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24
Law of Karma
spiritual individual, a true Purusa. The recognition of this great truth is another original feature of Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy. “The immense importance of the individual being”, he says, “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 cosmic Being or spirit and both are powers of the Eternal."43
The individual Puruşa, in working out his cosmic relations, has to assume a body. This assumption of body is called birth. It is only through this that we have progressive development of our being towards unity. Birth, therefore, is an essential condition of the manifestation of Puruşa on the Physical plane. But this birth cannot be imagined without a past which was preparatory to it or a future for its fulfilment. Birth, therefore, of an individual soul in a body must be continued in other births and must have been preceded by other births. The progressive evolution of the spirit in the cosmos has its counterpart in the progressive evolution of the individual soul through different births. If rebirth were not a fact, then the evolution of the self or soul also ceases to be a fact.
Aurobindo points out, “Rebirth is necessary as birth itself; for without it, birth would be an initial step without a sequel, the starting of a journey without its further step and arrival. It is rebirth that gives to the birth of an incomplete being in a body its promise of completeness and its spiritual signi. ficance."44
Moreover, it is evident that in one life we can not exhaust all the powers and values of that life. We can only carry out a past thread, weave out something in the present, and prepare infinitely more for the future. Due to this reason also, we have to accept the notion of rebirth.
“It is certain that while we are here, rebirth or karma even while it runs on its own lines, is intimately one with the same • lines in the universal existence. But my self-knowledge and alf-findiąg too do-not abolish my oneness with other life and other beings. This idea of universality, of oneness got only
