Page 9 - All India Magazine Dec-2024

If There Were No Siege of Death

“Death is the question Nature puts continually to Life and her
reminder to it that it has not yet found itself. If there were no
siege of death, the creature would be bound forever in the form
of an imperfect living. Pursued by death he awakes to the idea
of perfect life and seeks out its means and its possibility.”
Thoughts and Glimpses, SABCL, Vol. 16, p. 386

This is a question which every person whose consciousness is
awakened a little has asked himself at least once in his life. There
is in the depths of the being such a need to perpetuate, to pro-
long, to develop life, that the moment one has a first contact with
death, which, although it may be quite an accidental contact, is
yet inevitable, there is a sort of recoil in the being.
In persons who are sensitive, it produces horror; in others, in-
dignation. There is a tendency to ask oneself: “What is this mon-
strous farce in which one takes part without wanting to, without
understanding it? Why are we born, if it is only to die? Why all this
effort for development, progress, the flowering of the faculties,
if it is to come to a diminution ending in decline and disintegra-
tion?...” Some feel a revolt in them, others less strong feel despair
and always this question arises: “If there is a conscious Will behind
all that, this Will seems to be monstrous.”
But here Sri Aurobindo tells us that this was an indispensable
means of awakening in the consciousness of matter the need for
perfection, the necessity of progress, that without this catastro-
phe, all beings would have been satisfied with the condition they
were in — perhaps.... This is not certain.
But then, we have to take things as they are and tell ourselves
that we must find the way out of it all.
The fact is that everything is in a state of perpetual progres-
sive development, that is, the whole creation, the whole universe

All India Magazine, December 2024 9