Comparative World Philosophies Final
Sri Aurobindo—The Reincarnating Soul
Sri Aurobindo’s The Reincarnating Soul is an attempt to find the proper point from which we should start our discussion of the possibility of reincarnation. He feels that “human thought” for most people has resorted to “a rough and crude acceptance of unexamined ideas.” This observation holds even truer when the ideas require “subtle thinking” and “precision.” We can manage thought about evident, tangible things, but Sri Aurobindo feels that out of “impatience,” in almost a lazy manner, we are contented with accepting crude ideas.
Reincarnation is one such subject. Aurobindo holds that the idea of reincarnation as popularized by contemporary thought has become popularized in a crude, misleading manner. The popular idea is that of a reincarnating soul, where “the soul is reborn into a new body.” The questions often stop here, with no thought given to the definition of a soul. Is the soul Purusha (Person, or Atman)? Does Purusha simply take up a new body and bring along with it the old personality of the “now discarded physical frame?”
The popular view, as seen by Aurobindo, is that many believe that our identical souls infinitely waft into new bodies after the death of our present physical frame. The crude notion is that the personality is reborn into different “bodily circumstances.” According to Aurobindo, this view satiates those who truly love life and are afraid of the loss of “their” personality at death, for it offers them a promise of survival—a form of immortality, and a way to cope with death. The “obvious non-survival of memory” of past lives, however, is the prime objection to this idea of an identical “I” leaving one body and entering another.
This has not always been the view held of reincarnation. Aurobindo recalls Buddhist and Vedantist thought, which deny the survival of the identical personality. After all, what is an identical personality? Does my present personality persist for more than just a moment before it changes? Buddhist and Vedantist thinkers took this into consideration and determined that an “identical personality was a non-sense, a contradiction in terms.”
Buddhist thought concerning the self “denied any real identity.” As Aurobindo puts it, “The identical ‘I’ is not, never was, never will be.” Rather, we more closely resemble flowing water in a stream—ever changing. Continuing the analogy, however, despite the continually changing water in the stream, the identity of the identical stream remains the same to us. Buddhist thought does not believe that this is an incarnating soul or personality, but a flow of Karma that persists down an “apparently uninterrupted channel.” A major distinction in Buddhist thought, however, is that there can be an end to the permanent flow of Karma with enlightenment, at which point we are brought to a state of non-being.
Vedantist thought is a bit different from Buddhist thought. It also comes to the conclusion that there can be an end to the cycle of rebirth. But, according to Aurobindo, the Vedantist “admits an identical, a self—but other than my personality.” However, when the person achieves the knowledge—the enlightenment—of the real Person, Immortality is achieved. What separates the Vedantist conclusion from the Buddhist one is that there is a distinction in Vedantist thought between the Immortal life and the “constant passing from death to death,” while in Buddhism there is a cessation of being.
Aurobindo asks the question, “Who creates the forms into which we reincarnate?” Vedantist thought ascribes “the Self, the Purusha…” as the answer to this question. Our “ego-sense” then goes on to distort the reality, giving us notions of identity and personality. Indeed, the Purusha is “imperishable, immutable, unborn, undying,” and as such does not exist in the body, but rather, we exist in the Self. We create the illusion of our identities, but we are really all part something much larger.
What, then, are we? What is it that takes form and has personality? Sri Aurobindo says that the changing personality can be called Prakriti, or “the totality of nature that is not Purusha.” This is an intricate, multi-level composite that is “all surface work.” Memories or burdens of the past are set aside allowing us to “concentrate on the work immediately in hand.” Aurobindo sees the body simply as a convenience, and urges us to pay more attention to the Self: “To ignore it is to ignore the whole secret of our being.”