Thoughts and Aphorisms 11A

11. Immortality is not the survival of the mental personality after death, though that also is true, but the waking possession of the unborn and deathless Self of which body is only an instrument and a shadow.
(Thoughts and Aphorisms: Sri Aurobindo)

The human being has a body and a vital being, to be mastered and governed by a mental being. The vital being animates the physical being, and is the source of all passions and emotions and sentiments. But the mental being is able to fully control and govern the body only in rare cases — where the mental being is formed, organized and individualized, having a personality.

Every human being, as he is now, does not necessarily have a personality. In this connection, The Mother says: “In the great mass of human beings the mind is something fluid which has no organization of its own, and therefore it is not a personality. And as long as the mind is like that, fluid, unorganized, with no cohesive of its own and without personality, it cannot survive. ”

A fluid and unorganized mind can not then survive the death of the physical body. The mental being then is dissolved in the mental region, and the physical body gets dissolved in the physical substance.

What our mind generally is?

We may see what Sri Aurobindo says:
Our mind is a house haunted by the slain past,
Ideas soon mummified, ghosts of old truths,
God's spontaneities tied with formal strings
And packed into drawers of reason's trim bureau,
A grave of great lost opportunities,
Or an office for misuse of soul and life
And all the waste man makes of heaven's gifts
And all his squanderings of Nature's store,
A stage for the comedy of Ignorance.
[Savitri : Book II: Canto XIII]

But when there is a mental being with a personality, it can survive the death of the physical body and it can continue life after life, birth after birth.

Let us keep in mind that here the word personality has been used in a special sense — to have a personality, the mental being must have to stand erect without depending on the body and the vital being, with a full control over them.

As The Mother says, in the mental atmosphere on earth, there are independent mental personalities, who have continued their existence, independently, even after the physical existence, the body, is no more there. When the soul re-incarnates, the mental personality also re-incarnates, “carrying with it the memories of the previous lives.”

However, as Sri Aurobindo has stated, the continuity of the mental personality is not really what Immortality is, though it is an effect and an accompaniment of Immortality.

Immortality relates to the essential being of each individual human being, which is not different from the universal Self. To realize and live the conscious existence of that essential individual being, which has no beginning and no end, is what Immortality is.

Let us listen to the Call from Sri Aurobindo :
"Why camest thou to this dumb deathbound earth,
This ignorant life beneath indifferent skies
Tied like a sacrifice on the altar of Time,
O spirit, O immortal energy,
If 'twas to nurse grief in a helpless heart
Or with hard tearless eyes await thy doom?
Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and Death."
[Savitri: Book VII: Canto II]

[Continued]
Barin Chaki
11-05-2008

Thoughts and Aphorisms 10B

My soul knows that it is immortal. But you take a dead body to pieces and cry triumphantly, “Where is your soul and where is your immortality?”
(Thoughts and Aphorisms: Sri Aurobindo)
[From continuation]

When we perceive Death, we question about the existence of soul and immortality. Doubt darkens our mind, and disbelief sets in.

One cannot find the Soul by dissecting the dead body. One cannot find the Soul through the senses or through emotions or passions or through the deduction and induction of logic and reason. One has to rise above the senses and the emotions and reason and ascend to the higher range of Consciousness.

Even, as we know, life is not there in a dead body — but we can conclude that there is life in a living body. Similarly, when the Soul departs, the body is dead, and the soul cannot be found there.

Through the tenets of the physical sciences, through the use of a purely physical and “scientific” consciousness, you cannot reach the Soul.

The Mother says:

So when you imagine that you can know the secrets of Nature and still remain in a purely physical consciousness, you are entirely deceived. And this habit of demanding concrete material proofs before accepting the reality of something is one of the most glaring effects of ignorance.

One has to rise above doubt and disbelief. To rise above doubt and ignorance and the sense and the ordinary physical consciousness — that is the Way.

OOOOO

According to Sri Aurobindo, the eternal Origin is the Pure Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, Sat-Chit-Ananda, whom we may call the Divine, the Supreme, the All-Existence, or in any other suitable name. And the Divine All-Existence is also involved and omnipresent in the vast material cosmos, which is but the Manifestation of All-Existence Himself. The Divine has become the Manifestation, but has remained “hidden” behind the actual phenomenon of things. Substance or Matter is the initial Form of this Manifestation.

In this Manifestation, the Divine has become the Many. Or rather, All-Existence has also manifested His individual aspect and has expressed Himself as the Many, through the manifold expressions of Life and Mind. Each living being has a Soul — to express the matter in the ordinary human language. But in Reality, each soul has or may have a living body, and he soul has remained “hidden” and taken the masks of Matter and Life and Mind.

