Immortality
(Sri Aurobindo:) “Immortality is not the survival of the mental personality after death, though that also is true, but the waking possession of the unborn & deathless self of which body is only an instrument and a shadow.”[1]
(Sri Aurobindo:) “As for the conquest of death, it is only one of the sequelae of supramentalisation — and I am not aware that I have forsworn my views about the supramental descent. But I never said or thought that the supramental descent would automatically make everybody immortal. The supramental descent can only make the best conditions for anybody who can open to it then or thereafter attaining to the supramental consciousness and its consequences. But it would not dispense with the necessity of sadhana. If it did, the logical consequence would be that the whole earth, men, dogs and worms, would suddenly wake up to find themselves supramental. There would be no need of an Asram or of Yoga.
What is vital is the supramental change of consciousness — conquest of death is something minor and, as I have always said, the last physical result of it, not the first result of all or the most important — a thing to be added to complete the whole, not the one thing needed and essential. To put it first is to reverse all spiritual values — it would mean that the seeker was actuated not by any high spiritual aim but by a vital clinging to life or a selfish and timid seeking for the security of the body — such a spirit could not bring the supramental change.”[2]
(Sri Aurobindo:) “There can be no immortality of the body without supramentalisation; the potentiality is there in the Yogic force and Yogis can live for 200 or 300 years or more, but there can be no real principle of it without the Supramental.
Even Science believes that one day death may be conquered by physical means and its reasonings are perfectly sound. There is no reason why the Supramental Force should not do it. Forms on earth do not last (they do in other planes) because these forms are too rigid to grow expressing the progress of the spirit. If they become plastic enough to do that, there is no reason why they should not last.”[3]
(Sri Aurobindo:) “The ideal would be not to be subject to Death, but to change the body whenever it is necessary with full consciousness.”[4]
(Mother:) “We can have this knowledge only by identity, by a sort of enveloping, or one might say, a sort of englobing which gives one the truth without any resistance – as if one opened out into the Divine Consciousness pure and entire. Nothing is left out, nothing is neglected, but all is transformed by this Light, by this Ananda, by this Peace and by this Power. With this the whole cycle has changed, and in this New Manifestation nothing deteriorates – which means that nothing dies. There is no conflict because each one lives dependent on the other in a mutual interchange, knowing well that each has in him a right to the Truth; which means that decay, contradiction, suffering and pain disappear entirely; it means that the possibility to survive in this consciousness gives an impetus to extend life up to Eternity.
This is what I think; this is what I feel as the immortality of the body. This is what has touched here and there in the history of man in his terrestrial evolution to become immortal, and people have individually invoked their Adored One in an intense tapasya to make them immortal, each for his own self, – but this did not work because each person wanted this for his own existence, for his own body and not as a terrestrial event. And also because they were still far from this Supramental substance about which, moreover, they were totally ignorant. But now that the Supramental Manifestation has taken place on earth and that the process of the transformation of the body – with all that is being worked out – can be done, one becomes the master of life, as one wants and be what one wants.”[5]
(Sri Aurobindo, 1940:)
Immortality
- I have drunk deep of God’s own liberty
- From which an occult sovereignty derives:
- Hidden in an earthly garment that survives,
- I am the worldless being vast and free.
- A moment stamped with that supremacy
- Has rescued me from cosmic hooks and gyves;
- Abolishing death and time my nature lives
- In the deep heart of immortality.
- God’s contract signed with Ignorance is torn;
- Time has become the Eternal’s endless year,
- My soul’s wide self of living infinite Space
- Time has become the Eternal’s endless year,
- Outlines its body luminous and unborn
- Behind the earth-robe; under the earth-mask grows clear
- The mould of an imperishable face. [6]
- Behind the earth-robe; under the earth-mask grows clear
- ↑ Essays Divine and Human, p.424, “Thoughts and Aphorisms”
- ↑ Letters on Yoga – I, p.312
- ↑ Ibid., p.313
- ↑ Ibid., p.315
- ↑ The Supreme – Conversations with the Mother recollected by Mona Sarkar, p.37
- ↑ Collected Poems, p.625
See also