According to our tradition of Yogic Sadhana, death is something from which we return. That is why it is said in Yogic literature that we have died so many times, innumerable times, uncountable number of times and we haven’t yet learnt how to die. I mean it’s a logic that the American will understand, that if you have to go on doing something again and again, it means you haven’t mastered it.

In Hinduism, we have this idea that the moment a child is born, it has begun to die. I mean, it’s a fact. It is not going to die 60 years later or 100 years later. It has already begun to die. It is like when you wind up a clock, it has already begun to unwind itself. So, when is death? It is the moment you are born. Effectively this is death. Birth is death. Of course it may take time. That is all it takes. There is nothing else. It may take 60 years; it may take three days; it may take 17 years; it may take 124 years. But death is over. The moment you are born, you are literally dead. But, we think this is life. Now, per contra, the moment I am dead, my life has begun. So, that we are afraid of, this we are happy about. How foolish it is. So you see, the topsy-turvyness of the world.

To me death is nothing but the unutilisable part of time; it is taken away from us; like when you are put in prison for some wrong deed, you are not able to use space or time. What is imprisonment except removing your freedom to do anything? Of course, if you are like Shri Aurobindo or I don’t know, some of these great saints who were imprisoned, you can still meditate there and liberate yourself! But you have to be that before you go to prison. I think that is how these great saints are born in this world as our Gurus, as our Guides, as our Masters. Because they are able to come here, imprison themselves voluntarily and help the other prisoners to escape, may be not physically, but in every other possible way. Therefore the prisoner remains a prisoner but he is no longer that which he came in, no more a criminal, no more a murderer. He doesn’t have to be imprisoned any more but the law takes its course.

The soul and its journey
All of us are constantly travelling from somewhere to somewhere else. The journey has necessarily to be undertaken in a vehicle of some sort and the vehicle must have a surface prepared for it to ride on. And of course we go to a place which we have to reach – the destination. Therefore, we have the way upon which we must travel, the vehicle in which we travel, and the destination to which we are travelling. If perchance, the vehicle breaks down on the way, the intelligent traveller gets out of the now useless vehicle and takes another vehicle. This change of vehicle will be necessary as many times as the vehicle becomes unserviceable, so long as the destination has not been reached. Once the destination has been reached, vehicles are no more necessary. Once the destination has been reached, the way too becomes a thing of the past. So the important thing which we must ever keep before us is the goal, the destination. The way and the vehicle are but the means to our arriving at our pre-determined destination. 

In its travel back to its Original Home, as my Master has called it, the soul is the traveller. The way is the life that it adopts on its way home. The vehicle is the body in which it travels through life. Looked at in this way, we see that there is nothing to be afraid of in rebirth. Rebirth is nothing but the soul changing from one useless vehicle to another useful one, so that it can keep moving on and on upon its journey back to its Original Home. It is therefore, something of a misnomer to even call it as rebirth. What is being reborn? Is it the soul? No! Because as we see, the soul exists and continues to exist. Is it the body which is reborn? No! Because it is a new body that is created out of the elements for the use of the soul. Then what is it that is reborn, if anything? I can only say that the whole concept of rebirth is nothing but the change of vehicle necessary for the advancement of the soul to the Goal.

What is the way? Obviously the way has to be the right one, as otherwise we cannot reach the Goal at all. The importance of the way exists only so long as we are yet away from the destination. Once we have reached home, then we shall have no more to worry about the way, its condition, nor even its existence. For the soul, the way to its destination is life itself. Life, therefore, has to be properly led, if one is to go on to the Goal. Also, once we have arrived home, the very concept of life would appear to have no further meaning as life, (at least as we understand it) becomes redundant. So one has to hold on to life only until the goal is reached. So, for one who has arrived at his goal it would be as foolish and unnecessary to hold on to life as it would be to hold on to the vehicle. So the body has to be given up, and more importantly, the very idea of life has to go. 

What happens to the soul? It exists in its Original Home. One cannot, in my opinion, attribute life to the soul – when we look at the matter in this way. The soul exists eternally, but it takes upon itself a life for itself when it has become separated from its Original Home, and then a body too becomes necessary. Looked at in this way, life and life in the body would appear to be one and the same thing. Once the soul has reached its Home, the concept of life itself becomes meaningless.

The body is given by the past samskaras. Once we have been born, there is no chance in that life to change it. It is fixed. The vehicle has been assigned. Change of the vehicle becomes possible only when the vehicle becomes unserviceable through old age or disease, when the soul in its wisdom and in its anxiety to reach Home, discards the worn-out vehicle and adopts another one. This is what we see as death and rebirth. So, for one life we can have only one body, and wisdom dictates that it should be carefully preserved, so that it may serve its one and only purpose – that of transporting the soul to its Home. 

The body is nothing but the vehicle for life. Life itself, as we understand it, is nothing but the way that the soul adopts to enable it to reach its goal. The Master is the one who makes the life meaningful and purposeful. Once this is understood, fear of life, as well as the falsity of all attractions that distract becomes apparent and one becomes capable of abandoning all but the idea of the goal. 

What makes you come back is samskara
When we are in a train we want to get out; first we have rushed to get in, then we are waiting to get out. Same thing in a plane, same thing in anything. You get into a boat to cross the Hoogly, you are waiting to get out on the other side. So all the time we are getting in and out, getting in and out, getting in and out, crossing railways, crossing bridges, crossing rivers. And our whole existence is a journey through life. We have got in at birth, we have to get out at death.

When we die, how are we getting out that vehicle which we have called life here on earth? Am I going to be happier out from the train or am I going to stand like a bewildered man from a kheth, who does not know where he is, why he is there, what is he going to do there and he stands in bewilderment you see. What am I here for? Where am I? Why am I here? Because if you have not taken the pains to create an environment, which will be familiar to you after death, we are going to be bewildered and like a dog which is locked out of the house because it is troublesome you know. That dog runs round and round the house, yelping, barking, scratching at doors, we too will be yelping, barking and running round and round trying to get back into this life which we are familiar. No Mukti.

We are all very funnily oriented in that we think what is vital to our existence is money, power, position, prestige – things like that. But what happens when a man dies? You know in the Hindu tradition, when we put a corpse on the final funeral pyre even the clothes are removed. You must go out of this world as you came into it; no clothes. ‘I came naked – I go naked.’ It also applies to the wisdom that you have garnered in this world by education. The soul does not carry wisdom with it. It also applies to your nationalities. You can not carry your passport and say, ‘I am an American Citizen. I have free entry into Heaven.’ There are no visas, there are no passports. So what are we carrying? Our samskaras; the impressions that our thoughts and our actions have made upon us which we have to carry life after life and which come to fruition in the next existence.

Now I would like to suggest something, which, in India is much misunderstood – the idea of rebirth. People seem to imagine that rebirth is some sort of a punishment by God, that God sits in the Heaven and says, “You have sinned, go back.” I don’t think we can have a God who is punishing or rewarding, because He loves His creation. He, like a human parent, loves His children. Do you punish your children? You correct, but God does not even correct. In His infinite liberality, He has given us complete charge of ourselves. He says, “Go, live and come back.” And what do we do? We form the samskaras. And rebirth is nothing but the Bhoga of those samskaras. Nobody else is to blame but ourselves.

That is why each life is only so long and it is variable between a few days and perhaps eighty years, because we are taking the time that we need. Again this is not something which God has forecast or foreordained. We say “This much I can bear.” You know you wake up in the morning and you can live in the waking stage for so long and not more. After that you have to sleep. A sleep is nothing but a regeneration of the day’s efforts, the energy that I have consumed in living my waking life, which I recuperate when I go to sleep.

