If Birth is a Becoming, Death also is Becoming — Sri Aurobindo

Man, born into the world, revolves between world and world in the action of Prakriti and Karma. Purusha in Prakriti is his formula: what the soul in him thinks, contemplates and acts, that always he becomes. All that he had been, determined his present birth; and all that he is, thinks, does in this life up to the moment of his death, determines what he will become in the worlds beyond and in lives yet to be. If birth is a becoming, death also is becoming, not by any means a cessation. The body is abandoned, but the soul goes on its way, tyaktvā kalevaram. Much then depends on what he is at the critical moment of his departure. For whatever form of becoming his consciousness is fixed on at the time of death and has been full of that always in his mind and thought before death, to that form he must attain, since the Prakriti by Karma works out the soul’s thoughts and energies and that is in real fact her whole business. Therefore, if the soul in the human being desires to attain to the status of the Purushottama, there are two necessities, two conditions which must be satisfied before that can be possible. He must have moulded towards that ideal his whole inner life in his earthly living; and he must be faithful to his aspiration and will in his departing. “Whoever leaves his body and departs” says Krishna “remembering me at his time of end, comes to my bhāva,” that of the Purushottama, my status of being. He is united with the original being of the Divine and that is the ultimate becoming of the soul, paro bhāvaḥ, the last result of Karma in its return upon itself and towards its source. The soul which has followed the play of cosmic evolution that veils here its essential spiritual nature, its original form of becoming, svabhāva, and has passed through all these other ways of becoming of its consciousness which are only its phenomena, taṁ taṁ bhāvam, returns to that essential nature and, finding through this return its true self and spirit, comes to the original status of being which is from the point of view of the return a highest becoming, mad-bhāvam. In a certain sense we may say that it becomes God, since it unites itself with nature of the Divine in a last transformation of its own phenomenal nature and existence.

The Supreme Divine, Second Series, Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo.