On death, grief, and rebirth
Finding solace in troubled times
October 2024 was the worst month for Russia since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Throughout this month, more than 1,500 Russian soldiers were killed or injured on average every single day. The total number of Russian casualties since the start of the full-scale invasion now exceeds 700,000. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, by the end of September 2024 the confirmed minimum of civilian casualties in Ukraine was ca. 12,000 killed and ca. 26,000 wounded. And according to the Wall Street Journal (citing a confidential Ukrainian estimate), by the end of August 2024, 80,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and 400,000 wounded.
While I don’t care very much about the Russian soldiers Vladimir Putin keeps throwing into the meatgrinder, I care deeply about the Ukrainian casualties of Putin’s genocidal war, not to mention the Ukrainian children that have been abducted and forcibly adopted into Russian families. (While the official number of children kidnapped from Ukraine is 20,000, Moscow once bragged that their forces have trafficked over 700,000 Ukrainian children since February 24, 2022.)
In this regard I find solace in the words Sri Krishna spoke to Arjuna on the brink of the battle of Kurukshetra.
Realizing that some of his relatives, friends, and former teachers are on the opposite side, Arjuna the archer exclaims: “Seeing these my own people arrayed for battle, my limbs collapse and my mouth is parched, my body shakes and my hair stands on end; Gandiva [his bow] slips from my hand, and all my skin seems to be burning. I am not able to stand and my mind seems to be whirling.”
Claiming the moral-high-ground, he argues later: “Although these, with a consciousness clouded with greed, see no guilt in the destruction of the family, no crime in hostility to friends, why should not we have the wisdom to draw back from such a sin, we who see the evil in the destruction of the family?”
His epic lament concludes with this resolution: “It is more for my welfare that the sons of Dhritarashtra armed should slay me unarmed and unresisting. I will not fight!”
Krishna’s reply begins by pointing out Arjuna’s fallacy: “Thou grievest for those that should not be grieved for yet speakest words of wisdom.”
Why should they not be grieved for? Because, Krishna explains, “it is not true that at any time I was not, nor thou, nor these kings of men; nor is it true that any of us shall ever cease to be hereafter. As the soul passes physically through childhood and youth and age, so it passes on to the changing of the body. The calm and wise mind, the thinker who looks upon life steadily and does not allow himself to be disturbed and blinded by his sensations and emotions, is not deceived by appearances. He does not allow the clamor of his blood and his nerves and his heart to cloud his judgment or to contradict his knowledge” [Essays on the Gita, p. 61].
There is a soul, which is not hemmed in between the birth and death of a physical body. About the soul, Krishna has this to say: “Weapons cannot cleave it, nor the fire burn, nor do the waters drench it, nor the wind dry. It is uncleavable, it is incombustible, it can neither be drenched nor dried. Eternally stable, immobile, all-pervading, it is forever and forever. It is unmanifest, it is unthinkable, it is immutable; knowing it as such, thou shouldst not grieve.”
Krishna eventually grants Arjuna the “divine eye,” which enables him to see the universal and transcendent forms of the godhead embodied in his friend and charioteer. “I see Thy infinite forms on every side, but I see not Thy end nor Thy middle nor Thy beginning, O Lord of the universe, O Form universal,” Arjuna exclaims. “Thou art a luminous mass of energy on all sides of me, an encompassing blaze, a sun-bright fire-bright Immeasurable. Thou art the supreme Immutable whom we must know, Thou art the high foundation and abode of the universe, Thou art the imperishable guardian of the eternal laws, Thou art the sempiternal soul of existence.”
Then the vision grows darker. Arjuna sees the leaders of the opposing army along with the foremost warriors on his side “hasten into the tusked and terrible jaws” of Krishna’s universal aspect, some “with crushed and bleeding heads caught between its teeth.” And so, he begs: “Declare to me who Thou art that wearest this form of fierceness.”
“I am the Time-Spirit, destroyer of the world, arisen huge-statured for the destruction of the nations,” Krishna replies, and lets Arjuna know that “even without thee all these warriors shall be not, who are ranked in the opposing armies. Therefore arise, get thee glory, conquer thy enemies, and enjoy an opulent kingdom. By me and none other already are they slain, do thou become the occasion only.”
The enemies are already slain, and Arjuna’s subsequent actions are destined to bring this about.
