A metaphysical & scientific study of the evolutionary prospects of the human body in the light of Sri Aurobindo's vision & assurance of the body's divine destiny.
Chapter IV
MORTALITY AND IMMORTALITY:
THE REAL ISSUE
Abolishing death and time my nature lives
In the deep heart of immortality.
(Sri Aurobindo, More Poems, p. 72)
The sons of Death have to know themselves
as the children of Immortality.
(Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 685)
The Wise One is not bom, neither does he die: came not from anywhere,
neither is he any one: he is unborn, he is everlasting, he is ancient and sempiternal:
he is not slain in the slaying of the body.
(Katha Upanishad, 1.2.18*)
...Standing on Eternity's luminous brink
I have discovered that the world was He;
I have met Spirit with spirit, Self with self,
But I have loved too the body of my God.
(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book X, Canto IV, p. 649)
If manifestation is of any use, then it is worthwhile having a perfect manifestation rather than an imperfect one.
(Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga, p. 1231)
To live in the Divine and have the divine Consciousness is itself immortality and to be able to divinise the body and make it a fit instrument for divine works and divine life would be its material expression only.
(Ibid., p. 1232)
We have ventured to state that the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother has for its ultimate goal the realisation
* Sri Aurobindo's translation.
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for man of a radical victory even over the process of physical death, achieved here in the conditions of terrestrial life. But be it noted that this seeking after physical immortality is in no way related to the finite being's blind and egoistic attachment to body and bodily life, or to the limited self's fearful shrinking from the mystery of death and from the prospect of his physical dissolution.
For, with either of these dark disabilities of nature still present in the being of man, it is absolutely impossible to realize the ideal of a victory over death. In fact, even the slightest attachment on one side and a trace of fear on the other will render man an easy prey to the Adversary, In this connection we may recall the categorical statement of Sri Aurobindo:
"As for immortality, it cannot come if there is attachment to the body, for it is only by living in the immortal part of oneself which is unidentified with the body and bringing down its consciousness and force into the cells that it can come." 1
Hence is the command upon every Sadhaka of the Integral Yoga to overcome all attachment to life in the body and renounce "the repulsion to the death of the body which is so strong and vehement an instinct of the vital man.... Thrown away it must be and entirely. The fear of death and the aversion to bodily cessation are the stigma left by his animal origin on the human being. That brand must be utterly effaced." 2
And, so far as the fear of death is concerned, the Mother's injunction is equally categorical. For, as She says, "one can conquer that alone which one fears not, and he who fears death has already been conquered by Death." 3
As a matter of fact, in one of Her articles She has luminously analysed the source and nature of this general fear of death and recommended a number of methods for effectively combating and finally conquering this burdensome complex. To quote Her own words: "Generally speaking, the greatest obstacle perhaps that hinders man's progress is fear, a fear varied, numberless, self-contradictory, illogical, unreasonable and often irrational. Of all kinds of fear the most subtle and the most clinging is that of death.
1 Letters on Yoga, p. 1234.
2 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 334.
3 The Mother, "The Fear of Death and the Four Methods of Conquering It", in Bulletin of Physical Education, Vol. VI, No. 1, p. 65.