So death is a pause from this life to enable me to recoup and to live the next life more fruitfully, more evolutionarily and continue to move up. It is like when we are walking up a hill, we go a few kilometres then take a little rest – ten minutes, recoup our lung capacity, our circulation and take the next few kilometres again. Can you say I am dead, when I stop on my walk, up the hill? I am only pausing so that I can gather together my physical resources and take the next stage. And so we climb mountains. But if you are foolish and you try to do everything, all at one stage, well, you could burst your lungs or pull some muscles and then have to be carried back down, not up. This, all mountaineers know. People who climb hills have known ‘Use your capacities step by step in graded limits so that you don’t exhaust yourself.’

Now if you live life in such a way that we are exhausting our resources with foolish indulgences and wasteful energy consumption, whether physical or even biological, we are doomed. You see the next stage becomes something which we have to defer. And then we may have to live in the “Limbo” condition, for as long as it takes to recuperate, to come here again. It is a punishment we put upon ourselves by our own foolish way of living. There is no God who punishes. So to think of Heaven as God’s reward and Hell as God’s punishment, then death as something which is miserable, is stupid. You know people in the west say, “Oh, if all I am going to do is to die, why should I live?” It is like saying, “If all that I have to do at the end of the day is to go to sleep, why I should be awake? Or if all that I am going to do is to work, why should I go on a holiday?” A holiday is a pause between two work periods. Sleep is a pause between two waking periods. Death is a pause between two lives – not even a pause between two lives, it is a pause in the life stream. Like sleep is a pause in the waking stream, death is a pause in the life stream itself which we take because we are exhausted, the soul has to, sort of, write its diary of life, go over it and say, “Well, this and this and this. I have now to do if I am to continue on my upward path.”

To die is to come back
In the Bible I read, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.” I used to wonder, you see, why God says vengeance is his? Because we have no right to have vengeance, He can punish and re-create. He can kill and give life again to what he has destroyed. But we can only destroy, we cannot fulfill. If I say, “Arise Thomas.” That Thomas will not arise.

So one in whom this capacity to give life again exists, for him there is no life and death, for him there is no killing, because he does not kill. He changes in some way, by transforming that life which was apparently alive into that which is only an apparent death, so that he can re-create something out of that raw material. This is what death does to all of us. Death is an opportunity to renew life in a more positive, more productive, more evolutionary way. Death is not a final, shall we say, full stop to this life as the Occidental people are generally afraid. They think, “What after death, I cease to exist!” Nihilism, you see. If I am not here what is this life for? But who said you are not going to be here? It is like every day is a new opportunity, every life is a new opportunity.

So one who is fed up with this life, who has frustrated himself by not utilizing the opportunities given to him properly, must sooner expect death. And say, “God, put an end to this life so that I may have the new beginning quicker. Why wait sixty years more in this foolishness, in this stupidity, in this crass ignorance. Terminate my life, my Lord, so that I may begin new, quickly.” But we are wishing for a longer and longer life; what for? See, the only man who has a reasonable right or justification to want to live longer is one who can himself grow and help others to grow.

Babuji Maharaj used to tell me there are only two types of long-lived persons, the sinner and the saint. The sinner because he is condemned to a long life by virtue of his samskaras, of which he has to undergo the bhoga. And the saint because he has to be here to help those who are thus condemned. It is like a jailer in a jail. He is longer in the jail than any of his prisoners. If he is serving fifty years, he is fifty years in the jail. Others may come, one for two days, one for two months, one for two years, but he is in the jail longest. For the rest, there’s an old proverb that “Those whom the gods love, die young.”

Rebirth is not a punishment but a chance
Spirituality says, think of your life also as a vehicle between birth and death. It is a transit through the physical world, which must be treated as a school so that in this time that is allotted to you, or which you have chosen for yourself in the past, you are able to learn the lesson that upon reaching your destination, you don’t have to come back again. It is not death. It is the completion of my journey. Now it would be silly to say when I reach Silkeborg, I am one quarter dead; Sikanderborg, I am half dead; Arthus, I am fully dead. Don’t you think so? But this is what people are afraid of. They are afraid of death. Why? Because we are living life wrongly. Like a boy who has never studied for his exams. He is terrified of his exams, he gets nightmares. He does not want to go to school. He does not want to appear for his examinations. He prays that he may have fever or become sick so that he need not go. But nature will not oblige so easily. So when that boy fails and comes back to his same class the next year, can you say the school punished him? Or his teachers punished him? Or the system punished him? He was not fit for the next level, so he is retained at this level.

This law applies to our life too. Rebirth is nothing but my having to come back to learn lessons which I did not learn when I had the chance. So I come back and say, “Please, one more year. I have to learn this lesson because without doing it I cannot go forward.” So please remember, rebirth is not a fate, it is not a punishment. Please remember that rebirth is not a punishment given by God. In rebirth each one has an opportunity for a fresh life, to again start this journey, find one’s way and reach one’s goal. It is a fresh opportunity that nature gives us again and again and again and again.

So you see, nature gives us, without limit, eternally– chance after chance after chance, which we call rebirth and death, and not understanding, in our foolishness, in our fear of death, that this is like a new day, a new page in a book, to write upon, and create for ourselves a new future. I am surprised that people are afraid of death, when it is life they should be afraid of. What is there to be afraid of in death? Every fool dies. Every millionaire dies. Every king has died. Avatars have died. Who has not died? That which is the common and only heritage of all human beings – can it be fearful? Can it be something of which we should be afraid? Is it not only a door into the next life which beckons and says, “Forget this room full of horrors. Come into this room, where it is all beatitude, plenitude, love.” So you see, it is life we should be afraid of.

If we want to become like Him, it is never too late! Because Nature says, “Not only this life, I give you many lives hereafter.” Because it is Nature’s generosity, God’s greatness, mercy, that He gives chance after chance for us to evolve. He does not say “Stop”. You know in some religions, this life is the final life. And what do we do after this life? We are in some sort of a limbo awaiting the day of judgement. I consider it the most merciless conception of God that He can give me one life, expect me to perform and then judge me for it, millions of years hereafter – nobody knows when! Because that is their siddhantha, that after death, somewhere my soul will exist; and then one day, the day of judgement will come; all the souls will be called; some will be sent to heaven, some will be sent to hell. What a merciless God! What a cruel God!

Creation on the other hand gives us infinite chance. “All right, this life you have failed? Try again! That also you are failing? Try again!” “But Babuji, what about another Master for me?” “Why? Again and again I will come to help you.” “Yada yadahi Dharmasya Glanirbhavati Bharata”. Not only does He give you a chance but He gives Himself a chance too that you shall not be left helpless. “I shall come to you again and again. What can be more noble, more generous, more great than such a concept of Divinity who is not enslaving you but giving you a chance again and again like when you fail in school in one class you are allowed to go to that class again and sit and pass the examinations. Can you say ‘it is cruel? My teachers are cruel.’ No teacher is cruel! You have been cruel to yourself; you have not studied when you had the opportunity; you have failed when you should have passed! To make you capable we are giving you another chance to study again to pass, so that you can be fit for the next stage.

So please do not think of death as a punishment or as something from which we cannot rise or as something to be afraid of! On the contrary any man who thinks he cannot make it in this life should pray for a good next life: “At least give me the next life which can be good, so that I can achieve God.” Because when we are afraid we run away from it. As Babuji said, “We are running away from God because of our fear.” We are talking of the love of God but we are afraid of God. It is like saying “My mother loves me. I am running away from her.” Is it possible?

Today I would form a new slogan – “Die before you start doing.” And in what sense is this ‘dying’? I die to myself, myself from this existence, in the sense that the ‘I’ is gone. If I am able to die the moment I come into the spiritual existence that is, on my becoming a twice-born or Dwija, by having rebirth of this spiritual existence, then it means that the twice-born ceases to exist at the moment of its birth. That is, if you die before you begin to do, everything is done for you.

