Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Himself and the Ashram

The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35

His Life and Attempts to Write about It
On His Published Prose Writings

Passages from The Riddle of This World [6]

I have always believed that there was an existence after death akin to our existence in this world minus the physical body.

The soul goes out in a subtle body.

On the strength of certain phenomena that did not appear to me to be capable of being summarily dismissed, I further believed that after a period of confusion immediately following death, the recollections of the life just preceding returned, and persisted till rebirth.

Only for a time, not till rebirth — otherwise the stamp could be so strong that remembrance of past births even after taking a new body would be the rule rather than the exception.

I was also disposed to believe that in cases of pure and unalloyed attachment the relationships of one birth persisted in successive births, the number depending on the strength of attachment.

This is possible, but not a law — as a rule the same relationship would not be constantly repeated — the same people often meet again and again on earth in different lives, but the relations are different. The purpose of rebirth would not be served if the same personality with the same relations and experiences were incessantly repeated.

All these beliefs were shattered to pieces when someone drew my attention to certain statements of yours in the book The Riddle of This World [pp. 53 – 54, 58 – 60], in which I understood you to say that in the case of forms of life lower than man there is a complete annihilation of the ego on death.

That is not the case.

I further understood you to say that in the case of man, the ego persisted in a static condition of complete rest and carried with it (except in a very few exceptional cases) only the essence of the experiences and the inclinations gathered and acquired in the life just preceding.

This is said not of the ego, but of the psychic being after it has shed its vital and other sheaths and is resting in the psychic world. Before that it passes through vital and other worlds on its way to the psychic plane.

I would like to know whether it is possible to come into direct touch with those who have departed from this world.

Yes, so long as they are near enough to the earth (it is usually supposed by those who have occult experience that it is for three years only) or if they are earth-bound or if they are of those who do not proceed to the psychic plane but linger near the earth and are soon reborn.

Universal statements cannot be easily made about these things — there is a general line, but individual cases vary to an almost indefinite extent.

[Note by Sri Aurobindo to his secretary:] You will tell him that I do not carry on correspondence usually with people outside, but as his questions were from the book, I have asked you to give him my answers to his questions.

28 February 1938