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Fear of Death
You know the only fear is the fear of death. There is no other fear.
A man is afraid of being sick, it is because he is afraid of dying as
a result of that sickness. The fear of death is the base of all fears.
If there is no fear of death, there can be no other fear. Please take
it as an assurance. You are afraid of a lion. Why? Because you are afraid
of being killed by a lion. You are afraid of a terrorist in Punjab.
Why? Because you are afraid of being shot. You are afraid of the American
with their powerful atomic and nuclear bombs. Why? Because we are afraid
of being bombed out of existence. Then if you say, "For heaven's
sake, you can destroy this my friend, but not this," then what
are we afraid of? Lion is hungry; "Well, eat me. I am eternal you
know. All that you can get is my flesh and blood."
Any fear in any situation is essentially the fear of death. And if
that is removed, there should be no other fear. A person who has no
fear of death cannot be afraid of anything else. What else is there
to be afraid of? If fear of death is removed, there can be no other
fear. Fearlessness can come at one stroke by removing one single fear
which is the breeding ground of all other fears.
Now this inner courage, the truth of existence, the what and the why
and the how of existence, if we are able to understand, then this (bodily)
"me" is like a raincoat I am wearing. The Bhagavad Gita says
it again and again, you see, that the soul changes it's body in its
evolutionary course through eternity, like a man takes off his shirt
and throws it away. Now suppose we were to weep and beat our breasts
in the classical traditional way every time I have to change my dress,
wouldn't you consider it stupid, foolish? And when the soul in its wisdom,
it occupies a body for its experience of this world, having had this
experience, says, "Well it is enough, I don't need this anymore,"
and we throw it off, you see. Please be assured that nobody dies without
his inner self saying "enough." It is like a tourist who comes
to India with 21 days plan, but after 18 days, he feels that he has
enough of this country and he bids goodbye to India, you see. What is
there to weep about? He has had enough, he has seen enough, he says,
"Well, this I have seen. How much more I have yet to see?"
A market man goes to the public bazaar and he has to sell. He plans
on a three day tour, but he has sold his quota in one day. If he is
honest, he walks back to headquarters – unless he wants to cheat his
boss and make money for the rest of the two days. So the soul in its
wisdom says, "I have finished, I hope. Let me take up the next
step of my evolution". But the bodily ego says, "Please. I
am, you see, this which has supported you, which has allowed you to
inhabit itself. How can you throw it off so summarily, which has scant
justice to its existence? I refuse to die!"
I finish my existence in one body. Its purpose is finished. It can
be useful to me no more. It has now become a bondage, a prison. I escape
out of it. I get out of it by a voluntary act. Though we don't know
it in our lower consciousness, it is always a voluntary act. And we
choose another body if we have still to continue on this terrestrial
existence, so that we may continue to evolve further. It is like class
after class after class in schools and colleges. It is like grade after
grade after grade of promotion in the army. When l am promoted from
the first class to the second class in school, I don't think I'm dead.
I don't weep that I cannot be with the teacher of the first class any
more. I don't get attached to the bench on which I was sitting in that
classroom. I am happy to be out of it.
The soul too is happy when we die. When any human being dies, if you
watch the face of the person after death, you will find the utmost peace
and tranquility on the face of that body, which you never see during
his lifetime. This is a fact. It is the truth. People must have the
courage to look at dead bodies. And this drama of dressing up the dead
body, colouring it, rouging it, shaving it, presenting it like a gentleman
or a gentlewoman, is crazy. Even in death, we are cheating life. A dead
body is no less beautiful than a newly born baby. If you have the eyes
to see, if you can see that utter peace, that utter relaxation, you
know, there is a yogasana called the shavasana in the Patanjali
yoga system of Hatha yoga. Shavasana means the asana of the
corpse, the dead body. And it teaches us to lie as still and as relaxed,
as utterly relaxed as a dead body. And if you are able to do it for
10 or 15 minutes, you don't need pills, you don't need doctors, you
don't need psychotherapists, you don't need anything. But it is so difficult,
because in a sense it is like dying while you are still alive. Which
is what Babuji says of the spiritual condition, 'the living dead.'
