Integral Yoga and Evolutionary Mutation - Its Aid to Humanity and Human Species - The Problem of Death and Physical Immortality

PART FOUR

The Problem of Death and Physical Immortality

In the beginning of 1970, the Mother spoke of the replacement of knowledge-processes in her body by a new perception which was total, something that comprehended at the same time hearing, vision and knowledge. There was, she said, no differentiation among her organs. She pointed out that the new consciousness insisted on surpassing all divisions and all exclusiveness, including the great division of life and death. The Mother discovered 'over-life', which is at once life and death or which is rather something that cannot be described either as life or as death, but some other third state in which the contradiction of life and death is overcome. The question of death had begun to receive the Mother's attention more and more pointedly during the last several years. In fact, as the Mother had said, the problem of death was the problem that was given to her to solve.

The question of death and immortality has been explored right from the Vedic times, and the aim of the attainment of immortality has been envisaged right from the Vedic times. According to one view, the human body is by its very nature mortal, and it is destined to get dissolved sooner or later, even though there are a number of examples where individuals have been able to prolong their lives beyond hundred years. According to another view, while death is inevitable, the timing of death could be controlled. According to still another view, the mortality of the body does not affect the immortality

of the soul. Even when, in certain philosophies, the existence of the soul is denied, there is an affirmation of the immortal Eternal Spirit or Self, and the experience of that Self or Spirit is regarded as the experience of immortality and even of attainment of immortality. There is also a view that immortality need hot be pursued as an ideal, since the body gets worn out in due course of development and becomes afflicted with increasing disease and incapacity and, therefore, it is best to discard the body and to welcome the mortality of the body. It is true, it is acknowledged, that there is a great urge in most of the human beings to survive in the body as long as possible, and there has been also search for elixir, the administration of which would lead to continuous youthfulness of the body and immortality of the body. In the context of these conflicting views about mortality and immortality, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have confronted the issue centrally and come to the conclusion that the necessity of the death of the body implies deficiency in the manifestation of the spirit in the body and that the full manifestation of spirit in the body would imply optimality of the Will of the spirit to continue in the same body or to leave the body, ichachā mrtyu.50 In either case, the necessity of the death would have been overcome.

Ultimate Reality and Phenomena of Death, Desire and Incapacity⁵¹

According to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the highest concept and experience of yoga has been that of the Ultimate
Reality, which has come to be conveyed through the word 'Sachchidananda', the inexpressible complex oneness of Existence, Consciousness and Bliss. Although ineffable, this ultimate reality can still be intellectually grasped through

these three concepts and through two other concepts, namely, infinity and eternity as inevitably fundamental to the concept of Sachchidananda. It is seen that throughout the history of philosophy, Indian and Western, infinity and eternity, — these two concepts — have proved to be rationally inescapable, even though their intelligibility has often come to be questioned. Nonetheless, even when these two concepts have been declared to be intellectual fictions, they have still been found to be inescapable. The infinite existence and the eternal existence, even if intellectually declared to be incomprehensible, seem to impose upon ourselves as soon as we look at the universe and try to comprehend it. In yoga, however, the ultimate reality, at its highest, has come to be experienced and realized as infinite and eternal, both as the highest possibilities of extensions of consciousness and that which lies beyond all extensions. Even if, on a certain line of yogic experience, there is a farther attempt at transcendence, and even if, what is attained in the state of utter transcendence is described intellectually as Non-Being, the one inescapable truth of that experience is its permanence, and it can still be regarded as infinite and eternal and therefore immortal. Beyond all descriptions, That, which can be described as the utter Being or as Non being or both, being and a non-being and even beyond both being and non-being, has been affirmed by the Vedic and Upanishadic experience as imperishable and that, which having been attained, nothing further remains to be attained : that is the realization of immortality.

Sri Aurobindo has pointed out that That, which is described as ineffable Sachchidananda is the content of the loftiest experience of the reality, unsurpassed in the history of yoga and even unsurpassable, since That is the ultimate.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother confirmed that the attainment of That is the experience of immortality, and whatever other
meanings that may come to be attached to the word immortality must have their foundation in the experience of That unsurpassed and unsurpassable eternal and infinite X. The enigma for yoga, as also for any philosophical or intellectual enquiry, is the constant experience of impermanence and of constant formation and dissolution of forms, of birth and death.

The enigma is felt most acutely when an effort is made to arrive at the reconciliation between immortality and mortality. It was this enigma that the Vedic and the Upanishadic Rishis attempted to resolve, and the answer they came to propose is that although the ultimate Reality is eternal and infinite, the existence of that eternity and infinity is conscious and the consciousness of infinity and eternity has the power of eternal stability and constant mutability in terms of its formations. The eternal stability was experienced as the fullness of potency and therefore not incapable of formulating the endless forms of eternal infinite existence. And they further verified in their yogic experiences that the human being, too, in his consciousness can arrive at eternal stability as also its full potency capable of constant manifestation of endless forms. This Realization, on the part of the human being, arrived at by the pursuit of the methods of the fullest possible extension of his consciousness, can properly be called for the human being the experience of immortality. At the same time, they also pointed out that although that experience of immortality is always possible, the human being is at present found to be in his psychological state confined to relative finitude, which has taken the form of what can be described as the ego. How the consciousness of the human being has come to become

finite and limited in the egoistic consciousness was for these seers a matter for experiential and experimental exploration of consciousness. Consciousness was for them a central object of yogic enquiry, and it was through that enquiry that they sought to answer the enigma of the experiences of immortality and mortality or death.

