mental human consciousness as its instruments of world-experience and of a disguised, imperfect, but growing self-

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expression. All this it does from behind a veil..." (Letters on Yoga, p. 438)

"But a time comes when it is able to prepare to come out from behind the veil, to take command and turn all the instrumental nature towards a divine fulfilment. This is the beginning of the true spiritual life." (Ibid.)

"The soul is able now to make itself ready for a higher evolution of manifested consciousness than the mental human - it can pass from the mental to the spiritual and through degrees of the spiritual to the supramental state." (Ibid., pp. 438-39)

"Till then there is no reason why it should cease from birth, it cannot in fact do so. If having reached the spiritual state, it wishes to pass out of the terrestrial manifestation, it may indeed to do so - but there is also possible a higher manifestation, in the Knowledge and not in the Ignorance." (Ibid., p. 439)

"...the outward instrumental nature", the formed instrumental consciousness, and the outer personality have "been prepared for it and by it... for the present life." (Ibid., p. 439) Now, there are two possibilities:

"If he is originally an evolutionary being,... he must proceed by the evolutionary path to either the negative withdrawal through Nirvana or some positive divine fulfilment in the increasing manifestation of Sachchidananda." (Ibid., p. 442)

(Q. 37): Has Karma anything to do with the soul's terrestrial existence?

(A. 37): "Karma is only a machinery, it is not the fundamental cause of terrestrial existence - it cannot be, for when the soul first entered this existence, it had no Karma." (Letters on Yoga, p. 439)

(Q. 38): Sometimes people claim to have memory of their past lives. Is there any truth about such claims? Can one really remember one's past lives?

(A. 38): "...if anything is certain, it is that the ...[animal] has no contact whatever with the psychic consciousness and so transmits

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not one jot of his experiences to it. The impressions of his exterior [animal]-nature vanish with the crumbling of his animal body: to pretend to a knowledge of them is to betray the grossest ignorance of the actual facts of the problem under consideration." (CWM, Vol. 3, p. 148)

"Even with regard to human lives, it is only when the psychic has come to the fore that it carries and preserves definite memories, but certainly not of all the details of life unless it is constantly in front and one with the exterior being." (Ibid., pp. 148-49)

"For, as a rule, the physical mind and the physical vital dissolve with the death of the organism: they disintegrate and return to the universal Nature and nothing remains of their experiences." (Ibid., p. 149)

"Not until they [the physical mind and the physical vital] have become united with the psychic, so that there are not two halves but a single consciousness, the whole nature unified round the central Divine Will.... not until this happens can one receive the knowledge belonging to that consciousness and become aware of the entire series of forms and lives which were upheld by it as its own successive means of gradual self-expression." (Ibid.)

"Before this is done, it is meaningless to speak of one's past births and their various incidents." (Ibid.)

"This precious oneself is just the present impermanent exterior nature which has absolutely nothing to do with the several other formations behind which, as behind the present one, the true being stands." (Ibid.)

About remembering former lives:

"But this is a dangerous subject, because the human mind is too fond of romance. As soon as it comes to know something of this truth of rebirth, it wants to build up beautiful stories around it.... All this has nothing to do with spiritual life. The true remembrance of past births... cannot be got by that way of imaginative fancies.... here there is much chance of invention, distortion and or false building." (CWM, Vol. 3, pp. 40-41)

"To reach the truth of these things, your experiencing consciousness

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must be pure and limpid, free from any mental interference or any vital interference, liberated from your personal notions and feelings and from your mind's habit of interpreting or explaining in its own way." (Ibid., p. 41)

"... a certain state of inner organisation is necessary for this [the] psychic being to be able to have memories in the way the mental being has them..." (CWM, Vol.9 , p. 216)

"...neither the mental nor the vital being can remember past lives..." because it is not they which are bom again." (CWM, Vol. 15, p. 135)

"Only when one is consciously identified with one's divine origin, can one in truth speak of a memory of past lives. Sri Aurobindo speaks of the progressive manifestation of the Spirit in the forms in which it dwells. When one reaches the summit of this manifestation, one has a vision that plunges down upon the way traversed and one remembers." (Ibid., p. 361)

"But this memory is not a thing of the mental kind... What remains is the memory of those instants when the psychic being emerged from the depths of your being and revealed itself to you - that is to say, the memory of those instants when you were wholly conscious. That growth of consciousness is progressively effectuated in the course of evolution, and the memory of past lives is generally limited to the critical moments of evolution, to the decisive turns that marked the progress of your consciousness.... it is not the memory of your civic status that remains. On the contrary, you lose all consciousness of these petty external things, accessories and perishables, so that you may be wholly in the flare of the soul revelation or of the divine contact." (Ibid., pp. 361-62)

