If Death has to be overpowered and eliminated one will have to go to that place where lies his dwelling, his origin. The dark roots must be discovered in the deep abyss of non-being and destroyed in the fire of the spirit. Stating the presence of Death or even bypassing his domains by escaping to the worlds where he can have no hold is one plausible way of escaping it. But then that does not account for the operation of life in the inconscience of this existence; also the possibility that has to emerge out of it remains unfulfilled. Surely there must have been an intention behind it, a sufficiently assertive truth-dynamism to make this mortality a means for a different kind of  glorious manifestation. "Let me be many," as the Upanishad says, is certainly a wonderful thought and is meritorious enough to be pursued—through the mechanism of death to begin with. It is indeed the daring of consciousness in the delight of growth and expansion founded on the rhythms and laws of the essential truth which takes in its adventurous strides whatever comes in the process,—because there is a certain infallibility in the final reckoning. Which only means that, death is simply an issue that has arisen on the way. It has no fundamental basis and is avoidably just incidental.

Yet it has the strength of a rock and its stubbornness cannot be denied, and in the least dismissed. In a manner of rationalization, we may say that it will allow only a mightier truth to triumph over it. If this is true, should we not then consider it to be a marvellous thing which can ever happen to this creation? The mystery of death therefore becomes an aid in the fuller emergence of life.

There is no problem in the lustrous and honey-sweet milky ocean of immortal life; it is in the darkness that all this has to happen. Out of the dark waters of Inconscience, salilam apraketam, another living and widening immortality must emerge. Indeed, this immortality has to be the creative and luminous foundation for the emergence of the spirit in its several aspects of light, beauty, peace, sweetness, joy, power, harmony for the divine life in the material world. Perhaps this is an immortality which is richer than the immortality of the transcendental life. Continuous growth is its most cherished asset. The Gods are also envious of it.

The problem of death is after all an existential problem, and not an essential problem. Yet its origin lies beyond the immediate scope of life of which death is an aspect. It is a perfectly valid perception that death is in the midst of life. In other words, the problem of death gets shifted to the modus and organisation of life in the purpose of its appearance in this inconscience of existence. Talking about the twofold mystery of what we witness as birth and death Sri Aurobindo tells us:

Birth is the first spiritual mystery of the physical universe, death is the second which gives its double point of perplexity to the mystery of birth; for life, which would otherwise be a self-evident fact of existence, becomes itself a mystery by virtue of these two which seem to be its beginning and its end and yet in a thousand ways betray themselves as neither of these things, but rather intermediate stages in an occult processus of life. At first sight birth might seem to be a constant outburst of life in a general death, a persistent circumstance in the universal lifelessness of Matter. On a closer examination it begins to be more probable that life is something involved in Matter or even an inherent power of the Energy that creates matter, but able to appear only when it gets the necessary conditions for the affirmation of its characteristic phenomena and for an appropriate self-organisation. But in the birth of life there is something more that participates in the emergence,—there is an element which is no longer material, a strong upsurging of some flame of soul, a first evident vibration of the spirit. [1]

Explaining earlier about the fundamental necessity of the nature and object of embodied life seeking infinite experience on a finite basis, Sri Aurobindo said that for this to happen "change of form is essential" [2] which means that there has to be the dissolution of the body. In it is the occult indispensability and justification of Death.

Therefore death is presently a habit, a bad habit as the Mother says, and habits can be changed. A new law of the material nature to allow the infinite of the Infinity to emerge can dispense with death as a mechanism for it to be achieved.

The One who is nameless and formless takes on, accepts names and forms, becomes nāmarūpa and bhāvarūpa. But the problem is of their progressive growth and manifestation in the creation which in the mortal world, is governed by Death. The purpose of this Death is again an aspect of that growth and manifestation. Not to dissolve name and form in the infinity of the Unmanifest, not to drown in laya, but to enrich them more and more is the expedient mechanism which is Death.

But at times disproportionate importance is given to the conquest of death, as if that is the consummation of the entire process in this creation. Sure enough, such a proposition will convey a wrong sense of priorities and lead to deviation and distortion in the objective of the evolutionary manifestation. Immortality is a necessity but is only functional to achieve something that is higher in terms of spiritual aims. If death is but a minor though not a very happy means of immortality, immortality itself proves insufficient in the widening scale of possibilities of the infinite, unfolding infinitely. When the question was raised to this effect, Sri Aurobindo clarified it as follows:

What is vital is the supramental change of consciousness—conquest of death is something minor and… the last physical result of it, not the first result of all or the most important—a thing to be added to complete the whole, not the one thing needed and essential. To put it first is to reverse all spiritual values. [3]

References

[1] The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, p. 742

[2] Ibid., p. 193

[3] Letters on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 24, p. 1233