What you accomplish in your life, gives death its power. Achieve much, and death comes calmly. Accomplish little, and death becomes an annoyance, a persistence timer always ticking louder and louder as you understand more and more that you have completed little or nothing with the time available to you.
Is Death Mysterious?
Life continues in a repetitive pattern, and it tends to degenerate. The pattern varies according to climate, according to country, and according to circumstances, but it is a pattern. Moving in any pattern tends to continue and that continuity is a component of the degenerating process of a being. At the ending of continuity, something new takes place. One can comprehend it instantly if one has understood the entire movement of thought, hate, of fear, love - then one can take hold of the significance, directly, of what death is. Take the question of death which is an enormous problem to people. Death is always walking by your side. Can one meet it so completely that it does not create a problem of it at all? In order to meet it like that all hope, all belief, all fear about it must move toward to an end, otherwise you are meeting this strange thing with a winding up, an image, with an intentional anxiety, and as a result you are meeting it with time.
Life, Soul and Death
Belief in an immortal soul has dominated man’s thoughts since the time he became homo erectus, the possessors of this eternal ideal are assured of ceaseless life. Guarantees and assurances of the soul’s future prospects offer wings to our fantasies. You cannot be scared of the unknown since you do not know what the unusual is and so there is nothing to be anxious of. Death is only a word, and it is the word, the image, that generates fear. Can you look at death without the image of death? As long as the image subsists from which spring reflection, thought must always create panic. Then you either lessen your fear of death or build a disagreement against the inevitable or you invent numerous beliefs to guard you from the fear of death. Hence there is a space between you and the thing of which you are scared. In this time-space gap there must be conflict which is anxiety, fear and self-pity.
Thought, which breeds the fear of death, suggests postponement of it, let's avoid it, keep it as remote as possible, let's not reflect upon it' - but you are thinking about it. When you say, `I do not think about it', you have already deliberated out how to avoid it. You are scared of death because you have deferred it.
We have accepted life with all its agony and misery and have got used to it, and imagine of death as some- thing to be cautiously avoided. But death is amazingly like life when we know how to live. You cannot exist without dying. You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every moment.
This is not a rational paradox. To live wholly, wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness, there must be disappearing to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live unconsciously, and such a mind can never know what love is or what independence is.
Sir Francis Story in his work titled, “Rebirth as Doctrine and Experience” says,
‘Soul is an ambiguous term that has never been clearly defined in Western religious or philosophical thought, but it is generally taken to mean the sum total of an individual personality, an enduring ego-entry that exists more or less independently of the physical body and survives it after death.
The ‘soul’ is considered to be the personality factor which distinguishes one individual from another, and is supposed to consist of the elements of consciousness, mind, character, and all that goes to make up the psychic, immaterial side of a human being.’
Death is Frightening?
We are frightened of dying since we don't know what it means to live. We don't know how to exist; therefore we don't know how to die. As long as we are scared of life we shall be frightened of death. The man who is not worried of life is not frightened of being completely insecure for he understands that secretly, psychologically, there is no security..
To find out really what takes place when you pass away you must die. You must die - not physically but psychologically, privately, die to the things you have treasured and to the things you are bitter about. If you have died to one of your delights, the smallest or the greatest, obviously, without any enforcement or fight, then you will know what it means to die. To die is to have a mind that is totally empty of itself, empty of its daily yearning, pleasure; and agonies. Death is a regeneration, a mutation, in which reflection does not function at all because thought is old. When there is death there is something completely new. independence from the known is death, and then you are existing. If there is not freedom from the known one cannot possibly find out what death is, which is the ending of the whole thing, the physical organism with all its embedded habits, the identification with the body, with the name, with all the recollections it has acquired. One cannot take it all over when one goes to death. So, in the same way one has to end in life everything that one knows. That means there is complete aloneness; not loneliness but aloneness, in the sense there is nothing else but that state of mind that is totally whole. Aloneness means all one.
What is death? Thought has many answers. It says: ‘I do not want to go into all the miserable clarifications of death.’ Every living being has an answer to it, according to his desire, according to his conditioning, his hope. The answer will consistently be intellectual, verbally put together by thought. But one is exploratory, without having an answer, something entirely unknown, totally mysterious - death is an incredible thing.
The brain is the storehouse of memory; memory as experience, as acquaintance. From that experience and knowledge, stored up in the cells of the brain, thought arises. When the living being comes to an end, the brain also comes to an end, and so thought comes to an end. Thought is a material course - thought is nothing spiritual - it is based on memory held in the cells of the brain; thought dies when the organism dies. Thought creates the whole structure of ‘the me’ - that wants this, ‘the me’ that does not want that, ‘the me’ that is fearful, despairing, anxious, yearning - fearful of dying.
What is Before Death?
Instead of the usual, ‘What happens after death? Ask,‘What is before death’. Before death is one's life and what is one's life? Eat and drink, go to school, to university, employment, marry, live together, work for 40- 50 years, have children, anxiety and pain, fighting. Life is such a miserable one, but one wants to know what happens after death. Volumes have been written on it, all created by thought, all saying, ‘Believe’. Put all that aside, literally, actually, then what is one faced with? - The actual fact that ‘self’ who is put together by thought, comes to an end - all one's, all one's longings and anxieties come to an end. I am living in all energy, vigour and capacity, and death means a conclusion to that living. But, can I live with death all the time? : I am attached to you; end that attachment, which is death - is it not? You are greedy and when you die, you cannot carry greed with you; so end the greed, never postpone- end it, now. So you are living a life full of energy, vigour, capacity, observation, and also the ending of that instantaneously, which is death. So to live before death is to live with death; which means that you are living in a timeless world. You are living a life in which everything that you acquire is frequently ending, so that there is always a fantastic movement, you are not fixed in a certain place. This is not a concept. When you invite death, which means the ending of everything that you hold, dying to it, each moment, then you will find - not ‘one’ there is then no oneself finding it, since one has gone - then there is that state of ageless dimension in which the movement we call time, is not.
It means the emptying of the content of your consciousness so that there is no time; time gets nearer to an end, which is death.
“The fear of death follows from fear of life, A man who lives fully is prepared to die at anytime.”
- Mark Twain
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