Alternative to growth is death
The more we grow up, the more we become responsible, the more we have to be responsible for. For ourselves first, and for so many other things later – for our children, for society, for our cars, for our houses. So you see, either we grow – and the fact of growth means accepting more and more responsibility; accepting more and more restraints on how we can behave, how we can act. So the fact of growth means the fact of change. It means the fact of having to face new things every morning. Why every morning? Every moment of our existence. Things are eternally changing. You sit on the beach, and there is a new wave every second.

And you know that old famous story, the story of stupid King Canute, who had a lot of sycophants. And they said, “You are the greatest emperor on earth.” He said, “Oh, is it so? I want to prove it.” They said, “Majesty, tell the ocean to stop the waves.” He said, “Stop.” There are certain things not even the greatest ever human being can stop. You cannot stop the oceans moving. You cannot stop the stars on their course. You cannot stop the sun from rising and setting. You cannot change the laws of growth. And then, if you think, as some people do, that we have a choice of not growing, remember, the only alternative is death.

That which does not grow, dies. Whether it’s a plant, whether it’s a microbe, whether it’s a human being, whether it’s a culture, whether it’s a nation, even the whole world, you see. Because in Nature, there can be no static position. And you say, “Well, we are happy as we are, please leave us as we are.” Nature will not tolerate static conditions.

What you need when you want to climb the spiritual mountain is a great deal of courage that you must reach the top, even if you are going to die in the process. Those who are not willing to die in the process will hardly ever make it. But it is a strange thing that one who is willing to die rarely dies, and one who wants to avoid death is risking death every second. So we must be prepared.

Today it is dark, tomorrow is going to be light again, dawn again, a new glorious day again, when my whole outlook on life is going to be changed all over again. And I would feel the biggest fool if next morning I didn’t exist to feel these things.

That is one reason why suicide is a crime. Not a social crime or a legal crime, but a moral crime. Because when you terminate your life by an act of annihilation aimed at yourself, you are violating the first principle of nature, that everything changes, almost continuously. And, by virtue of having put a stop to your existence, you have put a stop to the possibility of change. It is anti-evolutionary. Therefore no man, no woman, and no child has a right over its own life, much less over the life of another person. Therefore, moral law says, “Thou shalt not kill.” If you have no right over your own existence, your own life, because Nature in its infinite mercy opens infinite possibilities every moment of your existence, how can you put a stop to those potentialities developing in me? And if I cannot do that to myself, how dare I do it to another?

When things cease to change, a stage sets in, which can be justifiably called death. Looked at, in this way, death can be said to be a cessation of the process of change. That is, death is the cessation of growth.

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.

Death is inevitable
You know the story of Parikshit who was killed by Vasuki, the snake. He was given a curse, and to save himself when the time came, it is said he built a palace in the ocean, very far away where no snake could possibly come. But Mrityu (death) cannot be stopped and a saint’s curse cannot possibly be erased or eradicated by anybody else except him. And this huge, enormous, world-encircling Vasuki became a tiny worn and went into a lemon and entered his palace. There it took its ‘swaroopa’ [true form] and confronted Parikshit and Parikshit bowed humbly and said, “Yes, I welcome you.” Mrityu cannot be escaped. Why should we be afraid of it? As I have been telling in the West, a life must mean a life in what we call life, and a life in what we call death. Death is the night’s half of life. Why are we afraid of that?

There is no one on earth who has ever been able to defeat death. Not the greatest king, not the greatest saint, not the greatest Gods. Rama died, Krishna died, all these people died you see. Forget Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Vivekananda. It is said that Lord Ramachandra of Ramayana died by walking into the river Sarayu. What happened to Lord Krishna? Not so much misery. He enjoyed himself, you see. He was always happy, always smiling. And finally an arrow of an archer hit Him on the right big toe and He was dispatched. So when they have not been able to avoid death, what are you going to avoid?

All these talks of Mruthunjaya Homa (sacrifice performed to conquer death) and all, it is stupid nonsense, you see. How many Mruthunjaya Homas have not been done in the past and in the present? You must remember that beautiful story of the Buddha. When a woman went to him with a dead child in her hands and said, “Lord, nobody is able to give this child, my precious child, life. They say you can do it. So I have come to you. Please do it.” Immense faith, you see. They say faith moves mountains. But it cannot give life. Now Buddha could very well have said, “You stupid woman, who can give life to a dead body?” He didn’t do it. He wanted to teach her a lesson in the only way it can be taught. He said, “My darling, my dear mother, my child,” everything you see, “I appreciate, I sympathize, I weep with you for your loss. I shall restore this child on one condition. You must beg and bring for me a handful of til (sesame seeds) from a house in which death has never occurred.” The woman is happy, you see. “Here at last is a man, a yogi, who says I will give life to your child.” She forgot the rest. She says joyously, “Lord, I leave this child at your feet. I will beg and come back soon.” House by house she begs. Everybody is willing to give, why a handful, a bagful of til. Those were the days of generosity you see, not the miserable materiality of today, where we cannot pay a five paise to a beggar and we pay seven lakhs in income tax. Nobody could do it.

Everybody said, “Yes, here is the til.”

“Has there been a death in your house?”

“What can I say my dear. My mousi (aunt) died day before yesterday.” In another house, “My husband died last week.”

In yet another house, “My grandmother died.”

Ultimately she realises death is a universal phenomenon. Nobody can avoid it. She comes back to the Lord, falls at his feet and becomes his disciple. That is the way of overcoming death. The point of the story, I think most of our people have missed for the last three thousand years that

the only way of overcoming death is
to fall at the feet of Master and say,
“Master! Take me. Before death takes me, you take me.”

So if there is one way of avoiding death, which is the same thing as acquiring immortality, you see, it is to go to the Master, fall at His feet, seek His Blessings. This is what my Master taught me.

Death, the great leveller
“Death, the great leveller,” they say. And we often refer to the fact that king or pauper, man or woman, saint or sinner, the end of the human life is the same for all. In that sense we say death is the great leveller. But for me it seems to point to the fact that the levelling is after death. Some people have asked me questions, “How is this possible that we can begin life with equal opportunity? Does it not go against this business of samskara in Sahaj Marg?” It’s a valid question, but it also shows that we don’t understand Sahaj Marg very well yet, for several reasons.

 The first reason is Babuji’s definition of death itself, that when we become unable to bear the loads and the burdens of this life, Nature brings a pause in the existence; in the worldly existence; temporal existence and gives us relief, so that the Self can recoup its energies once again; review its life; work off as much samskara as possible, and start afresh.

 Now why do we start afresh? Precisely because in that interregnum between this end and that beginning, it has not been possible to work off all the samskaras. There is some remnant, some residue. So, we come again. So, death is really a holiday from life. And Babuji has used this beautiful analogy, that even the prisoners in the dungeons are let out for one or two hours every day to go up in the sunshine in the courtyards, to have fresh air, to have some exercise, so that they can face the next period of incarceration in the dungeon.

 Therefore death is not a punishment, neither is death an end. Some Occidental writers on the subject treat death with contempt, with fear. And many people have been educated into thinking that death is to be avoided, even by committing suicide, which is ridiculous. You cannot avoid death by dying. You can only avoid death by living properly. Because again and again I have these references in the books that I read, of all classes, whether it be science fiction, whether it be philosophy, poetry, this misery about death, “Why am I born if I am only to die?” I ask you, “What else should I be born for?” It’s like saying, “Why do I get onto this TGV if I only have to get out of it again?” It would be as silly, you see. A journey does not mean that you go on and on forever. Life goes on, but not journeys.

 So again and again we come back to this idea that when we think of life only in the body as the true life, and that after the body drops off we have no existence, we are going into some sort of limbo, some sort of dirty thing, we make the mistake ourselves. So whatever may be the residual samskara that we bring to this life, it is absolutely a fact that at the beginning we all have the same opportunity that any one of us has.

