The Destiny of the Body

Chapter IX

The Mystery of Life and Death

Birth is the first spiritual mystery of the physical universe, death is the second

which gives its double point of perplexity to the mystery of birth; for life,

which would otherwise be a self-evident fact of existence, becomes itself

a mystery by virtue of these two which seem to be its beginning and its end

and yet in a thousand ways betray themselves as neither of these

things, but rather intermediate stages in an occult processus of life.

(Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 742)

Our mortality is only justified in the light of our immortality...

(Ibid., p. 681)

Immortal life breathe in that monstrous death.

(Sri Aurobindo, Last Poems, p. 43)

Although Death walks beside us on Life's road,

A dim bystander at the body's start...

Other is the riddle of its ambiguous face:

Death is a stair, a door, a stumbling stride

The soul must take to cross from birth to birth,

A grey defeat pregnant with victory,

A whip to lash us towards our deathless state.

(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book X, Canto I, pp. 600-01)

To make a terror of death

Who smiling beckons us to farther life,

And is a bridge for the persistent breath,

[Is] born of folly...

(Sri Aurobindo, More Poems, p. 18)

We now come to the question of questions, praśnam uttamam, the ultimate problem that all embodied life has to face:

What is the raison d'être of death, this cruel and monstrous jest played with immortal life by some mysterious necessity of

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things, or by some diabolical Power, as some in their exasperation would like to declare?

Nachiketas, the young aspirant of the Kathopanishad, asked Yama for the solution to this problem of death — Yama "the knower and keeper of the cosmic Law through which the soul has to rise by death and life to the freedom of Immortality."¹ Even when asked by Yama, the Lord of Death: "Another boon choose, O Nachiketas; importune me not, nor urge me; this, this abandon,"² the seeking soul of Nachiketas stood firm and declared: "This of which they thus debate, O Death, declare to me, even that which is in the great passage; than this boon which enters in into the secret that is hidden from us, no other chooses Nachiketas."³

And Gilgamesh of the ancient Babylonian lore, who set out on the quest after the Plant of Everlasting Life but failed in his attempt, raised the same insistent cry to the departed soul of Enkidu: "Tell me, my Friend, tell me, reveal to me, the mystery of death."⁴

As the Mother has remarked: "Why is there death? This question has been put at least once in their life by all persons whose consciousness is awakened in the slightest degree. In the depth of each being there is such a need to prolong, develop, perpetuate life that contact with death produces a shock, a recoil; in some sensitive beings it produces horror, in others, indignation. One asks: 'What is this monstrous farce in which one has to take part without wishing for it or understanding it? Why to be born, if it is to die? Why all this effort for growth, for progress, for the development of faculties, if it is to arrive at an impoverishment and finally at decline and decomposition?' Some submit passively to a fate that seems inexorable, others revolt or, if they are less strong, despair."⁵

While discussing the necessity and justification and the culmination and self-fulfilment of the process of death, we must at the very outset try to get rid of a basic and besetting error of perspective

¹ Sri Aurobindo, Eight Upanishads, p. 47 fn.

² Katha Upanishad, I.1.21. (Sri Aurobindo's translation)

³ Ibid., I.1.29.

⁴ The Epic of Gilgamesh composed around the beginning of the second mil lennium B.C.

⁵ Bulletin of Physical Education, Vol. IX, No. 2, p. 81.

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that tends to vitiate a proper and unbiased evaluation of the phenomenon of death. For, if we can contemplate this sombre phenomenon, not from the limited and necessarily distorted angle of vision of the finite terror-struck ego-bound individual, but from the perspective of cosmic Becoming, we cannot fail to discover that death and dissolution is not such an unmitigated evil as it appears at first sight to be. As a matter of fact, death as death has no Separate or intrinsic reality: it is there solely to serve the purpose of life. We can even go farther and state that death is a process and phase of life itself and that the latter, and by no means death, is the fundamental all-pervading truth of existence.

But what is Life, what are its criteria? Biological sciences know no definite answer to these questions. As a matter of fact, the more profoundly men of science have sought to probe the mystery of the essence of life, the more it has eluded their grasp, so much so that life at times appears to them to be immanently present everywhere, its overt manifestation depending upon some favourable conditions which alone Science can hope to study and specify. To modern biological thought there are no universally valid criteria of life. Baffled with the task of defining what a living organism is, biology seeks at times to proceed in a roundabout way, as in the following definition offered by Prof. George E. Hutchinson:¹

"The necessary and sufficient condition for an object to be recognizable as a living organism, and so to be the subject of biological investigation, is that it be a discreet mass of matter, with a definite boundary, undergoing continual interchange of material with its surroundings without manifest alteration of properties over short periods of time and, as ascertained either by direct observations or by analogy with other objects of the same class, originating by some process of division or fractionation from one or two pre-existing objects of the same kind."