Earlier in this dialogue, Krishna had indicated a possible cause for Arjuna’s eventual change of heart. Countering his seemingly moral argument, he had painted a vivid picture of the disgrace that would befall him were he to indulge his bout of pacifism: “Men will recount thy perpetual disgrace, and to one in noble station dishonor is worse than death. The mighty men will think thee fled from the battle through fear, and thou, that wast highly esteemed by them, will allow a smirch to fall on thy honor. Many unseemly words will be spoken by thy enemies, slandering thy strength; what is worse grief than that?”
Presently he goes on to say: “Vain is this thy resolve, that in thy egoism thou thinkest, saying “I will not fight”; thy nature shall appoint thee to thy work. What from delusion thou desirest not to do, O Son of Kunti, helplessly thou shalt do bound by thy own work born of thy swabhava [Arjuna’s warrior nature].”
Does this mean that we have no freedom? That we are like puppets on strings?
In the spiritual world view of the Bhagavad Gita, there is but one Power at work in the world, and there is but one Being who owns it. This Power can become Arjuna’s strength if he allows it to replace his weakness. The goal of Yoga, according to the Gita, is to become one with that Being, first in consciousness and eventually in action as well. At its core, evolution is the gradual emergence, in a multitude of individuals, of that Being, of its self-experience, of its intrinsic and infinite delight of being. It is also the gradual realization, for each individual, of Being’s absolute freedom. We are puppets with the potential to become one with the Puppeteer.
Even though in Krishna’s universal consciousness the enemies are already slain, Arjuna is actually left with a choice. He will certainly fight. But he may fight because his shame of being judged a coward, a disgraced knight-in-arms, will get the better of him. Or he may fight because he has become one in consciousness with the universal and transcendent Krishna, because he now knows what the right thing to do is and why it is the right thing to do. The limited power he once attributed to himself, egoistically, is now known and felt by him to be an action of the one and only Power at work in the world. And it is still his own, because he has become one with the Being who owns it.
Although this transformation does not usually take place all of a sudden, it could, at least metaphorically, take place in a day. The following words spoken later by Krishna contain what the Gita calls its “supreme secret”: “Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in Me alone. I will deliver thee from all sin and evil, do not grieve.” If one can free oneself from all mental standards of conduct, letting one’s actions be controlled entirely by the will of the Supreme, then one can indeed have done in a single day with grief and such notions as sin and evil. However — and there’s the rub — those who can do this will have been prepared for it through many lives. And this brings me to the subject of rebirth.
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At this vulnerable juncture, when the global situation seems almost as dangerous as it was in the 1930s (if not more so considering the lack of nuclear weapons at the time), it would be wise to pause and reflect on our existence on a timescale greater than the interval between the birth and death of a physical body. And let’s not waste time on whether there is such a thing as a soul which puts on and takes off bodies much like a living person puts on and takes off clothes.
The soul needs no proof of its rebirth any more than it needs proof of its immortality. For there comes a time when it is consciously immortal, aware of itself in its eternal and immutable essence. Once that realisation is accomplished, all intellectual questionings for and against the immortality of the soul fall away like a vain clamour of ignorance around the self-evident and ever-present truth. [Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, 268]
The “true dynamic belief in immortality” is “not an intellectual dogma but a fact as evident as the physical fact of our breathing and as little in need of proof or argument.”
So also there comes a time when the soul becomes aware of itself in its eternal and mutable movement; it is then aware of the ages behind that constituted the present organisation of the movement, sees how this was prepared in an uninterrupted past, remembers something of the bygone soul-states, environments, particular forms of activity which built up its present constituents and knows to what it is moving by development in an uninterrupted future. This is the true dynamic belief in rebirth, and there too the play of the questioning intellect ceases; the soul’s vision and the soul’s memory are all. [Ibid.]
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Our explanation of the evolution in Matter is that the universe is a self-creative process of a supreme Reality whose presence makes spirit the substance of things…. An infinite existence, an infinite consciousness, an infinite force and will, an infinite delight of being is the Reality secret behind the appearances of the universe; its divine Supermind or Gnosis has arranged the cosmic order, but arranged it indirectly through the three subordinate and limiting terms of which we are conscious here, Mind, Life and Matter. The material universe is the lowest stage of a downward plunge of the manifestation, an involution of the manifested being of this triune Reality into an apparent nescience of itself, that which we now call the Inconscient; but out of this nescience the evolution of that manifested being into a recovered self-awareness was from the very first inevitable….
