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Meditation is a Training in Dying
We are always afraid of death. That’s a very natural fear.
But to be told that perhaps, my dear friend, you don’t exist even now
would be awful. Wouldn’t it? But when you plunge into yourself in meditation
and, if, by Master’s grace, by the solemnity of your experience, you
are able to experience those spiritual states where you find first nothing,
then you find yourself all alone, and then you find that the universe
into which you are put all alone by yourself is really you...! The universe
is you. You are there as something experiencing yourself in a cosmic
form. Then comes this really brilliant, fascinating experience that
“I am the Universe, which means you are part of me, everybody is part
of me, you are me in a sense.”
Now this is a psychological truth, that psychologists are
always trying to expose us to that which we are afraid of, so that we
may lose the fear of that particular thing. If you are afraid of dogs,
they bring a dog near you, ask you to pet it, put it on your lap, and
your fear goes. Here also, we do the same thing. As Babuji Maharaj said,
“Every meditation is a training in dying.” Because when you go really
deep into yourself, and you come out after it and say, “I was absorbed.
I don’t know where I was. I didn’t even know whether I was sleeping
or meditating.” You have literally been not there. In a sense you were
dead to this existence. Therefore meditation is a training in dying.
And if we have done it correctly we should be masters of death, masters
of the act of dying; one who can die when he wishes; one who can die
when he chooses; coming back again and again if he wishes, so that his
death is not really a death, but will be a resurrection like in the
Christian tradition. Christ died, was put into the sepulcher, and he
disappeared you see. We call it the resurrection.
So you see, if we continue to be afraid of death it means
we have not been meditating properly. Our practice has been wrong. So
we should think of this and say, “What in heaven am I doing? Have I
been meditating at all? If so, have I been meditating correctly? Why
am I still afraid of death?” Is not meditation a training in dying,
daily? Should not one who does something daily become a master of that?
Should I not by now be a master of death? Therefore we say, “One who
is a master of life is also a master of death.” As Babuji Maharaj said,
“He alone is the master of life and death as we understand it.” Therefore
it is a divine state when we achieve this purpose, when we become free
of the fear of death and of the craving to be born. Both are negative.
I remember the first time I went deep into meditation, what
you call samadhi. It took Babuji several minutes to recall
me out of it. He said, “That’s all.” I did not open my eyes. He said
it several times, louder and louder. And finally he had to touch me.
Then I asked him what happened. He said, “That is an experience which
you should have at death. What we really do in meditation is
to learn to die.” So I told him this would be a very difficult
thing to teach people, because who wants to die? They want training
in how to live more joyously, more healthily, more richly. He said,
“They are fools, because they do not know the secret that, unless you
know how to die, you cannot live.”
And it is such a simple truth, you see. Because one of the
greatest, most prevalent modern diseases is fear of death. And it manifests
itself in so many ways. So when we go deep into meditation, Babuji told
me, “But for the grace of the Master, you would not have come back today.”
I said, “Why did you bring me back?” He just smiled and kept quiet.
He said, “But it is a fact that when you went into that level, your
soul did not want to come back. Therefore it took me four minutes to
wake you up again. Because that is its original state, its real state,
its natural state.”
Now we have become conditioned to existing in the body. We
associate our existence with the body, our pleasures, everything we
associate with the body. And then we have this funny idea that when
the body goes we are dead. It cannot be. If life is eternal, how can
I die just because my body has dropped? So when I said that meditation
teaches us to die, it teaches us by showing us that there is no real
death. It is a state of existence which we call death. But the moment
you get into meditation, and go deeper and deeper into that condition,
and the Master’s grace brings you up, again and again, out of it, we
learn the truth about life and death. That is real, this is artificial.
I have known abhyasis weeping when they have come out of
meditation and prayed to Master, “Why do you not leave me there? Why
do you bring me here and torture me again?” Babuji used to sympathize.
He said, “Yes, I know your state. I can understand your mental condition,
but it is not permitted to shorten your life like that. But I am happy
you had this experience because it is this experience which will divert
your mind away from this silly, stupid, material existence.” So I asked
him, “Why do you call it silly and stupid? It has its moments of glory,
ecstasy.” He said, “It is silly and stupid because it is not eternal.
If it is my destiny to die, I should die meditating. I remember
a preceptor in our country, in India who had a heart attack, and stopped
meditation. Babuji was very upset. He said, “This man is so stupid.
He is going to die. The best way of dying is, to sit in meditation thinking
of the Master. Then the door into eternity is opened automatically.
Instead of that, he is not meditating, he is taking medicines and he
is relying upon some fools, astrologers.”
Death for the average human being is the ultimate pain, the
ultimate loss, the ultimate tragedy. But the saint dies every moment
– when he sits in meditation he is lost! He is dead to this world. Therefore
– ‘living dead.’ His body may suffer. His body may speak. His body may
shout out to God, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” but he doesn’t shout.
He is in the calm of his absolute meditation, what we call the mahasamadhi.
The body speaks, it works, it runs, it mates, it defecates, it does
all these things because it is the body. The soul, in its utter state
of weightlessness, state of nothingness suffers nothing, enjoys nothing,
feels nothing, knows nothing, sees nothing.
Spiritual tradition says that when we die, the spiritual
aspirant, an abhyasi – a sadhak, when he dies, no death comes to him.
It is his Guru who comes and says, “come my son, it is time for us to
move on.” So when we have experienced this throughout our meditation,
sitting after sitting, session after session, how can there be fear!
There is only longing, you see.
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