 I repeat, there is no doubt that opportunity at the beginning is the same. I find this thought reflected for instance in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. You may or may not believe in it, but it is an old system, and a superb system, where again this thought is reflected. That at the moment of death, everything is possible. Babuji has said, “At the moment of death, it is possible to take the soul from here and put it there, to liberate it.” The trouble begins thereafter. So the need to die in the right way.

Now when we are afraid of death, and we say, “I don’t want to die at all,” how can we accept this idea that we have to die correctly? Die rightly? Constant remembrance is very much a feature of this dying rightly. Because if you are ever in His memory, remembering Him all the time, and our end comes in this life with the thought of the Master in our mind, He comes, takes us away. That is liberation. That is, the moment of death becomes the moment of liberation.

At every moment of this transition between this death and that life, liberation continues to be possible. Liberation was possible absolutely at the moment of death. Possibilities, according to the Tibetan tradition, continue through death. It continues into the next life. What is holding us back? According to them, our fears and temptations. According to Sahaj Marg our samskaras. So what is the difference? There is no difference. All traditions which are not religious per se speak of the same possibility. Religion talks of death, burial, judgement, possible redemption. The non-religious, I won’t say they are irreligious, but those philosophies which transcend religion always speak of the possibility of escape. Not an escape in the idea of escape like a sinner running away from something, or a prisoner breaking out of jail, but escaping from our own self, the lower self. This possibility is absolute, it is eternal. It has never stopped at any moment in time. It has never been withheld from anybody. This is the absolute justice, mercy, compassion, love of the Almighty. In this we have to have faith.

This being so, how can our opportunities differ at birth? They did not differ at death. Because anybody dying with this thought of the Ultimate, with the thought of his goal in mind, reaches that goal – anybody! To ensure that we have the right thought at the moment of oblivion, is all this problem that we are facing – meditation, constant remembrance, developing love for the Master. So that if we have established it as a continuing truth in our existence, it cannot depart from us at the moment of death. We shall die with this thought, with this condition. And therefore there is no more question of being reborn, and of not being liberated. Hinduism says, even if you are not able to do this, if at the end of your life, at that moment you are able to think of God in His absolute form, which is a formless, attributeless, nameless existence, then too, this is possible.

Death shouldn’t bring us sorrow
Our mental turmoil, and our feeling of anguish are because of the feeling that we are in this body in which we are now. We create the separateness. Now what can we do about that? You know, the thing which most upset me in the beginning of my life with Master, was that there were always abhyasis dying or sick, something like that, and it never visibly seemed to bother him. I used to think he was a heartless person. People would come weeping, even from his own locality, from his own village, and saying so and so died only two hours ago. He would only put on a long face and say, “It is very sad,” nothing more than that. Now, I used to think, that on one side he has a heart which loves everything in the universe, but you never see a tear in the eyes of that old man. What is this contradiction? Then, I learnt the secret of it in meditation, you see. For him there is no death. We die, but for him there is no death. For whom is he to weep? It would be crazy to weep for somebody who is not dead. So, that is the mystery, you see.

We have to learn slowly, little by little, and then when our turn comes, we become like that and people accuse us of being heartless. So you have to wait until they learn the lesson, you see. A funny thing happened: you know, my father died; all my life I have been afraid of the time, when he will die. Because my mother died when I was five years old or five and a half years old and he was our support. All our life he brought us up, he trained us, he educated us and for me, it was a frightening thing to think of a time where I would have to live without him. Now, on the day he was going to die, I had a dream in the morning: I received a letter from him; on the front is my address, naturally. Now, I have a habit of turning the envelope round to see who it is from, though generally I know from the handwriting. When I turned it round, I found my father had written, “I may never see you again.” This was at four o’clock in the morning and at twelve o’clock he passed away in Bangalore, I was in Madras and we of course had to go immediately to Bangalore, we all went there.

Now, I have always been afraid of dead bodies, or staying in a place where there is a dead body. It was some old primeval fear. But when I went there, and the body was there, laid out, I didn’t even feel that it was my father or that he was dead. Nothing! We reached Bangalore at six in the evening. Now, normally I would not be able to sleep in that house. But I went to bed at nine and slept until six in the morning. It is most unusual. Normally I don’t sleep so much. And next morning, the body was there, people were coming for condolence and I was sitting in a chair like this, perfectly happy. Now the question is, where was that fear of death which I had been nursing for sixty years? It disappeared. And for me it was a great revelation, you see, because it meant the Master is still working. So, these are things which we learn by experience, not by being taught. In fact, some people may have thought, “This son, he is sitting there, like a philosopher... Should there not be some emotion when the father dies?” But really, it should not be there because, where has he gone? He is still very much somewhere. Isn’t it?

Now, suppose your son decides to migrate to Australia, he leaves you and maybe you don’t see him for fifty years again. But we are not sorry about it. In death, what is the separation? It’s the same thing. So, we make this artificial difference, this one is dead, this one is not dead. So that again it is a question of our human consciousness making us suffer or enjoy.

You know there is a funny thing. In most societies, we are happy when a child is born, and we weep when somebody dies. But there is one society where the opposite is done. They weep when a child is born, and celebrate when a man dies. That is a sensible attitude. A soul which was free, in bliss, and which had liberty, is suddenly imprisoned in a stupid human body here. Is it not a matter for grief? So they weep. And death is a liberation from this prison – they celebrate it. I think it’s a very healthy attitude. Don’t you think so? It doesn’t matter which society or where! But the fact is there!

You see, if I say somebody made a million dollars by doing this business, you don’t ask who. You say, “How can I do it quickly, tell me!” Here also we should do the same thing. Actually most of our grief, and most of our enjoyment, is conventional. The heart rarely participates. I think there must have been a time in the human evolution, when, without the cooperation of the heart, the tear glands would not work, but now we have mastered the art of shedding tears without the heart participating. I sincerely believe, you know, that to feel grief when somebody dies, you must have been extraordinarily related to that person.

 Every one of us here has attended birthday parties, and also funerals. We are so comfortable with a birthday party, but few people feel easy, or at ease, when going for a funeral, or for a condolence. They are thinking of what to say, how to say it! Is it right to smile? Should I shake hands or not? Why all these inhibitions? Because we are going to play a part, and we want to make sure we play it well. I mean it’s total hypocrisy, all this business of condolences and funerals. In birthday parties there is no part to play, you see. Happiness is so easy to emulate. That is why there is this old saying in English, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone.” It is not easy to feel grief! We must go beyond it. We must develop spiritually, and then see the changes in ourselves.

It is how you die that matters
We are afraid of graves and graveyards, forgetting that my bed is going to be my grave; in it I am going to die. You know that story of the man who was ferried across a river by a girl. He was a wise man, supposed to be a wise man among wise men. He asked the girl, “Are you not frightened of this ferry business?” She said, “My lord, I have to earn my living. This is how I do it.” “Yes, but my dear, it is so dangerous. What happens when the wind blows and the river gets rough?” She says, “It can be dangerous, yes.” “How did your father die?” “He died in a storm.” “And your grandfather?” “He died in a storm, too. We have all died in storms in this river.” So the wise man says, “Are you not afraid then, of ferrying this boat across the river?” She says, “Father, forgive me. How did your father die?” “Oh, he died at home peacefully in bed.” “And your grandfather?” “He too died peacefully at home in bed.” And she said, “Are you not afraid of sleeping in your bed at home?”

So you see, we should be afraid of our beds, because that is where most of us are going to die. We should be afraid of our homes, but on the contrary, a good man in a good hospital under good attendants says, “Please take me home. I want to die at home.” What on earth for? It is not where you die which matters, it is how you die which matters. How you die does not mean by sickness or ill health, or heart attack or accident. The way in which my Self leaves this lower self, gets out of its cage which is a prison for it, and says “Today I am free.” Is that freedom real, or ephemeral, imaginary. If it is real, it is liberation. If it is not, it is a momentary freedom, like Babuji has described a prisoner being let out, even from the dungeon for one hour a day, up into the sunlight for exercise, and after the one hour is over he goes back. For the bulk of humanity, death is such an escape; a moment of exercise in the sunlight of His benign presence, where we are told, “Think over what you did, which has brought about your incarceration here.” If he is wise he will think over it, he will repent, he will be free. If he is arrogant and says, “Theek hai! [all right] Twenty years here or there, what does it matter?” he goes back in and he stays in.

