THE Mother has many interesting and unconventional things to say about rebirth. She dispels the obscurity which surrounds this important subject, exposes the fraud or self-deception of those who retail entertaining stories of past lives, and gives a clear account of what happens to the soul after it has departed this life—through what worlds it passes, how it assimilates its past experiences and what is the process of its reincarnation. The careful reader will find the cloud of his misconceptions on this subject melting away under the glare of her categoric utterances; for her words spring from her own experiences and not from her speculative thought. As the problem of rebirth is of universal interest, the Mother's visions and experiences will be found to be very illuminating.
The original and ultimate rationale of reincarnation, according to the Mother, is not that the soul is entangled in the meshes of karma and has, in consequence, to pass through a series of births till it is liberated. Maya or karma or samskaras may be the apparent and ancillary cause of the soul's rebirth, but the real reason, the compelling cause and drive is the irrepressible urge in the soul for evolution. Originally a spark of the sempiternal Fire, the soul develops here in Matter into an individual being through the chequered process of rebirth, even as a new-born child grows into a man, .or a seed grows into a tree. The cycle of births and deaths is, therefore, an indispensable means of evolution, freely and voluntarily adopted by it. The pain and suffering incidental to this cycle is the inevitable price it has to pay for dispelling the darkness of inconscience and snapping the bonds of ignorance in which it is held. Pain is, indeed, nothing but a natural reaction of ignorance, of the little ego- bound personality of man, to those impacts of life which it fails to bear and assimilate. Suffering breaks asunder the moulds of thought and feeling, the hard shells of habits in which our being is so complacently imprisoned. It widens our consciousness and calls forth our latent strength. But if we go behind pain
Page 93
and suffering, behind the confederacy of untoward impacts and circumstances, we shall discover the organising and directing will of the soul, its will to grow, to develop by experience, to harmonise and unify the discordant elements of its instrumental nature, so that it can use it freely and masterfully for the work of the Divine in the material world. The developed soul does not hesitate to choose a life of pain and suffering, if it thinks that in that way it can accelerate its evolution.
Viewed in this light, birth ceases to be a mournful and meaningless episode, and death loses all its paralysing horror. Every incident of life, every pang of birth and death, all that we call chance (because we cannot probe beyond appearance and fate), everything is accepted by the soul, everything is grist to its evolutionary mill. It profits by every event in the long chain of its rebirths, whether the event is happy or unhappy, fortunate or unfortunate, according to the superficial standards of human ignorance. And since progress is possible only on earth, as all schools of Indian philosophy unanimously hold, birth and a long life of dedicated action are always welcome, for they are always conducive to the soul's evolution and a means of its self- expression...kurvanneveha karmāṇi jijīviṣet śatam samāh. Birth should not be accepted on sufferance, as a means of exhausting the prāravdha, but as a field, and the only field, of evolutionary progress, as an opportunity for the soul's awakening and ascent to the higher levels of consciousness, and, when the ascent is achieved, for the manifestation of the Divine on earth through its liberated and transformed nature.
"Rebirth is a necessity, it is compulsory; for it is through reincarnation...taking up a new body...that he (the psychic being) progresses, develops and grows. It is in the physical life and in the physical body that the soul slowly builds itself until it becomes a fully conscious being.”¹
¹ The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Part VII by Nolini Kanta Gupta.