It is through the conscious individual being that this recovery is possible; it is in him that the evolving consciousness becomes organised and capable of awaking to its own Reality. The immense importance of the individual being, which increases as he rises in the scale, is the most remarkable and significant fact of a universe which started without consciousness and without individuality in an undifferentiated Nescience. This importance can only be justified if the Self as individual is no less real than the Self as cosmic Being or Spirit and both are powers of the Eternal. It is only so that can be explained the necessity for the growth of the individual and his discovery of himself as a condition for the discovery of the cosmic Self and Consciousness and of the supreme Reality. [The Life Divine, 784‒85]
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[H]uman birth is a term at which the soul must arrive in a long succession of rebirths and that it has had for its previous and preparatory terms in the succession the lower forms of life upon earth; it has passed through the whole chain that life has strung in the physical universe on the basis of the body, the physical principle….
But why a succession of human births and not one alone? … [Because] the soul has not finished what it has to do by merely developing into humanity; it has still to develop that humanity into its higher possibilities. Obviously, the soul that lodges in an untaught primitive or an Apache of Paris or an American gangster, has not yet exhausted the necessity of human birth, has not developed all its possibilities or the whole meaning of humanity…. [N]either has the soul lodged in a vitalistic European occupied with dynamic production and vital pleasure or in an Asiatic peasant engrossed in the ignorant round of the domestic and economic life. We may reasonably doubt whether even a Plato or a Shankara marks the crown and therefore the end of the outflowering of the spirit in man....
There may too be beyond this initial culmination a greater flowering of the spirit in the human life of which we have as yet only the first intimations; the imperfection of Man is not the last word of Nature, but his perfection too is not the last peak of the Spirit.
This possibility becomes a certitude if the present leading principle of the mind as man has developed it, the intellect, is not its highest principle. If mind itself has other powers as yet only imperfectly possessed by the highest types of the human individual, then a prolongation of the line of evolution and consequently of the ascending line of rebirth to embody them is inevitable. If supermind also is a power of consciousness concealed here in the evolution, the line of rebirth cannot stop even there; it cannot cease in its ascent before the mental has been replaced by the supramental nature and an embodied supramental being becomes the leader of terrestrial existence. [Ibid. 791‒93]
There are two aspects to Sri Aurobindo’s concept of “soul,” one beyond time, the other enduring through time. The soul which is “aware of itself in its eternal and immutable essence” is called “central being” or “Jivatman.” It is an individuation of the Reality described above as “an infinite existence, an infinite consciousness, an infinite force and will, an infinite delight of being.” The soul which is “aware of itself in its eternal and mutable movement” is called “psychic entity,” “psychic being,” or simply “the psychic.”
In earlier postings (here and here) I stated that evolution begins with two multitudes. There is a multitude of interacting particles, which sets the stage for the Spirit’s adventure of evolution, and there is a multitude of “spark-souls.” In the following letter, Sri Aurobindo explains the difference between the Jivatman, the psychic being, and the spark-soul:
The Jivatman, spark-soul and psychic being are three different forms of the same reality and they must not be mixed up together as that confuses the clearness of the inner experience.
The Jivatman or spirit, as it is usually called in English, is self-existent above the manifested or instrumental being — it is superior to birth and death, always the same, the individual Self or ātman. It is the eternal true being of the individual.
The soul is a spark of the Divine which is not seated above the manifested being, but comes down into the manifestation to support its evolution in the material world. It is at first an undifferentiated power of the divine consciousness, containing all possibilities, but at first unevolved possibilities, which have not yet taken form, but to which it is the function of evolution to give form. This spark is there in all living beings, from the lowest to the highest.
