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Death as Transformation

Rekha Vijayshankar

Abstract
The growth of modern medicine has been witness to the increasing medicalisation of chronic
illness, and unsurprisingly a consequent death phobia embedding itself in human psyches across
the world. Post-colonial modern neo-liberal anthropocentric ways of living, have further eroded
into family and community ownership of our ill and dying. Yet, as health economies across the
world, grapple with the challenges of resource scarcity, there appears to be a real need to restore
death and dying back to families and communities. This article is an attempt to seek to bring back
death and dying to our families and communities, by aiming to address the fear and existential
crises that invariably accompanies the experience of dying and death. The objective is to explore the
purpose and value of death, re-visioning death as a core mechanism for facilitating transformation,
in light of the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

Introduction a problem in relations of principles and the
balance of forces: but also we should speak
“The universe is not merely a mathematical of Him as if He were a lover, a musician of
formula for working out the relation of certain universal and particular harmonies, a child,
mental abstractions called numbers and a poet. The side of thought is not enough; the
principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void side of delight too must be entirely grasped:
unit, neither is it merely a physical operation Ideas, Forces, Existences, Principles are hollow
embodying certain equations of forces. It is the moulds unless they are filled with the breath
delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the of God’s delight.
endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated
with the rapture of His own power of endless These things are images, but all is an image.
creation. Abstractions give us the pure conception of
God’s truths; images give us their living reality.
We may speak of the Supreme as if He were a
mathematician working out a cosmic sum in If Idea embracing Force begot the worlds, Delight
numbers or a thinker resolving by experiment of Being begot the Idea. Because the Infinite

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