Behind all our needs and desires, motivations and aspirations, the urge for immortality, expressed or veiled, persists in the human psyche. It has hitherto been of interest to metaphysicians and mystics, but psychology needs to understand its intrinsic value and persistent nature. The urge for immortality is of special interest as it exists despite the fact that death is the starkest reality of life.
The Upanissadic seers pondered over this problem and experientially realised that Life per se is a universal Energy and, though matter and energy were interconvertible, once the life-energy was embodied in a form, newer complications arose. The life-energy, held in an individual form, had to be constantly exchanged and renewed from the repertoire of universal energy so as to be dynamic and effective. When the form could no longer support the process of renewal of energy, it had to be dismantled, dissolved (‘devoured’) or die to facilitate new construction and fresh renewal.
Sri Aurobindo took up this Upanissadic cue, where the creation and dissolution of form in the matrix of matter necessary to maintain the dynamism of universal Life-Energy is expressed by the formula of the material world that, “the eater eating is himself eaten 1.” Such a phrase may sound metaphorical, although it represents the dynamics of the universal Energy in action, creating and renewing forms and at the same time using up the material of the substantial form it has created and maintained for in reality, energy and matter are interconvertible. The imbalance between these two operations symbolised in the Upanissads through the phenomena of ‘eating’ and being ‘eaten’, translated today as anabolism and catabolism (though these two scientific terms do not convey the sense of dynamism that is vibrant in the Upanissadic symbolism), can result in disharmony and eventually end in disintegration. “If the balance between these two operations is imperfect or is disturbed or if the ordered play of the different currents of life-force is thrown out of gear, then disease and decay intervene and commence the process of disintegration 2.” Sri Aurobindo pointed out that, with the growth of mind in the evolutionary trajectory, things became more complex. This was to be inevitable as the mind with its vision and will, placed new demands on the life-energy. “For there is an increasing demand of the life-energy on the form, a demand which is in excess of the original system of supply and disturbs the original balance of supply and demand and, before a new balance can be established, many disorders are introduced inimical to the harmony and to the length of maintenance of the life; in addition the attempt at mastery creates always a corresponding reaction in the environment which is full of forces that also desire fulfilment and are therefore intolerant of, revolt against and attack the existence which seeks to master them. There too a balance is disturbed, a more intense struggle is generated; however strong the mastering life, unless either it is unlimited or else succeeds in establishing a new harmony with its environment, it cannot always resist and triumph but must one day be overcome and disintegrated 3.”
The Law of Death 
However, there is another more important characteristic of embodied life that makes death an inevitability. One fundamental object of embodied life, “is to seek infinite experience on a finite basis, and since the form, the basis by its very organisation limits the possibility of experience, this can only be done by dissolving it and seeking new forms 4.”
Sri Aurobindo further elaborated, “For the soul, having once limited itself by concentrating on the moment and the field, is driven to seek its infinity again by the principle of succession, by adding moment to moment and thus storing up a Time-experience which it calls its past; in that Time it moves through successive fields, successive experiences or lives, successive accumulations of knowledge, capacity, enjoyment, and all this it holds in subconscious or superconscious memory as its fund of past acquisition in Time. To this process change of form is essential, and for the soul involved in individual body change of form means dissolution of the body in subjection to the law and compulsion of the All-life in the material universe, to its law of supply of the material of form and demand on the material, to its principle of constant intershock and the struggle of the embodied life to exist in a world of mutual devouring. And this is the law of Death.
“This then is the necessity and justification of Death, not as a denial of life but as a process of life; death is necessary because eternal change of form is the sole immortality to which the finite living substance can aspire and eternal change of experience the sole infinity to which the finite mind involved in the living body can attain 5.”
“Life and death are in fact one, and we may say from different points of view that all death is only a process and change of life or that all life is only an activity of death. Really both are one energy, the activity of which presents to us a duality of aspects 6.”
Death is therefore not the opposite of life, but merely the opposite of birth, along the long-spiralling journey of the soul through the vicissitudes of Time. “Death has no reality except as a process of life. Disintegration of substance and renewal of substance, maintenance of form and change of form are the constant process of life; death is merely a rapid disintegration subservient to life’s necessity of change and variation of formal experience. Even in the death of the body there is no cessation of Life, only the material of one form of life is broken up to serve as material for other forms of life. Similarly, we may be sure, in the uniform law of Nature, that if there is in the bodily form a mental or psychic energy, that also is not destroyed but only breaks out from one form to assume others by some process of metempsychosis or new ensouling of the body. All renews itself; nothing perishes 7.”
Even in a terminal subject, the life-energy becomes busy in disengaging itself from the body and disintegrating it so as to escape in its elements to reconstitute fresh forms. “The Will in the universal force that held the form together, now withdraws from constitution and supports instead a process of dispersion. Not till then is there the real death of the body 8.”
Once death came to be regarded as a natural process of life, the quest that followed was to trace the elements which could survive the limitations of forms to act as templates for future forms. This led to two momentous experiential realisations: firstly, that con-sciousness per se could outlive the individual lifespan and secondly, the immortality of the soul.
That consciousness can outlive the individual lifespan is now being acknowledged by consciousness researchers. The 2001 Manifesto of the Scientific and Medical Network in the UK postulated that some form of consciousness could survive brain death. Ordinarily however, the average person is a loose amalgam of thoughts, emotions and habits of inconsequential value and such components of consciousness that survive brain death get scattered in the cosmic ignorance. If the individual consciousness has worked upon and developed one or several dimensions ranging from intuitive creativity to titanic strength, then that consciousness can outlive the lifespan to influence receptive and vulnerable subjects cutting across the limits of space and time. Thus, the consciousness of an Alexander, Shivaji, Galileo, Columbus. Beethoven, Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci continue to inspire and mould the lives of warriors, thinkers, scientists, explorers, musicians, litterateurs and artists throughout the millennia. This kind of inspiration is not merely hypothetical; it can be concretely experienced in the depths of the being. In an indirect way, it is a pathway to immortality.
