Karma and Rebirth

Author(s): T G Kalghatgi
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 77

T. G. Kalghatgi
Such persons will remain for a long time in the stupified state in the Devachan and then they are reborn on this earth. According to the nature of the intensity of impulses which varies with individuals some men may remain in the Devachan state for one, ten or a number of years in accordance with the force of the impulses generated in life and the time required for the average person to exhaust psychic energies and impulses generated in life is from 1000 to 15000 years, and as the masses of persons return from Devachan in that cycle, it must follow that the Roman, the old Aryan and other ages will be seen again and can to a great extent be plainly. traced. Only when the force of the soul's aspirations and higher desires. has been exhausted can the Ego be again attracted to the earth, drawn by the pulling or magnetic force of the thirst for life inherent in all beings. and fixed in the depths of their essential nature." This is the picture, the theosophists have given, of the journey of the soul and reincarnation.
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Sri Aurobindo rails at the attempt of religious philosophers to justify the belief in the theory of rebirth on traditional moral grounds. It may be comforting to believe that good men will be rewarded and the wicked will suffer in the next life. The ideas of after-life and rebirth as fields of punishment and reward were needed at a lower stage of development. But after a certain stage, the theory ceases to be really effective.
The true foundation of rebirth is to be found in the evolution of the soul, or rather its efflorescence out of the veil of Matter and its gradual selffinding. Buddhism contained this turth. Hinduism knew it of old, but afterwards missed the right balance of its expression. 'Now we are again able to restate the ancient truth in a new language and this is already being done. by certain schools of thought, though, still the old incrustations tend to tack themselves on the deeper wisdom.' Sri Aurobindo explains hist concepts of cosmic and individual evolution. The individual plays an important role in evolution. "The immense importance of the individual being which increases as he rises in the scale, is the most remarkable and significant fact of a universe which started without consciousness and without individuality in an undifferentiated Nescience. This importance can only be justified if the Self as individual is no less real than the Self as no less real than the Self as cosmic Being or Spirit and both are powers of the eternal." From this, Sri Aurobindo conIcludes that rebirth is a necessity, and an outcome of the root nature of our existence. The individual is a product of plunge into self-oblivion by which the sense of identity with the universe is lost and a consciousness of a
64. Ibid. p. 15.
65. Sri Aurobindo: Problem of Rebirth. Pondicherry, 1952, p. 12. 66. Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, Vol. II. Pt. II p 704.