Page 4 - All India Magazine Dec-2024
P. 4

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
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