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This has roots deep in the subconscient and it is not easy to dislodge it from there. Obviously, it is made up of several intermingled elements: the spirit of conservation, the concern for self-preservation so as to ensure the continuity of consciousness, the recoil before the unknown, the unease caused by the unexpected and the incalculable and perhaps, behind all that, hidden in the depths of the cells, the instinct that death is not an inescapable thing and that, if certain conditions are fulfilled, it can be conquered; although, as a matter of fact, fear itself is one of the greatest obstacles to that conquest."1
But how are we to get rid of this fear of death? There are of course different methods that can be used. But the most potent of them all is to grow in the consciousness of the immortality of soul. In the inimitable words of the Mother:
"Beyond all the emotions, in the silent and quiet depths of our being, there is a light burning constantly, the light of the psychic consciousness. Go in search of this light, concentrate upon it; it is within you. With a persevering will you will surely find it. As soon as you enter into it, you awake to the sense of immortality. You feel you have always lived, you will live always. You become wholly independent of your body; your conscious existence does not depend upon it. The body is only one of the many transient forms through which you have manifested yourself. Death is no more extinction, it is only a transition. Fear vanishes forthwith and you march forward in life with the calm certitude of a free man."2
Indeed, as someone has so aptly pointed out, when man knows himself, and dares be himself, the fact of physical death appears but a slight episode, or perhaps a shadowy myth, along the radiant orb of immortality. Can we forget the beautiful description of this memorable experience as given by Goethe in "The Confessions of a Beautiful Soul" in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship:
"During many sleepless nights, especially, I had some feelings so remarkable that I cannot describe them clearly. It was as if my soul was thinking unaccompanied by my body. It looked upon the body as something apart from itself, much as we look on a dress ... the body will rend like a garment, but I — I am."3
1 2 The Mother, "The Fear of Death and the Four Methods of Conquering It", in Bulletin of Physical Education, Vol. VI, No. 1, p. 65.
3 See H. Carrington and J. R. Meader, Death, pp. 170-72.
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This citation from Goethe reminds us of the memorable words of Sri Krishna in the Bhagavadgita:
"Finite bodies have an end, but that which possesses and uses the body is infinite, illimitable, eternal, indestructible. It casts away old and takes up new bodies as a man changes worn-out raiment for new; and where is there in this to grieve at and recoil and shrink?"1
Incidentally we may touch upon two insistent questions that have been raised by the mind and heart of man throughout the ages and which have been sought to be variously answered on metaphysical, theological and scientific grounds:
(i)what is the meaning and content of soul immortality?
(ii)and, to be more searching, what evidence and proof is there to suppose that a soul-entity as distinct from and independent of our body and bodily organisation exists and endures?
The restless yearning of man for the continuity of his personal existence beyond the dissolution of his bodily frame, the insistent conviction of his heart that there is something in him that is eternal and immortal, — may this not be a mere psychological transcription of the material instinct of self-preservation which is common to all biological organisms ?
To answer the second point first: it should be made perfectly clear even at the very outset that this is not a question of external observation or mentally cogitated evidence at all. The awareness of soul immortality comes from a domain of knowledge beyond the ken of our mind. As a matter of fact, in the course of the heightening and deepening of our consciousness brought about by the pursuit of spiritual Sadhana, there arises spontaneously a trans-mental knowledge of our true being which is then realised as a consciousness altogether independent of the bodily vehicle, as a spiritual entity possessed of a continuous soul-life perpetually developing and determining its own becoming.
About this spiritual knowledge, not at all ideative but felt in the very depths of our true being, Sri Aurobindo says:
"The soul needs no proof of its rebirth any more than it needs proof of its immortality. For there comes a time when it is consciously immortal, aware of itself in its eternal and immutable essence. Once that realisation is accomplished, all intellectual questions for or against the immortality of the soul fall away like
1 Gita, II. 20-22. (Sri Aurobindo's translation)
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a vain clamour of ignorance around the self-evident and ever-present truth. Tato rut vicikitsate. That is the true dynamic belief in immortality when it becomes to us not an intellectual dogma but a fact as evident as the physical fact of our breathing and as little in need of proof or argument. So also there comes a time when the soul becomes aware of itself in its eternal and mutable movement; it is then aware of the ages behind that constituted the present organisation of the movement, sees how this was prepared in an uninterrupted past, remembers the bygone soul-states, environments, particular forms of activity which built up its present constituents and knows to what it is moving by development in an uninterrupted future."1
This quotation from Sri Aurobindo has already met by implication our first point. For, we see that immortality in its fundamental sense does not mean merely some kind of personal survival after the dissolution of the body. "The Self always survives the dissolution of the body, because it always pre-existed before the birth of the body. The Self is unborn and undying."2 This eternity of our self-existence, the spirit's timeless existence, constitutes our true immortality. "By immortality is meant the consciousness which is beyond birth and death, beyond the chain of cause and effect, beyond all bondage and limitation, free, blissful, self-existent in conscious-being, the consciousness of the Lord, of the supreme Purusha, of Sachchidananda."3
But as a corollary to this true immortality—our spirit's time-lessness, there exists as a natural consequence "a perpetual continuity of our temporal existence and experience"4 from life to life, from world to world after the dissolution of the physical body. "The realisation of timeless immortality comes by the knowledge of self in the Non-birth and Non-becoming and of the changeless spirit within us: the realisation of time-immortality comes by the knowledge of self in the birth and Becoming and is translated into a sense of the persistent identity of the soul through all changes of mind and life and body; this too is not mere survival, it is timelessness translated into Time manifestation."5
