CHAPTER TWO

LIFE, DEATH, AND REBIRTH

1.   News of someone's death was brought to the Master. He remarked: "Good. The dead are indeed happy. They have got rid of the troublesome overgrowth — the body.
The dead man does not grieve. The survivors grieve for him. Do men fear sleep? On the contrary they court it and on waking up they remark that they have had a happy sleep. Yet sleep is nothing but temporary death.
Death is a long sleep."
Talk 64

Note: Bhagavan points out the glaring contrast in our behaviour in the twin states of death and sleep, which are the same except in matter of duration. Of that too we cannot be very sure. We hate death, but run with might and main after sleep, so much so that if we remain sleepless for a few nights, we seek medical help and start swallowing sleeping tablets, if not also resort to drastic morphia injections. In the temporary death we call sleep, we spread our beds and look forward to it, singing with the Ancient Mariner:

"O Sleep, it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole
To Mary Queen the praise be given,
She sent the gentle sleep from heaven
That slid into my soul!"

In the long sleep we call death, instead of feeling happier still for the departed beloved who enjoys it, we put on long
faces and mourn. The irrationality of our behaviour would appear ludicrous to the man of wisdom but for the poignancy of the intense grief and terrifying fear which death inspires.

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The Master perceives the body as a "troublesome overgrowth" because it is superimposed on him — the pure being. Though he has a body he sees himself bodiless — videha. The body-'I' sense does not exist for him, yet the needs and diseases of the body continue to be "troublesome".
The Videha ^[?] is a Mukta, sometimes called Videhamukta ^[?].
Devotees worship him as the manifestation of the pure
Brahman, but the unintelligent call his state `living death'.
But then we are all working for this `living death', and they who ridicule him too.

The Master continues:

2.   "If a man dies while yet alive he need not grieve over another's death. One's existence is evident with or without the body. Then why should one desire the bodily shackles? One should find out his immortal Self and be happy."
Talk 64

Note: In the last note we have seen who the "man who dies while yet alive" is. Naturally such a man does not mourn the death of anybody; for he knows their state and condition as he knows his own, and laughs with joy. Bhagavan speaks from experience when he says that one remains the same under all circumstances and conditions "with or without a body."

3.   A great devotee of Bhagavan lost his only son — three years old. The next day he and his bereaved family came to the Ashram. The Master seeing them said: "Training of mind helps one to bear sorrow and bereavement with courage — the loss of offspring in particular. Grief exists only so long as one believes oneself to be of a definite
form. If the form is transcended one would realise oneself to be eternal, having neither birth nor death. That which is born is only the body."
Talk 80

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Note: "Transcending the form" is a grand idea. What
death destroys is only the form, and so long as we attach ourselves to the form we continue to feel the sting of death.
But if by knowledge we come to realise that the form is not the person we love, we will be able to transcend grief and, in fact, death itself.

We are all agreed that the beloved is not a mere shape, a coloured picture, an inanimate substance, but a being, an entity which teems with life and intelligence, which thinks, feels, loves, wills, acts, and with which we establish relationships as father, son, husband, neighbour, friend, etc.
The body, being devoid of intelligence, can, by itself, perform none of these functions, and, when life (i.e., the man) withdraws from it, it remains an effete matter fit for cremation.

The "mental training", which Bhagavan suggests, will not only kill all sorrow at bereavements, but will also reveal to us the truth of our immortality, and thus save us from future birth and death. Hence the Scriptures (Srutis ^[?]) lay down the law that any perceivable and conceivable object is the object of consciousness, and thus insentient, changeable and destructible. The subject or consciousness alone is sentient, changeless and indestructible.

4.   "See how a tree, whose branches are cut grows again. So long as the life-source is not affected it will grow. Similarly the samskaras sink into the heart in death: they do not perish. They are reborn. Just as a big banyan tree sprouts from a tiny seed, so the wide universe with names and forms sprouts forth from the Heart."
Talk 108

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Note: This is the rationale of rebirth. The samskaras, or impressions, left over at the close of one life become the seeds for the next. They are stored up in the Heart, from which a new body with new environments, new circumstances and new tendencies "sprouts" forth at the right time to form the new life. As the tortoise withdraws its limbs into its shell, so do the lifelong (psychical) impressions gather together at the last moment and, along with the senses, withdraw into the centre of consciousness, to form the nucleus of the future birth. The Bhagavad Gita puts this graphically:

"When the Lord acquires a body and when He
abandons it, He seizes the senses and manas and goes with them, as the wind carries perfume from flowers.