Page 94
After-death Journey and the Process of Rebirth
As I have already said, the Mother does not subscribe to the current notions about rebirth. According to her, it is not a fact, except only in some cases, that a soul takes birth immediately after leaving its old body. If it did so, its next incarnation would perforce be a mere duplication or repetition of its previous personality. This popular notion does not square with the fact of the soul's post-mortem journeying in the different worlds described in the religious books of India. What actually happens is that after death the soul continues to live in the subtle-physical body for some time—the time varies in each case—till the latter is dissolved. The soul then continues to live in the vital sheath, prāṇamaya koṣa, having experiences in the vital world. The vital sheath, then, dissolves in its turn, and the soul lives on in the mental sheath, manomaya koṣa, till that too is dissolved. When all the three sheaths are dissolved, the soul goes to its own plane, the psychic plane, for rest, for assimilation of its past experiences—the quintessence of which it carries with it—and for preparation for the next incarnation. "In the psychic world there is a kind of blissful repose." This is the normal process, but there are certain exceptional cases in which birth may follow immediately after death; but such cases are, as I have already said, rare. For instance, if a person is inordinately attached to somebody or something on earth, he will be irresistibly pulled by his attachment to return to the earth almost immediately after his death, or, if a soul has just emerged from animal life and assumed the human form for the first time, it may not feel at home in the new environment and atmosphere, and has to depart only to return again and again till it gets acclimatised and accustomed to the ways of human life. There are other cases also, but it would be going beyond our present scope to deal with them here.
It would be interesting to note in this connection that the Mother totally discounts the traditional belief that the human soul has to be born as a animal or a tree, if its karma in human life has been very dark and gross. In her view, if a soul, in
Page 95
course of its evolution, has once reached the level of human consciousness and lived a human life, it can never sink back to the obscure levels of animal or vegetable consciousness, whatever may be the nature of its karma. This kind of total devolution is not observed in the normal working of Nature. What actually happens sometimes is that, if a man is very vicious or extremely avid of the gross pleasures of the lower prana, a part of his pranic being or the lower vital may project itself into the animal birth for the desired enjoyment. It may enter the body of a pig or a dog or any other animal. But his soul or central being can never take an animal body. Such projection of a part being into non-human birth can be but a temporary episode in the life of the man for the exhaustion of his abnormal animal appetites.
Another thing that happens sometimes is that a certain formation, mental, vital or subtle-physical, of a dead man may remain in the earth atmosphere and enter into a suitable living person for its own satisfaction. "... When I speak of a formation entering into a living person, the formation does not mean the man himself who is dead, that is to say, his soul or psychic being. I say that it is only a special/acuity which continues to remain in the earth atmosphere even after the death of the man to whom the faculty belonged: it was so well developed, well formed that it continues to retain its independent identity.”¹ The Mother gives an example of the above phenomenon : "I shall tell you the very interesting case of a musician, a pianist, a pianist of a very high order; he had hands that had become something marvellous, full of skill, accuracy, precision, force, swiftness; it was truly remark- able. The man dies comparatively young, and with the feeling that had he lived he would have continued to advance in his musical self-expression. Such was the intensity of his aspiration that his subtle hands retained their form without getting dissolved, and wherever there was someone passive and receptive and at the same time a good musician, the hands of the dead man would enter into the living hands that played. In the case that I saw the man used to play well enough normally, but quite in the ordinary way;
¹ The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Part VII, by Nolini Kanta Gupta.
Page 96
he became, however, as he continued to play, all on a sudden not only a virtuoso, but a marvellous artist; it was the hands of the other person which made use of him.”¹
To take up our thread. When the time is ripe for another incarnation, the psychic comes out of the psychic plane and begins again the downward journey. The Mother gives a very interesting description of how the soul chooses in advance the form it will take, the place where it will be born, and the line of progress it will follow. "As I have told you...there are psychic beings that are just on the way of formation and growth, they usually cannot choose at the beginning, they cannot choose very much. But when they have come to a certain degree of development and consciousness, they make a choice; generally when they are still in the body, when they have gathered a certain amount of experience, they decide what is to be their next field of experience. I shall give you an illustration, although somewhat external. A psychic being, for example, needed the experience of power, authority, command, and wanted to know the reactions of these movements and also how to turn them towards the Divine, to learn, in a word, what these things can teach. So the soul took the body of a king (or a queen). When it had the necessary experience, learnt what it had to learn, it gave up the body, no longer useful. It is at that moment when it decides to leave the body but is still in the body that the soul makes the choice of the next experience. The choice very often takes a course of action and reaction. If the soul has experienced and studied a particular field, its choice falls upon a contrary field on the following occasion. Thus if the soul has had the experience of a kingly position and worked through that to enter into a conscious relation with the Divine, then at the moment of leaving the body that served with power and authority and command, it perhaps would say : 'This time I shall take a middle position, neither high nor low, where there will be no need to lead mostly an external life, where one is neither in great luxury nor in great misery.’ With that resolution it returns to the psychic World for the necessary rest, for the assimilation of past experiences and preparation/or the future. When the time comes for
