The Destiny of the Body

Chapter XII

Metaphysics of Life and Death

A Truth supreme has forced the world to be;

It has wrapped itself in Matter as in a shroud,

A shroud of Death, a shroud of Ignorance.

(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book X, Canto IV, p. 658)

Who thinks he sees difference, from death to death he goes.

(Katha Upanishad, II. 1.10)

When every desire that finds lodging in the heart of man

has been loosened from its moorings, then this mortal

puts on immortality.

(Ibid., II.3.14)

Forms on earth do not last ... because these forms are too

rigid to grow expressing the progress of the spirit. If they

become plastic enough to do that there is no reason

why they should not last.

(Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 1229)

We have had occasion to mention before that, viewed through the eye of the spirit, life appears to be a "universal Force working so as to create, energise, maintain and modify, even to the extent of dissolving and reconstructing, substantial forms with mutual play and interchange of an overtly or secretly conscious energy as its fundamental character."¹ But what is the basic nature of this Force whose other name is Life ? In order to unravel the mystery of life and death, we must first comprehend the sense and significance of this great Cosmic Becoming.

The self-creation, ātma-kṛti, and a progressive unfoldment of a supremely transcendent and luminous Reality "with the multitudinous relativities of this world that we see and those other worlds that we do not see as means and material, condition and field",² is the secret meaning of the universe. This transcendent

¹ The Life Divine, p. 188.

² Ibid, p. 42.

Page 396

Reality that has thus thrown itself into forms and is even secretly present behind the appearances of the universe, being indeed "the origin, the continent, the initial and the ultimate reality of all that is in the cosmos," ¹ is Sachchidananda, a triune principle of Existence-Consciousness-Bliss — an infinite and absolute Existence, an infinite and absolute Consciousness, an infinite and absolute Bliss, all rolled into one. Consciousness has a double aspect, — an aspect of absolute self-awareness, Chit, and an aspect of absolute self-force, Shakti, — by which Being possesses itself whether in its static condition or in its dynamic movement. The creative action of Sachchidananda has its nodus in a fourth divine principle, turīya dhāma, that has been given by Sri Aurobindo the suggestive name of Real-Idea or Supermind, and in which is "a divine Knowledge one with self-existence and self-awareness and a substantial Will which is in perfect unison with that knowledge." ² Thus, "Consciousness that is Force is the nature of Being and this Conscious-Being manifested as a creative Knowledge-Will is the Real-Idea or Supermind." ³ This Supermind that is the divine Gnosis has created and arranged the cosmic order, but arranged it indirectly through three other subordinate and limiting terms, Mind, Life and Matter, which form by some sort of refraction in this lower hemisphere of existence a triple aspect of the divine quaternary, and work, "so far as our universe is concerned, in subjection to the principle of Ignorance, to the superficial and apparent self-forgetfulness of the One in its play of division and multiplicity.... Mind is a subordinate power of Supermind, which takes its stand in the standpoint of division, actually forgetful here of the oneness behind though able to return to it by re-illumination from the supramental; Life is similarly a subordinate power of the energy aspect of Sachchidananda, it is Force working out form and the play of conscious energy from the standpoint of division created by Mind; Matter is the form of substance of being which the existence of Sachchidananda assumes when it subjects itself to this phenomenal action of its own consciousness and force." ⁴

Life is thus seen to be the putting forth of the Conscious-Force, Chit-Shakti of Sachchidananda, which is in its own nature "infinite,

^{1 2} Life Divine p. 262.

³ Ibid. 189.

⁴Ibid., p. 263.

Page 397

absolute, untrammelled, inalienably possessed of its own unity and bliss." ¹ But the central circumstance of the cosmic process as it is constituted now, in the involution of the triune Reality in the apparent nescience of the material universe and in its slow evolution therefrom, is the dividing and darkening faculty of mind, itself obscured by ignorance. And since our Life is subservient to "the divided mortal Mind, parent of limitation and ignorance and the dualities",² it becomes in its turn "darkened and divided and undergoes all that subjection to death, limitation, weakness, suffering, ignorant functioning of which the bound and limited creature-Mind is the parent and cause." ³

This disabling perversion whose consequence for the individual being is a 'state of mortality', mṛtyu, has its source and origin in the self-ignorance of the individual soul, because of which it suffers a "limitation and self-division from the One who is all and in all and beyond all",⁴ and has its idea of self fixed to "a single formation in Time and Space of body, life and mind,"⁵ thus excluding from its view "all that it verily is with the exception of a mass of experiences flowing out from and in upon a particular centre and limited by the capacities of a particular mental, vital and bodily frame..."⁶

Thus, through this essentially separative action of the ego-centre in the mind, the soul in its self-ignorance considers itself as a separate self-existent individuality — although in reality it is never so — and "regards all cosmic action only as it presents itself to its own individual consciousness, knowledge, will, force, enjoyment and limited being instead of seeing itself as a conscious form of the One and embracing all consciousness, all knowledge, all will, all force, all enjoyment and all being as one with its own." ⁷

However, consciousness and force being essentially one, we can expect to have some real power only over something with which we are one in our self-awareness. Hence, the separative ego, attributing to itself only a certain fragmented portion of the play of Consciousness-Force, becomes in the process the possessor only of "a certain limited capacity of force of consciousness which has to

¹ The Life Divine p. 207.

² Ibid., p. 198.

³ Ibid., p. 190.

^{4 5 6} Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, p. 101.

⁷ The Life Divine, p. 191.

Page 398

bear all the impact of what the soul does not regard as itself but as a rush of alien forces; against them it defends its separate formation of individuality from dissolution into Nature or mastery by Nature. It seeks to assert in the individual form and by its means its innate character of Ish or Lord and so to possess and enjoy its world."¹

But in the very nature of things this cannot happen, since by the very definition of the term, the ego possesses but a limited capacity. And the difficulty of the individual life arises from this original sin of the separative mind-ego. For the "universal life in us, obeying this direction of the soul imprisoned in mind, itself becomes imprisoned in an individual action. It exists and acts as a separate life with a limited insufficient capacity undergoing and not freely embracing the shock and pressure of all the cosmic life around it."² But because of the inherent limitation of individual life cabined in the confines of a rigidly static material frame, the life-being in the poor individual existence cannot but succumb sooner or later to the inexorable nemesis of disintegration and death.

We must try to be more specific and enumerate the different situations that the limited individual life has to confront and that have for their cumulative effect the inevitable decay and dissolution of this life.

¹ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, p. 102. (Italics ours)

2 The Life Divine, p. 191.

Page 399