यदा सत्त्वे प्रवृद्धे तु प्रलयं याति देहभृत् ।तदोत्तमविदां लोकान् अमलान्प्रतिपद्यते ॥
yadā sattve pravṛddhe tu pralayaṁ yāti dehabhṛttadottamavidāṁ lokān amalānpratipadyate
If sattwa prevails when the embodied goes to dissolution, then he attains to the spotless worlds of the knowers of the highest principles.
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
AI translation
Essays on the Gita
To be immortal was never held in the ancient spiritual teaching to consist merely in a personal survival of the death of the body: all beings are immortal in that sense and it is only the forms that perish. The souls that do not arrive at liberation, live through the returning aeons; all exist involved or secret in the Brahman during the dissolution of the manifest worlds and are born again in the appearance of a new cycle. Pralaya, the end of a cycle of aeons, is the temporary disintegration of a universal form of existence and of all the individual forms which move in its rounds, but that is only a momentary pause, a silent interval followed by an outburst of new creation, reintegration and reconstruction in which they reappear and recover the impetus of their progression. Our physical death is also a pralaya,—the Gita will presently use the word in the sense of this death, pralayaṁ yāti deha-bhṛt, “the soul bearing the body comes to a14·14 pralaya,” to a disintegration of that form of matter with which its ignorance identified its being and which now dissolves into the natural elements. But the soul itself persists and after an interval resumes in a new body formed from those elements its round of births in the cycle, just as after the interval of pause and cessation the universal Being resumes his endless round of the cyclic aeons. This immortality in the rounds of Time is common to all embodied spirits.