Now there is one thing that people are afraid of death, precisely because
we think we are born, and that's a happy occasion; and when we are dead,
it's a miserable occasion. But the whole thing is because I think I
am alive only when I am in the body. I am happy with my birth and sad
about my death. Now, how can an eternal being or one blessed with eternity
of existence, think like this? Therefore, you see, the attachment to
the body is what creates this idea of birth and death, and makes us
afraid throughout life about that which will happen someday, as nothing
more than 'I' escaping out of this shell into the liberty which I have
to achieve. We want liberation on one side, that is why we are all here;
on the other side, we are afraid of death. These are two contradictory
ideas in ourselves. And since they are there in us, both together, it
is not surprising that we are not progressing as fast as we should.
Spiritual aspirants who are growing all the time should have lost this
idea of the fear of death long ago. Death doesn't exist you see. If
I take off my shirt and put it in the wash basket it doesn't mean it
is dead, nor does it mean that I am dead. Both are still there, the
only thing is they are not together. The shirt is somewhere, I am still
somewhere. So when I am dead, my body is somewhere, I am still somewhere.
What is there to worry about? What is there to be afraid about? So you
see, the idea of the fear of death is a limiting factor. It still means
that we are seeking liberation, being afraid of that same liberation.
Fear of death is the fear of liberation. This is something
we must all understand very positively. As long as we are afraid to
die, we will not be liberated, but we will continue to be imprisoned
within that cycle of birth and death of which we are so afraid. That
means one who is afraid of death will have to die again and again and
again until he loses his fear of it.
"That which never was, shall never be," says the ancient
Upanishad. And "That which is today, must have been, and will ever
exist," because nothing new is coming into this universe. It is
there as He created it. The soul is eternal. It is part of the divine
essence, the ultimate, the infinite, the Godhead. It can no more cease
to exist than God can cease to exist. God is not born, He does not die.
Therefore, I am not born, I cannot die. All that I see and experience
of birth and death are my problems imposed upon myself by my observing
people being born and people being dead. Therefore I think I was born
and I am going to die. The truth is that my body came into existence
and will cease to be. I am eternal.
So you see, this is the teaching of spirituality. And I repeat, if
we are meditating properly, there is an absolute mastery of death that
waits for us. One who is the master of something cannot be afraid of
that which he is master of. He is the master. Death becomes a subordinate,
an instrument. So we use death as something which we need to get out
of a certain situation. Therefore the soul can manifest itself again
if it chooses, if it has work to do. Again using death to liberate itself
from that momentary manifestation in an environment which it must clean
and remodel. Thus masters come into existence at their will,
born when they wish, leaving when they wish, neither the slaves of birth,
nor the slaves of death, but masters of both.
Now if that is the condition of death, or the state of death, or the
state that we shall achieve when the body is dropped off, why should
we be afraid of it? It is because we are holding on to two things. One,
the conventional idea and the fear of death, very human; and the other,
the spiritual condition of eternity; the condition of the perception
of immortality. And we never try to reconcile these two in our minds.
I don't think we ever give a moment's thought to this. That if this
is what is going to happen to me when I leave this body, if this is
the state of being that I am going to have and to be in, what am I afraid
of?
If we can think of death in the right way, we should say to ourselves,
"We have wasted our life, let us not waste our death."
This should be our last thought you see. Because what I could not achieve
in life, I can surely achieve in death again, if I know what I'm doing.
Therefore at the moment of death, it is necessary to be at least able
to be conscious of our purpose and to die. Like when you sleep, if you
make a determination that you shall wake up at 5 o'clock in the morning,
you do wake up at 5 o'clock. Why? Because there is this mind over matter
business. Something wakes me up. It cannot fail.
So in spirituality we say, death is there only when we have not decided
to go on beyond death but to come back because of our fears, because
of our attachments. So please understand very carefully that if you
have been able to clean yourself of all your samskaras, and through
meditation create a greater and greater illumination in yourself, through
the divine presence that is eternally there, there is no death for us.
We leave the body behind, like you get out of the taxi, you get out
of the train, you get out of the airplane and go home. So fear has to
go.
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