So it is how we die that matters, not where we die. Kings die in their palaces, beggars die in their, I don’t know, hovels. The sick die in hospitals, the miserable die in their misery. They all go to the same destination. Now, many people imagine that there are more – there’s a bigger population in hell than in heaven, but Babuji told me it is wrong. There are fewer souls in hell, than in heavens.

He told me a story of a long queue at the doors of Heaven, at the gates of Heaven, waiting there for days, millions of people lined up. Each one has to come and report to the receptionist, have his identity checked, and sent in to Heaven. Suddenly a vehicle draws up and there is a big flurry, you see, telephones operating everywhere, bells clanging, the gates opening. They are led in through a wicket gate one by one, normally. But the gates of Heaven are opened, and a car comes from inside. Bugles, fanfare, and this fellow is driven up, he is put into the car and driven there, when all these people are waiting for weeks, months. One fellow there, you know, must have been a Communist while on earth. Eventually when he reaches the sannidhanam of Heaven, the grand audience chamber of God, he says, “My Lord, I have to make a complaint.” The Lord says, “Yes? Even here? Even in my Divine presence there is a complaint? Yes, speak, my son.” He says, “Lord, I waited eighteen days at your door. We were let in one by one. Eighteen days outside Heaven you know it is like Hell. When you are not in Heaven you are in Hell.” “Yes, what is your complaint?” He says, “Suddenly a car came up, your authorities from the gatehouse telephoned, there was a big flurry of activity, the gates were opened for this fellow, your Divine car came and took him in with much fanfare and bugles. I object to this nepotism, this favouritism.” God smiled. He said, “In a way, you are right. But remember my son, people like you come in the millions every day to Heaven. A soul like that comes once in many millions of years. Don’t you think he deserves a little special attention?” That was a rich man, who was a great man on earth. Such people come very rarely. “Even a camel may walk through the eye of a needle, but a rich man shall not enter the gates of Heaven. But this man made it, you see. Therefore, a little extra attention, a little recognition of the fact that even such a soul can come into my Divine presence!” So you see, at the same time the rarity of such a soul going to Heaven, and also the multitudes of simple, innocent people who reach Heaven without any effort. Therefore Heaven is the more populous, not Hell.

Many people asked Babuji, “Can we progress after we are dead?” If you are liberated, yes. Therefore, liberation is the minimum that we have to achieve in this life – the absolute minimum. It is not progress, it is just escape. Then some sort of progress through eternity becomes possible, unimpeded by grossness, because the soul has no grossness. So if you are not willing to do anything else, at least make sure of your liberation, because without liberation you are back again, into another body, into another harem, into another sensory world, into another arena of temptation, danger, fear, despondency. So an awareness of the Self, the existence of something inside me which is making me, myself, exist, is an absolute requirement – the bottom line for a spiritual search to begin. It is no use coming here as businessmen, as beautiful women, as wise people, to find out.

The way one should die
Death is not liberation and liberation is not death. Death is just death; the body stops activity because that which made it active has escaped. Does it escape into liberation by having become nothing or does it escape into this limbo of this other existence from which you must return is the only criterion to be applied to ‘how we die.’ If you are going to the limbo way, the dark way, that from here, I am not going to just exit into an immortality in which I am nothing, and everything that is having me is nothing, and into that infinite Nothingness I merge myself. If it is not that, then we have this fright, this terrible fear of death. What will happen to me after I die because your heart tells you, you have done nothing to ensure what you are going to do after you are dead.

You may be a rich man. You may be a philosopher. You may be a poet. You may be the greatest artist in the world. When we die, we all die the same death. So spirituality says, “It is not in life that you are going to be different – these are superficial differences – it is in death you are going to be different. If you live your life as you should live it, in whatever station of life your earlier destiny may have put you, you will die in such a way that you do not return again to this existence. But the others are all going to come back.”

So you see, the true difference of a spiritual existence is not in the way we live life here on earth, but in the way we die, ultimately, here. And as Babuji Maharaj always said, “It is one of the greatest tragedies and one of the greatest mysteries, that man learns everything by experience. You learn to operate a computer by operating a computer. A child learns to walk by falling and getting up, falling and getting up – ultimately it does not fall any more. But we have died so many millions of times, and yet we have not learned to die correctly.” This is the tragedy of death. The tragedy of death is not that we die, but that we never learn to die in the right way. See, it is like a man who opens the door, closes it, opens the door, closes it. And he is always inside. Or like one of these nice brass doors, polished, in big hotels, four sections, rotating and children use it as a roundabout. They just go round and round and round and round. They do not go anywhere, just stay there.

So we are using life and death like one of these roundabouts. Eternally we are going round and round. In fact, somebody has called it the eternal return. Now whose fault is it? We always want to blame God. We want to blame destiny. We want to blame everything except ourselves. So spiritual science says, “Live in such a way that this death is your last, no more coming back here.” Then life has been properly lived and death has proved a door into eternity. Now the function of death is precisely to lead you out of this life into the higher life. But even that has to be learned, you see, and somebody has to teach us how to do it. Now, that is what we learn in meditation.

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.

Dying in Love
When there is love between two persons, whether husband and wife, father and son, mother and daughter, friends, guru and disciple – if this real love is there between the two, there will automatically develop a mutual respect, a mutual regard, even a mutual admiration, perhaps, even a mutual worship. Because friendship must ripen into love, love must ripen into adoration. Adoration must ripen into worship, into surrender and then into the extinction of the self.

Therefore you see, loving is dying. To love is to die. And when you cease to exist in love, that is, “I must be alive so that I can enjoy my love, bask in my love, drown myself in my own love,” that is narcissistic, psychologically speaking, and it is destructive. So, to say that love and death are linked is also a lesser truth than to say that love is death. Truly, when you love, you seek only the other, you think only of the other – only the other exists, you don’t exist. It is love which gives form to substance, to essence.

The spirit takes up matter, makes it fit for itself, embodies it itself and there you have a body – white, black, tall, short, it doesn’t matter. And when this idea comes, that this body is so wonderful, this body is so beautiful, this body is so attractive – the ego comes, the love of the self comes, the narcissistic love comes, selfishness comes and love goes out of the door. That is why, today, there is so little love in this world. It is all self, self, self! So, what is necessary to bring back the bliss of love, the glory of love, the transcendental experiences of love, and the ability to transcend love itself into a final extinction of the self – to die to oneself, which is what Babuji Maharaj, in spiritual terms, called the living death, the living dead.

So you see, if you don’t die in love, you will have a different type of death – in fear, hatred, sorrow, misery. Death is inevitable. One death is unglorious, painful, miserable, self-destructive. The other death is glorious, worshipful, full of love, full of beatitude. So all that we do, when we inculcate our children and ourselves with the spirit of holiness, with the attitudes of holiness, the ability to worship that which we love, to adore that which we love, to surrender to that which we love, to finally die for that which we love – we are seeking a form of death which transcends death. It is no longer death. I die without dying. Death, for me, no more exists. It is erased from the slate of my existence in eternity. Such a person never dies, because he has died to himself, by himself. For such a person, death can have no fears. Since he cannot die, we call such persons immortal. They are there forever. Their love is inextinguishable. Why is it inextinguishable? Because they no longer love – they are love. So you see, how closely love and death are linked. To die in love means to live forever. To die thinking of yourself, in your selfishness, in your own personal vainglory, is to die forever. So, one is the way to immortality; the other is the way to hell; to recurrence – eternal recurrence, as one psychologist has called it, again and again and again, until we learn to love, to sacrifice, to die to ourselves.

