IMMORTALITY

 

IMMORTALITY

            Immortality is the strongest desire of all human beings. Whether they get it or not is both an illusion and reality.  Illusion in this case is depressive; reality stimulative.  

New-borns don’t have to think about mortality or immorality. It is adults whom they  go on troubling throughout life. The redeeming feature is that some prophets of immortality are also available in person or in their writings to help them soothe their troubled minds .   

            Look at  the following quotes:

The seed dies into a new life, and so does man. Those who live in the Lord never see each other for the last time.  The spirit of man, which God inspired, cannot together perish with this corporeal clod. Whatsoever that be within us that feels, thinks, desires, animates, is something celestial, divine, and, consequently imperishable. What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat. Nothing short of an eternity could enable men to imagine, think , and feel, and to express all they have imagined, thought and felt. Immortality which is the spiritual desire, is  the intellectual necessity. It is the divinity that stirs within us; it is heaven itself that points out a hereafter and points out eternity to man. A voice within us speaks that startling word, “Man thou shalt  never die!

            The most believable message of immortality comes from Lord Krishna’s address to Arjuna in the Gita. The Lord says:

“Arjuna, the wise man to whom pain and pleasure are alike, and who is not tormented by these contacts, becomes eligible for immortality. The unreal has no existence, and the real never ceases to be. The soul is never born nor dies; nor  does it exist on coming into being. For it is unborn, eternal, everlasting and primeval; even though  the body is slain, the soul is not.

            And this is what Ralph Waldo Emerson says in his poem Brahma : If the red slayer think he slays,/Or if the slain think he is slain,/They know not well the subtle ways/I keep, and pass, and turn again.”     

            And finally what Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, who extends the scope of  immortality , says in his poem : Dedication from Michael Angelo: a Fragment

“Nothing that is shall perish utterly,

But perish only to revive again

In other forms, as clouds restore in  rain

The exhalations of  the land and the sea.

Men build their house from the masonry

Of ruined tombs; t he passion and the pain

Of hearts, that long have ceased to be.

So from old chronicles, where sleep in dust

Names  that once filled the world with trumpet tones,

I build this verse; and flowers of song have thrust

Their roots among the loose disjointed stones,

Which to this end I fashion as I must.

Quickened are they that touch the Prophet’s bones.

 

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22^nd May 2021                                                                        G. R. Kanwal