Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4

You told us the other day that there are spirits who remain bound to trees. How are they to get free?

WHY should they get free?

You told us how the spirits in the trees got freed when someone was kind to them and prayed on their behalf.....

Yes, but that was in the story. It was a Christian legend and put in that way to illustrate a lesson. It was to show that if you are wicked you suffer even after death, that it is a virtuous life that saves you from misery. In reality, however, there is no question here of sin and punishment, it is not that spirits get attached to trees in order to be punished. When a person dies, his vital being leaves the body and goes out; but it finds itself in unfamiliar and inhospitable surroundings, especially if there is no one, none among his friends and relatives upon earth, to help him in the proper way, to guide or protect him in the new country where there are hostile beings to harm. In such a situation a tree is often a very ready shelter, a big old tree with friendly branches spread out, possessing a strong vitality. It is the sap, the elements of water coursing in the substance of the tree, that is to say, the support of its life-power, to which the vital being of the dead man is drawn as its physical support and shelter. There is no question of forced imprisonment and a desire to be freed.

Are they not harmful, these spirits?

In what way? Usually they do not seem to be so.

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But we hear stories of people who are possessed by them and troubled and tortured.

Those are of a different kind. They are beings belonging to the vital world and are hostile forces. Here we were speaking of the remnants of the vital being of a dead man. But even in cases of possession by hostile forces of beings, the real truth is most often of another kind. Usually these beings or spirits, as they are called, are nothing more than creations of men. That is to say, it is fear that produces them; it is a mere mental formation which is taken to be a reality. And the greater the fear, the more concrete and effective the formation appears to be. I have had to deal with hundreds of such cases and I have found that there are very few which contain anything more than imagination. Some time ago, I was told of a tree nearby that was the haunt of a ghost. Our milkmen were afraid of the ghost and had seen it! I sent Amrita 1 to burn some incense there and go round the tree a few times and tell the people it was gone. Well, it was indeed gone; for it was not a very substantial being. As I said, most of the spirits are the creations of our fear.

How long do Spirits of dead people live in their trees?

That depends. There are entities that stay or live only for a short time; there are others that have a stronger formation and may stay on in their shelter for a thousand years, if the trees live up to a thousand years.

Do such spirits go out of animals also and possess trees?

Not likely. A certain growth and organisation of the vital being is necessary to be able to persist after death. The vital being of an animal is too unformed and fluid, too bound to the body to continue as an independent entity. When an animal dies its vitality almost immediately disintegrates and merges into the general forces of Nature. It is only in man where there is a mental being to organise the vitality into some sort of an individualised form that the persistence of that form is possible after the dissolution of the body.

¹ A disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

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