“The belief in our immortality is only a faith, the belief in our mortality is only a faith.” Sri Aurobindo sums up here the predicament we have if we use the mind to try to decide ultimate Reality. Either way we look at it, we cannot KNOW, using the mind as an instrument of knowing. Sri Aurobindo continues: “It is impossible for the materialist to prove that our consciousness ends with the death of the body; for he may indeed show that there is as yet no convincing proof that anything in us consciously survives, but equally there is and there can be in the nature of things no proof that our conscious self does not outlast the physical dissolution. Survival of the body by the human personality may hereafter be proved even to the satisfaction of the sceptic; but even then what will be established will only be a greater continuity and not the eternity of the conscious being.
For all of the theories, philosophies, faiths that humans have expressed through our existence, everything eventually comes out to the fact that from our present standpoint and capabilities we cannot truly see, understand and appreciate the actual functioning of the Universe or the Creation. A different method of knowledge than that based on our limited mental being is the only possible solution to finding an answer to these eternal questions….does anything of the conscious individual that we recognize through the action of memory, actually have some kind of persistence through time, beyond the life and death of the individual body, and if so, what is the nature of that persistence? Is it eternal?
reference: Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 2, Part I, Chapter 8, Memory, Self-Consciousness and the Ignorance, pg. 504
Sri Aurobindo Studies 