What should we do with the dead?
It is a common experience of all of us, miserable human beings, that we love our parents more after they are dead. While they are alive, they are a nuisance to us. They trouble us with their demands for discipline, for performance. And when they die, we work off our self-felt, self-created guilty feelings by expensive shraddhas, expensive ceremonies, putting up big pictures on the walls. Why is it that we have to love the dead and not the living? I mean, this is a very sordid bit of human existence, that somebody has to die before they earn our love. What is the use of weeping for the dead? Shall we not weep for the living?

So you see, instead of spending thousands of rupees on a dead person’s cremation, and his shraddhas year after year and the tarpana every amavasya (new moon) day, if you have loved them well, cherished them well during their existence, all this ritualistic expiation of our inability to love becomes unnecessary. Love the living; it’s no use loving the dead.

Now that brings me to the problem of those people who left us. You know, fathers die, mothers die, and we put their pictures at home and with great devotion we put a mala (garland) and light a lamp. According to my Master, this is the most destructive thing that we can do which holds back these souls from their own progress in the afterlife. What should we do with the dead? First, of course, we bury them or cremate them; that is physical disposal. As far as the mind is concerned, love them and forget them. Most of you would probably think that this is very inhuman and in some way a crazy advice. Forget our forefathers? Yes. Because every time you remember them, especially from the depth of your heart, it is a pull on that soul and you are dragging them backwards. So with all these kriyas, rituals associated with the departed, we think we are helping them but actually we are putting a brake on their progress, whatever it may be. So I asked Babuji, “What should be the way? If at all I remember my dead people, what should I do about it?” Sometimes we have no control over our memory; we don’t remember by choice. He said, “When you remember, pray to the Master, ‘May that soul receive peace.’ That is enough.”

So all these essentially Hindu ideas, you know, putting the picture (especially in a very prominent place) in the drawing room to show our love and affection to our departed parents, putting garlands, putting chandan (sandalwood), lighting the lamp, you know, it is the most crazy thing to do. However good our parents may have been, however elevated, we should not give them the status of gods. A parent is a parent and is a human being. Unless of course, like my Master, He was God. Then we don’t need to put a picture of Him and worship. We worship Him in our hearts.

Indeed if you look to the ritualistic ideas of most of our Hindu religious texts, you will find that there is more of destructiveness associated with them than any helpful attitude towards the pitrus (forefathers). Pitru worship is the most destructive single ritual of our Hindu religion. So I would urge all of you, who are doing it, to kindly stop it – in any form you see. And if you want to remember them on the day of their departure, try to forget it, you will remember them better. If memory comes, sit in meditation for ten minutes or fifteen minutes. Pray to the Master, “Almighty Master! My departed father, mother, brother, sister, whoever it may be, may your Grace flow towards him or her. May he or she receive peace.”

Babuji told me that Lalaji Maharaj, wherever He went, if He saw a graveyard, He would transmit; if He saw a tomb, He would transmit; if He saw a burial ground, He would transmit, just thinking that all the souls which have had their final departure from this place, may they receive peace. And they did receive peace. So that was the way Lalaji helped the dead souls with whom He had no connection whatsoever. Anybody who has died (was buried) in this graveyard, let there be peace in his soul. Wherever the soul is in this universe, it receives His blessings, His Grace, a momentary peace. Somebody may say, “What is the use of momentary peace? I want lasting peace.” But imagine, if a man is about to commit a murder and at that moment peace descends on his mind and the murder is stopped, is he not saved from the phansi (the hangman’s rope)?

What happens to an abhyasi who dies prematurely?
The answer is obvious, because my Master has said, unless we reach the liberation point within this lifetime, we have to be reborn again. So the earnest abhyasi must make certain that he reaches at least the liberation point during this lifetime.

We had an abhyasi in Coimbatore, in South India. He was very earnest, and I had also intended to make him a preceptor for the Coimbatore centre. He went on some work to Bangalore, and there he fell sick. Intense stomach ache. They brought him back to Coimbatore and in three days he was dead.

But just before he died, two, three hours before he died, he called his mother to him and said, “Please don’t make a scene, don’t weep or anything, just be quiet and leave the room.” So they all left him alone. After half an hour he called his mother alone into the room, and he pointed to the air above his bed, the atmosphere above his bed, and said, “I am seeing the Divine light here, and this is the light for which everybody has been meditating. I am going to die, but I am happy. So I bid you goodbye.” And after half an hour he passed away.

Now I was unhappy with this because I had wanted to make him a preceptor for that centre. He was a good soul you see. So I wrote to Master. Master wrote back and said, “I see the soul sitting in a corner, weeping.” He was able to see it in His vision, and then He said, “Had he meditated one month more, he would not have to be reborn, because he would have reached liberation point. As it is, he has to take one birth more.” So you see, that emphasizes the need for very, very diligent spiritual practice.

What do you think about birth control, contraception?
Well, generally it is considered to be not quite the thing done, according to religion. But there are techniques available by which you need not have a baby. But not by contraception, it is more by abstention.

 I had once asked Master a question about rebirth. I had the impression, my own personal impression, that good souls are reborn instantly after death. It was my opinion that they would be qualifying for quick evolution. But Master said no. It is the bad souls which are reborn quickly – or souls with bad samskaras. I asked Him why this should be so. He said those with good samskara, or the souls without much samskara but yet destined to be reborn, they cannot find the proper environment to be reborn. So by following these unnatural practices, we might be denying an opportunity to souls which are higher in evolution, which need yet to be reborn, from being reborn.

So this is the highest reason for not practicing birth control, especially for spiritual people like Sahaj Marg abhyasis. Because we must remember that as we evolve, it becomes impossible for the negative types of souls to be reborn to us, in our environment, and only the higher souls will find our environment suitable for birth. Why I am saying this is, we should not automatically assume we will therefore have nine children, or twelve children, because as we evolve, the possibility of having children of that level decreases for us too, because there are not many around. So it will be a safe married life even without contraception. There is no problem.

What lies beyond death?
We have the famous story of the Upanishads. It’s called the Kathopanishad, where a young boy of eight manages to reach the abode of death, the God of death. He has been made to wait three days because the Lord of death wasn’t there. So the Lord of death, when he returns says, “For each day, you must have a boon. Please ask me whatever you like.”

The first two are rather trivial. The third one, is “What lies beyond death?” Yama says, “You are a boy. Ask for things suited to your age. Ask for pleasure, ask for fun, ask for knowledge; anything you want I will give you.” He says, “No. This is what I want. You are the Lord of Death. You should know what lies beyond.” Lord of death says, “My son, don’t ask for these things. These are mysteries beyond the comprehension of even the gods. The great Rishis who have been doing tapasya, they don’t know. So, what will you do with this knowledge?” He says, “If they don’t know it, if even the gods don’t know it, all the more reason why I should know it. I won’t go until you tell me.” Then he tries to bribe this youngster, “I will give you ten thousand years of life, and ten thousand grandsons who will each live ten thousand years, and all the beautiful women of heaven, anything you want, you see, untold wealth.”

So the boy asks Yama, “Tell me one thing. If after all these ten thousand or hundred thousand or two hundred thousand years that I can ask for, and you are sure to give, have I not ultimately to come face to face with you again, and then go beyond?” He says, “Yes.” “Then why should I wait all those years? Do it now. I want to know it now.” Very wise, and there the text stops. Unfortunately, the text stops there. It doesn’t say what happened after that.

We need the Master, in the hereafter too
What will happen when I die? If the Master can help me in life, He can help me after I am dead. So it makes no difference whether I am here or not. If I have been connected with Him during life, His help should be available to me after my so-called death too. And if I have faith in that, I would rather die sooner than later, for at least two very important reasons. The first reason is very important: that every moment I live, I am subjected to pressures, temptations, possible falls, why should I take that risk? Isn’t it? The second is the suffering concomitant on life. What is the fun in suffering if I can leave this body and still receive His help?

