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Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo
with God or eternal self in me, but with all humanity and other beings, is growing to be the most prominent strain in our minds and it has to be taken more largely into account in any future ideas or computation of the significance of rebirth and karma."'45
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The soul needs no proof of its rebirth any more than it needs proof of its immortality. Time comes when it is consciously immortal and is also aware of its eternal and immutable essence. Once that realization is accomplished, all intellectual quests, for and against the immortality of the soul fall away. So, there also comes a time when self or soul becomes aware of itself. It is then aware of the ages behind that constituted the past moments. How it was prepared to the interrupted past becomes the known fact. When this state is gained, nothing is left to be known.
Human
Hence birth and death are not sheer accidents. life is not a mere chance-product. It is a term in a graded series, through which the secret spirit in the universe develops his purpose gradually. The individual has two aspects, a spiritual person and a soul of personality. As the spiritual impersonal person, he is one with Sacchidananda, while as the soul of personality, his own evolution must follow the law of cosmic evolution. The soul is not a by-product of body, life or mind. Hence it can pass to the stages higher or lower to them. It may adopt different bodies according to its various manifestations. "The soul is not bound by the formula of mental humanity; it did not begin with that and will not end with it; it had a prehuman past, it has a superhuman future."46 The individual soul develops from form to form till it reaches man. The transition from lower to higher from animal to man is too decisive to reverse. Thus the natural law is the recurrence of birth in new human forms. When we express a spiritual significance to cosmic evolution, not limited to our own place but a part of a larger universal totality, rebirth becomes an absolute necessity.
Rebirth refers to the old world also. Since our world is not the only world, the soul does not enter the body immediately after death. For Sri Aurobindo, if the experiences of the soul are complex, there must be an internal relation between