The psychic being is formed by the soul in its evolution. It supports the mind, vital, body, grows by their experiences, carries the nature from life to life.... At first it is veiled by mind, vital and body, but, as it grows, it becomes capable of coming forward and dominating the mind, life and body; in the ordinary man it depends on them for expression and is not able to take them up and freely use them.... When the psychic being can by sadhana [the practice of yoga] become dominant and freely use its instruments, then the impulse towards the Divine becomes complete and the transformation of mind, vital and body, not merely their liberation becomes possible. [Letters on Yoga I, 64‒65]
Between those two multitudes — physically interacting particles and psychic sparks rife with unevolved possibilities — there yawns a gulf. Evolution may therefore be likened to the construction of a bridge that proceeds from both ends. On the external side first life evolves as a creative principle capable of receiving ideas and casting them into material forms, then mind evolves as a creative principle that can receive essential qualities and cast them into expressive ideas. On the inner side psychic beings evolve.
[T]he psychic being ... rests its formation, its dynamic self-building on the power of soul that has been actually and more or less successfully, against the resistance of the Ignorance and Inconscience, put forth in the evolution upon the surface. [The Life Divine, 928]
The psychic being can at first exercise only a concealed and partial and indirect action through the mind, the life and the body, since it is these parts of Nature that have to be developed as its instruments of self-expression, and it is long confined by their evolution. Missioned to lead man in the Ignorance towards the light of the Divine Consciousness, it takes the essence of all experience in the Ignorance to form a nucleus of soul-growth in the nature; the rest it turns into material for the future growth of the instruments which it has to use until they are ready to be a luminous instrumentation of the Divine. It is this secret psychic entity which is the true original Conscience in us deeper than the constructed and conventional conscience of the moralist, for it is this which points always towards Truth and Right and Beauty, towards Love and Harmony and all that is a divine possibility in us, and persists till these things become the major need of our nature. It is the psychic personality in us that flowers as the saint, the sage, the seer; when it reaches its full strength, it turns the being towards the Knowledge of Self and the Divine, towards the supreme Truth, the supreme Good, the supreme Beauty, Love and Bliss, the divine heights and largenesses, and opens us to the touch of spiritual sympathy, universality, oneness. [Ibid. 239]
One can foresee an eventual integration of two dynamisms: nature-force, governed by determinisms which have evolved on the surface, and the soul-power which is exerted by the psychic being. Nature-force will be increasingly susceptible to modification by soul-power until it ceases to exist as a separate dynamism.
Let us now recall the immense role which the supraphysical worlds play in the evolution of mind and life.
Evolution comes by the unceasing pressure of the supra-material planes on the material compelling it to deliver out of itself their principles and powers which might conceivably otherwise have slept imprisoned in the rigidity of the material formula. [Ibid. 272–73]
It is the pressure of the life-world which enables life to evolve and develop here in the forms we already know; it is that increasing pressure which drives it to aspire in us to a greater revelation of itself and will one day deliver the mortal from his subjection to the narrow limitations of his present incompetent and restricting physicality. It is the pressure of the mind-world which evolves and develops mind here and helps us to find a leverage for our mental self-uplifting and expansion, so that we may hope to enlarge continually our self of intelligence and even to break the prison walls of our matter-bound physical mentality. It is the pressure of the supramental and spiritual worlds which is preparing to develop here the manifest power of the spirit and by it open our being on the physical plane into the freedom and infinity of the superconscient Divine; that contact, that pressure can alone liberate from the apparent Inconscience, which was our starting-point, the all-conscient Godhead concealed in us. [Ibid. 811]
These higher planes are not only responsible for the evolution of life and mind here: they are “at every moment acting upon and in communication with our own plane of being, although this action is naturally not present to our ordinary waking or outer consciousness.”
We find even that the human being can project himself partially into these higher planes under certain conditions, even while in the body; a fortiori must he be able to do it when out of the body, and to do it then completely, since there is no longer the disabling condition of the physical life bound down to the body. [Ibid. 819]
It may be said that we have not only a physical body but also subtle bodies which are closely connected to the higher planes. It would however be nearer the truth to say that it is the psychic being — in which our transtemporal identity resides — that has a physical, a vital, and a mental “sheath” or body.