"Enshrined in the ear, eye, touch, taste, smell, and
the mind, He enjoys the objects of sense.

"The deluded do not perceive Him when He
departs or stays or enjoys, swayed by the qualities (gunas); the wisdom-eyed perceive Him."

(XV. 8-10)
Thus the Lord equates the jiva with Himself, for it is He, the immortal and changeless, who takes bodies to enjoy the senses through them, discards them, and takes new ones, etc.
This is a scriptural confirmation of our immortality and divinity.

With the rise of the body, the senses and all the psychical faculties also rise and spread a universe in infinite space and infinite time. Therefore the whole universe has its roots in the small cavity we call Heart.

5.   "If a person we love dies, grief results. Shall we avoid grief by loving all alike, or by not loving at all?"
Bhagavan: "Both amount to the same thing. When all have become the one Self, who remains to be loved or
hated? The ego that grieves must die. That is the only way."
Talk 252

Note: We have already discussed the point that he who grieves is he who takes the body for the beloved himself.
When the body dies the beloved himself is believed to have died. Who is responsible for this error? The ego, of course, that is, the person who mistakes himself for his own body.
But this ego is itself an erroneous conception, an imagined entity. The conclusion is therefore clear that the whole phenomenon is dud — the dead, the grief over the dead, and the one who is stricken with grief over the dead. It is an incubus created by the imagination, of which it is difficult to rid oneself. If a way can be found to kill the incubus, say, by a sadhana, the hallucination will disintegrate of its own accord into the reality of the Self. In that case the love to which the questioner refers will have no occasion to manifest, because of the absence of duality of lover and loved, the Self being the sole existence.

6.   "You ask if it is the ego that reincarnates. Yes, but what is reincarnation? The ego is the same but new bodies appear and hold it. Just observe what happens even (now) to your body. Suppose you want to go to London. You take a conveyance to the docks, board a steamer and reach London in a few days. What has happened? The conveyance travelled from one part of the world to the other. The movements of the conveyance have been superimposed on your body.
Similarly the reincarnations are superimpositions. Do you go to the dream world, or does it come to you? Surely the latter. The same may be said of the reincarnations. The ego remains changeless all along."
Talk 311

Note: The main point of this text is that what happens to the individual rises from inside himself, though it appears to come
from outside. Birth is the assuming by the individual — jiva or ego — of a body woven from inside himself, like the dream body which rises from the dreamer himself and superimposes itself on his mind, or what is the same, himself. This is the meaning of "Do you go to the dream, or does it come to you?"
Death is the temporary elimination of that superimposition, and birth is the reestablishing of it in a new form, and so on and on till jnana brings the superimpositions to a radical end.
This resembles the infinite number of webs which the spider spins out of himself for his temporary use.

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The analogy of travelling demonstrates the fact that the individual himself remains always the same, and that the long journey (samsara) is not undertaken by him but by the number of vehicles he uses for the purpose. The jiva constructs its own vehicles (bodies) and rides them for its own pleasure, as it were, according to the demand of prarabdha — the result of its behaviour and its psychical impressions in its use of the previous bodies. It is therefore wrong to say that we die and are reborn, or that it is we who go round and round on the wheel of evolution. We remain always the same without beginning or end. Let us fix that firmly in our mind lest we lose ourselves in Darwinism,
Occultism, Behaviourism and the rest of their tribe.

7.   "Do intellect and emotions survive death?"
Bhagavan: "Before considering that, first consider what happens in your sleep. Sleep is only the interval between two wakings. Do these survive in this interval? They represent the body-consciousness and nothing more. If you are the body they always hold on to you. If you are not, then they do not affect you. The one who was in sleep is the one who is speaking now. You were not the body in sleep. Are you the body now? Find out this, and the whole problem will be solved.