To cite a few observations reflecting the sense of biological predicament before the task of delimiting the field of Life and of Mind:

(i) "While there is little difficulty in telling whether a higher organism is alive, there is no agreement as to what characteristics would be required for the most primitive organisms in order to call them living." (Prof. Stanley L. Miller.)

¹ Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 3, p. 606.

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(ii) In recent years, the "study of viruses has become intensive, leading to a blurring of the conception of the 'vital' phenomena. It is still doubtful whether a virus can be described as living and, indeed, as to what we mean by living." (Prof. Charles Singer)

In fact, as the faint glimmerings of recent scientific research suggest and spiritual experience and vision certify, "Life reveals itself as essentially the same everywhere from the atom to man, the atom containing the subconscious stuff and movement of being which are released into consciousness in the animal, with plant life as a midway stage in the evolution. Life is really a universal operation of Conscious-Force acting subconsciously on and in Matter; it is the operation that creates, maintains, destroys and re-creates forms or bodies and attempts by play of nerve-force, that is to say, by currents of interchange of stimulating energy to awake conscious sensation in those bodies. In this operation there are three stages; the lowest is that in which the vibration is still in the sleep of Matter entirely subconscious so as to seem wholly mechanical; the middle stage is that in which it becomes capable of a response still submental but on the verge of what we know as consciousness; the highest is that in which life develops conscious mentality in the form of a mentally perceptible sensation which in this transition becomes the basis for the development of sense-mind and intelligence. It is in the middle stage that we catch the idea of life as distinguished from Matter and Mind, but in reality it is the same in all the stages."¹ Thus, "there is no break, no rigid line of demarcation between the earth and the metal formed in it or between the metal and the plant and...there is none either between the elements and atoms that constitute the earth or metal and the metal or earth that they constitute. Each step of this graded existence prepares the next, holds in itself what appears in that which follows it. Life is everywhere, secret or manifest, Organised or elemental, involved or evolved, but universal, all-pervading, imperishable; only its forms and organisings differ."²

It is this prāṇo sarvāyuṣam,³ "the omnipresent Life that has manifested and inhabits the material universe"⁴ that the Mother

¹ The Life Divine, p. 186.

² Ibid., p. 179.

³ "Prana, the life-stuff of all". (Taittiriya Upanishad, II.3)

⁴ The Life Divine, p. 187.

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has in view when she refers in one of her articles to "a few fundamental notions...needed to help us in our endeavour" to conquer the fear of death. As she says:

"The first and the most important thing is to know that life is one and immortal. Only the forms, countless in number, are transient and brittle. This knowledge one must establish securely and permanently in the mind, and as far as possible, one must identify one's consciousness with the life everlasting that is independent of any form but manifests itself in all forms. This gives the indispensable psychological basis from where to face the problem...

"Life then does not die; but the forms are dissolved, and it is this dissolution that physical consciousness fears. And yet the form changes constantly and there is nothing that debars this change from being progressive. This progressive change alone can make it possible that death would no more be inevitable."¹

But since, due to reasons that we shall presently explore, this progressive change of the body and the physical being of man, responding fully to the demands made upon it by the divine Inhabitant in His infinitely progressive self-becoming, could not be so far effectuated, death has been put forward and made to play its role as an agent of life itself to serve the ends of cosmic wisdom.

That death is no more than a temporary curtain placed against eternal life — mors janua vitae — or that death is but the obverse of the coin of Life, as hinted by the Osirian Mysteries, has been known to the mystics throughout the ages. This knowledge has been variously given literary expressions of which a few representative ones may be cited here:

(i) "Death is life." (Novalis)

(ii) "Life is death and Death is life." (Euripides)

(iii)"All Death in Nature is Birth, and in Death itself appears visibly the exaltation of Life." (Fichte)

(iv)"For birth hath in itself the germ of death, But death hath in itself the germ of birth... For they are twain yet one, and Death is Birth."

(Francis Thomson: "Ode to the Setting Sun")

(v)"Life and Death — two companions who relieve one another in the leading of the soul to its journey's end."

(Paul Richard)

¹ Bulletin of Physical Education, Vol. VI, No. 1, pp. 65-67. (Italics ours)

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(vi) "Life [is] a figure of death and Death of life."

(Sri Aurobindo, Eight Upanishads, p. 51. fn.)

So we see that the opposition that our mentality makes between life and death is no more than an error of perspective brought about by the superficial view of things deceived by the appearances. As a matter of fact, death is there simply to serve the purpose of life, and disintegration of substance no less than renewal of substance, change of form no less than maintenance of form are the constant process of life itself. Death is the vaulting-board that life has chosen in order to pass from birth to greater birth, till the hour comes when there will be

"The end of Death, the death of Ignorance."

(Savitri, Book XI, Canto I, p. 708)

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