Death; An Inside Story: A book for all those who shall die

by Sadhguru

as far as this body is concerned, whether someone kills you or you kill yourself, or if you overate and got a heart attack, or whatever—it does not matter. If you don’t live properly, you will get a disease and die.

In terms of life, did you exhaust your Prarabdha Karma or not? This is the only factor that matters and determines what happens after that.

The worst part of this modern life is everything has to be explained. Life does not work like that. Tell me, how are you alive?

but in the cellular level there is energy, lots of energy.

They want to use this little spurt or energy to transport themselves into something. They are trying to extract that little life and use it.

you notice, when you are joyous, you are not greedy any more. You are very generous. You will give away anything at that moment. It is only when you are miserable, you are very greedy.

The longing to move on to the next dimension becomes urgent, especially if you look back and realize you have been in the same movie for a long time.

If your goal is set, if you have made Self-Realization the top priority in your life, then everything else which does not take you one step closer is meaningless.

When I say you are free from existence, I am not talking about existence as a quantity and you are free from that. You are free from your own existence. Your existence is finished. When there is no existence, you are even free from freedom, because freedom is also a certain bondage. As long as you exist, one way or the other you are bound.

people are still children. They might have grown-up bodies, but in terms of understanding, they are still children. They want to see this, they want to see that. Let us say, the memory of a hundred lifetimes opens up to you, you will see that you are going through the same nonsense over and over

If you have not lived a life of awareness, the possibility of you suddenly becoming aware in an extreme situation like death does not arise at all.

If you understand there is nothing to lose, because anyway you came with nothing and there is nothing to lose, the fear of death will not be relevant.

Fundamentally, death means you are shedding what you have gathered in this life in terms of physical content and psychological content.

Have you noticed, if people feel insecure they will just curl up and sleep? They just go back into that foetal position. The need is to go back into the womb.

When people feel insecure, they want to drink and sleep because sleep is just a small manifestation of death. People want to sleep absolutely like a log because it gives freedom from life.

Insecurity comes to you because of limited identification. You identify yourself as a body, and only because of that, there is all this insecurity.

If you have tasted the unboundedness in you, if you truly experienced yourself beyond the limitations of the physical and the mental, there would be no fear. This is why there is so much emphasis on using your time and life to know that which is beyond the physical. That is why you must do sadhana.

Calamities, especially like death and illness, are a tremendous opportunity to look beyond the limitations of what you normally understand as life.

Fundamentally, the problem is that we think there is a solution for anger, there is another solution for fear, there is another solution for depression. No. There is no treatment as such for these things. This may look simplistic, but the fundamental reality is that your mind is not taking instructions from you.

What is needed is taking charge of your physiological and psychological process, paying attention to the process of how we generate thoughts, how we generate emotions, how we conduct our body and how we manage our chemistry.

Every day, just spend five minutes reminding yourself that you are mortal and today you may die.

Just reminding yourself constantly that you are mortal and you may die today will take away your fear of death.

Even on a daily basis, one can make this awareness a part of one’s life. When you are hungry and want to eat, just postpone it by ten minutes. Be conscious of your hunger, do not get busy with some other activity. Consciously postpone your meal and wait. Even when you normally sit for a meal, just be conscious of your hunger while looking at the food.

a family or a home means a whole lot of over-organization of life for today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. When you live at home or with your family, you will get sucked into it. This connection with the other bodies and the over-organization of life will create an enhanced sense of the self in a person. This will make it very difficult to let go of things.

If dying in Nature is not possible, the next best option is to withdraw from everyone that you know, particularly relatives and close friends.

It is good to check how relevant you are to the situation around you, what your priorities in life are, and whether it is time for you to withdraw.

it is to live your life with a certain kind of awareness and preparation, so that death can happen in the best possible manner. This is not an invitation to death but a

profound acceptance of the huma...

Unfortunately, for most of these millionaire immortality-seekers, all they have known in their life is the pleasures of body, the joys and pains of psychological drama and the intoxication of power in the world they live in.

in life, one should have passion towards the highest, compassion for all and dispassion towards oneself.

All physical realities exist within the ambit of time. If your time is destroyed, everything is over for you.

spirituality means putting your life on fast forward. You may suffer much more because everything happens at a fast pace. What you would have stretched for ten years happens, let us say, in one month. So the intensity of the suffering that you go through is

extremely acute. There may be moments of ecstasy and joy, but there is so much suffering also happening rapidly within you.

Hell and heaven do not exist as geographical places but as human experience. You don’t have to be disembodied to be in hell or heaven; even when you are alive, they can exist for you.

The advantage of being here with the body is that sometimes when you get into hell in your experience, you can employ your discrimination and get out of that pit.

We have created a collection of sacred chants called Vairagya. It has five mantras. Listen to the album over and over a few times, paying attention to each one of the mantras. Each one runs for ten minutes. Figure out which mantra really draws you. Just listen repeatedly. When you feel that one of them is really grabbing you, just go by that.

Sexuality, food and even constantly sipping water opens up the body to various influences that will not always work positively for people.

One should also avoid unnecessary touching of the dead body. Whatever touching you need to do should be to clean or bathe or move the body, but one should avoid unnecessarily holding the body, hugging, and all that. That is not good for you or that life which is exiting.

When you live by memory, you live with one foot in the land of death and another in the land of life. That is torture!

whatever happened yesterday, whatever happened in the previous moment, you must always be conscious it is dead.

some scriptures were read aloud to give people an understanding of what was happening,

You should live in such a way that there should be no need for any after-death rituals for you. You should promise me that you will not trouble me even after you are dead! Please make yourself in such a way that you will not need any ritual from me or anybody else when you are dead.

The main problem with rituals is that when the level of integrity drops in the social fabric, all rituals will turn corrupt.

If the child does the right things after the death of the parent, he can even liberate the parent through this connection.

People who lived completely unaware and did not do anything about themselves, depended on their children to liberate them. And that became a whole tradition by itself.

Today, these rituals are commonly misunderstood as remembrances, but they are mainly to assist in dissolving one’s runas, or debts, to the ancestors.

One important aspect of spiritual development is that you must distance yourself from your Genetic Memory and Evolutionary Memory.

Well, I myself have said that after I am physically gone, for eighty years, I will be here in a presence bigger than the way I am right now and see that everyone who is here is seen through in some way.

Once someone leaves their body, whether you like it or not, they have nothing to do with you any more.

Someone entered your life and left—if they have enriched your life, you must live joyfully. Acknowledge them for whatever they have done to you, don’t make it look like they poisoned your life and left.