1 Sri Aurobindo, The Problem of Rebirth, pp. 13-14.
2 Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, p. 106.
3 Ibid., p. 107.
4 5 The Life Divine, p. 738.
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As a matter of fact, in the midst of our aspiration for physical immortality, we must never for a moment lose sight of the fact that the real and true immortality for the individual would always and fundamentally be this eternity of the spirit and the immortality of the soul; "the physical survival could only be relative, terminable at will (icchāmṛtyu), a temporal sign of the spirit's victory here over Death and Matter."1
Not only that; this too must be borne in mind that the essential prerequisite for any attempt at a physical conquest of death to be at all feasible is to fully grow in the consciousness of this spirit-eternity and the immortality of the soul. For on this twofold realisation alone can man base his free and masterful activity over his being and nature. "By the first realisation we become free from obscuring subjection to the chain of birth and death, that supreme object of so many Indian disciplines; by the second realisation added to the first we are able to possess freely, with right knowledge, without ignorance, without bondage by the chain of our actions, the experiences of the spirit in its successions of time-eternity.... In either realisation truly envisaged as side and other side of one truth, to exist consciously in eternity and not in the bondage of the hour and the succession of the moments is the substance of the change: so to exist is a first condition of the divine consciousness and the divine life. To possess and govern from that inner eternity of being the course and process of the becoming is the second, the dynamic condition with, as its practical outcome, a spiritual self-possession and self-mastery."2
Thus, after having effected a total release of the being from all sense of egoistic identification with the body and the heart and the mind, after having achieved the double realisation of timeless eternity and time-immortality, the Sadhaka of the Integral Yoga does not want to stop at that alone, nor does he contemplate a withdrawal from the field of terrestrial Becoming. Indeed, what has been termed 'the Lure of the Night and eternal Repose of Sleep', albeit spiritual, — the fana-al-fana or the 'absolute Disappearance' of some Sufis, the Nirvanic Extinction of our Buddhist India, — has been for many a seeker the motivation of his spiritual pursuit. None has expressed so forcefully the absolute repugnance to all existence as the great Buddha who, according
1 The Life Divine, p. 823.
2 Ibid., pp. 738-39.
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to tradition, felt sore at heart and went out on his Nirvanic quest when he, a young and happy prince, met for the first time with cases of destitution, decrepitude, disease and death. Buddha's contemplation led him to assert the uncompromising principle that 'to exist itself is to suffer'; not only sickness, old age and death are forms of misery, birth and being alike are in themselves wretchedness. To cease to exist, to withdraw from the field of Becoming is thus the ultimate goal of the aspirant. Did not Gautama, the Buddha or the Illumined, exclaim after his great Illumination:
"Through countless births have I wandered, seeking but not discovering the maker of this mortal dwelling-house, and still, again and again, have birth and life and pain returned. But now, at length, art thou discovered, thou builder of this house of flesh. No longer shalt thou rear a house for me. Rafters and beams are shattered, and with the extinction of tanha1 deliverance from repeated life is gained at last."2
Yes, even if we do not go so far as to assert with Buddhism that a transcendental Nirvana or Extinction should be the ultimate goal of Sadhana, the fact remains that, dissatisfied with the 'Vale of Tears' that our earth-life is, many a seeker on the path of the Spirit has endeavoured to convert the body's death into a unique event to be experienced once and for all so that the seeker may not have to repeat in future ad nauseam the sorrowful cycle of birth-death-birth-death .... The young Nachiketas' quest after the knowledge of the mystery of Death began with this observation:
"Look back and see, even as were the men of old, — look round! — even so are they that have come after. Mortal man withers like the fruits of the field and like the fruits of the field he is bom again!"3
To arrest this great cycle of repeated births and deaths, this Brahmacakra of the Swetaswatara Upanishad, has been the traditional goal of most of Indian spiritual Sadhanas. And in order to realise this goal, one has to transform the act of the body's death into a vaivasvaia mṛtyu ('the luminous death of the Wise') and for that again one has to grow into the sense of one's spirit-eternity while still in the body. For an aspirant thus made 'ripe', the advent
1 thirst.
