Page 7 - NAMAH-Apr-2018

Editorial

To live without dying

While sceptics and rationalists would vouchsafe What is then important is not the dissolution
for a doomsday to be the penultimate destiny but renewal of forms. What is eternal is not
of the earth and therefore of humanity (unless the persistence of the same form but constant
it emigrates somewhere else in space), the renewal of forms. Life has to be perceived,
classical Indian view is that creation has been enjoyed and lived not only during life-spans
manifesting and dissolving in a scheme of but also, albeit in a different integer, in the
eternal recurrence. A particular creation form of memory-traces in the intervals ‘in-
can dissolve when it has exhausted all its between’ renewals. In fact, this is the raison
potentialities of development and would d’ etre of the phenomenon of death.
need to start anew with a fresh denouement
to explore newer vistas. A creation can also The ‘in between’
dissolve if it embarks on a course of self-
destruction ticking the doomsday clock. Life that exists ‘in between’ birth and death
is constantly renewed in the existence that
Any creation is therefore ‘in between’ creations lies ‘in between’ reality and birth. In Tibetan
of the past and creations of the future. Instead mysticism, this concept of ‘in between’ (called
of conceiving the present creation as the in Tibetan as ‘bar-do’) has esoteric significance.
grand experiential finale, Indian and Tibetan If life is in between birth and death, the
seers have always considered it to be a state ‘death-point’ (not the point of clinical death
in between renewable states, a moment that is but the point when consciousness per se
in between recurrent moments and therefore gets completely de-linked from the bodily
eternal in recurrence, temporal amidst the form) is between life and reality and what
timeless, spatial in the sea of infinitudes. we perceive as reality lies in between death
point and existence while existence is itself
As with creation, individual life is not the discernible between reality and birth. “All
end of all dreams and possibilities, but an ‘moments of existence’ are ‘between’ moments,
‘in between’ state in a renewable trajectory. unstable, fluid and transformable into liberated
Sri Aurobindo explains that as the object of enlightenment experience (3).”
embodied life “is to seek infinite experience
on a finite basis, and since the form, the basis The individual’s role
by its very organisation limits the possibility of
experience, this can only be done by dissolving Has the individual any role in this grand
it and seeking new forms (1).” “And this is the cosmic play that runs through endless
law of Death (2)” epochs? When a particular creation dissolves,

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