Wednesday, September 11, 2013

VIII: 5

Chapter 8, Verse 5

"Whosoever, in those final moments,
Thinks of me
In truth comes into my very being.
At the time of death,
That one comes to me.

Swami Shivananda:

You who practice profound meditation on God throughout your life will be able to meet death with an unruffled mind.  Your whole mind will be absorbed into him.  You will not allow any outside impressions wherein there will be one iota of selfish desire to sink into your subconscious mind.  Then you can think of God exclusively at the time of death and enter into his very being.

Sri Aurobindo:

Here Krishna lays great stress on the thought and state of mind at the time of death, which is difficult to understand unless we recognize the creative power of consciousness.  What your thought, inner regard and faith, Shraddha, settles upon with a consecrated insistence, into that our inner being will evolve.

You steadily become that which you keep your mind and heart fixed upon and towards which you constantly aspire.  Each lapse of thought and each infidelity of the memory means always the retardation of the evolution, a fall in its process and a return to what you were before, insofar as you have not substantially and irrevocably fixed your new becoming.  When you have accomplished it, when you have made it par for the course, the memory of it remains self-existently, because that now is the natural form of your consciousness.

This teaching of Krishna is on a different level from the indulgences of popular religion.  It has nothing in common, for example, with the fantasy that makes the precaution of a death in sacred Kashi a sufficient machinery of salvation.

The divine becoming on which the mind and heart become fixed firmly in the moment of physical death must have been one in which you were growing inwardly during the physical life.  If birth is a becoming, death also is a becoming, and not by any means a cessation.  The body is abandoned, but the soul goes on its way.

A friend:

I have always believed that the state of consciousness is what matters at the time of death.  No matter what kind of a life you have led, if you have peace and love in your heart, that's what counts.  The thing is...

How do you get to that point in the last instant?

It is by constant practice.

[There are many things in our lives for which we can make substitutions.  If we want less dairy in our diets, we can try nut milk.  If we want to stop putting lots of carbon dioxide in the air, we can sell the car and buy a bicycle.  However, there's no substitute for Sadhana.  Fortunately, there are so many Sadhanas for so many different temperaments.  Find the Sadhana that is right for you, and follow through with it to the end.]

No comments:

Related Posts with Thumbnails