Death. This term brings into our perception some sense of sombre solemnity, a despairing sadness, fear, separation, annihilation, disappearance and an end. The term “birth”, on the other hand, brings to our sensibilities hope, happiness, newness, and the semblance of a future. There is tension between these two terms apparently anti-thetical when viewed with the measuring mind and a vehement vital. But are these all that can be ascribed to birth and death? Are these all that we can understand with our humanness? Where was one before birth and where, after death? Can we know? Which part in us decides that death is an end? And an end to what? Pleasures, pain in life, joy, sadness, happiness, comfort, relations? What or who in one was hanging on to these? Who is this ‘one’?
However illuminating religious and spiritual explanations of death maybe, they will only flower as truths in our consciousness when we start to “see” and “know” from within, with our own being. Now, how is this “seeing” going to be part of the “being” or experience? Certainly it cannot come about in the way we take death to be in our ordinary consciousness that suffers a pang at the mention of the word “death”. The principle of ‘ego’ is probably at work here, as the ‘pang’ would well indicate to us. If we can imagine, just for a minute, of an egoless state within and how life would then turn out to be, then we may see a faint glimmer of another way of seeing death.
The theme of this issue centres on Sri Aurobindo’s passing and evokes some thought of the issue of Death. Sri Aurobindo himself has examined this phenomenon extensively in his writings and in nowhere do they appeal to our sensibilities more than in the way he dealt with it in Savitri, where Death is given a voice that rises against the voice of She who came down upon earth to reveal death in His utter truth, as a mask of the Divine. Let us not forget to fix a rendezvous with the revealing chapters of Savitri in our seekings on the meaning of death.
A Truth supreme has forced the world to be;
It has wrapped itself in Matter as in a shroud,
A shroud of Death, a shroud of Ignorance.
In response to a Sadhak’s question on how one could approach the darshan days of 5th and 9th Dec and one’s birthday, The Mother replied: “In search of a knowledge truer than ordinary knowledge. The fifth and ninth on understanding what death is, the birthday in finding out the purpose of life.”(Mother’s words italicised by editor) There is more to death than what we choose to understand or are capable of understanding.
In Dr Alok Pandey’s story, “The second coming”, the master, responds, to a devotee’s apprehensions of the master’s impending passing thus: “But where am I leaving you? Do you think I am this body? None of us are mere physical bodies alone. Only you are not conscious of it whereas I am fully conscious of my deathless Self and the many births before. And the deathless Self is immortal. It does not die.”
This could be the subject of meditation (or object) of one who may want to know what death is, in another dimension.
When Sri Aurobindo passed, his body was lowered into the earth and a Samadhi erected over it. 58 years have passed and the Samadhi continues to draw an ever increasing number of devotees who stand around it in silent reverence for a man the majority of whom had never seen before. What then is death with Sri Aurobindo, the avatar and what is it with a common man? Can death be a needed end for a glorious beginning? Where do the terms ‘mortal’ and ‘immortal’ fit in the scheme of things?
However illuminating religious and spiritual explanations of death maybe, they will only flower as truths in our consciousness when we start to “see” and “know” from within, with our own being. Now, how is this “seeing” going to be part of the “being” or experience? Certainly it cannot come about in the way we take death to be in our ordinary consciousness that suffers a pang at the mention of the word “death”. The principle of ‘ego’ is probably at work here, as the ‘pang’ would well indicate to us. If we can imagine, just for a minute, of an egoless state within and how life would then turn out to be, then we may see a faint glimmer of another way of seeing death.
The theme of this issue centres on Sri Aurobindo’s passing and evokes some thought of the issue of Death. Sri Aurobindo himself has examined this phenomenon extensively in his writings and in nowhere do they appeal to our sensibilities more than in the way he dealt with it in Savitri, where Death is given a voice that rises against the voice of She who came down upon earth to reveal death in His utter truth, as a mask of the Divine. Let us not forget to fix a rendezvous with the revealing chapters of Savitri in our seekings on the meaning of death.
A Truth supreme has forced the world to be;
It has wrapped itself in Matter as in a shroud,
A shroud of Death, a shroud of Ignorance.
In response to a Sadhak’s question on how one could approach the darshan days of 5th and 9th Dec and one’s birthday, The Mother replied: “In search of a knowledge truer than ordinary knowledge. The fifth and ninth on understanding what death is, the birthday in finding out the purpose of life.”(Mother’s words italicised by editor) There is more to death than what we choose to understand or are capable of understanding.
In Dr Alok Pandey’s story, “The second coming”, the master, responds, to a devotee’s apprehensions of the master’s impending passing thus: “But where am I leaving you? Do you think I am this body? None of us are mere physical bodies alone. Only you are not conscious of it whereas I am fully conscious of my deathless Self and the many births before. And the deathless Self is immortal. It does not die.”
This could be the subject of meditation (or object) of one who may want to know what death is, in another dimension.
When Sri Aurobindo passed, his body was lowered into the earth and a Samadhi erected over it. 58 years have passed and the Samadhi continues to draw an ever increasing number of devotees who stand around it in silent reverence for a man the majority of whom had never seen before. What then is death with Sri Aurobindo, the avatar and what is it with a common man? Can death be a needed end for a glorious beginning? Where do the terms ‘mortal’ and ‘immortal’ fit in the scheme of things?
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