So, especially for an abhyasi, it is very stupid to want to live a long life. In fact, there is that other English saying, “Those whom the gods love, die young.” There are only two classes of old people. The large multitude which have to suffer the bhoga of their samskaras, which needs time, and for them therefore old age is a curse. Therefore the human being, with all his or her stupidity knows old age to be a curse. And the other class, in which there may be one or two persons in several thousands of years, are the saints who have to live to serve. They have no bhoga, nothing – the saint exists for our service. So, whichever way you look at it, it is foolish. Let us, of course, not pray that people should die young, but we should not oppose it when it happens.

I have heard so many people say, you know, “Oh! I wish he had lived a few years more!” Now look at this funny sentiment. Why a few years more, why not many years more? So we want him or her to live for our sake, not for his or her sake. And at least in India, whenever somebody dies, we can hear this very often, you see. “What will I do now?” This is always the cry of the person left behind. Not a concern for the dead. What is that departed soul doing? Is it wandering in darkness? Does it have the Master’s guidance? Can it see the light? We are not concerned with all that, you see. We are only concerned with ourselves. “What will I do now?”

There is a well-known short story where a man’s wife dies in the morning. He is miserable, and at night winds up in a brothel, the justification being that he is utterly lonely without his wife. He had no time to think of his wife’s loneliness – thrown into the void, in the dark, no company, where nobody can speak to her, nobody can touch her. What is she doing? He never thought of it! Many people praise that novel for its supposed psychological insight into human behaviour. For me it is a shameful exposition of human selfishness. So, this is the problem of life and death.

I asked Babuji once, “Why do I need a Master?” All the conventional answers he gave me. Then I asked Him a question, which He admired very much. I said, “Will your help be available to me when either I am no longer here, or you are no longer here?” You know, He was so immensely happy, He said, “You are the first person in my experience who has asked me this question.” Now I was amazed. Surely we should be concerned with what is going to happen to us when we die. Master said, “That is the tragedy. Even in the spiritual life they think only of this life and of the Master in this life. Who is there who can think of the life after this, or what they are going to do there?” And the second more shameful thing I realised myself later, that we limit the Master’s ability only to help us in this life, not beyond.

I cannot conceive that a soul can have its identity in a recognisable form in the hereafter, to know who it is or to know who is coming across the border. It cannot possibly know this. Now I am talking of unliberated souls who are going to be reborn, because death removes this memory from this life. Then who is the child, who is the wife, who is the mother? And if the soul is liberated it goes to the brighter world and has no more concern with us. If we understand this fact correctly, that at my death no other soul of a human being can be there to receive me, then comes the possibility of my overcoming this fear of losing my humanness and loving my Master, and surrendering to Him. Because for Him this barrier of death doesn’t exist, He can pass through this barrier, or the border between the lives, up and down, as many times as He chooses. Then comes the faith that when this life of mine is ending, He, the real beloved will not wait at some abstract border of life, you know, but He will be at my death bed to take me away with Him. That is the biggest fear and the biggest promise, both in one.

Most of us have to go back, “Sorry you cannot cross the border, next life!” So we need the Master very much to take us across. Because everyone who is born is going to die, everyone needs the Master. There can be no exception to this. So now if you love somebody so much, don’t you think you must bring him or her to the Master at the quickest possible moment? Because, as Babuji said, “Death is one thing which does not wait and we cannot know when our life is going to end.” He defined wisdom as, “Leading life as if we are going to die the next moment.” But we lead our lives as if we were going to be millionaires the next moment, or cinema stars, and we waste it. So that is the greatest need. As Babuji said, “Find the Master and having found Him, bind Him to yourself in such a way that you can never be separated from Him.”

It is He who is always with us
It is said in the Upanishad, for instance, that of the Panchabhutas, it is said, “Mrityurdhaavati panchama iti.” Death is chasing all these five things, the five senses. It is always behind. Then there is another story of a woodcutter, who was cutting wood for his living every day and bringing a head-load home every evening, selling part of it, using part of it, going on for years like this. And one day in the jungle he is tying up his bundle of firewood to take home – he feels afraid. For no reason, he feels a strange presence, you see, and he starts walking fast. And pit-pat, pit-pat, pit-pat, the footsteps are following behind. He runs. The footsteps run behind him. Finally, you know, he makes a terrific effort, trying to run away from this thing which is following him, and falls exhausted, and then he sees – God. He says, “What is this? I have been looking for you all my life. Where have you been?” He says, “my son, it was always me who was trying to catch you, trying to follow you and catch you, but you have been eternally running away from me. Today you are caught!”

So you see, on one side we have this idea of death, who is pursuing us inexorably with his loop in his hand, like the lasso of, you know, the Western cowboy. In the Hindu tradition, it is the lasso which is thrown around – it is called the yama-paasha, and it works in such a way that the soul is removed from the body. The body falls, and the soul goes away with the Yama-dhoota or Yama himself. Simultaneously, God is also following.

Now, whom should we think is following us? Who is it, who is following me all my life? If I am afraid, I think it is death. If I am a devotee, I think it is my Master. Master always said, “Think the Master is behind you in everything that you are doing. On the stray occasions when you are afraid – for instance, when you are going to a new place in the darkness, think the Master is going in front of you.” So, fear puts the Master in front. Devotion puts Him just behind. In both cases He must be with us – in fear, during temptation, in confidence. Without the Master we are nothing. Either He must be in front of me, or He must be behind me. Preferably He should be all around me, surrounding me like the praetorian guard around the emperor.

It is said you know that, when the saints die, they tell their sishyas, the disciples, “the moment for meeting my beloved has come. It is not that Yamadev, riding on a black buffalo, it is the beloved, because he who liberates me must be my beloved. Who will liberate me from this stupid life that we are leading? Only somebody who loves me will liberated me. Who will let you out of this jail? Has somebody come and released you? If somebody comes and releases you, he must be the beloved. He must be the one who loves you and says, “Come, enough of this imprisonment, what are you doing here, 25 years, 50 years, 75 years, still in jail? Chhi, come out.” That is the Guru.

Death can be a gateway to liberation
I asked Master how destruction could ever be justified. Master answered, “Yes, you have some doubt. But it is there only because you are thinking in a narrow way. Think of destruction as change. What happens when you cut down a tree? The tree is destroyed. But the carpenter makes furniture out of it. So the wood is used. The wood is still there, the form has changed. When a person dies we think it is the end. Death is final, that is our view. But it is not correct. What we see as death is only the rebirth into another life. Similarly what we see as birth, when a baby is born, must be death in another life, giving birth here. You understand this? It is only a change of form. The life goes on and on, but the form keeps changing until a fortunate person finds a Master who can grant him his liberation.”

I requested Master to explain whether death could be considered a liberation in itself. Some people feel that this is so. Master replied, “Death does not solve the problems of life, but it creates intricacies for the next life. Death sends one to another state, so that, one may not feel the continuity of trouble. There must be some pause between this life and the next life to come. Men are kept in dungeons. But if they are there for years in a gloomy dungeon they will require a change. So they are brought out to exercise once in a while before they go into it again. Death is like that. Really speaking only fools die, and not the saints. Saints are everlasting in their own regime. So, death is of value for the other troubled persons; for the saints it is an unrevealed object. Now I tell you something very important, Life in life should be our real object.”

Master once told me that the moment most appropriate, or easy, for liberation is the moment of death. He said, “At the moment of death it is very easy to liberate anybody. I just take him and put him up there.” He raised his hand, pointing from a low level to a high level, as if removing a bottle from a lower shelf and putting it on a higher shelf! “Later on it becomes difficult. The soul must not have taken rebirth. Suppose it has taken rebirth and I liberate it, the person it has been reborn as will die! And if it has taken several rebirths then nothing can be done. You see this difficulty! So I say try for it in this life itself. Who is to say whether the Master can be free to serve you at the exact moment of your death? So try for it now. I tell you one thing. Heart is heart if it is diverted to God. Soul is soul if it jumps into the ultimate Reality. We have to try to reach the changeless state. When we have a goal like that, then changes are necessary. Changes develop power for the Ultimate growth.”

