Death is a Celebration🔗

Our concern for karma is rooted in our fear of death. It is a primal fear, that of the unknown. Our actions in this life are for the most part driven by the desire to be in a better place after death or the fear not to be in a worse place after death. This fear of leaving the body and mind has existed through the ages.

There is a nice story in Mahabharata, the great Indian epic:

There was once a king by the name of Yayati. He lived extremely well for hundred years, enjoying his kingdom and all the physical and mental comforts of life. At the end of 100 years, Yama, the lord of death, came to take him away as it was time for him to leave the earth. The king was shocked to see Yama and started crying, 'Why have you come so fast and that too suddenly without any notice? I have not lived my life fully yet. Please give me some more time to live.'

Yama replied that there is no extension possible to one's life. But Yayati pleaded with him and begged for more time. Yama finally agreed that if any one of his sons was ready to give up his life for Yayati, then the king could live for that much more time.

Yayati called one of his sons. The son agreed, 'I will give up my life, let my father live.' He gave up his life. Yama extended Yayati 's life by a hundred years.

Yayati continued to enjoy all the material comforts in the same way as before and lived another hundred years. At the end of this period Yama returned to take him.

There are two issues: the incident of death that happens at the end of our lives, and psychological death. Real death happens only once, but psychological death, the fear of death, permeates our life. The idea and fear of death decides our entire life structure.

Every part of your body is connected to someone or the other. Your being is not an individual being. It is not alone, separate, as you think. We are all interlinked. That is why we undergo terrible suffering when we lose someone or something. Every missing that you experience, no matter of whom or what is what I call death. Fear of death is just the fear of continuity or discontinuity. We are afraid about the 'what next'.

Once, in the USA, a young lady asked the great Indian monk Vivekananda, 'What is life?' Vivekananda said, 'Come with me to India. I will teach you.' She asked, 'What will you teach me?'

He said, 'I will teach you how to die.'

If you know the secret of death, the quality of your life will be different. Your very understanding and attitude towards everything will change.

Death is not a mere incident at the end of your life. It is a profound knowing. If you know how to die, you know how to live. Living and leaving are two sides of the same thing. Your life will be totally different once you understand death.

Almost all the traditions have tried to conquer death, to outlive death. But one group of really intelligent, intuitive people understood after much struggle that we were approaching death in a completely wrong direction. They decided to take a 180-degree turn. They started working with death in a different way.

They used meditation as a technique to take them where others had not dared to go before. Those few intelligent ones were the rishis of the Upanishad age. The report they submitted on their research into the phenomenon of death is called the Kathopanishad.

These rishis researched deeply on death and finally came to the conclusion that death cannot be understood or overcome by resistance. By resisting death you cannot go beyond death. The only way to break free from the vicious cycle of birth and death is by becoming enlightened – entering into death, dropping the fear.

Please understand that death has power over you because of your belief, your faith in it, that's all. If you take a little time and look into your fear of death you will see that it has the power to transform your life in the most positive way. You will realize that it is not contradictory to life but complementary to life. happening in him. I could see very clearly how the life source was moving away from the body.

That is the strongest experience that has happened in my life outside my body. Inside my body, the strongest experience that happened was realizing the mission!

I was able to see what was happening, but I was not able to bear it. An important thing you should know is, if you see somebody in physical pain, it will affect you only about thirty to forty percent. But if you see somebody in depres-sion and you can relate to the person and feel the depression, it will affect you more – say around sixty percent. Further, if it is emotional pain and if you are able to connect and understand the pain, it will affect you much more – about eighty percent. The more subtle the pain, the more you will be affected.

I saw not only the physical, mental or emotional pains of the dying man, but I also saw the being level pain. It was almost like I was going through the pain myself. I wanted to just run away from there but the elderly monk got afraid and just held my hand begging me to stay. I had been taking care of him for two to three months, so he had got really attached to me.

Since a young age, I have loved serving monks. I used to take food and clothes from my house and give it away to the monks! Serving monks has always been my passion. I have always felt that this whole vedic tradition is alive even today only because of such monks. They have kept this science alive.

For doing research in any science, you need great support in many areas. For example, in the West, a lot of research happens in the outer world science because there are people and organizations to support it. If it is research on medicines, a pharmaceutical company may support the research. If it is some research related to space and astronomy, the government may sponsor and support it.

In the same way, in India, the whole country supports and sponsors spir-itual science research. The whole country has taken up the responsibility to support an inner world scientist by providing him food, shelter and clothes so that he can continue his research in the inner world without spending time for basic outer world requirements. So I have always felt that it is my responsibility to take care of the monks and inner world scientists.