The immortality of the soul has been one of the most triumphant realisations in the realm of Indian spiritual tradition. Sri Aurobindo, in continuation of that pristine heritage, explained how the intrinsic element of divinity in the depths of one’s being was a beyond-ego, fourth-dimensional principle, which was a projection of the unborn soul in its evolutionary poise. This soul-entity (the Psychic Being) gathers the essence of the peak-experiences of a lifetime, which are carried in the cosmic consciousness as memory traces that can influence future personalities through myriad ways; as subtle influences, as intuitive insights, as archetypal images, as encrypts carried by the psychic memory or impregnated in the soul-substance itself. Thus, the immortality of the soul carries the thread of continuity through a sort of aeonic resonance.
Once the immortality of the soul was experientially established in spiritual para-digms, the quest for aligning the individual will with the universal Will operative in the cosmic consciousness became a significant phenomenon. If the individual will and the universal Will were correctly aligned, one could also decide one’s point of departure from the world as a soul-choice, because death occurs when the universal Will no longer supports the cohesiveness of the form. This ability was also cultivated and refined through a technology of consciousness in selected subjects and came to be known as Icchamrityu (death through soul-choice).
A New Dimension of Immortality
Sri Aurobindo introduced an important dimension to the quest for immortality — the immortality of the present species to which the human being belongs. Our human species today is endangered in different ways. Firstly, there is the law of cosmic dissolution that alternates with creative epochs. Secondly, the ecological exploitation of the planet spells its own doomsday. Thirdly, the human being is possessed with its own self-destroying propensities, recalling those surreal lines:
“A scientist played with atoms and blew out
The universe before God had time to shout 9.”
Sri Aurobindo advocated that the only way to outlive the limitation of forms is an evolutionary growth in consciousness that secondarily influences the biological evolution to manifest higher transformative models of human being till the highest creative Supramental Consciousness gets embodied in earthly terms. Sri Aurobindo not only conceptualised such a possibility, but along with The Mother, embarked upon a deep and dynamic spiritual pursuit so that humanity might not miss that chance.
Just as yogis perfected the art of willed death by aligning the individual will with the universal Will, the transformative models of the human being, en route to supramentalisation, can even, in the intermediate stage, develop the power of prolongation of life at will, provided of course on the condition that the body-consciousness itself is fully absorbed in a receptive contemplation for transformation 10. This capacity, achieved at the level of body-consciousness to prolong life at will, is a paradigm shift in the annals of spirituality.
‘It’s a denial of all the spiritual assertions of the past: “If you want to live fully conscious of the divine life, leave your body — the body cannot follow”. Well, Sri Aurobindo came and said, ‘Not only can the body follow, but it can be the base that will manifest the Divine 11. ‘”
Besides, it would be improbable to exclude the exceptional possibility of physical immortality under certain conditions in one form or the other. It could be that instead of the usual notion of immortality meaning never dying, physical immortality could signify the persistence of subtilised body matter in the subtle physical to act as templates for other bodies.
The Mother elaborated on the consciousness of immortality in the forward movement of the transformative evolutionary trajectory:
“There’s a difference between immortality and the state without death…
“The state without death is what we can envision in the future for the human physical body: it is constant rebirth. Instead of slipping back and disintegrating for want of plasticity and from incapacity to adjust to the universal movement, the body is broken up in a forward movement, as it were.
“There is an element that remains constant: in each type of atom, the inner arrangement of the elements is different, and that’s what makes the difference in the substance. In the same way, maybe each person has a different and particular way of arranging the cells of his body, and that particular way is what persists throughout every outer change; everything else is broken up and rebuilt — but broken up in a forward movement instead of sinking backward into death, and rebuilt in a constant aspiration to follow the progressive movement of the divine Truth 12.”
In other words, death as we conventionally know, is an outcome of the sense of the defeatism in the subconscious, an end-result of falsehood, ignorance and suffering, a lapse into the primal inertia, a triumph of the Inconscience; factors that finally culminate in the abdication of the universal Will to hold the cohesiveness and compactness of the form. In contrast, the movement in the transformative trajectory breaks up the form in the scheme of a forward movement, so as to rebuild the form in a higher denouement, unlike the retrograde movement in conventional death. The result is not a ghost in the backyard of Inconscience, but a divine archetype in the courtyard of the effulgent Superconscience. Death would cease to be a sinking into the abyss of the Inconscience but a forward movement where the body breaks through the spell of nihilism to manifest progressively higher forms. One could then have the experience of dying without dying 13. It is in this transformative context, where death is no more a conventional retrogression but a dissolution of form in a forward movement for a higher-order reconstruction, that the Mother stated, “Unless we conquer Death, the victory isn’t won. Death must be vanquished, there must be no more death. That’s very clear 14.”
The issue then revolves, is to how to ensure that a dissolution of form does not represent the conventional lapse into Inconscience or a dissipation into the cosmic ignorance, but a forward movement towards a greater reconstruction. Obviously, this endeavour can only be pursued through a new and creative technology of consciousness. The very substance constituting the form has to be worked upon to get qualitatively elevated, as the evolutionary trajectory manifests progressively higher and higher forms till the supreme creative Supramental consciousness gets embodied in a form that surpasses the present human consciousness. The Mother initiated this experiment in her own consciousness and worked at the level of cellular consciousness so as to be a pioneer of evolutionary research that heralds the birth of a new age.
