Page 31 - All India Magazine Dec-2024

Is the Moment of Death Predestined

Q: You have said: “One can neither hasten nor delay its hour.” *... Does
this mean that from one’s birth the day and the moment of death are
predestined?

No. This is altogether something else and on another plane. I have
written elsewhere that one dies only when one consents to die
— which seems to contradict what I have said here. But this is the
truth. I have told you this once already, I believe; in any case, I have
written it somewhere. There are two points of view. Here I have
taken quite an ordinary, material point of view, that of the physical
consciousness. But I have explained somewhere that there are, as it
were, different “layers of determinisms” in our being. The physical
existence has a determinism; the vital existence has a determinism;
the mental existence has a determinism; the higher mental, the psy-
chic have a determinism. And then the higher existences have deter-
minisms — the supramental existence has a determinism. And the
determinism of everyone comes from the combination of all these
determinisms. If, for instance, at a given moment, when the entire
physical determinism must necessarily bring death, you suddenly
enter into contact with an extremely high determinism, like the su-
pramental one, for example, and you succeed in joining the two,
you change your physical determinism completely at that moment:
death which had been determined by the physical determinism is
abolished, and the conditions change and are pushed back.
I do not speak of this in that article.* I have taken a purely ma-
terial point of view. I have given the example of people (and people
who lived almost exclusively in their material consciousness, their
physical consciousness, you understand, mental, vital and mate-
rial), and who eagerly wanted to die from the time they were fifty
— they lived to be eighty-seven! I have had an instance of that. I
had another example the very opposite of this, of someone who

All India Magazine, December 2024 31