An obituary

I did not know him personally, yet heard many anecdotes of him from his mother. They were very fond of him. He died a year or two after this photo was taken. Long afterwards, almost eight years later, his mother had a daughter born to her and it is she who sent this photograph to me. It was only last week that the sister - who never saw this particular elder brother, for he died long before she was born - sent me his photo, remembering him on his birthday. His birthday fell on the 18th of August. The year was 1972.

So I thought let me remember him too, and sit down to write a few lines about the little I know about him. He was born in Calcutta (the current name of this eastern city is Kolkata, after how the natives call it themselves, Calcutta being an Anglicised version of the name) but the father (incidentally the father is no more; he passed away last year) being posted in Asansol, the baby was taken to that town and he grew up there. There cannot be many incidents in a short life. He was put in a preparatory school called Ananda Marg - a beautiful name isn't it? - and when this photo was taken he was visiting the Himalayas with his parents and maternal grandfather.

The most interesting part is about his death. He had this disease all the time and it could not be detected clinically, so subtle it is. It is in fact a universal malady, and it spares no one, man or woman, rich or poor, and it affects the saint and the sinner equally. It is called Life. Our whole existence is afflicted with this disease called Life.
All living things are submerged in this sea of Life. It brings death every moment and we are not aware of it, just like our little boy was not aware of it. It is inescapable and unavoidable.

But how does this disease act and with what results? It is said by people who know, "Death has no reality except as a process of life." Equally life as we know it, in ourselves and in others, is nothing but a constant death. That is the truth of the matter. In our ordinary mentality the ideas we hold about life and death with all the consequent reactions of happiness or recoil are illusions of the mind. There is no separate name that can be given to this phenomenon; we cant separately call it life, neither can we call it death. Nor are there two separate entities one called life and the other death. It is one thing, one energy, irrespective of what we choose to call it.

How, then, does this one thing effect such vastly different results? For on the one hand we can imagine exuberant youth, boisterous childhood, energetic and lively growth - what we call the May of life - and on the other we are familiar with the picture of old age, of decadence, of wearing away, and finally of cessation that we call death. If it were just one principle and one uniform action without variance then why such widely disparate results?

The question is invalid because it it based on a false premise. More specifically, ours is a  false perception based on our mental samskaras or habits. There is an underlying principle which we must grasp with all our mind and heart in order to be able to cast off this veil of false perception. Point one: there is in fact only one principle of expansion that works everywhere in the universe. Point two: we are fundamentally disillusioned in thinking of this universe as a conglomeration of numberless separate entities - all is actually an inseparable and indivisible vast sea of Life. Just like we cannot assign any permanent existent value to particular waves in the ocean, so we cannot affirm our or our fellow beings' existence as separate from the whole. Just like each wave is an ephemeral and infinitesimal expression of the one existent ocean and the former has no separate law-of-existence-by-itself, so we are just waves of one sea of Life - now rising, reaching a crest, now falling and disappearing forever, but leaving the ocean unchanged. If Mr A thinks very highly of himself as a separate and distinct individual then there is only a superficial (a phenomenal) truth in his contention but the reality, in spite of the great individuality of Mr A, asserts itself otherwise with obvious results: he ages and he dies.

So what is this principle of expansion by which the universal Life functions? It is simply that: an instinct, an impulse to grow, spread, expand, increase. However the conditions under which it does so are unfortunate. There is no harmony and self-giving in the universe yet as the process of this expansion, rather all the opposites - devouring, strife, clash. Individual waves of life clashing and devouring to increase and expand themselves. So naturally there will be victims if there are to be victors! The rule of mutual help and growth is still an unknown or foreign principle and its vistas have not yet opened up in this tumultuous sea.

Even in temporary victorious growth it loses its permanence: for it mutates to something that was not what it was before. All growth as well as decadence is a mutation, a death of the original. Mr A at sixty may look upon Mr A at forty as himself but that would be a samskara and an invalid supposition with no reality to support it. In fact in this great hunger of life, in this immense battleground of mutual devouring he has mutated to something that has no correspondence with his former self. His body has become entirely different: there is not one original cell of a past Mr A in his current body, his life has changed irrevocably, his mind has changed too. A thread perhaps links him to the past, and that thread is memory, but we cannot on that ground say that the past has survived. For then Mr A's mother would remember more of Mr A's childhood than Mr A himself and certainly by that dint she has also a claim to be Mr A!

Even outwardly we see the same devouring action of life. I eat everyday - whether meat or grain - and it is in fact a devouring of another life to grow my own. In wild animals we see this same behaviour. Other realms of life are not so obvious but they exist and their oceans are bigger than this physical earth's. For instance, when I speak with someone face-to-face or over phone, or even communicate by letters, there is always and invariably an interchange. Even without such obvious contacts, the fact is that each one of us is always and unceasingly in a state of exchange with the vast ocean of Life of which we are a part. The yogis are aware of this just as we are aware of out physical world and to communicate they use this ether of life. The guru may help his disciple puissantly without the latter knowing of the action but he would feel the results nonetheless!

I am sorry to have digressed from my original intention of writing an obituary. Coming back to this boy who died,  I admit I feel sorry for him. Just as I feel sorry for myself too. How nice would it have been if no one died. Each could maintain himself and grow by mutual help! Alas that is not yet to be.

Incidentally, this boy's name was also Tirthankar Ghosh.