Life and Death: Incredible Journey To Immortality

By KAMLESH DIXIT

The enormity of death is felt by people when they lose someone close to them. Knowledge and spirituality are often the light at the end of the tunnel in such moments of sadness. A human being who has died, is like a torch extinguished.

However, the flame of his life burns in his children, friends, work, and in his ideas. He has enriched the earth on which he has walked, the rivers in which he has bathed, and the living beings with whom he has been in communion.

According to the  Upanishads  , death marks the end of a commerce with life, a transmission of all a person has received and the completion of a journey. What is important and what the world remembers is how well one has lived this journey.

Not every man attains immortality . Spiritual growth separates the immortal from the mortal. The asu or life-principle, the power of life or vital strength, is considered by some traditions to be ahamkara , the selfish ego of unfulfilled desires and unachieved projects. This ego is impure; it consists of unburnt karmas; it is afraid of death, because it must certainly die. There is, on the other hand, the personal atman , that spark of the paramatman , which does not die.

The Katha Upanishad enunciates the essence of death, the Great Departure or Mahaprasthana . The temporal world is not everything, human life is not exhausted in space and time and the person is not totally dissolved into his constituent elements. In other words, there is another world.

The other world is intimately connected with this world. Human life on earth conditions the other world. The last rites for the dead, blessings for their journey, and the climactic moment of death are important - they condition the new form of human existence and open the gates to the other world.

The Great Departure , according to the Upanishads , is not to another parallel, superior, or inferior world - it is a departure from the human condition itself. We discard our spatio-temporal, corporeal trappings and move to the other 'shore', suggestive of the existence of another realm. Brahma - nirvana has no shores. They are visible, as a mirage, only from this side.

The Upanishads do not place the other world outside this life. The difference between real, liberated life, and the unauthentic existence of the life of the senses or the body, is so radical that the former could be immanent in the latter. The atman is so different from and so superior to the body that it does not rest on or depend upon the body - as is forcefully affirmed in expressions like 'the world is a great illusion'.

Death, therefore, is not seen as an end ; it is a gate. Samsara is not the cosmos; it is the world in its dynamic and evolutionary aspect. It implies both change and continuity; it is a cyclical process of all the elements of this world. Together with the idea of karma, the notion of samsara suggests the contingency of all things, their inter-relationship, and the dynamic nature of all the elements of the empirical world. The universality of death gives it a superhuman and quasi-divine status.

Through death, immortality is achieved. Immortality is not deathlessness, the mere continuation of a given earthly and temporal condition; it is the overcoming of death, passing through it and reaching the other shore, a shore that can exist only because the river of death lies between it and life. Death is the very condition of authentic life; it is the door to the realm where man can fully be what he ultimately is.

As the Bhagavad Gita says:  ''Death is certain for all that is born / and birth for all that dies/ therefore for what is unavoidable/ you should not be distressed'' . (II.27)

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See also: Life and Death, Life and Beyond, Death and Dying, Body Mind and Soul)