Immortality

An extract from Zarathushtra: The Transcendental Vision by Phiroz Mehta

Some religions promise blissful immortality after death in an eternal heaven to the faithful devotee who has lived the Good Life, and consign unrepentant sinners to everlasting tortures in a permanent hell.

Religions which uphold theories of karma and rebirth teach that, after the effects of all the causes generated by each human being have worked themselves out through many lives on earth — during which he has at last turned his face to the Light and succeeded in realizing perfection and has fully awakened to Truth — man will then be one with the Ultimate Reality, or be united with God, or enjoy everlasting fellowship with God, perpetually standing in the Divine Presence. Heaven, Nirvana, Paradise, Garo-demana, the Happy Lands, etc., will be the reward, a final payment, for him as an individual, self-conscious being.

Man is in thrall to duality. Credit and debit, success and failure, gain and loss, reward and punishment, pleasure and pain — all these duals dominate his deeds, misguide his mind and lead him astray. Being isolatively self-conscious, it is difficult for him to walk out of his ego-centred prison — self-condemned to hard labour which brings only conflict and insecurity, misery and despair, not only to him but also those around him. Such is man who is still in his sub-human stage of development. And yet, this self-same creature, man, is indeed Transcendence embodied, bearing within himself a wonderful spiritual heritage and a divine potential.

Founders of religions have been credited by their followers with being sons of God, as with Zarathushtra and Jesus, or as being God incarnate, as with Shree Krishna. As such, omniscience has been ascribed to them, just as it has been ascribed to Gotama the Buddha. The masses imagine that this omniscience is an encyclopaedic knowledge of the whole cosmos, including man, and all its past, present and future, as also of celestial realms invisible to us ordinary people.

All true spiritual teachers thoroughly understand the human psyche. Compared with us, they are omniscient in this sphere. They are “soul-healing Lords of Wisdom”. By the complete understanding and purification and the consequent healing of their own psyches, they become eminently qualified to diagnose the illness of any soul and to suggest the right remedy. Their prescription is always a suggestion, never a compulsion. If the patient is sensible, he will do the needful. If not, the consequences will be his.

Such spiritual teachers were living examples of the apothegm mens sana in corpore sano, a healthy mind in a healthy body, which is the one meaning of haurvatat. They well knew the power of the healthy psyche to heal, through asha, the entire psycho-physical existential being and maintain him in perfect health, so that the person could duly realize his spiritual goal. Here lies the significance of the later Avestan prayers in oft-repeated phrases like:

O Lord God, Ahura Mazda, from all my sins do I repent and turn back. From every evil thought, evil word and evil deed, which in this world I may have conceived of, uttered or committed, which from me has come forth, or originated through me; of all such sins of thought, word and deed, pertaining to my body or soul, pertaining to this world or the spiritual world; O Lord! with sincere contrition I repent with three-fold renunciation.

By the accomplished turning away from all evil, the person becomes the New Man.

The Holy Ones clearly understood the ambivalence of the psyche, its relationship to and interaction with one’s innermost consciousness which is not cognized by the brain. This consciousness is the silent watcher and lord, sustainer and consummator of our entire existential being, the microcosm. It does not depend upon sense activity, concept and word for its operation. It is a constant, tranquil influence for the purification and well-being of the psycho-physical person. It is non-compulsive in its action, neither persuading or dissuading. It is universal. It is Transcendence embodied in us, and is not to be mistaken for the ordinary discriminative consciousness (which does depend upon sense activity, concept and word) characterizing the everyday living process of our psycho-physical organism.

Continued in part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5

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