¹ The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Part VII, by Nolini Kanta Gupta,
Page 97
return upon earth, for the descent into a physical body, it remembers naturally the choice it made.. ,”¹ From above it surveys the earth atmosphere and can discern things, not, indeed, in their detail, but in their general contours. But the degree of the discernment depends upon its development. A developed psychic can even choose a particular country and a particular milieu in which it intends to be born. It has in view the kind of life it will lead here on earth, the culture in which it will be brought up, and the education it will avail itself of. As it descends more and more and comes closer to the earth, its perception becomes clearer, and it advances towards the region which appears to it likely to answer to its evolutionary purpose. Here a new factor intervenes. The choice of the psychic is not enough, there must be an aspiration and a receptivity in the atmosphere of its choice. It is said of Sri Ramakrishna's mother that she had an aspiration for having a godlike being as her child. This aspiration from below is a sort of invocation or call, the peculiar vibration of which is easily felt by the developed psychic. It perceives a pin-point of light there, and precipitates headlong into that atmosphere. But this headlong plunge lands it directly into the darkness and inconscience of the material world, and for a more or less long time, even after its birth, it remains, as it were, dazed, lost to itself and lost to its preconceived purpose in life. "Generally it takes time for the soul to come to its own. It wakes up but slowly from its numbness, it is only gradually that it begins to understand that it is there for some reason and by choice. This oblivion is occasioned by the presence of the mind and mental education which completely shuts off the psychic consciousness. All kinds of circumstances, happenings, experiences—external and emotional—are then needed to strike open the doors within, to bring the memory that one comes from elsewhere and for a very special reason.”² In this way all knowledge comes to the psychic as memory, as reminiscence, to use Plato's expression; for all knowledge is already in the psychic; what is needed is the shocks and impacts of the world to break open the seals and let the latent consciousness, the veiled knowledge, shine out in their
¹ & ² The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Part VII, by Nolini Kanta Gupta.
Page 98
unbarred wideness. If we look at rebirth from this standpoint, we can easily understand why the psychic sometimes chooses difficulties, struggles and hardships as a very drastic means to the evolution of its consciousness and the purification of its instrumental nature. "Many people come to me and complain: 'What have I done in my past life that I have to be under such difficult conditions now, to suffer so much /' I always reply : 'But don't you see it is a blessing for you, the divine grace upon you ? In your past life perhaps you yourself asked for such conditions so that you may make greater progress through them.”¹
Our ordinary, ignorant notions of good fortune and ill fortune, of justice and reward and punishment have only an ethical value, not spiritual. What we regard as the good fortune of a man—good looks, wealth, fame, etc.—may be the cause of his downfall and degradation, while adversity, obstacles, hard- ships, poverty, etc. may and do sometimes act as the most powerful lever of the soul's ascent. The soul knows infinitely better than our cocksure mind what is good for its evolution and growth. It uses rebirth as the only means of the evolution of its consciousness, and the evolution of consciousness is the primary end of human life. The other things must be considered as secondary or subservient to it, and as instruments of its self-expression.
For the evolution of its consciousness and the development of its being with all its faculties, the soul freely chooses the most congenial atmosphere and situation in its earthly life. It changes its role, its line of self-development, the pattern of its life and action from birth to birth. "Suppose the psychic being has had the experience of the life of a writer. The function of the writer is to express himself, his perceptions and observations and judgements in words : he has a certain field, a certain range of associations and circumstances in which to live and move. But there are other fields and ranges beyond and outside of which he has no experience. So he may say to himself : 'I have lived with my head, I know something of the intellectual reactions to life; now let me live with my heart and experience the reactions of feeling and
Page 99
passion'....So the psychic being, in order to have this new kind of experience, abandons his intellectual heights, so to say, and comes down to the vital plane. He is no longer a creative genius, but an ordinary man but with a heart enriched or enriching itself with its intense or generous movements. ...It is not rare to see psychic beings that have reached the maximum of their growth in certain directions, take up a very modest and ordinary life in some other new direction or for some other purpose....Can you say it is a decline and a fall ? It is only facing life, meeting its problems from another angle, another point of view.”¹ The psychic makes no distinction between glory and obscurity, success and failure, as we understand them. What it is most concerned with is the growth of its consciousness, the development of its possibilities, the variety and richness of its experiences, and the flowering of its innate swabhava and swadharma in its outer nature and life. The total urge in it is not for self-extinction, but for self-fulfilment.
Groups of Souls
The souls are not, as is maintained by Sankhya and Jainism, and, more or less, by the concensus of philosophical opinion in India, absolutely separate entities, like Leibnitz's monads, coming down to earth and departing in perfect isolation, having nothing to do with one another. According to the Mother, there are groups or families of souls, bound together by an inner. affinity, that come down more or less at the same time or epoch for a particular type of work in their earthly life. They follow each a certain basic line of development and are intimately connected with certain aspects and phases of the evolution of the earth-consciousness. Each soul, being a spark or ray of the divine Consciousness, plays its individual part, as a constituent of its group, in the work of the illumination of the material inconscience. The coming together of many kindred souls under the prophet's banner, or round the revolutionary presence of the Avatara or Vibhuti testifies to the fact of the existence
Page 100
of groups or families of souls. One such group, it is said, gathered round the personality of Sri Chaitanya, and another round Sri Ramakrishna, who had seen it in vision before it came to him physically. Sri Ramakrishna would often say in regard to a sadhaka or yogi that he belonged to this house or that, meaning, evidently, this line or that of the manifesting divine Consciousness. All this proves that there is a universal Will and a universal plan behind the apparent phenomenon of the soul's coming and going, a community and solidarity of purpose, and a complex interplay of evolutionary interests, which are ignored by the simplist theory of the individual soul's transmigration in perfect insularity. The theory of karma, as it is expounded from different standpoints, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jaina, errs on the side of oversimplification, and bypasses the important truth that karma is not only individual, but collective; that there is a constant intermingling of all karmas, and that no individual karma can pursue its solitary course completely uninvaded and unaffected by the environmental and collective karma.
A new, revealing light is thrown upon the problem of rebirth and the grouping of souls by the following words of the Mother :
"To understand rightly the problem of what is called reincarnation, you must perceive that there are two factors in it which require consideration. First, there is the line of divine consciousness which seeks to manifest from above and upholds a certain series of formations, peculiar to itself, in the universe which is its field of manifestation. Secondly, there is the psychic consciousness which climbs up from below, the seed of the Divine developing through tine till h meets the Force from above and takes the impress of the supramental Truth. ”¹
We have already seen how the psychic, a tiny, pulsing spark, develops through many births into a full-fledged psychic being in man. When it is fully formed, it often feels an aspiration for a
¹ Words of the Mother, 3rd Series,
Page 101
greater realisation, a higher ascent, in order to manifest the Divine more perfectly on earth. "As a result of this pullet generally draws towards itself a being of a higher order, from a higher plane, from the Overmind, as Sri Aurobindo calls it, a being of involution who incarnates in the psychic being. These overmental entities are termed gods or divinities by men. Now when the fusion takes place of a god into a psychic being, the latter naturally increases in stature and partakes of the nature of the god and acquires also the capacity to produce emanations; that is to say, it throws out of itself a pan which possesses an independent existence and can incarnate in others. In this way there may be not only two but several emanations or projections of the same original being. In other words, there may be a single psycho-divine origin but many personalities coming out of it.... If you emanate a being out of you, you remain whole and entire without losing anything of yourself and the emanation too is a being whole and entire living its independent life.”¹
The subject is somewhat difficult, because occult to our ordinary ideas, and rather unfamiliar. But the fact of the higher gods or a ray of the divine Consciousness entering into exceptional men and investing them with a superhuman greatness, majesty or valour, is not quite unknown to readers of the ancient myths. But what is original and very illuminating from the standpoint of the soul's evolutionary purpose is the Mother's Statement that there are different lines of divine Consciousness seeking to manifest from above and upholding various series of formations here below for their diverse self-expression. The statement establishes the teleological significance of the soul's evolution. It makes it clear that the end of the soul's evolution is not flight from the material world, or nirvana, but letting the divine Consciousness descend into and flow out of its liberated and perfected individuality and manifest its infinite glory upon earth. The soul's aspiration from below and the divine Grace from above combine to fulfil what the soul seeks through many births and the earth is made for.