Soul is, however, independent of Life and Matter and Mind. It may not have a body, and it may not also have any participation in the Manifestation, though that is to be the ultimate aim for the ultimate fulfilment.

A formless spirit became the soul of form.
All there was soul or made of sheer soul-stuff;
A sky of soul covered a deep soul-ground.
All here was known by a spiritual sense:
Thought was not there but a knowledge near and one
Seized on all things by a moved identity,
A sympathy of self with other selves,
The touch of consciousness on consciousness
And being's look on being with inmost gaze
And heart laid bare to heart without walls of speech
And the unanimity of seeing minds
In myriad forms luminous with the one God.
Life was not there, but an impassioned force,
Finer than fineness, deeper than the deeps,
Felt as a subtle and spiritual power,
A quivering out from soul to answering soul,
A mystic movement, a close influence,
A free and happy and intense approach
Of being to being with no screen or check,
Without which life and love could never have been.
Body was not there, for bodies were needed not,
The soul itself was its own deathless form
And met at once the touch of other souls
Close, blissful, concrete, wonderfully true.
[Savitri : Book II: Canto XIV]

OOOOO

The Soul is eternally an individual expression of the Divine — the One is also the Many: the Many are also the One. The Manifestation of the living beings and the human beings has been a matter of Evolution on earth. And in course of Evolution, through the Supramental Manifestation, the inherent immortality of the Soul — of the Psychic Being, as Sri Aurobindo puts it — will be expressed through and in the Supramental Body also.

All earth shall be the Spirit's manifest home,
Hidden no more by the body and the life,
Hidden no more by the mind's ignorance;
An unerring Hand shall shape event and act.
The Spirit's eyes shall look through Nature's eyes,
The Spirit's force shall occupy Nature's force.
This world shall be God's visible garden-house,
The earth shall be a field and camp of God,
Man shall forget consent to mortality
And his embodied frail impermanence.
ooooo
All then shall change, a magic order come
Overtopping this mechanical universe.
A mightier race shall inhabit the mortal's world.
On Nature's luminous tops, on the Spirit's ground,
The superman shall reign as king of life,
Make earth almost the mate and peer of heaven,
And lead towards God and truth man's ignorant heart
And lift towards godhead his mortality.
[Savitri : Book XI: Canto I]

Barin Chaki
09-05-2005
[Published in barin chaki's blog in Sulekha on 18-04-2008.]

Some Viewpoints

There has been some correspondence between "Tusar N. Mohapatra" tusarnmohapatra@gmail.com and Robert E. Wilkinson robtw@sprynet.com of which copies were sent to me by Tusar. The mails are several and I have gone though them all.

I also find a message from M Alan Kazlev in this regard, which I quote below:
hi Tusar
I do find the students of PNB (Thea) to be sincere and decent people. It is just that, like you, I cannot agree with their belief that PNB is an avatar.
best wishes
alan

I fully agree with Alan.

I am quoting below the latest message from Roberts to Tusar:
My Dear Tusar,
People such as who have come to Sri Aurobindo’s work without a direct understanding forged in the fires of a yogic tapasya believe only in the IDEA of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. You have not yet attained the lived experience of their message. And because of this limitation, you have unknowingly entombed this greatest spiritual work of the Age in a religious dogma which you and others preside over as the final authorities of their message. This is not a Supra-mental realization but a MENTAL one. When what I write challenges your dogmatic mental beliefs, you respond with an indignant snarl, arrogantly proclaiming my words to be “dishonest concoctions, spiritual distortions and contagious curios.” What unbelievable hypocrisy. You have not read the first word of any of Thea’s books yet you dismiss her as an irrelevant interloper. This is beyond arrogance, it is simply dishonest.
Everything you have written here about philosophy and ontology is an old mental view based on BEING and its correspondences. By this approach you attempt to FREEZE Sri and the Mother as the eternal symbols of Purusha and Prakriti, with no movement or continuity but this is NOT Sri Aurobindo’s message. He wrote:
"The significance of our existence here determines our destiny... If there is a Being that is becoming, a Reality of existence that is unrolling itself in Time, what that being, that reality secretly is what we have to become, and so to become is our life's significance." The Life Divine, Chapter 28. - Sri Aurobindo
In order to move beyond this frozen duality of BEING into a dynamic reality of existence and Destiny, a THIRD principle is required to add synthesis and Becoming. This is a fundamental principal of Vedic knowledge. It may be called “the Law of Three” for it expresses an irreducible truth that at the heart of the creation lies a tripartite harmony of energy or “seed” from which the entire cosmos evolves. The three principle gods of India, the “Trimurti” of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva are representative of this essential truth and reflect its supreme importance. The ancient tradition of Ayurveda honors this essential harmony of Three as the “Tridoshas” (the three energies), the primary factors of the human body that govern our health. In the Bhagavad Gita this occult knowledge is described as the “Three Gunas” and is extolled by Krishna as the basis of an Ultimate Wisdom. In Christianity this eternal formula is simply known as the “Trinity of God.” In more modern times this sublime principle was appropriated by the philosopher Hegel to describe his dialectical process of Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis.
The ‘Law of Three’ permeates myth, legend and religious forms because it is an irreducible archetype. For this reason, among many others, I find it stunningly naive that you and many of the followers of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have glibly dismissed Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet (Thea) and her prodigious body of Supramental knowledge as irrelevant to their epochal yoga. Was it not Sri Aurobindo himself who wrote?
“While the Divine is One, it is also manifold... It is at once Transcendental, Cosmic and Individual. By knowing the eternal unity of these three powers of the eternal manifestation, God, the Cosmos and the Individual self, and their intimate necessity to each other, we come to understand existence itself.…” Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga
Until this error is corrected, we will continue the religious worship of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother with no real understanding of their message and this work will languish for another forty years.
Perhaps you will remember Tusar, that the Mother herself said that the leadership of this work would be based upon REALIZATION, and KNOWLEDGE. And how is this leadership to arise if people who have been given the sacred responsibility of broadcasting Sri Aurobindo’s message to the world use it to indulge their own intellectual hypocrisy? The Hour of God is upon us now as never before,
“…woe to them whose ears are sealed to the call… and thrice woe to them who are strong and ready yet waste the force and misuse the moment, for them is irreparable loss or great destruction.”
Perhaps you should take this to heart.
In the service of Truth, Robert

