Few days back, while I was reading the book “The Problem of Rebirth” written by Sri. Maharshi Aurobindo few thoughts have intricated my mind on Reborn or Rebirth of Humans. As I am in a constant search to find answers to these some of the complex questions in life like; Who am I? What’s the purpose of my existence? Is there a meaning for life? Did I exists before? Perhaps, since centuries people are trying to find a conclusive answers to these questions via by doing meditation, prayers, chants, dervish whirls, sadhus mutilates their flesh, some penitents crawl a hundred miles on their kneels or some Native Americans pierce themselves in the Sun Dance! May be: one has to feel, absorb, inundate oneself or relook ‘inside’ to experience these answers? Anyhow, while pondering on ‘Rebirth’ I took some notes like below:
Is Man Reborn?
HUMAN mind today has grown very sceptic about the greatest truth ever told about man that he is reborn. It has ever remained a ‘faith’ and has never been proved by modern methods of science. As such it needs some sort of scientific treatment before it can claim the status of a ‘fact’ rather than a ‘faith.’
Before any scientific investigation of the subject proceeded with, it should be remembered that science has its limitations. Its scope stops with the flesh, blood, bone and the nerves; their formation and development, their action and reaction, in short, all that is ‘material’ and pertains to the ‘material’. Beyond this, science can know nothing about a non-material entity hidden within man, whether at all it exists or does not exists, whether it had a life before birth or would have another after death. Nor can science claim any authority on a subject-matter like this. The theory of rebirth, therefore, shall have to be settled more by psychological evidence rather than physical.
In my opinion, it can also be established that ‘matter’ (including the body) itself an inference of the ‘mind.’ It is, so to say, purely an effect of a psychic event and therefore can never be its cause. The body thus is itself an effect of some psychic processes and not vice versa.
To think that the ‘psyche’ also is destroyed with the destruction of the body will be as much a folly as it would be to think that waves are destroyed with the destruction of the receiving set.
The body serves only as an instrument, created and possessed by the psyche, to record as well as transmit a certain event. The destruction of the instrument does not mean that its creator and possessor also is destroyed! Or, that its creator and possessor cannot create and another instrument as he pleases !
To comprehend these would lead to the dogma of ‘Karma‘ theory of Hindu Philosophy. It be mentioned that if a “law of cause and effect” holds true in the physical plane, surely the same must equally hold true in the mental plane within!
In relation to this, here is what Maharshi Aurobindo said about the fundamental meaning of Karma in his “The Problem of Rebirth.”
“In fact there is within his being a power of development, a power of change, or in the language of our modern conceptions, an evolutionary power. His nature is what it is because he has so made it by his past; he has induced this present formulation by a precedent ‘will’ in this spirit. He has risen to humanity by the force of his spirit and by the power of the All-Soul out of the vast possibilities of universal Nature. He has developed by his own long evolution of that humanity the character and law of action of his present individual being, he has built his own height and form of human nature. He may change what he has made, he may rise even, if that be within the possibilities of the universe, beyond human and to or towards super human nature. It is the possibility of the and universal Nature and her law that determines his natural being and action, but it is part of her law to be subject to the spirit, and she will develop in reply to an insistent call; for then she must respond, she must supply the needed energy, she must determine the acts in that direction, she must assure its issue. His past present and his present nature and the environment he has secured may present constant obstacles, but they must still yield in the end to the evolutionary ‘will’ in him in proportion to its sincerity, wholeness and instance. All the possibility of the All-being is in him, all the power of the All-being is in him. This evolution and all its circumstances, his life, its form, its events, its values arise out of that urge and are shaped according to the past, present or future active ‘will’ of his spirit. As is his use of energy, so was and will be the return of the universal energy to him now and hereafter.”
sivaayyala 