In fact, death, they found, is intimately connected with the phenomena of desire and incapacity. These phenomena, death, desire and incapacity, are directly linked with the finiteness of human consciousness. The mark of finiteness, they discovered, was the rigid confinement to the apprehension of multiplicity of formations accompanied by the absence of the comprehension of the unity and transcendence of infinity and eternity. That confinement to the exclusive apprehension of multiplicity was termed by the Vedic Rishis as aciti and by the Upanishadic Rishis as avidyā. According to them, confinement to aciti or avidyā was the cause of desire or hunger, and they equated hunger with Death (aśanāyā mrtyuh).

The individual, on account of limitation of his consciousness within the boundaries of his finitude or ignorance, does not know how to receive the infinitude of the ocean of life that is all around himself. On account of the ignorance, the individual finds himself incapable of receiving in his field the flow of the infinity. This incapacity is sought to be overcome by the finite consciousness, even when the individual does not normally know how to overcome that incapacity. The ignorant seeking of the
removal of the incapacity takes the form of desire. Desire is in its ultimate analysis, the ignorant effort of the finite to become the infinite, to receive the infinite and to relate properly with the infinite. But confined to the ignorance and

finiteness, the individual seeks and seeks, — desires and desires, — and indeed, grows and aggrandizes himself, but fails to grow into infinity and to receive the infinity and to relate rightly with infinity. In his extreme effort, the individual gets dashed by the infinity and the finite form in which the individual remains confined gets dissolved, and it is that dissolution that we call death. But if the individual were only a finite form struggling with immense incapacity to embrace the infinity through the impulsion of desire, then the finitude must inevitably get dissolved, and death becomes the unsurpassable law for finite existence. But the Vedic and Vedantic knowledge discovers that the individual is himself an imperishable portion, an individual portion of the imperishable Reality that is at once static and dynamic, and this is the truth of the individual that the Gita formulates in clear terms when it describes the individual as the eternal and imperishable portion of the Supreme, mama eva amśah sanātanah.52 The individual remains always immortal, even though the finite forms in which it is embodied get dissolved.

The question is of ignorance and of the ego. If the ego ceases to be confined to its finitude and if the ego comes to learn and know the truth of the infinity, the imperishable infinity of stability as also the infinity of imperishable flow of Life, and if it comes to know and also applies its knowledge of the Immortal Reality and Immortal Life, then there is no inevitability of these three great deficiencies which seem to be the imperative yoke and law of human life, — incapacity, desire and death. The immortal and eternal portion of the Supreme does not need to remain confined to incapacity, if he knows and practises the truth that he is imperishably connected with the supreme infinite stability which is also imperishable source of Life. He does not need

to desire and does not need to struggle to catch scattered portions from the flow of the infinity and to aggrandize his finitude, if he comes to know that he himself is the imperishable portion of all that is there in the universe and beyond. He does not need necessarily to die, he does not stand in an obligation to dissolve the forms in which he is at present confined, if he knows the art of connecting his finite forms with the rush of the infinite ocean of Life and if he renews his forms at will in accordance with the rhythm of the flow of the infinity of the ocean of life. He may then retain his constantly developing forms of expression; he may
enlarge them, contract them and even dissolve them and renew them in harmony with the flow of the universal life force. He does not need to be besieged constantly by the sting of Death, and he can constantly change his formations or enlarge his formations according to the need of the universal flow of life. He can vanquish the necessity of dissolving the form; he can live immortally with constant renewal of forms and be the master of Life, since he is indeed the imperishable portion of the Master of all existence, static and dynamic.

Indeed, the knowledge by which the individual can recover his awareness of immortality, of the immortality of the supreme of which he is a eternal portion and the Knowledge of the imperishable stability of the infinite and the eternal and the imperishable flow of the ocean of the eternity, — if that knowledge happens to be merely intellectual, it cannot bring about an effective dissolution of the operation of the twilight of the ignorance by which the individual is surrounded and to which he is tied. That knowledge is to be Yogic knowledge, and that Yogic knowledge can be developed by the process of rising upwards from the plane of the mind to the supermind; all this

was known and affirmed by the Rishis of the Veda and the Upanishads. Even then, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother point out that there was still in their knowledge and in their yogic discipline incompleteness. According to them, there is a need of the descent of the supermind and its permanent establishment in the earth plane, if the full consequences of the premises of the knowledge of the Sachchidananda are to be concretely realized in the life of the earth. And it is here that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother conducted a fresh research, and they discovered that which had still remained undiscovered; and they opened the way by which the supermind can be manifested on the earth as a gradation of the earth-life, and, as a result, there could appear even in physical life, by the very process of transformation of matter itself, a divine body, which shall be free from the inevitability, even in the earth life, of the law of Death.