Page 24 - All India Magazine Dec-2024

ment of passing from the mortal plane of living, the importance of
our then state of consciousness becomes evident. But it is not a
deathbed remembrance at variance with or insufficiently prepared
by the whole tenor of our life and our past subjectivity that can
have this saving power. The thought of the Gita here is not on a
par with the indulgences and facilities of popular religion; it has
nothing in common with the crude fancies that make the absolu-
tion and last unction of the priest, an edifying “Christian” death
after an unedifying profane life or the precaution or accident of
a death in sacred Benares or holy Ganges a sufficient machinery
of salvation. The divine subjective becoming on which the mind
has to be fixed firmly in the moment of the physical death, yaW
smaran bhDvaW tyajati ante kalevaram, must have been one into
which the soul was at each moment growing inwardly during the
physical life, sadDtad-bhDva-bhDvitaU. “Therefore,” says the divine
Teacher, “at all times remember me and fight; for if thy mind and
thy understanding are always fixed on and given up to Me, mayi
arpita-mano-buddhiU, to Me thou shalt surely come. For it is by
thinking always of him with a consciousness united with him in
an undeviating Yoga of constant practice that one comes to the
divine and supreme Purusha.”
CWSA 19: 295-296 Sri Aurobindo

Q: The time and the way of death, are these not always chosen
by the soul? In the great destructions of mankind by bombing,
flood, earthquake, have all the souls chosen to die together
at that moment?

The immense majority of men have a collective destiny.
For them the question does not arise at all. One who has an
individualised psychic being can survive even in the midst of
collective catastrophes, if that is his soul’s choice.
CWM 11: 61 The Mother

24 All India Magazine, December 2024