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 Lights on Yoga [10]

“The ego... does not cease with the body” [pp. 16–17]. Does this mean that it is carried by the psychic as a separate principle after death, just as the psychic sometimes carries with it a highly developed mental or vital being, or does it mean that it is taken up in the psychic as a seed-saṃskāra or that it exists side by side with the psychic in the after-death state?

It is only meant that the separative ego is not a creation of birth in the physical body; the mental and the vital have it also. So long as the mental and vital are subject to ignorance, the ego will last also. When the psychic being goes into rest it naturally takes it with the essence of its past experience and in coming back it takes up a mental, vital and physical existence which has the mark of the ego and the ignorance.

29 October 1935