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Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo
By immortality, we generally mean the immortality of the spirit in man. According to Integral Idealism, man's individual self is transcendent in character. It presides over its protracted evolution through cycles of birth and rebirth. This timeless existence of the Individual self has been described as spiritual immortality. Further, we have maintained that in the inmost centre of a man's embodied existence, there is a psychic being, which is the highest representative of the Individual Soul. The soul evolves with the evolving individual and carries him through a long succession of births and rebirths. This succession is towards the final fruition of the individual self. But the final goal of terrestrial evolution is material immortality.
For Aurobindo, this is, however, an ideal. But this ideal is not impossible, because the physical, the mental and the vital are only the lower manifestation of the constitutive principles of the supreme spirit. To many this notion of material immortality may appear ridiculous, but the puzzle is solved, only when there is the evolution of man into Superman. “The empirical proof of all ideals lies indeed in their effective realisation.''?
Now, Aurobindo points out that psychic being takes birth again and again in order to get spiritual immortality But in this cycle of birth and rebirth, one has to consume one's own previous actions. It is not possible to consume all the effects of all actions in one life. Aurobindo is of the view that no rulc is imposed on a man from outside, whether in the name of a supposed mechanical or impersonal law. When the inner being revealed, evolved, then we get the true, the inner and the intuitive law. An act of justice, truth, love, compassion, purity, sacrifice becomes then the faultless expression of the soul. Nothing is impossible for a man. “Materially you are nothing, spiritually you are cverything. It is only the Indian who can believe everything, dare everything, sacrifice everything."'38
The immortality of the soul can be justified by referring it to the Law of Karma on the basis of rebirth. And the soul needs no proof of its rebirth any more than it needs proof of its
