“The mystery of life and death, whose solution is the only purpose of man’s sojourn on earth, is intimately interwoven with breath.” — Paramahansa Yogananda, from Chapter 49 of “Autobiography of a Yogi.”
The solution to the mystery of life and death is the only purpose of man’s sojourn on Earth. I have always felt this to be true in my gut, without ever actually articulating it to myself so succinctly. Yogananda’s words release the truth of something I feel I have always known. Beyond resolving the mystery of life and death, everything else in life is distraction and attachment. Yet most of us never confront this deeper purpose of life except on our death beds, or attending at the death beds of our loved ones. There is nothing like the departure of a loved one to remind us why we are really here: it is not to play soccer, to pick up the kids at school, or even to produce our latest play or write our latest novel. Those are merely roles we take on in our current incarnation; they do not represent more than one aspect of our true Selves. Instead, our true purpose is to confront, accept and finally transcend the gulf between life and death; the gulf that is crossed by our departed loved ones.
How is the great mystery solved? Yogananda and other great spiritual leaders teach us, paradoxically, that there is no real difference between life and death. According to the Hindu theory of reincarnation, the purpose of each of our earthly lives is to work out the karmic debt we amassed in our previous lives. When we die, some but not all of our karmic debt has been repaid, so we must continue to be reborn until we have overcome all earthly desires and we are prepared to join in the One-ness of God. In the intervals between our earth lives, the theory goes, we are reborn as astral bodies in a subtler astral plane where (guess what?) we must work out our previously amassed “astral karma.”
It is in this sense that Yogananda teaches that there is no real difference between life and death: in both realms, each of us is a consciousness and each of us is working successively to repay our karmic debts and ultimately to transcend the karmic burden entirely. The soul is immortal; it merely takes on a series of ephemeral transient identities, now on the physical plane and then on the astral one. Consciousness and the necessity to confront one’s karma, karma that is born with each of us in the dualistic world of maya-creation, are the universal constants bridging the gap between the realms of death and life. As we bow our heads before the Unity of God that stands above the duality of Creation, there is no difference between the life we lead in life and the life we lead after death.
Bird of Spirit 
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