A friend of mine on Facebook , Bhaskar Ganesh , posted this poem below today on his own page inviting comments from his fellow FB friends :
Death is nothing at all
I have only slipped away into the next room
I am I and you are you
Whatever we were to each other
That we are still
Call me by my old familiar name
Speak to me in the easy way you always used
Put no difference into your tone
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow
Laugh as we always laughed
At the little jokes we always enjoyed together
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was
Let it be spoken without effort
Without the ghost of a shadow in it
Life means all that it ever meant
It is the same as it ever was
There is absolute unbroken continuity
What is death but a negligible accident?
Why should I be out of mind
Because I am out of sight?
I am waiting for you for an interval
Somewhere very near
Just around the corner
All is well.
Nothing is past; nothing is lost
One brief moment and all will be as it was before
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!
—- Canon Henry Scott-Holland, 1847-1918, Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral
The above lines are not only very moving but also philosophical in mood, content and intent. So, it instantly brought to my mind the words of the Bhagavath Gita which I thought encapsulated in 4 simple lines of stirring Sanskrit poesy the very same pith of the substance the above 28 lines of the English stanza contain…
वासांसि जीर्णानि यथा विहाय
नवानि गृह्णाति नरोऽपराणि |
तथा शरीराणि विहाय जीर्णा
न्यन्यानि संयाति नवानि देही || 22||
vāsānsi jīrṇāni yathā vihāya
navāni gṛihṇāti naro ’parāṇi
tathā śharīrāṇi vihāya jīrṇānya
nyāni sanyāti navāni dehī
i.e. As a person sheds worn-out garments and wears new ones, likewise, at the time of death, the soul casts off its worn-out body and enters a new one.
Bhagavath Gita II.22
Your beloved departed ones have not departed …. they are still alive and are around you … except they they’ve assumed different bodily form…. So grieve not for them … and pine not forever.
In Vedanta , there is the concept of sthoola Sareera and sukshma sareera … the gross and subtle bodily forms with which the soul chooses to clothe or dress itself. If we understand the concept well , we will neither grieve for the loss of our beloved ones nor will we fear Death that we too will meet one day.
We must understand and appreciate that every soul —- including our very own — has the right to chose the dress (sareera) it wants to wear … And so it surely will…
No force or being on earth can impose upon the Atma that it should remain wearing only the same dress in which we might want it to always see it in … That would be very selfish of us.
And most importantly … we must prepare ourselves to let our own Atma free to choose the dress it will want to change into one day …. We must actively and eagerly aid it in fact in all ways possible to make the best and most elegant sartorial choice for what it knows is best suited for it.
Another friend interjected : “ Who is the “we” that you are referring to ? And do you mean that “we” is different from our Atma? Do you imply that the “we” own the Atma in some sort of proprietary way ?! That somehow doesn’t seem right to me … (In other words, doesn’t Vedanta say “Tat tvam Asi!” “that thou art!”? … In which case how can I or We, as you seem to imply, “own” my or our Atma when I am or we are the Atma itself ?”
Well, my dear friend, you don’t seem to understand that the We (or I) is the Manas , the mind … In other words, there is the Atma with which we find ourselves to be wholly and forever unable to identify … and then there is the Manas with which our whole being relates to completely …
Hence , the Manas grieves mistakenly for the loss of all its beloved ones and also fears the impending end of itself … And all that’s because it does not know yet the real nature of the Atma well enough to get wholly identified with it…
But that’s about all I am going to say on the matter. Besides wanting to only share a few of my fleeting thoughts that got triggered by the lines of English poetry quoted above, I had not really intended to launch into any long-winded (and perhaps boring?) reflections on Vedantic ideas.
Sudarshan Madabushi