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]
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.]
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