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Everywhere in the world, life is mostly considered a success that is to be sung and celebrated, but death is considered a failure that is to be shunned and mourned.
Modern science, characterized by objectivity and universality, has now enabled people to look at death in ways that were not possible before.
Death—just as life—can be understood as having three components. There is a biological part, a psychological part and a metaphysical part that causes the biology and the psychology to happen.
The grand phenomenon of life cannot be constrained to the period between birth and death, as seen by modern science. It goes back all the way to the beginning of Creation and extends all the way to wherever the Creation is heading. Hence, any understanding of death that does not take this fact into account is bound to be incomplete and incorrect. In the first part of the book—Life and Death in One Breath—Sadhguru describes the essential mechanism of life and death using several approaches.
He concludes the first part by describing the highest form of death—the dissolution of the Self—which is the goal of all spiritual seekers.
‘Hundreds and thousands of living beings meet death at every moment, yet the foolish man thinks himself deathless and does not prepare for death. This is the biggest wonder of life.’
Upon birth, the first thing that a child does is to inhale, to take in a gasp of air. And the last thing that you will do in your life is an exhalation.
How is it that after living here for millions of years of life, human beings still don’t know a damn thing about death? Well, they know nothing about life either. We know all the trappings about life, but what do you know about life as such?
Once you come to terms with death, and you are conscious that you will die, you will want to make every moment of your life as beautiful as possible.
When your very body perceives the fragility of its existence, there is a very profound relief and acceptance.
Death is the creation of the unaware, because if you are aware, it is life, life and life alone—moving from one dimension of Existence to another.
Death is compassion because it relieves you.
Life needs a certain amount of tension to keep it going, but in death, there is relaxation. In fact, death is the highest relaxation. However, if you also know the relaxation of death when you are alive, then life becomes an utterly effortless process.
The moment you reject death, you also reject life.
If you want to live as a full life, you should look at your mortal nature every day, not only when you are beyond a certain age. Every day of your life, you need to be aware that you are mortal. It is not that I want to die today, but if I do, it is all right with me. I will do everything to protect myself, to nurture myself, to take care of myself, but if I have to die today, it is okay with me.
Let new things happen to you. If you create this kind of nothing-should-happen-to-me situation within yourself, you will become stagnant. Stagnation is death. If life does not move on, if new possibilities don’t arise within you, you are living dead.
According to the Yogic system, memory is basically an accumulation of impressions.
Elemental Memory and Atomic Memory together constitute what can be called Inanimate Memory.
Right now, you see a huge upsurge in activities like trekking, cycling, running, etc. This is not only for fitness. Most realize that by just being in a demanding activity, they sleep, think and act better. Their enthusiasm and energy for relationships and work are enhanced.
People want to avoid whatever is unpleasant in their life because they cannot handle it. Only
One who has mastery over one’s information, or mastery over the tendencies caused by the information, has mastery over the quality of one’s life.
But one who has mastery over time will determine the nature of one’s life and death. They can determine whether they want to live or die.
The volume of Conscious Memory that you are capable of determines your capability of intent. From an amoeba to a human being, it is only a question of complexity.
The entire Yogic process or the entire spiritual process is to wear this bubble thin so that one day when it bursts, there is absolutely nothing left.
Once you become disembodied, it is largely only the Karmic Memory which holds you together.
When you say ‘the mind’, people generally think it is located in one place. It is not so.
When we are in touch with that aspect beyond the physical, we become blissful.
Only if the energy body, the mental body and the physical body are in place can they hold the bliss body in place. When they are no more, the bliss body is also no more. Now, they are completely no more. This is the whole story of life, death and dissolution.
The reason why thought and respiration are so directly connected is simply because both these are handled by the same energy known as Prana Vayu.
you have complete mastery over udana, they say you can even fly. But more importantly, if you activate your udana, you become less and less available to gravity.
If one has mastery over one’s vyana, one can leave one’s body at will. Now,
basic understanding of the pranas is necessary to understand how death happens because, at the moment of death, each of these pranas recedes differently and affects the dead differently. The process of death or the process of disembodiment extends well beyond the point where the breath has stopped.
There are a total of 114 such chakras, 112 of them in the body and two outside the body. The chakras within the body are classified into seven main categories of sixteen each.
you want that moment of death to happen in full awareness, you have to live a life of awareness. Otherwise, at that moment, there is no way you are going to be aware. One who is conscious can leave whichever way one wants, but one who is unconscious simply goes in a fixed way—because their life was a bondage, so death is also a bondage. If at the moment of death, a person can be 100 per cent aware, that person will not have to go through rebirth. They will not
No two people in the world live their lives the same way. Similarly, no two people die the same way. People may die in the same situation, of the same cause, but still they don’t die the same way.
When your Prarabdha Karma runs out, even if you lived a bad life, the last few moments will become very peaceful, wonderful and perceptive.
because everyone is trying to be immortal at any cost, and they will die a bad death because of that. You can die well only if you accept your mortality.
Some very simple signs are very noticeable in the sense organs. For example, a person for whom this transition towards death has begun will not be able to look at the tip of their nose.
This is why it is said that you must be ready for death every moment of your life. You should live your life in such a way that if you were to drop dead the next moment, you still have ended it reasonably well.
You are just a tiny speck in this Creation. If you look at yourself in the context of Creation as a whole, you are nothing.
This is why, unless you make your experience of life very sweet, you will naturally become death-oriented, not life-oriented. Fundamentally, people want to commit suicide because in some way they don’t know how to handle life.
You should know that if life is not making enough sense to you, it is obvious that you don’t have enough sense. Instead of seeing that ‘I lack sense,’ you are projecting that life does not make sense.
Now, when things don’t happen that way, they will freak out because they have such grand ideas about themselves, they have become too important in their own thought process. Once you have become too important in your own thought process, you will be like a tyrant, super confident and bombastic.
Most people who want to commit suicide do it not because the world is torturing them; it is because they are torturing themselves through their own thoughts and emotions.
You must understand that there is no such thing as your Universe. Your Universe is an illusion.
It is best that people understand this: you did not create life, so you have no business to take it either—whether it is yours or someone else’s.
if a person sits alone in a room in the dark, without lighting a lamp or turning on the light, this means that either they are going to commit suicide or they are going to become a yogi. Both are in a way connected. ‘I became a yogi’ means, in a way, consciously, I killed myself.
You need to understand that either with suicide or with another kind of death, you are only killing the physical body. You can only kill the physical body, but with that, you are putting an end only to the Annamaya Kosha and the conscious parts of the Manomaya Kosha, that is all. You cannot end it completely. For that, you have to dissolve the subtler portions of the body, which needs something else altogether.
They will put everything under their limited logical lens and come to their own conclusions.
When one is bitten by a snake, the prana takes a much longer time to leave the body. In the meantime, if the effect of the venom wears out or if there is an external infusion of prana, then it is possible for the person to be revived.