Resolving Mystery of Death

by Vimla S. Bhagat

Death is not a problem to be solved, it is a mystery to be entered into.

Marcel

We are living in a world bristling with problems. Each one has his own problems of one kind or another, may be personal and private or of social and public nature – economic, political, racial and religious.

The field of problems is vast and varied in nature. As many men, so many problems – nay, hundredfold for every one has problems at every step, from the cradle to the grave: making life itself a long line of problems. An individual without any problem becomes himself problematic for the family and the physicians – a pathological case, to be diagnosed and treated for this aberration.

Living in the world of problems, we never get time even to understand what the term ‘problem’ implies. It is something doubtful and difficult, something hard to understand. For the geometricians, it is a proposition in which something has to be done. For the logicians it is n question involved in the syllogism and for the physicist an enquiry starting from a certain hypothesis for further investigation. This then is the nature of a problem, a proposition to be worked out from a supposition or assumption without any reference to its truth, and we try to reach at the required conclusion. It is all a play of human ingenuity, an intellectual jugglery that may sharpen the wits by a process of reasoning born of a heated brain without reaching out at any truth that may stand solid for all times.

All our self-created problems in which we are inextricably mixed up belong to the phenomenal world without us and we solve them for the most part impersonally, without personal self-involvement. The Life-Principle, the mysterious vital being in us, enlivening the body, mind and intellect, runs far deeper in us and is not affected at all by our outer activities. The being is quite different from having. The being and the non-being are not problems of the mind and the intellect and as such cannot be solved on the human level. The state of non-being or what in popular parlance is known as death comes on by the withdrawal of the being in us. The death of which we are so mortally afraid of is itself a great mystery, and like all other mysteries, it is something hidden, inexplicable and mystifying because of the Divine Element involved in the process. Though we are unwittingly participating in the mysteries of life yet we cannot solve them as we do a Euclidean problem.

In order to reach to the hard core of any mystery, one far from being a silent and helpless spectator looking passively on and dumbly accepting the inevitable when it comes, one has actively to plunge headlong into it and forestall the event. This requires a courage and elan of the highest order. Unless one, while alive, consciously passes through the mysterious valley of the shadow of death, one cannot resolve the mystery of death. To get to True Knowledge of Reality at the bottom of the mystery, one has to transcend the mystery itself and plunge headlong into its deepest depths.

True Knowledge or the Knowledge of Truth is an action of the soul independent of the senses.

Those who are initiated into the mysteries of the beyond, have to pass through experience akin to those of death,

says St Augustine.

And this experience, hard though it may seem, is a possibility simple and sure if one could take hold of the Saving Life-Lines so graciously provided by Providence in the human organism, in the form of the Light of Life – the audible Life-Stream in which we unknowingly live, move and have our very being. It is a transcendent experience of death-in-life, right here and now, ‘swallowing death in victory,’ as exclaimed by St Paul. So the mystery of death, though it cannot be solved, but it can be resolved by just slipping into the domain of death through a point-like window – smaller than a mustard seed (Chh. Up. 3:1) or like the eye of a needle, as Jesus puts it and then treading thc ancient Path that stretches far away into the unknown and the unknowable (Brih. Up. 4:4,8), and plumb the secrets ut Yama – the Lord of Death – as prince Nachiketas did (Kath. Up.).

To find the True Life, one has to lose the false one of the world and take to the ‘death-cold’ Path 1eading to Eternity. This the mystic death through which, those who seek the light of wisdom, have to pass undeterred. There is no go without it for the seekers after Truth.

The surest way into Truth,

says Henri Bergson,

is by perception, by intuition, by reasoning to a certain point, and then finally by taking a mortal leap.