2 Dhammapada, Chapter XI. (Translation by De La Vallee Poussain)
3Katha Upanishad, I.1.6. (Sri Aurobindo's translation)
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of physical death is indeed a welcome event, for with this terminal event the cycle of transmigration will be absolutely ended. It is for this that Sri Krishna said: "Ripe souls meet death as their most beloved guest (kṛta-krtyāḥ pratikṣante mṛtyuṁ priyam ivātithim)."
But cetainly this type of world-disgust cannot be the attitude for a Sadhaka of the Integral Yoga. For him, death has to be transcended in order that life may be divinely fulfilled. Ihaiva, 'Here itself, is his motto. Thus, with divine detachment coupled with a spiritual mastery, he seeks to come back to the task of founding the life divine in the field of ignorance and division and matter, to complete the Being's victory in the realm of Becoming. After all, this Becoming being progressive and evolutionary on the terrestrial plane, the present spectacle of earth-life afflicted with its load of suffering and death cannot in any way represent the unalterable last act of the drama. As the Mother has so beautifully put it:
"All things considered, looking at the world as it is and as it seems it must be irremediably, the human intellect decreed that this world must have been a mistake on the part of God and the manifestation or creation can be only the result of desire, desire for self-knowledge, desire for self-manifestation, desire for self-enjoyment and the only thing to be done is to put an end to this mistake as soon as possible by refusing consent to desire and its evil consequences.
"But the supreme Lord answers that the comedy has not yet been wholly played out, and He adds, 'Wait for the last act, maybe you will change your opinion." 1
The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo seeks to hasten the day of the advent of this glorious earthly manifestation that is still preparing behind the veil and the Sadhakas of this Yoga aspire after this physical conquest of death, viewing it as a sure sign of this final and total achievement. For, as the Mother declares:
"There are those who are born warriors. They cannot accept life as it is. They feel pulsating in them their right to immortality, an integral immortality and upon this earth. They possess a kind of intuitive knowledge that death is only a bad habit; they seem to be born with the resolution to conquer it." 2
In order to obviate a possible chance of misunderstanding let us
1 Bulletin of Physical Education, Vol. X. No. 3, p. 70.
2 The Mother,"The Fear of Death and the Four methods of Conquering It."
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forthwith state that the attainment of physical immortality as envisaged by the Yoga of Integral Transformation does not mean in the least that one will be tied down for ever to a particular body and willy-nilly will have to suffer an indefinite prolongation of life here upon earth. The conquest of death does not convey that implication at all. It means that "[the body] would no longer be subject to decay and disease ... it could not be subject to ordinary processes by which death comes. If a change of body had to be made, it would have to be by the will of the inhabitant. This (not an obligation to live 3000 years, for that too would be a bondage) would be the essence of physical immortality." 1
This then is the true import of the elan towards the conquest of physical immortality, because "immortality beyond the universe is not the object of manifestation in the universe, for that the Self always possessed Man exists in order that through him the Self may enjoy Immortality in the birth as well as in the non-becoming."2 And the secret sense of the cosmic Becoming is that" .. . here in the material body it [this Immortality] is to be worked out and enjoyed by the divine Inhabitant under circumstances that are in appearance the most opposite to its terms ... "3
This then is the attitude of a typical Sadhaka of the Integral Yoga towards the perfection of the body and bodily being (kāyāsiddhi), including as its last term the physical conquest over death.
1 Letters on Yoga, p. 1231.
2 Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, p. 107.
3Ibid., p. 116.
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