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After
Death - VI
Page
2
More
frequently there are cases in which, just at the moment of
its birth, that is to say, of its first gesture of independence,
when the child begins to develop its lungs by crying as much
as it can, at that moment, very often, this sort of call from
life makes the descent easier and more effective.
Sometimes
days and at times months pass, and the preparation is slow
and the entry takes place very gradually, in quite a subtle
and almost imperceptible way.
Sometimes
it comes much later, when the child itself becomes a little
conscious and feels a very subtle but very real relation with
something from above, far above, which is like an influence
pressing upon it; and then it can begin to feel the need of
being in contact with this something which it does not know,
does not understand, but which it can only feel; and this
aspiration draws the psychic and makes it descend into the
child.
I
am giving you here a few fairly common instances; there are
many others; this may happen in innumerable different ways.
What I have described to you are the most frequent cases I
have seen.
So,
the soul which wants to incarnate stays at times in a domain
of the higher mind, quite close to the earth, having chosen
its future home; or else it can descend further, into the
vital, and from there have a more direct action; or again
it can enter the subtle physical and very closely govern the
development of its future body.
Now
the other question—the one about departure.
That too depends on the degree of development, the conditions
of death—and above all on the unification of the being
and its attitude at the time of leaving the body. The question
here was about fully developed beings, that is, fully developed
psychic beings—and I don't know if it means a psychic
being which has profited by its presence in a physical body
to do yoga, for then the conditions are quite different. But
in a more general way, I have often told you that, with regard
to the external envelope of the being, everything depends
on its attitude at the moment of death, and that attitude
necessarily depends on its inner development and its unification.
If
we take the best instance, of someone who has unified his
being completely around the divine Presence within him, who
is now only one will, one consciousness, this
person will have grouped around his central psychic being
a fully developed and organised mind, an absolutely surrendered
and collaborating vital and an obedient, docile and supple
physical being. This physical being, as it is fully developed,
will have a subtle body—what Sri Aurobindo calls the
"true physical''—which will infinitely surpass the
limits of its body and have enough suppleness, plasticity,
balance to be able to adhere to the inner parts of the being
and follow the movement of the soul in its... I don't want
to say in its ascent, but in its peregrinations outside the
body. What the soul will do, where it will go—it all
depends on what it has decided before leaving the body. And
this capacity to keep around itself the being that has been
fully organised and unified in its physical life, will allow
it to really choose what it wants to do. And this also represents
a very different field of possibilities, from passing consciously
from one body into another, directly—there are instances
in which one of these fully conscious and fully developed
beings has slowly prepared another being capable of receiving
and assimilating it, and in order not to stop its material
work when it leaves one body, it goes and joins another psychic
being, merges with it, combines with it in another physical
body; that is an extreme case, extremely rare also, but one
which forms part of an altogether traditional occult knowledge—to
the instance at the other extreme, where the soul having finished
its bodily experience, wants to assimilate it in repose and
prepare for another physical existence later, sometimes much
later. And so this is what happens, among many other possibilities:
it leaves in each domain—in the subtle physical, in the
vital, in the mental domain—the corresponding beings;
it leaves them with a sort of link between them, but each
one keeps its independent existence, and it itself goes into
the zone, the reality, the world of the psychic proper, and
enters into a blissful repose for assimilation, until it has
assimilated (laughing), as described in this paper,
all its good deeds, digested all its good deeds, and is ready
to begin a new experience. And then, if its work has been
well done and the parts or sheaths of its being which it has
left in their different domains have acted as they should
there, when it descends again, it will put on one after another
all these parts which lived with it in a former life, and
with this wealth of knowledge and experience it will prepare
to enter a new body... This may be after hundreds or thousands
of years, for in those domains all that is organised is no
longer necessarily subject to the deposition which here we
call "death''. As soon as a vital being is fully harmonised,
it becomes immortal. What dissolves it and breaks it up are
all the disorders within it and all the tendencies towards
destruction and deposition; but if it is fully harmonised
and organised and, so to say, divinised, it becomes immortal.
It is the same thing for the mind. And even in the subtle
physical, beings who are fully developed and have been impregnated
with spiritual forces do not necessarily dissolve after death.
They may continue to act or may take a beneficial rest in
certain elements of Nature like water—generally it is
in some liquid, in water or the sap of trees—or it may
be, as described here (laughing), in the clouds. But
they may also remain active and continue to act on the more
material elements of physical Nature.
I
have given you here a certain number of examples; I tell you,
I could talk to you for hours and there would always be new
examples to give! But this covers the subject broadly and
opens the door to imagination.
There we are
24
October 1956
- The Mother
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