"That which is born must die. Whose is the birth? Were you born? How do birth and death affect the eternal Self?
Think to whom these questions occur and you will know."
Talk 426

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Note: This is extremely interesting to those who are interested in their own death. You are awake now, and you will be awake tomorrow. But in between the two there is a gap of no-waking state. What happens to your intellect and emotions in that state? You may plead ignorance of what happens, but you do know that you exist then, otherwise you would not mention the gap, namely, sleep, at all: you would not say "I slept for six hours last night," admitting thereby that you undergo the experience of sleep as you undergo that of waking. If there were an interruption in your existence at night, you would end with every day and be a new man every morning. Then there could be no question of your being able to remember that you met so- and-so yesterday, or did such and such thing twenty years ago. There would be no memory of anything previous to this day, not even of your name, home, business or family relationship at all, for it would be as if you had taken a new birth. The fact that the memory of previous incidents, objects and of having again and again slept and wakened persists, proves your fixity, that you are a logical continuum, passing through a variety of experiences, sometimes pleasant and memorable, and sometimes the reverse. You are the thread on which all these experiences string themselves, like beads.

"Granting," you may contend, "that I exist in all these
experiences and states and in all these years, how is it that I remember most of these experiences, but not those which happened only a few hours ago in my sleep?" The answer is, we are not concerned with the experiences at all; for memory,
like the senses, returns to the Source in sleep and comes out again on waking. We are concerned only with your own existence and, as you admit its continuity in sleep, there remains nothing for us to do but to apply this to the state of after death. I think there should be no difficulty to do that.
Taking our stand on the continuity of the jiva even in the absence of the body in sleep, we find that the possession of a body need not be the criterion for existence. That being the case, what valid evidence do we have to postulate extinction of existence with the extinction of the body? Certainly none.

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As for our intellect and emotions after death, they will go where they are even now going every night.

Bhagavan's remarks now become obvious: "The one who is in sleep is now in waking. You were not the body in sleep, so you are not it now. That which is born — the body — must die. You are not born so that you may die. Births and deaths do not affect you — the Self."

8.    "How were we all in our previous births? Why do we not know our own past?"
Bhagavan: "God in His mercy has withheld this knowledge from people. If they knew that they were virtuous, they would grow proud; contrariwise they would be depressed. Both are bad. It is enough that one knows the Self."
Talk 553

Note: The question comes from the Ashramites: it occurs in fact to almost everyone in the spiritual line. Bhagavan rightly thanks merciful God for causing this oblivion before rebirth, or else the world would have been in complete chaos, and life far more miserable than it is already under the present conditions. Apart from the pride or humiliation, of which
Bhagavan speaks, there are thousands of events and things which are better completely forgotten, and millions of people
who had better remain unrecognised for one's own sake and for the sake of the people concerned. Problems would have arisen in such numbers and of such a nature as to make the earth too hot for a decent man to live in. We have therefore to say "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof ", and offer thanks to God Almighty for drawing a heavy curtain between one life and another.

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Yet we have all heard of some "occultists", who claim the power to rend the curtain and see the Past, and wonder what good has that done? Has it given jnana to the person whose past life is supposed to have been read, or even to the "occultist" himself? If it does anything at all, it is to create serious doubts of its genuineness in some minds, and an abject, primitive faith in some others, both of which are definitely spiritually harmful. Why, therefore, dabble in useless preternatural matters? Bhagavan reminds us that the only knowledge worth acquiring is that of the Self: the rest is pure fantasy.

9.   "Where is the necessity for reincarnation? The theory of evolution is physically perfect. But for the soul further development may be required which happens after death."
The Master: "Let us first see if there is incarnation before we speak of reincarnation. Who is the man: the body or the soul? You answer `both together'. But you do not cease to exist in the absence of the body, say, in sleep.
You call sleep temporary death. Therefore life is also temporary. If life and death are temporary, there must be something which is not temporary: that is the Reality.
See for whom these questions arise. Unless the questioner is found, the questions can never be set at rest."
Talk 644

Note: Doubts about past births have been expressed by many people, more especially by those whose scriptures do not
teach reincarnation. The questioner is a Muslim who has found complete satisfaction in the theory of evolution without the necessity of rebirths and without deviating from his theological beliefs, except in that man has sprung up from the amoeba. But his questions carry in them their own solutions, if they are but carefully thought out.

