Plato in his Phaedo has Socrates make one of the most

cryptic statements in all of Philosophy, The purpose of

Life is to prepare for Death. Often interpreted as a ode to
glorified pessimism, it verily contains the essence of the
whole of Platonic Philosophy and the nature of the
philosophical endeavour itself. The Greek age was one of
the last cultures where Philosophy reflected the esoteric
structures of reality and concerns of human life in its most
far reaching aspirations, much like the Upanishads with
its mystic Mahavakyas and deep springs of wisdom. So
when Plato links life and death in one sweep of rhetoric, it
behooves us to look closely at what he is trying to teach
Mankind. Ever since Man has evolved to the
consciousness of a thinking self-aware human being,
Death has been the one constant which has terrified him
throughout his existence. He may have invented ways to
evade his confrontation with this enemy until late in his
life, but he has not defeated him. Our myths, epics and
legends are full of Death, sometimes as a friend,
sometimes as a fair or unfair Judge, mostly as an enemy
who robs innocent lives of their chance to enjoy mortal
life. The greatest artistic depiction of death undoubtedly
remains Ingmar Bergmans The Seventh Seal but haunted
by a distorted Christian version of death, Bergman could
only paint him as a dark, hooded foe. Art might entertain
us but its not for Art to enlighten us, not anymore. Today,
death occupies an even more prominent place in the
consciousness of mankind since man is now using his
latest toy, Science to defeat Him. But He remains
undaunted and undefeated. And so shall He be until we
take the next evolutionary step in consciousness to
understand what Death has been trying to say for many
millions of years. Our wise men knew it and spoke to us,
sometimes in riddles and sometimes in plain speech. But
we were not ready. With Science behaving like a toddler
trying to scrape together something to placate the deep
despair and agony of its denizens, it is time to speak
more clearly about what really Death is so we can finally
rest our souls and stop trying to win an impossible war.
For this is not a War in the first place.

Plato was an initiate, a Siddha in Indian terms who had

access to knowledge forbidden to the layman. This
restriction upon knowledge might offend our modern
democratic sensibilities but this was not done to exclude
anyone. Knowledge as Man has always known is like a
knife which can be used to kill as well to redeem. Since
the advent of materialistic Science, we have been taught
this lesson in umpteen ways but drugged by a false ideal
of equality, we have still not learnt these truths. One is
given knowledge not because he wishes for it but
because he has proven himself deserving of it. These
tests of endurance and deservedness were called
initiations in the Greek Mysteries only after which, one was
allowed entry into the hallowed portals of wisdom. There
are frightening accounts of such tests in the ancient
literatures and Proclus, the Neo-platonist disciple of Plato,
wrote that the Odyssey is itself the allegorical depiction of
a profound Initiation ritual. To describe them is not the
objective of this essay so we come back to Death. When
Plato mentions Philosophy as a way to prepare for Death,
he is making a very crucial assumption that Death is a
milestone in a journey, a signpost that something
significant has been achieved in a long itinerary of the
soul. Phaedo in itself is a wonderful dialogue on the
existence of an afterlife and is highly recommended. The
question is, what is the nature of this journey and what
meaning can then be ascribed to Life given the certainty
of Death ? For Plato, life only has meaning because we
will die. If there was no Death, would this life have any
meaning ? If we could be assured to living for ever, would
there be any imperative in us to create meaning in life ?
The great psychoanalyst, Ernest Becker in his
pathbreaking work, Denial of Death, made the striking
claim that all human endeavor and civilization is built as a
defense mechanism against Death. As true as it is, it must
be remarked that this is largely true of the Western
Civilization for in the east, Death has been always taken
as a friend, until lately when it got drugged by its
fascination for the glamour of the west. Our stories of
course have a Dark Deva, Yama who rides a bull and
comes to take us from our mortal bodies but he takes us
to YamaLoka, which is in truth, a state of consciousness
and not a location. But Death as such has never been
hated and feared by the virtuous and the wise. Its only the
spiritually corrupt and sinners who fear death. And Plato
makes the same point in Phaedo through Socrates when
he says that he is looking forward to meet the Gods after
Death. Our modern consciousness has become so cut off
from the truth of our existences that what was common
exoteric knowledge of our ancestor has become esoteric
and hidden in our times.

