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This is because, as we already saw, death happens slowly—the withdrawal of the life process happens step by step. When the lung, heart and brain activity stops, they declare you dead, but the life process is still continuing and you can rekindle that.
Happy people are loosely attached to life. They are willing to drop off at any time. People always think that miserable people want to die. It is not so. Miserable people cling to life more than anyone else.
God is the creation of miserable people. Because there are lots of miserable people in the world, God has thrived. If the world was full of blissful beings, God would
But, in reality, if you really want to curse someone, don’t wish them death; wish them an endless life.
You must decide if, for you, life is an account book or a phenomenon. If it is an account book, numbers matter. If it is a phenomenon of experience, then numbers don’t matter.
Living well means that you have grasped all aspects of life. If you have grasped everything that is there to know about life, then you have broken through the bubbles of memory in which you are storing these different things.
Time and space are a creation of your mind. Once you transcend the mind as a limitation, time and space don’t exist for you.
In the Indian way of life, reaching God or heaven is not the highest goal of life. They always spoke about mukti or Ultimate Liberation or freedom from the cycle of birth and death as the highest goal of life.
Mukti means you want to become free from the process of life and death, not because you are suffering. People who are suffering cannot attain mukti. You are fine, you are joyful, but you have had enough of kindergarten, you want to move on.
Mukti is also called as Mahasamadhi. Mahasamadhi means one is able to walk out of one’s body, consciously, without damaging it.
In reality, death is not the end because there is no such thing as death. Death exists only to one who has no awareness of life.
Today’s movies are big culprits in spreading this fallacy of instantaneous death. They think of life as a quantity which is sitting inside that goes pop! when someone is shot. It is not like that.
you have sufficient ojas around you, your passage through life and death will become very effortless. You will go through the whole process smoothly.
The fear of death is simply because we are not in touch with reality. The fear of death has come to us because we have gotten deeply identified with this body. Our identification with this body has become so strong because we have not explored other dimensions.
You talk of your body as if you came with it. You did not. You only gathered it. You gathered it while in your mother’s womb and continued gathering it after your birth.
human being is not made to smoke; you are not an automobile! It is not natural for you to smoke. But people will make it natural.
Fear is not a virtue, but people have made it so natural that they think something is missing if there is no fear.
The fear of death is about what you think you will lose by death. The fear of death is essentially the fear of loss. If someone is going to lose their job or all their money or someone who is very dear to them or a person whom they are very dependent upon, they will have greater fears.
When people feel insecure, they want to drink and sleep because sleep is just a small manifestation of death.
whatever it is—illness, death or any calamity that happens around—you can either use it to liberate yourself or you can use it to entangle yourself. Calamities, especially like death and illness, are a tremendous opportunity to look beyond the limitations of what you normally understand as life.
When you became youthful, your intelligence got hijacked by your hormones. Whatever you did, knowingly or unknowingly, it just pushed you in that direction.
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.
Similarly, I would say, if you want to die well, you have to cultivate a certain amount of dispassion towards your own death. Otherwise, one will go struggling—kicking and screaming—which will not be good for what is going to come next.
All physical realities exist within the ambit of time. If your time is destroyed, everything is over for you.
During this phase of disembodiment, if your pleasantness multiplies, we say you are in heaven. If your unpleasantness multiplies, we say you are in hell. Hell and heaven do not exist as geographical places but as human experience.
This prolonged suffering would not be there if you did not unnecessarily interfere with the process of life and go on medically pushing death. Without this, no one will stay beyond their natural time.
This is what I am doing—helping people grow into such a capability that they can terminate their life by will when
Inward projection of life energies gives you organic unity and stability of life. Outward projection gives you a strong presence and expression of life. This
Death happens slowly. The withdrawal of the life process from this lump of earth—the body—happens step by step. For all practical purposes, the activity of the lungs, heart and brain stops, so they are declared dead, but it is not yet so. Even if the person’s body is burned, they are still not gone because their movement into the other realm has not yet happened.
However, when a person is dying, you should place the head towards the north because it eases and aids the disentanglement process of the being from the body.
All their life they lived thinking they are the body, never realizing the physical mass that we carry is an accumulation from this planet.
Usually, people build samadhis for such people so that the energies that they have left behind can be made use of by other people.
But normally people used to have long hair, and hair is one thing that can easily gather a certain amount of aura. You know that hair gathers static. People who have a lot of hair have static—it will be crackling sometimes in certain weather.
After cremation, if you keep the ash in one place, there is a tendency for the being to look for that. So they are put in a river where they get really spread out.
Moreover, for a person to die with the intention—‘Let my body be useful to ten people’—is a good thing.
This is because, during the process of disembodiment, the Pancha Pranas do not exit all at once but recede in stages. It is like this, you were not just born one day. It took a little over nine months before you could become a full life. Similarly, even one’s exit does not happen just like that. Life exits the body in stages.
You cannot really listen to something unless you invest some energy in it. You cannot taste or touch anything unless something of you is invested. With this investment comes a bonding. In traditional terms, this is called runanubandha.
This is the reason why, traditionally, in India, people greet each other with folded hands because they do not want to acquire that extra runanubandha that can create bondage and impede their Liberation process.
Even if you just as much as hold someone’s hand, you develop runanubandha. Of all the relationships, sexual relationships have maximum impact in terms of the amount of memory that they leave upon you, compared to any other kind of substance you come in touch with.
This is why Indian culture evolved many methods in the rituals that were performed after death to consciously dissolve the runanubandha.
For most people, what happened yesterday is more real than what is happening right now. That is their experience of life. They live by memory.
This is because you leave puddles of memory when you walk—as our individual scent is a consequence of the unique nature of our complex memory structure. That is why a dog is able to trace it down. So if with just a few moments of your contact with the ground you are leaving puddles of memory for a creature like a dog to pick up, imagine how much memory you are leaving behind throughout the span of your life? How much memory do you think the clothes that you wore, the places you sat on, the places you slept on, the objects that you were in touch with and such other things carry?
Close relatives, particularly if they had very loving relationships with them, will bother the dead. That is why, in this culture, when someone wanted to die, they went away to a place where they were not among family. You don’t want to be with your family when you die because, till the last moment, these attachments will go on.
Generally, all around the world, when these after-death rituals were performed, there were two components to it: one was to handle the emotions of those who were left behind and the other was to direct the departed being in a suitable manner.
The subtle body of the cow has evolved through emotional competence.
People of certain castes were considered untouchables and others would not touch them. But even the untouchables would not touch a chandala because he was considered the lowest of the lowest.
If it is a process where genuinely something is happening where you are handling a disembodied life, then involving women in it is a little bit of an issue. There are various reasons for this. One reason was in those times a woman would be pregnant at least eight to twelve times in her lifespan.
There are different kinds of biological responsibilities for male and female bodies. Instead of understanding and appreciating this, we have imbibed a mentality in the world where we make every small difference into a discrimination.
Women have a natural capacity to absorb order due to the deeper sense of survival instinct that is needed to fulfil their reproductive responsibilities.
If there is a very threatening and difficult kind of situation, it may contract so that it feels safer with less Prarabdha Karma and more robust surface. It does not want to stretch itself. This is why, irrespective of which culture you come from, they all insist that if you come across a child, whatever your troubles are, you must smile at the child, you must interact
