Question: You have spoken about physical death. Could you say something about the kind of death and rebirth that occurs in the spiritual life?

Sri Chinmoy: When we wholeheartedly, sincerely and unreservedly accept the spiritual life, we feel that it is the real death of ignorance, of desire, of limitation. It is the death of our limited, strangling, unfulfilled and obscure consciousness in the vital. It is the vital that is craving to fulfil all kinds of desires, not the physical, so this death takes place in the vital plane. When we really launch into the spiritual life, we have an inner death. This death is the death of our past, of the way we have formed our past.

We will build the edifice of Truth on aspiration, not on desires and worries or anxieties and doubts. The past wanted to show us the Truth in one way. But the past was not able to show us the Truth; that is why we are what we are in the present. Whether the present will show us the Truth or not we do not know. But we think we will see the Reality either in the immediate present or in the fast-dawning future, the future that is growing in the immediacy of today.

One of the mysteries in the spiritual life is that at every moment we are dying and renewing ourselves. Each moment we see that a new consciousness, a new thought, a new hope, a new light is dawning in us. When something new dawns, at that time we see that the old has been transformed into something higher, deeper and more profound. So in the higher spiritual life, at every moment we can see the so-called death of our limited consciousness and its transformation into a newer, brighter consciousness.

From:Sri Chinmoy,Death and reincarnation: Eternity's voyage, Agni Press, 1973
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/dr