A common space for harmonic peacemakers

II: 13

Chapter 2, Verse 13

"Just as the spirit of our mortal body

Wanders on in childhood, youth, and old age,

So at death the spirit wanders on

To another kind of body.

About this the wise have no doubts."

Swami Satchidananda:

"One with a calm mind isn't affected when the body undergoes changes. It was conceived, it grows up, dies, then decays and decomposes. There is impermanence in the body. How can that be the immortal soul?"

Ram Dass:

“The belief that nothing exists beyond what we can see, taste, touch, hear, or experience has wide-ranging effects, but none more critical than how we view the cycles of our lives, from birth through maturity, aging, and death. For people who view life only through the filters of the senses, death is the obvious end of the road. According to this material view, we are separate, finite entities living in a world of changing phenomena, waiting for our annihilation. So it’s no great surprise that death and its friends, sickness and old age, have been sources of such dread in this culture, and are so terribly misunderstood. If we begin to open our minds and hearts, however, recognizing the degree to which this kind of thinking has influenced us, we’re able to think and feel outside this box and take a quite different view of the process of aging.”

Sri Aurobindo:

"The wise ones look beyond the apparent facts of the life of the body and the senses to the real fact of their being and rise beyond the desires of the material nature to the true and only aim of human existence. What is that fact and that highest aim? This, that human life and death repeated through the eons in the great cycles of the world are only a long process by which human beings prepare and make themselves fit for immortality. By immortality is meant not the survival of physical death, but rather that ascension by which we learn to live at last in the spirit. Whoever is a slave to suffering, and to sensations and emotions preoccupied by the touches of things transient, cannot become fit for immortality. These things will leave prints in our consciousness until we are able to receive all the material happenings of the world, be they joyful or sorrowful, upon a foundation of calm equality, just as the tranquil, eternal spirit secret within us receives them."