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In the first instance he admits the immortality of the soul and its continued development after death till perfection is achieved, yet he is unable to rid himself of the bias for the body, which he makes the partner of the soul in the synthesis of his self, or `I'. On what ground does he give the body a place in the make up of the `I', he does not care to investigate.
If the body is half his self, then this is no longer a homogeneous unit, but a hybrid compound of mortal and immortal substances, of which the immortal, which he calls the soul that survives death, is only a part, or half. Is this rational? Moreover, if the soul is not an integral whole, how is it possible for it to attain perfection in the evolution of which he speaks? Again, how does he know that the soul undergoes "further development" after death? What does he, first of all, conceive the soul to be to require this development? Confusion becomes more confounded when he gives the body a share in his `I', endowing it with sentience, with intelligence, when a little thinking would have convinced him to the contrary. By admitting mortality to the body, he has at once confessed to its insentience, for sentience never dies: it is eternal life. The body is thus insentient and therefore unintelligent; whereas the `I' is pure intelligence as the knower of all things. Therefore the body is neither the `I' nor a part of it.

As for rebirths, why does he find them illogical? If in this life he is born, as he admits he is, why cannot he be reborn? That which has caused this birth should be a valid
cause for another birth. What makes him imagine that the cause of this birth of his has exhausted itself and can no longer be available for another birth, or a series of new births?

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Let us illustrate this by a concrete example. A man marries because he has a desire for a woman. If the woman a little later dies, he may marry a second time, impelled by the same urge. But suppose he also loses his body in the meantime, what is he to do to satisfy this persistent craving?
Naturally he has to take another body, as he had taken the present one for some desire or other.

Thus Bhagavan tells us that there is no such thing as rebirth: what there is, is only assuming one body after another for the satisfaction of desires. If you do not want to take another body, by all means you are at liberty not to, provided you have ceased to crave for anything, thereby eliminating the cause of "rebirth".

We have therefore to study man before we enquire about evolution, reincarnation, life, death, etc., which is what makes the Master advise the questioner to discover himself first.

Bhagavan continues:

10.    "One sees an edifice in his dream. Then he begins to
think how it has been built brick by brick by so many labourers and during so long a time. So also with the theory of evolution. Because he finds himself a man he thinks that he has evolved from the primal state of the amoeba."
Talk 614

Note: This makes our sciences dream sciences. So they are.
It is a well-known fact that scientists do not concern themselves with the absolute reality, which they leave to the philosophers to do, and remain satisfied with the physical reality, for example, the splitting and multiplication of the
chromosomes, the proportional combination of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms to form the water molecule, etc. And when they step out of the physical into a non-physical area they get confused and confounded. When biologists, for example, speak of the evolution of life, they really mean the evolution of the form which the life inhabits, as we see before our eyes the evolution of the human body from the pinhead zygote to the size of the newborn babe, to that of childhood, adolescence, and full adulthood, and the gradual unfoldment of the mind in it. Scientists do not have direct contact with life to know what life is, whether it evolves or remains changeless. They cannot, for instance, directly perceive the life in the chromosome but can only infer it from the behaviour of the chromosome, whose physical qualities they can directly observe: size, colour, shape, movements, changes, constituents, etc.

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Therefore those who believe in the laws of evolution must understand that their knowledge is very partial, and pertains only to the insentient universe, which alone can be perceived and can suffer changes.

As life is a closed book to the scientists, so also is life's other name — mind. Not their activities, but life and mind as they are in themselves, as substances, as `First Principles'.
If they knew the nature of the mind, they would have also known that all their endeavours were limited to a world which is essentially a dream, taking place inside their own consciousness. For at no moment can the scientist step out of his mind and say `here is a real world which can stand by itself without me — without my mind'. When one is in a dream and is asked to step out of it to realise that it is a dream, one can shake oneself a bit and be out of the dream to the waking state to verify his old position. But in the waking dream — jagrat — it is not so easy, because the senses
are then all out, fully entrenched in this their own dominion, of which they are the absolute monarchs. This is the reason why the scientist refuses to believe himself dreaming, and continues to imagine that he had crawled out of the amoeba into the monkey some millions of years ago, and out of the monkey some scores of thousands of centuries ago. How are we to convince him of his error that it is not he who has undergone all these metamorphoses, but the shapes of the bodies he has assumed? If he could be convinced of this truth, he would presumably be also convinced that the amoeba, the monkey, and the millions of years are parts of the evolution of this, his jagrat dream.

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