"And this will explain to you why the so-called memories of past animal lives are the most fantastic: the divine spark in them is buried much too deep down to be able to come up consciously to the surface and be associated with the outer life. One must become a wholly conscious being, conscious in all its parts, totally united with one's divine origin before one can truly say that one remembers his past lives." (Ibid., p. 364)

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Nature of psychic memory:

"The psychic decants - that is exactly what happens. The psychic does not retain things in their totality - it decants, it gradually decants the vibrations. The psychic memory is a decanted memory of events. For example, in past lives there have been moments when, for some reason or other, the psychic was present and participated; in that case it retains the memory of the circumstance. But the memory it retains is that of the psychic life of that moment; so even if it retains the memory of the image, it is a simplified image such as it is translated in the psychic consciousness and according to the psychic vibration of all the people present." (CWM, Vol. 16, p. 350)

"It is through contact with the psychic that one gets fragmentary memories of past lives - the memory of events in which the psychic took part. This happens spontaneously when these same elements of the psychic become active again. Any deliberate mental effort is liable to produce misleading imaginations." (CWM, Vol. 17, p. 371)

"The departed soul retains the memory of its past experiences only in their essence, not in their form of detail. It is only if the soul brings back some past personality or personalities as part of its present manifestation that it is likely to remember the details of the past life. Otherwise, it is only by Yogadrishti that the memory comes." (Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 434)

(Q. 39): What is the main purpose behind the assumption of new bodies at successive rebirths? Is it for enjoying or suffering rewards and punishments for one's past good deeds and misdeeds?

(A. 39): No, not at all. That may be the popular idea, but there is great difference between the popular conception of after-life interval and rebirth and the true truth of things.

"... both rebirth and the after-life [have] a different significance from the colour put on them by the long-current belief about reincarnation and the after-death sojourn in worlds beyond us." (The Life Divine, Cent. Ed., p. 804)

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Popular idea about reincarnation:

"Reincarnation is commonly supposed to have two aspects, metaphysical and moral, an aspect of spiritual necessity, an aspect of cosmic justice and ethical discipline. The soul... is on earth as a result of desire and ignorance; it has to remain on earth or return to it always so long as it has not wearied of desire and awakened to the fact of its ignorance and to the true knowledge.... It does not, however, remain always on earth, but alternates between earth and other worlds, celestial and infernal, where it exhausts its accumulated store of merit or demerit due to the enactment of sin or virtue and then returns to the earth and to some kind of terrestrial body.... The nature of this new incarnation and its fortunes are determined automatically by the soul's past actions, Karma..." (The Life Divine, Cent. Ed., p. 804)

"[Thus,] there is a double punishment and a double reward for sin and virtue; for the sinner is first tortured in hell and afterwards afflicted for the same sins in another life here and the righteous or the puritan is rewarded with celestial joys and afterwards again pampered for the same virtues and good deeds in a new terrestrial existence." (Ibid., p. 805)

True truth: Vision of the Integral Yoga:

"... a law or chain of Karma is only an outward machinery and cannot be elevated... as the sole and absolute determinant of the life-workings of the cosmos..." (Ibid., pp. 807-08)

"... the Spirit within is [not] an automaton in the hands of Karma, a slave in this life of its past actions... If a certain amount of results of past Karma is formulated in the present life, it must be with the consent of the psychic being which presides over the new formation of its earth-experience and assents not merely to an outward compulsory process, but to a secret Will and Guidance. That secret Will is not mechanical, but spiritual... Self-expression and experience are what the soul seeks by its birth into the body; whatever is necessary for the self-expression and experience of this life, whether it intervenes as an automatic outcome of past lives or

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as a free selection of results and a continuity or as a new development,... that will be formulated..." (Ibid., pp. 808-09)

"...Karma - cannot be accepted as the sole determinant of circumstances and the whole machinery of rebirth and of our future evolution." (Ibid., p. 809)

Real purpose of Rebirth: Not for Rewarding and Punishing:

"Cosmic existence is not a vast administrative system of universal justice with a cosmic Law of recompense and retribution as its machinery... It is [the]... [field of] a self-developing movement of consciousness, a movement therefore of Spirit working out its own being in the motion of Energy of Nature. In this motion takes place the cycle of rebirth, and in that cycle the soul, the psychic being prepares for itself, - or the Divine Wisdom or the Cosmic Consciousness-Force prepares for it and through its action, - whatever is needed for the next step in its evolution, the next formation of personality... for each new birth, for each new step of the Spirit backward or forward or else still in a circle, but always a step in the growth of the being towards its destined self-unfolding in Nature." (Ibid., pp. 815-16)