Page 102
Memory of Past Lives
Considerable romance and an extravagant play of fancy and imagination have entered into the fascinating subject of the memory of past lives. It is not unoften that we hear fantastic stories about one's recovering a knowledge of one's past life or lives. It is sometimes reported that somebody has recounted in staggering detail the incidents and scenes of his previous birth, and described the persons and places he was then familiar with. Such reports have to be taken with a grain of salt. "What commonly goes by the name of such recollection is, mostly, either deliberate imposture or a fabrication out of a few spasmodic hints received from within." The fact of the matter is that it is only the psychic, when it has evolved sufficiently to come to the front of the nature, that holds and carries clear memories of its past births. Till the psychic is fully awake and in control of its terrestrial nature, the human being is an ephemeral individual made up of diverse, heterogeneous elements, a composite flux with only the semblance of a constant personality. Death breaks up all this shifting formation. With the dissolution of the different parts, the memory is also dissolved. The psychic then goes to the psychic plane, carrying with it the essence of its experiences. When it returns to human birth again, it puts on a new mind, a new vital or prana, and a new body in accordance with its past experiences and the fresh line of evolution it is going to pursue. Where then does the memory of past lives reside ? For, nothing, except the psychic, survives the dissolution of the constructed personality. If the psychic is not much developed and the life and mind it assumes are not purified and organised enough to receive its direct influence and communication, there is no possibility of the external personality knowing anything of the soul's past births. It is only when the nature parts are organised round the psychic and open to its communications, that the external personality can have a flash of some of the incidents of the previous birth. And it is usually the Foments of the psychic awakening or the psychic touch that are preserved in the memory rather than the outer details of life.
Page 103
"At a given point in our life, there comes a special circumstance, there is a call within, an absolute inner necessity that brings forward the psychic and a contact is made perhaps for an instant. That experience is preserved in the psychic memory. More than the outer circumstances and the physical events, however, what is cherished in the consciousness is the intimate emotion, the vibration that accompanied the perception at the time....These psychic flashes, more in some cases, less in others, are the only genuine and authentic records of the story of a person's lives.”¹
"It is a being who is completely identified with his psychic, who has organised his whole person, in all its parts, around this centre; in fact, a being of one piece, entirely and solely turned to the Divine that can alone remember or hold in his consciousness something like a totality of his personal history. For in his case even when the body drops, the other parts being integrated and taken up into the soul substance maintain their individual existence; the personality formed around the psychic continues with its memory intact; even it can pass from one life to another without losing its consciousness. ”²
The psychic memory has an extraordinary intensity. It retains with a wonderful clarity the most precious moments of its life, moments of the widening and illumination of its consciousness, moments when it experienced its freedom and bliss, or felt the rapture of the Divine's embrace. Till the psychic has organised and integrated our being, the perishable parts of our nature are all dissolved after our death, and the memories and impressions stored in the physical brain or floating amorphous in the subconscient, are also dissolved.
The problem of karma and rebirth is a knotty problem comprising countless possibilities of variation and departure, and the supraphysical worlds teem with mysteries and marvels for our human mind. It is only a developed occult vision and a penetrating spiritual perception that can command a clear and comprehensive view of those worlds and the elements and energies,
² The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, by Nolini Kanta Gupta,
Page 104
beings and forces abounding in them. And it is only the souls shepherded by divine Grace that can pass through them unscarred and safe.
Page 105
Home
Disciples
Rishabhchand
Books
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.