To understand the purpose of Death, we have to

understand the purpose of Birth. And the first important
truth to understand is that Death is the opposite of Birth
and not Life. Since we are born, we must die but in
neither case are we ending the continuity of Life itself. We
have simply changed its mode of operation, from a non-
material one to a material one and back. For now, this has
to be an assumption for most but I will come to more
proofs later in the essay. India has always been the land
of the seekers. Religion in its modern sense does not
really belong to this country since we have never been a
group of blind believers unlike the west where Faith held
sway for well over a thousand years until its crumbled
under its own weight. The greatest spiritual treatise, The
Bhagwad Gita mentions in unambiguous terms, the
illusory nature of Death when it says, Death is simply the
discarding of a piece of cloth and the wearing of a new
one. These are important words. To understand the
meaning of these words, we have to take recourse to the
science of Koshas or cloaks in Yoga. Man is composed of
5 koshas, Annamaya Kosha or Physical Body, Pranamaya
Kosha or the Etheric Body, Manomaya Kosha or Astral
Body, Vijnanamaya Kosha or Lower Mind body,
Anandamaya Kosha or Higher Intuitive mind body. Death
is essentially the severing of the first 2 bodies, Physical
and the Etheric from the last three bodies. After death,
one is simply retreating into his or her Manomaya Kosha
along with the last 2 bodies, leaving behind the physical
and etheric. One of the yogic principles on which the
science of Ayurveda and Homoeopathy is based on, is
that the physical body is not the realm of causes, but
rather the one of effects. The physical body is the
recipient of forces that originate in the etheric body which
in turn, depend on the forces acting from the astral and
mental bodies. Thus these medicinal disciplines affect
this body and not the physical. All scientific tests
designed to disprove these disciplines will end up in vain
because these bodies are not detected by the modern
scientific instruments. Science will bang its head for
sometime and finally dismiss the whole field because of a
misplaced idea of causation, ignorant of the esoteric
nature of inner bodies. This interconnected nature of inner
bodies is the reason why, Ayurveda and Homoeopathy
always insists on clean living, good thinking and
harmonious living. It is not that they are some die-hard
moralists refusing to go modern. It is because the
emotional or astral bodies are so connected to the
physical through the effects on the Pranamaya Kosha that
disturbances in emotional life invariably result in physical
problems. Modern Science is not finally coming to terms
with this truth. Death therefore, robs you of your physical
and etheric cloaks and releases you in your emotional
and mental bodies. To be sure, these are not locations in
space one enters into. Space and Time are realities only
in the Physical Plane. These are rather states of
consciousness just that the physical life on earth is also
just a state of consciousness. The defining feature of this
state is the existence of sense-organs through which one
is able to cognize the exterior world. Similarly the defining
state of consciousness in after-death states is the
existence of subtle organs of perception called tanmatras
well known in Yoga. After death, one is not robbed of Life,
he is released into a much more wider realm of
consciousness whose laws are very different from the
physical plane. I will come to this later. The more
immediate problem to confront is the meaning of Death
since it is Death that gives Meaning to Birth and Life as
we know it. One of the great Spiritual classics of India is
the Bhagawat Purana where a story is related of the King
Chitraketu who had everything in life except a son. He
requests Sage Angiras to bless him with a child which the
sage accepts on a condition that this Son will be a cause
of despair for the King. The King accepts it and within a
few months upon birth, the child dies drowning the whole
royal family in despair. When Sage Angiras comes to
placate the King with some truths about the illusory nature
of birth and death, the king is unmoved. Sage Narada
then invokes the soul of the departed child in a trance
who then speaks to the King about the true nature of birth
and death. Illumined as to the truth, the King takes to
Yoga and gets released from the cycle of births and
deaths. As fable-like as they sound to us today, these are
essentially Yogic truths encased in a story form. We must
realize the great truth that all the Vedas, Puranas, Itihasas
and ancient stories are the result of deep meditation of
Yogis and Rishis. They were written for the benefit of
ignorant humanity who did not yet have the capability to
verify these truths by direct experience of Yoga. Hence
the requirement of Faith in the Masters. Aside from being
a source of great power, the result of Faith is best
reflected in Life itself. I am not ignoring the dark side of
Faith which has also led to great disasters. But as I shall
show, this has its bright side too. Sage Narada while
invoking the soul of the departed child was having a
dialogue with the essential Man behind the physical child
who died. The soul which appeared was a grown up man
and not a child. In Yoga, this plane of reality is called the
Karana Sharira, the causal body. It is the True Man behind
the outer coverings of lower mind, emotions and physical
body. These three bodies are just the accumulation of
forces outside the True Man, the Thinker in esoteric terms.
One incarnates on the physical plane to work off karma,
or the result of forces one has set in motion in previous
lifetimes. By forces, we are essentially talking of thought
currents, emotional forces of jealousy, anger, hurt at
others and of course, physical plane actions. We have
forgotten today that thought is as much a force as
physical forces. In truth, Thought is the real force which
sometimes manifests as physical force. This is why we
think of doing many things but dont. But for the universe,
thinking is also doing, albeit in a different plane of
consciousness. It is well known in Yoga that the thought
currents directed outwards at external objects remain in
the causal body as impressions to be worked off in a
future or present incarnation. The true Man is not involved
in any of these currents but remains independent in its