Immortality
One who is going to be liberated and immortal doesn’t bother about death, because he has time as his instrument. One who is afraid of death and thinks that people die, is a slave of time. So you have the chance, the opportunity, the choice, between slavery to time or mastery over time. So I recommend to you all a little wisdom in handling time because that is the secret to what we call immortality.

What is immortality in the presence of Divinity? No longer must He be someone from whom I can be separated even by thought. Because in the realm of the infinite, there can be no separation. Separation from what, where, how? I breathe, and the air I breathe is of course separate from me but it’s also a part of me. It is something which is of me, in me, and yet not of me because a moment comes when I cease to breathe. That moment when I cease to breathe, when I can say I no longer can breathe, I no longer have oxygen in my lungs, is precisely the moment when I die. That separation means death.

It was not for nothing Babuji used to say that He could not be separated from Lalaji even for a second. It is the breath of His breath, the life of His life, Pranasya Prana. We are all talking of Pranasya Prana. We don’t understand what it means. We all know that physical extinction comes about when physical breathing stops. If a mere few cc’s of air can make a difference between life and death to me, as we physically understand it, what should be the situation when my life’s life is separated from me. Because in yogic tradition we say the body lives by that which we call life, and the life lives by that which we call the life of the life, the prana of the prana. So if for this merely mortal physical existence, this breathing is so important, that few seconds, few minutes of separation means an extinction of my existence, can we be ever parted from that which is the life of this life? Logic says no. Because if that happened, I couldn’t even exist physically. That is responsible for that life in me which is keeping me alive in this existence

Immortality does not mean eternal existence, as it is commonly interpreted. It means not being subjected any more to death. Eternal existence has no meaning, because we think eternal existence means an infinitely extended existence in time. Eternal existence means rising above time itself. There is no past, there is no present, there is no future, and in that condition, how are you going to live for ever and ever? When I am beyond time, there is no possibility of living eternally, living for ever and ever after. I live, that’s all. I exist.

Living dead
In India you know, saints stop eating, they stop breathing. They stop breathing – it’s an unimaginable feat of the will. Any fool can stop eating; when he doesn’t get something to eat, he stops eating. But if I try stopping to breathe? It’s impossible. But saints have been known to do it. They said, “My existence is of no use. Whatever I came to do I have done, finished.” They left. See, that is the absolute control of an evolved being who has control not over life, but over death itself. Therefore, India has revered the great saints of the past who could die at will, not under compulsion. They chose the moment of death, lay down and went to sleep. They don’t die, they exit, you see. That is the mystery of evolution, that until a human being can leave life like an actor leaving the stage, at will, purpose accomplished, he is subject to the law of eternal recurrence, until he evolves.

We have a saying that ‘to know what happens at death, you must die once.’ That is what Babuji calls a living death. So, we must be alive after we are dead, before we can know what death is. Isn’t it? If we are dead finally, we cannot know anything about it. That is why we have been denied a knowledge of death even though, according to tradition, we have been born and have died so many times. That is what our Indian philosophy says: “We die without gaining a knowledge of death.” And anything which we do without gaining a knowledge about it is a wasted experience. So, in that sense, all our previous deaths have been wasteful deaths, useless deaths. So, now we should try to die usefully, that is, gainfully, because it is common sense knowledge that we overcome that about which we have full knowledge, and when we can know all about death while we are still alive, then death has no longer any power over us. That is the condition of living death of Sahaj Marg.

Let us free ourselves of these obsessive tendencies. Let us note that there is only one wealth, one wisdom, one beauty which we can carry with us – that is the beauty, the wisdom, and the wealth of the eternal which is inside me – the Self in me, which is eternally beautiful. It does not know age. It does not know sickness. “Janma mrityu jaraa vyadhi.” They say, the four upaadhis of existence. janma [Birth] – if you take it, all the other three follow. Mrityu, jara, vyadhi – death, old age, sickness. One who is born will inevitably die. That is why the Gita says, “It is never born, and never dead.” “Na jaayate va mriyate”– because one which is born, must die, even if it is a god. Therefore, Avatars have died. Rama died. Krishna died.

So you see, that which is born must die. Naturally, it has to age, it has to face sickness. Therefore this craze for mukti. Why are people so fascinated by mukti even when they don’t want mukti; when they don’t want to die? Suppose we ask, “How many of you want to be liberated now?” How many people will say yes? Because we want mukti at a moment of our choosing. We do not know when we shall die. Like spirituality should be ideally commenced at the moment of conception, but since nobody knows when conception is taking place, it is not possible, therefore it is delayed to the eighteenth year, nobody knows when death is stalking him. To say, “No, no, wait, Yama! I am going to be liberated by my Master.” And Yama laughs. He says, “Which Master? Have you a Master? Come. You are mine.” Mukti not of our choice, but His choice. Mukti not at the time of our choosing, but of His choosing. All that we can do is to prepare ourselves for that moment, praying to Him, “Lord, at the moment of my death, may you come and lead me to the hereafter.”

As Babuji said, “If you remove the saltiness from salt, what is left? It is no longer salt. If you remove the sweetness from sugar, what is left?” So, when all the qualities are removed from us, what is left? It is that which has no qualities, no form, no name – God. So, divinisation comes by removing things. I am arrogant – remove it. I am wise – remove it. I am capable – remove it. It does not mean we become incapable. On the contrary, we become more capable. Ice cannot come in, through the chink under the door, but the wind can blow through it. Isn’t it?

Subtler and subtler, you have access to everything in creation. Grosser and grosser, you are limited by everything. All this is grossness – wisdom is grossness; strength is grossness; power is grossness; ego is grossness; arrogance is grossness. So Babuji said, “Even wisdom we have to surrender.” As Vivekananda says, “The intellect we need, but so far and no further.” We come to the boundary, and then we respectfully bid it goodbye, because now we don’t need intellect. If I am going into a territory where there is no north, no east, no south, no west, why do I need a compass? Where there is no wind, where there is no rain, where there is no sunshine, why do I need clothes? Isn’t it? There is never hunger, never pain, so why do I need a body?

So, one by one these things are cast off. And then comes death – the divine moment when everything is God. And what remains? As Babuji said, “Remove all qualities one by one, and what remains is God.” You understand? Thank you.

Some pearls to pick 

• Health is given to those who are not yet healthy. Death comes to him who is not yet dead.
  
  
• Our whole existence is a journey through life. We have got in at birth, we have to get out at death.
  
  
• ‘Live as if you are going to die the next moment.’ Our attitude should be like that, so that we do the most important things and not the stupid things, trivial things, that we generally indulge in.
  
  
• If you have not been liberated in life, you cannot be liberated after death. 
  
  
• We have to live to learn to die. And if you are going to continue to be afraid of death, in some way your life is a waste. It is a purposeless life.
  
  
• That which is not born cannot die. So the moment of our birth signals the process of death commencing.
  
  
• One who must be, and wants to be, at the pinnacle of human perfection has to pay the price for it, and the price is your life.
  
  

“There is no death for a true disciple;
he only merges in the Master.”

In life, we think everything belongs to us – our houses, our swimming pools, our gardens – not understanding that we are a tenant, and one day we have to leave. So all that spirituality says is, “Remember, you are not only a tenant of this house, you are a tenant in this body itself. Prepare your next residence, before you leave this. Otherwise, you will be a houseless person, with nowhere to go.” That is the dreadful thing about the afterlife. So spirituality says, “My friend, look for your next house first, and do it quickly, because here there is no written contract, and nobody can say when you have to vacate.” So like the scouts: “Be prepared.”