"... the idea of rebirth and the circumstances of the new life as a reward or punishment of puṇya and pāpa [sin or virtue] is a crude human idea of 'justice' which is quite unphilosophical and unspiritual and distorts the true intention of life. Life here is an evolution and the soul grows by experience, working out by it this or that in the nature, and if there is suffering, it is for the purpose of that working out, not as a judgment inflicted by God or Cosmic Law on the errors or stumblings which are inevitable in the Ignorance." (Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 441)

"If indeed rebirth were goverened by a system of rewards and punishments, if life's whole intention were to teach the embodied spirit to be good and moral,... then there is evidently a great stupidity and injustice in denying to the mind in its new incarnation all memory of its past births and actions. For it deprives the reborn being of all chance to realise why he is rewarded or punished or to get any advantage from the lesson of the profitableness of virtue

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and the unprofitableness of sin vouchsafed to him or inflicted on him." (The Life Divine Cent. Ed., p. 818)

"The object of birth being growth by experience, whatever reactions come to past deeds must be for the being to learn and grow, not as lollipops for the good boys of the class (in the past) and canings for the bad ones." (Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 445)

(Q. 40): Is the attainment of a human birth the last possible term in the progression of the soul upon earth? Does the process of terrestrial rebirth stop there? Is there any culminating point in the phenomenon of rebirth?

(A. 40): In ancient theories, even in Indian theories with their idea of Karma, "there was no suggestion of a progressive evolution from type to higher type, still less of birth into a kind of being [gnostic being,] that has never yet existed but has still to evolve in the future.

"If evolution there is, then [according to those theories,] man is the last stage, because through him there can be the rejection of terrestrial or embodied life and an escape into some heaven or Nirvana. That was the end envisaged by the ancient theories and, since this is fundamentally and unchangeably a world of Ignorance... that escape is likely to be the true end of the cycle." (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Cent. Ed., p. 833)

That is the ancient view, but our way of looking at things is different. We affirm that in the Vision of the Integral Yoga the consummation of a triple immortality is the crown of rebirth. Let us explain.

"... normally, when we insist on the soul's undying existence [the immortality of the soul], what is meant is the survival after death of a definite unchanging personality which was and will always remain the same throughout eternity. It is the very imperfect superficial 'I' of the moment, evidently regarded by Nature as a temporary form and not worth preservation....

"It is [the] secret Spirit or divinity of Self in us which is imperishable, because it is unborn and eternal.

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"The psychic entity within, its representative, the spiritual individual in us, is the Person that we are; but the 'I' of this moment, the 'I' of this life, is only a formation, a temporary personality of this inner Person... It is the inner Person that survives death, even as it pre-exists before birth; for this constant survival is a rendering of the eternity of our timeless Spirit into the terms of Time.

"What our normal demand of survival asks for is a similar survival for our mind, our life, even our body....

"This consummation of a triple immortality, - immortality of the nature completing the essential immortality of the Spirit and the psychic survival of death, - might be the crown of rebirth and a momentous indication of the conquest of the material Inconscience and Ignorance even in the very foundation of the reign of Matter." (The Life Divine, pp. 821-23)

This, the triple immortality, would be evidently an immense victory of soul and mind and life over the basic limitations of material Nature. But is the conquest of physical death at all possible ever in the future upon earth? For, as Sri Aurobindo has warned us:

"Even if Science, - physical Science or occult Science, - were to discover the necessary conditions or means for an indefinite survival of the body, still, if the body could not adapt itself so as to become a fit instrument of expression for the inner growth, the soul would find some way to abandon it and pass on to a new incarnation. The material or physical causes of death are not its sole or its true cause; its true inmost reason is the spiritual necessity for the evolution of a new being." (The Life Divine, p. 822, fn.)

In the present book we have sought to throw some light on the basic mysteries of Death, Fate, Karma and Rebirth. But the greatest mystery of all is: Why is there death at all? And, is it at all possible for man to score a victory over physical death? We should have spoken about these mysteries too. But we have refrained from doing so for a valid reason.

The author has already penned and published a book bearing

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the title The Destiny of the Body* whose entire Part Five is devoted to the discussion of the problem of "The Physical Conquest of Death". The interested readers are requested to refer to this Part of the aforesaid book. The fifteen chapters of this Part are respectively entitled:

Here ends our book on the quadruple mystery of Death, Fate, Karma and Rebirth. The author will feel immensely gratified if the detailed discussion in this book entirely based on the yogic revelations of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother bring some clarity and consolation to the mind and heart of at least a few amongst our bereaved and/or inquisitive readers.

For after all, the ultimate goal before men is:

...the sons of Death have to know themselves as the children of Immortality. (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 685)

Abolishing death and time my nature lives

In the deep heart of immortality.

(Sri Aurobindo, More Poems, p. 72)

* Jugal Kishore Mukherjee. The Destiny of the Body. (Publishers: Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry-605 002).

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