own plane untouched by these. It gains experience of
these lower planes but it is equally true that for the man
identified with these three lower bodies, reaching his
Own True nature, means dis-identifying with the three
bodies of physical, emotional and lower mental natures.
All of Yoga, meditation and spirituality is in reality, this one
striving to dis-identify. Death gives us release from the
physical but not from the emotional and mental. There is a
secondary process after death called the second death
when the emotional body is broken down into its
constituent elements and the mental body is the only one
left. What most religions call Heaven is in truth, a residing
in the pure mental body, also known as the plane of
Meaning. Heaven has been mis-represented by most
religions as some paradise of pleasure, but it is simply the
reaping of the most meaningful and blissful acts in the last
incarnation. It is selfish in the sense that you only reap
the fruits of your own life. The nature of this reaping is a
very complex business and i will discuss it in some future
post but for now, the essential truth is that in heaven, one
finally comes to understand the True Meaning behind the
physical plane actions one did. This meaning is in
essence, abstract as all true meaning is. Abstraction
today, remains as the pursuit of only mathematicians and
philosophical thinkers, but ideally, it should be the pursuit
of all since that is what life essentially about. This urge to
meaning which every human being realizes after death is
manifested in earthly life as the Human search for
meaning. One result of Philosophical pursuit which Plato
wanted to instill in his students is that one can understand
the true Purpose of Life here itself its its abstract Truth and
thus prepare for Death. By Death, Plato did not the mean
the usual laymans death just described earlier. Death for
Plato is essentially a release from Life just like the old
Indian goal of Mukti or Liberation. We come to birth due to
karmas which are the result of our identifications with the
three lower bodies. Philosophy, but educating us about
the true reality behind the appearance of objects,
releases us from this identification and lets us go beyond
a personal or selfish obsession. This letting go of these
false identifications is what is called Moksha or Liberation.
When one has dis-identified with the three illusory planes
of lower life, namely, physical, emotional and lower mental
bodies, one has nothing selfish remaining. One has gone
Universal. One is bound to nothing narrow. In Yogic terms,
one has graduated from the earthly life, only to enter into
a much wider canvas of activity. The Planet Earth only
exists for human beings to learn this lesson of universality.
This truth has been spoken by many masters over the
millenia in sentences like, Life is a school, not a
playground, The purpose of Life is God-realization.
God realization is simply the identification of the personal
with the universal consciousness. Death for the normal
man, is a release from the fetters of the flesh so that one
can learn the truths of the last earthly life he led, learn
from the mistakes and come back to complete this lesson
of universality. Until one learns this, one will keep on re-
incarnating on earth. To be even more exact, there is a
limit on how many chances one gets to learn these
lessons. In the Bible, there is a mention of a certain
Judgement Day. This has been mis-interpreted as usual
by dogmatic theologians. The estoeric truth behind this is
that after a certain period of time, Planet Earth will no
more give uneducated souls a chance to keep
reincarnating to learn the essential universal truths of
existence. These failures will then be kept in cosmic
cold storage so to say, until a new planet conducive to
their evolution is found. What will be the parameter for
such a separation is not known but the fact of separation
is undoubtedly true. This truth gives a tremendous force
to the individual striving for liberation which the Buddhists
embody to the greatest level. Death is thus revealed to be
a friend who shakes off the cloak when it sees that the
individual is not carrying out the purpose of its incarnation
anymore. Most lives are led without any idea as to the
origin or the end of that life existence. He or she might be
accumulating many things in outer life but these
acquisitions most often do not serve either the individual
or the society. Such lives are in need of the shocking
wisdom that only Death can give sometimes because the
earthly life has become so stagnant that nothing
worthwhile will reach him. Beyond Death is not liberation.
Beyond Death is a chance to come back to birth to
pursue liberation. Beyond the selfish Heaven is Liberation
which is to be sought for in earth itself. I shall give a
beautiful illustration of this process through a small
diagram in a book written by the American sage, Franklin
Merrel Wolfe called Death and After.

In this figure, the innermost circle BCDEFG is the goal of

human evolution and the three outer circles are the region
in which man keeps revolving for many incarnations until
he is able to break through into the inner circles. Breaking
through, in a true sense means raising the vibration and
consciousness through Yoga and not reaching
somewhere in space and time. The book Death and After
is one of the most scientific explorations of the process of
death I have ever come across and must be read by any
seeker of Truth. Here is theLink :Merrell Wolfe Death
and After

Death constitutes the most pressing problem of modern

life as we are faced with ever increasing problems of
extinction driven by our own selfishness caused by a
forgetting of the purposes of life itself. The divine created
this Planet only so we could evolve spiritually and for no
other reason. But this evolution is not something
guaranteed and human have to earn it for themselves.
The Masters can show the path just like Krishna showed
the path to Arjuna but Arjuna and Mankind has to walk
this path themselves. Truth brooks no barriers no matter
what. At the end of all doubts as to the feasibility of such
a quest, the only certainty we have is the search for our
own Truth. As we find our own Truth inside, we will find the
truth of everything outside. Death is a beneficent blessing
and a friend who teaches us when we falter that we have
to come back and walk the path to infinite Glory and
sublime Truth.