OOOOO

On perusal of the message of Robert to Tusar, I find that there has been attack on Tusar that he arrogantly proclaimed the words of Robert to be “dishonest concoctions, spiritual distortions and contagious curios.” Robert declares that Tusar’s words are an indignant snarl and arrogant proclamation. So, Robert has tried to bat in the same fashion that he thinks to be the fashion of Tusar’s batting. If Tusar’s presentation does not seem to him to be Supramental, Robert’s claims are also not Supramental. The Supramental does not at all have the necessity of similar actions and reactions, of trying to prove Itself before others that It is present. When the Sun rises, darkness recedes. One does not search out the Sun by lighting a torch or a lamp.

Robert has rightly quoted the following :
"The significance of our existence here determines our destiny... If there is a Being that is becoming, a Reality of existence that is unrolling itself in Time, what that being, that reality secretly is what we have to become, and so to become is our life's significance." [Life Divine : Sri Aurobindo]

If there is a Being, there is a becoming. This is known by all who are in touch with the Truth Sri Aurobindo represents. This Becoming is an Involution and Evolution of the Being, from the Being.

There is a reference to a frozen duality of BEING : obviously, that is a reference to the dual godhead of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Are They frozen, without a third principle? To say that would really be too much of indignation and disdain. If The Mother and Sri Aurobindo are frozen, who else can be there to lead the onward becoming towards the New World? Has anyone the audacity to say that someone else is there to liberate Them from the frozenness?

The Mother and Sri Aurobindo have never said anywhere that there would come a third Avatar, after Them, to complete Them. Of course, there will be others who will carry onward and complete The Work which They began. They will be Their instruments. Even there may be some Vibhutis, as described in the book The Mother.

To bring in and add the Idea of Trinity and Trimurty and the references to Triguna and Tridosha in order to activate the Frozen Force of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, does not simply fit in the Philosophy and Teaching of Sri Aurobindo. His Teaching is complete and the most synthetic — it excludes nothing. Nothing is left there so that someone else will fill up the gap.

The Idea of Trinity etc was not new or unknown to Sri Aurobindo. According to Him, the Trinity is the Transcendental, the Cosmic and the Individual Divine.

If one still presses the idea of Trinity, I would say that The Mother has already answered the question. She said to Huta:

Love. love and love as much as you can … the Lord, Sri Aurobindo and me. None of this love is wasted.

And one may still argue that The Mother referred to Sri Aurobindo by saying the words ‘the Lord’. But it is not so. There was a question asked to The Mother :

Mother, what is the difference between the Lord and Sri Aurobindo?

The Mother says:

There is no essential difference, but the Lord is All and Sri Aurobindo is a part but Conscious of the Supreme Lord of whom He is an emanation.

Thus, those were the Ideas of Trinity Sri Aurobindo and The Mother had.

Conclusively, I say that I have a great regard for Thea [PNB] as a great spiritual person and have read some of her writings, and all her followers and students have every right to regard her in the way as they think best, for she is a Guru for them. However, I do not regard her to be an Avatar.

And I have no intention to question the faith and conviction of Roberts, who is on his Way.

Barindranath Chaki
03-05-2008