Page 4 - All India Magazine Dec-2024

Significance of Death

Death as a fact has been attached to all life upon earth; but man
understands it in a different sense from the meaning Nature origi-
nally put into it. In man and in the animals that are nearest to his
level, the necessity of death has taken a special form and signifi-
cance to their consciousness; but the subconscious knowledge in
this lower Nature which supports it is a feeling of the necessity of
renewal and change and transformation.
It was the conditions of matter upon earth that made death
indispensable. The whole sense of the evolution of matter has
been a growth from a first state of unconsciousness to an increas-
ing consciousness. And in this process of growth dissolution of
forms became an inevitable necessity, as things actually took
place. For a fixed form was needed in order that the organised
individual consciousness might have a stable support. And yet it
is the fixity of the form that made death inevitable. Matter had to
assume forms; individualisation and the concrete embodiment of
life-forces or consciousness-forces were impossible without it and
without these there would have been lacking the first conditions
of organised existence on the plane of matter. But a definite and
concrete formation contracts the tendency to become at once
rigid and hard and petrified. The individual form persisted as a too
binding mould; it cannot follow the movements of the forces; it
cannot change in harmony with the progressive change in the uni-
versal dynamism; it cannot meet continually Nature’s demand or
keep pace with her; it gets out of the current. At a certain point
of this growing disparity and disharmony between the form and
the force that presses upon it, a complete dissolution of the form
is unavoidable. A new form must be created; a new harmony and
parity made possible. This is the true significance of death and this
is its use in Nature. But if the form can become more quick and
pliant and the cells of the body can be awakened to change with

4 All India Magazine, December 2024