Estimating the benefit enjoyed by a Man-of-Perfection, through the realisation of the Self, it is said that “HAVING ATTAINED ME, THE HIGH-SOULED ONES ARE NO MORE SUBJECT TO RE-BIRTH.” To the philosophically thoughtful, rebirth is the starting point of all pains and imperfections. Krishna also says in the verse that rebirthis a “HOUSE OF PAIN AND IS EPHEMERAL.”
In the history of thought in the Upanishads, it is quite interesting to note how the goal of life, which was considered in the beginning as “the state of deathlessness” (Amritattwa), came to the reckoned, later on, as the “the absence of rebirth” (Na-punar-janma). In the beginning, the anxiety of the seeker was to end the unavoidable and the most horrid of all experiences called ‘death.’ As knowledge increased through the right evaluation of the happenings in life, it soon became clear to the subjective research-scholars, the Rishis, that death had really no sting at all for those who had understood that it is nothing but one of the different experiences in life. Death can in no way clip off the continuity of existence. Those relentless thinkers had, in the logic of their thoughts, come to the conclusion that birth was the beginning of all pains, and therefore, the goal of life, if at all it was possible to achieve, should be “THE STATE OF NO MORE REBIRTH.”
The dream of rebirth and its destinies belongs to the delusory ego, which is nothing but the Unborn Self identifying with its delusory matter-envelopments. Electricity conditioned by the bulb is the light; when the bulb gets broken, the light which is an effect merges with its cause, the current, one-without-a-second, everywhere the same, illumining all the bulbs in the world. Similarly, the Self conditioned by a given mind and intellect is the ego (Jeeva), which suffers the rebirth, the agonies of imperfections, the disease, the decay and the death. The ego comes to rediscover that it is nothing other than the Self, once the mind-intellect equipment has been stilled.
He who thus experiences the Self as his own Real Nature realises that he has never any relationship at all with the equipments of feeling and understanding. Just as an awakened man has no more relationship with his own dream-wife and children, the ego ends its march through the thorny path of pain and finitude, when it awakens to the spiritual cognition of the Self. Such great souls will no more have any need to manifest in the plane of plurality to be presented with the repeated lashes of sorrow and misery.
He who has, through the process of “CONSTANT CONTEMPLATION OF THE SELF” (VIII-14) during his lifetime, learnt to control all the senses, to regulate the mind and the heart, to control and to arrest all pranas in the intellect — he directly comes to identify himself with the Infinite and the Eternal, and shall no more come back into a limited embodiment to continue his futile search for infinite satisfaction among the finite world-of-objects.
BUT ARE THERE ANY WHO COME BACK NOT REACHING THE HIGHEST? LISTEN:
