Know as we’d what actually happens when we die, we spend our lives trembling on the truth of our finitude, attempting to wrest from it some higher poetic fact — one thing that slakes the soul’s thirst for which means. Even the spiritual materialists amongst us are haunted by incomprehension on the cessation of consciousness — how can this whole carnival of marvel simply, at some point, soften into nothingness? And what, in the long run, does all of it imply, will all of it have meant?
These questions come alive within the 1908 e-book An Indian Study of Love and Death (public library | public domain) by the Irish trainer and activist Margaret Elizabeth Noble (October 18, 1867–October 13, 1911), christened Sister Nivedita by Swami Vivekananda after she emigrated to Calcutta when she was twenty-one to start devoting her life to India and the sacred seek for which means.
To be clear, Sister Nivedita’s intimation that the soul is immortal is a essentially unprovable truth — a declare counter to everything we know about the universe, past the attain of our empiricism — and but radiating it from it’s that bigger poetic fact Whitman too touched, as did Tracy K. Smith, which is its personal comfort, its personal consecration.
Sister Nivedita writes:
All issues convey forth their opposites… Life is a rhythm, a rhythm of rhythms, and rhythm is however a steady motion from one level to the reverse. Each expertise inside life is made up of such motion between two, and we can not conceive that life itself ought to be totally different from all its components. But when so, it should itself, in expertise, be succeeded by loss of life. Bodily consciousness should be succeeded by bodily unconsciousness. Manifestation by non-manifestation. This mode of performing and realizing, by not performing and never realizing on this mode.
But as I’m myself a relentless issue, in my very own waking and sleeping, in well being and in illness, so there should be an element which stays fixed, and undergoes this expertise, of loss of life in addition to of life. This issue we name the soul.
The soul then persists.
[…]
For the soul dwells ever within the presence of the soul. At loss of life, a veil that confused and dimmed has been withdrawn. We could weep for the veil, as for the wearer of the veil?
Such a conception of the soul renders it one thing totally different from consciousness — for we now know that consciousness is a full-body phenomenon that doesn’t survive the entropic undoing of loss of life. Sister Nivedita paints the afterlife she imagines for this supra-conscious entity:
To the soul, time doesn’t exist. Solely her personal nice objective exists, shining clear and regular by the mists earlier than her.
To her, loss of life brings no change. Loss of life modifications the physique alone. The soul loses not her personal consciousness: she loses body-consciousness. And that’s all.
The cares of the physique are gone. The hopes and fears and recollections of the physique not exist. However that which was the lifetime of the soul, the considered God, or the craving to bless, or the burning hope of fact, stays nonetheless, gathers ever to its excellent consummation within the everlasting.
However inside this metaphysical meditation is a quiet invitation for one thing else, one thing consummately earthly — it doesn’t matter what occurs at loss of life, think about what life can be like if lived with a passionate love of fact and “the craving to bless” every little thing it touches. Think about.