The necessity for an interregnum between birth and birth and a passage to other worlds arises from a double cause: there is an attraction of the other planes for the mental and the vital being in man’s composite nature due to their affinity with these levels, and there is the utility or even the need of an interval for assimilation of the completed life-experience, a working out of what has to be discarded, a preparation for the new embodiment and the new terrestrial experience. [Ibid. 825]
[T]he mental worlds are not likely to be the last normal stage of the after-death passage; for man is not entirely mental: it is the soul, the psychic being, and not the mind, that is the traveller between death and birth, and the mental being is only a predominant element in the figure of its self-expression. There must then be a final resort to a plane of pure psychic existence in which the soul would await rebirth; there it could assimilate the energies of its past experience and life and prepare its future. Ordinarily, the normally developed human being, who has risen to a sufficient power of mentality, might be expected to pass successively through all these planes, subtle-physical, vital and mental, on his way to his psychic habitation. At each stage he would exhaust and get rid of the fractions of formed personality structure, temporary and superficial, that belonged to the past life; he would cast off his mind sheath and life sheath as he had already cast off his body sheath: but the essence of the personality and its mental, vital and physical experiences would remain in latent memory or as a dynamic potency for the future. But if the development of mind were insufficient, it is possible that it would not be able to go consciously beyond the vital level and the being would either fall back from there, returning from its vital heavens or purgatories to earth, or, more consistently, would pass at once into a kind of psychic assimilative sleep co-extensive with the internatal period. [Ibid. 832]
[E]ach birth is a new start; it develops indeed from the past, but is not its mechanical continuation: rebirth is not a constant reiteration but a progression, it is the machinery of an evolutionary process. Part of this rearrangement, the discarding especially of past strong vibrations of the personality, can only be effected by an exhaustion of the push of previous mental, vital, physical motives after death, and this internatal liberation or lightening of impedimenta must be put through on the planes proper to the motives that are to be discarded or otherwise manipulated, those planes which are themselves of that nature; for it is only there that the soul can still continue the activities which have to be exhausted and rejected from the consciousness so that it can pass on to a new formation. It is probable also that the integrating positive preparation would be carried out and the character of the new life would be decided by the soul itself in a resort to its native habitat, a plane of psychic repose, where it would draw all back into itself and await its new stage in the evolution. This would mean a passage of the soul progressively through subtle-physical, vital and mental worlds to the psychic dwelling-place from which it would return to its terrestrial pilgrimage. The terrestrial gathering up and development of the materials thus prepared, their working out in the earth life would be the consequence of this internatal resort, and the new birth would be a field of the resultant activity, a new stadium or spiral curve in the individual evolution of the embodied spirit. [Ibid. 833‒34]
For someone who expects to be reborn with their old character, temperament, and dispositions intact, I have bad news. None of this survives. If Mr. Smith has never been in touch with his soul, the old Mr. Smith would be gone. His psychic being would have discarded not only his physical but also his vital and mental sheaths or personalities. But if, by chance, the living Mr. Smith has suffered/enjoyed a near-death experience (NDE), he might have experienced the inalienable peace and felicity of his immortal psychic essence, and this he would recognize at the time of his actual passing. (That’s why most people who underwent an NDE are no longer afraid of dying.)
[T]he soul that has been John Smith cannot gain anything or fulfil itself by remaining John Smith forever.... Our life and rebirth would be ... not an evolution but the meaningless continuity of an eternal repetition.... John Smith wants to be John Smith forever: but the demand is obviously ignorant and, if it were satisfied, that would be a frustration, not a fulfilment....
When [the soul] passes from its body, it keeps still the same vital and mental form for a time, but the forms or sheaths dissolve and what is kept is only the essential elements of the past quantum, of which some will but some may not be used in the next incarnation. The essential form of the past personality may remain as one element among many, one personality among many personalities of the same Person, but in the background, in the subliminal behind the veil of the surface mind and life and body, contributing from there whatever is needed of itself to the new formation; but it will not itself be the whole formation or build anew the old unchanged type of nature. It may even be that the new quantum or structure of being will exhibit a quite contrary character and temperament, quite other capacities, other very different tendencies.... The greater the variety of formations that have existed in the past and can be utilised, the more rich and multitudinous the accumulated buildings of experience, the more their essential result of capacity for knowledge, power, action, character, manifold response to the universe can be brought forward and harmonised in the new birth, the more numerous the veiled personalities mental, vital, subtle-physical that combine to enrich the new personality on the surface, the greater and more opulent will be that personality and the nearer to the possible transition out of the completed mental stage of evolution to something beyond it. [Ibid. 848‒49]
Thank you. Enriching the understanding of life, death, soul, evolution, rebirth. Aurocafe is living up to its name.