Shri Mataji: Many people ask Me questions: What about death?

[Guest guest]

" Many people ask Me questions: " What about death? " . . . But you know

that you have eternal life. You can never die. Death is not this body

disappearing. Death is where you are absolutely without any control

of your soul. Once you are a Realized soul you have all the control,

all the Powers to take your soul wherever you feel like — to be born

if you like, if you don't want you will not be born. To be born with

the people, in the families, in the communities, wherever you like.

There are many great souls I know that have taken birth daringly into

societies which are very much, I should say, deteriorating and are in

danger of getting destroyed because of stupidity they do.

 

So this happening that we are afraid of death is absolutely absurd

for Sahaja Yogis. What is there to think even about your death? There

is nothing like death for you because you have got eternal life. It's

not that you continue with the same body. You may go on changing your

dress but you are living, you are aware. And you know even if this

body is not there you will be there, all the time. I will agree for

Sahaja Yoga, for anything that is to be done in the name of Reality.

So you must know your position as eternal beings — what is your work,

what is your idea, what you have to do. So one has to get rid of this

idea of death because death does not exist for you. It is finished...

your spirit is free.

 

And when you die what happens to you is a very simple thing; that you

feel liberated, absolutely, and then you feel your freedom

completely, and you can decide what to do. It's all under your own

guidance, your own desires, everything works out. You don't feel that

you have come out of your body and this is what I should tell you:

That there should be no fear of death but on the contrary, should be

welcomed because you will feel much more liberated, much more at

ease...

 

This body is finished is a very good idea. So troublesome it is. The

most sticky thing we have is this body... So to forget about death is

the easiest thing to do. "

 

Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi

To Achieve Complete Freedom, May 7, 1995 — Cabella, Italy

 

 

" The Upanishads do not teach a death experience, but an experience of

life. Ultimately there is no experience of death and the death

experiment is, in the last analysis, unreal because the " subject " who

died was not real. The supreme Upanishadic experience is discovered

precisely by realizing that the experiment of death is only a

psychological experience, made by the immortal atman.

 

The Vedic experience is one of liberation, of freedom from

everything. It thus includes freedom or liberation from time. What

both fascinates and haunts Upanishadic Man is not anything that comes

after, but that which has no after. As long as we are entrammeled in

the net of mere temporal existence, we are in the clutches of death,

even if we postpone death by a sequence of successive existences. An

afterlife is as inauthentic a life as a prelife. The piercing of the

skin of time as with a needle, without either hurting or destroying

the spatiotemporal epidermis and yet transcending it, is what

liberation is all about...

 

Now, the end is not death and dissolution, nor is it an indefinite

and horizontal repetition of one and the same circle. One of the

discoveries of the Vedic wisdom is precisely that, whereas time is

circular, Man is not, so that for him it is not a question of

beginning all over again. On the contrary, it is imperative that he

escape the enclosure of the circle. The circularity of time indicates

its ontic finitude, whereas Man is infinite. Man has to break the

circularity of time in order to reach the ontological fullness of his

being. To enter into this other nontemporal, but no less real, sphere

is to attain realization, to reach liberation from the encirclement

of time and freedom from temporal chains. It is a truly new life, not

in the sense of a " recycled " life but in the sense of a new type, a

new kind of life, indeed, the only real and authentic life. "

 

Professor Raimundo Panikkar, The Vedic Experience

http://www.cybrlink.com/vedtoc.htm

 

 

" Modern Man wonders about death and weaves innumerable theories about

it; he seems to be sure about only one thing: its factual reality and

thus its inevitability. In spite of startling news produced now and

then by the scientific shamans of our age, contemporary Man seems at

a loss when he is confronted with one of the most ancient myths of

mankind: the possibility of avoiding death. Because death is seen to

be inevitable, modern society tends to wipe out from the memory of

the living all dealings with the dying and the dead. The fundamental

Vedic attitude is almost the opposite: it does not reckon with

death's inevitability and it does not try to smuggle death away from

everyday life.

 

According to this vision, which is common to other cultures as well,

death is not inevitable; it is only accidental. You die if your life

is snatched away before you reach maturity, or before you marry, or

if something unexpected happens to you which prevents you from

achieving what you yourself or society was expecting of your life.

Death is limited to this rupture, this misfortune, this accident.

Thus it is always an unnatural event, and it is always akala mrtyu,

untimely death.

 

On the other hand the old Man, " the Man of long life, " as the Vedas

call him, the one who has lived his life, who has fulfilled his life

span, his ayus, 1 does not die; he does not experience a break and,

thus, a trauma; he has simply consumed the torch and exhausted the

fuel. The flame of his life goes on and it burns in his sons, his

daughters, his children's children, his friends, his work, and in his

ideas which are scattered to the four winds. Even his body, with its

own energy, has already enriched the earth on which he has walked,

the rivers in which he has bathed, and the living beings with whom he

has been in communication and communion. Only the last gifts of his

body and breath still remain to be given away. The old Man does not

die; he simply finishes his commerce with life and achieves the

transmission of all that he himself has received, as the Upanishads

describe. 2 He cancels the constitutive rna, the debt of gratitude

for the gift of his existence. 3 The natural extinction of one

particular carrier of life or the completion of one's own life is not

death.

 

Indeed, not every Man who is old in years reaches long life,

maturity, and thus immortality. It is not a question of mere number

of years but of growth, for which the passing of years — the hundred

autumns — is certainly required but of which it is not the only

condition. Time, in fact, is more than its measurement by the passing

of days and seasons; it is the qualitative coefficient of human

growth itself. To disentangle the immortal from the mortal, to

liberate himself from the claws of death, is the task of every Man.

On the one hand there is the asu or life-principle, the power of life

or vital strength, which is assimilated in some traditions to the

ahamkara, the selfish ego of unfulfilled desires and unachieved

projects. This ego is not pure, later periods will say, inasmuch as

it consists of unburnt karmas; it is this ego that is afraid of

death, because it must certainly die. There is, on the other hand,

the personal atman, that spark of the paramatman, which does not die.

Jiva, in spite of the variety of meanings given by different schools,

could also be another word for immortal Man. "

 

Professor Raimundo Panikkar, The Vedic Experience

http://www.cybrlink.com/vedtoc.htm

 

 

" For Hindus, death is nobly referred to as mahaprasthana, " the great

journey. " When the lessons of this life have been learned and karmas

reach a point of intensity, the soul leaves the physical body, which

then returns its elements to the earth. The awareness, will, memory

and intelligence which we think of as ourselves continue to exist in

the soul body. Death is a most natural experience, not to be feared.

It is a quick transition from the physical world to the astral plane,

like walking through a door, leaving one room and entering another.

Knowing this, we approach death as a sadhana, as a spiritual

opportunity, bringing a level of detachment which is difficult to

achieve in the tumult of life and an urgency to strive more than ever

in our search for the Divine Self. To be near a realized soul at the

time he or she gives up the body yields blessings surpassing those of

a thousand and eight visits to holy persons at other times. The Vedas

explain, " As a caterpillar coming to the end of a blade of grass

draws itself together in taking the next step, so does the soul in

the process of transition strike down this body and dispel its

ignorance. " Aum Namah Sivaya "

 

Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami

(Himalayan Academy, 1998, www.hinduismtoday.kauai.hi.us/welcome.html)