The elderly monk who I was taking care of in the ICU did not want me to leave because he was afraid seeing the man next to him dying. The man was going through such a hard time. It was like the whole six feet of his body was being torn apart! Imagine the pain if you have a small cut in your finger. Now imagine how painful it would be if the skin on your whole body is literally being peeled. It is something like a thousand scorpions stinging at the same time! I could clearly see the pain the man was going through.

On one side, the individual soul associated with all the unfulfilled emotions like desire, greed and guilt was undergoing terrible suffering. The individual soul wanted to stay in the body and fulfill these, but the body was tired and wanted to relax! It was a fight between the body and individual soul. It was as if the body wanted to leave but the individual soul was trying to hold onto it. If the right hand was gone, the soul was trying to hold onto the left. If the right leg was dead and gone, the individual soul was trying to hold onto the left leg. Whichever part of the body it could hold on to, the individual soul was trying to hold onto it.

Part by part the body was dying. I saw that with the lower body there was not much struggle. But when it came to the upper body, the whole body was vibrating and pulsating with pain.

Slowly the individual soul started moving out of the physical body. Under-stand, when the breathing stops, that is the moment when the individual soul actually leaves the physical body. There are seven layers or bodies in you. The body of flesh, bones and blood that you see is the physical body. The energy moving in you as prana or life energy is the pranic body. There are five kinds of prana or air movements that happen in the body: air that enters into the body, air that circulates inside the body, air that spreads all over the body as life force, air that comes out of the body, and air that cleanses. These form the second body or the pranic body.

The third body is the body where inner chatter continuously happens. Inner chatter is nothing but the continuous stream of words or thoughts that move within you.

The fourth body is made up of emotions like fear, anger and greed which spread as feelings all over the body without even words coming into play. An emotion by itself can simply shake you. This is the emotional layer.

The fifth layer is the body that you experience in deep sleep. This is where all the engraved memories or engrams are stored in the seed or causal level. The engrams are not active but they are not dead either. It is like a deep coma where you are neither living what you want nor are you dead. You are just stuck in this layer.

From the causal body, the individual soul moves to the cosmic body. The sixth layer is the cosmic body where you experience bliss. This is what like this: you booked the flight ticket and sat inside the aircraft also, but during the flight you were put in coma and so when you landed, you forgot all about why you came to that particular place! Only when you leave the place and board the flight again, you suddenly remember why you had come to that place!

In the same way, when you die, you feel the strong guilt of not fulfilling the purpose of your birth or what we call the prarabdha karma.

After passing through this guilt, next, all the pain experiences of your life will come up. So at the time of death, you first pass through physical pain, then through all desires, next through all guilt, then through all emotional pain and finally through all the pleasures that you experienced in this birth.

Normally, as soon as you reach the cosmic body or the sixth layer itself, you return to assume the next body, the next birth. That is, the individual soul returns to assume the next body. Sometimes, rarely, you go beyond the sixth layer into the nirvanic body. Then you don't come back to assume another body.

When you travel through these various bodies and experience your unfulfilled desires, deep guilt and intense pain, you decide strongly, 'Let me take another body, another birth. When I do, I will not forget the purpose of my life and get caught in these illusive games. I will straightaway follow the path of Truth.' But when you actually take birth the next time, again because of the intense pain during birth, you drop into coma and forget all about your decision!

Finally, the man died. But the experience left a strong scar in me. It left a very strong impression in my mind. The fortunate thing was that the elderly monk became alright and he was discharged from the hospital. I continued my journey, and after a few months, I had my own death experience and I became enlightened, thus realizing the mission and purpose of my life. My life as a liberated being started at the age of twelve itself when I had my deep spiritual experience. But the clarity about the mission, and what was exactly going to happen through my body, dawned when I became enlightened.

After my enlightenment, I came back to South India. I was in Bangalore in a devotee's house, healing people who sought me out. At that time, a devotee was admitted in the ICU and I was requested to heal him.

There again, while healing, the person in the bed next to the devotee started dying! The moment I saw that the person was about to die, the first thing I felt like doing was to move away from the suffering that was about to come! But the devotee was afraid and not ready to leave me!

It is like how during your night dream, the dream world looks real and the waking world looks vague, whereas when you are awake, that is when you are with a higher consciousness, the dream world becomes imagination while the waking world becomes reality. In the dream state, the dream world that you see appears alive, like a 4D colour film! When you come out of the dream, the whole dream appears black and white.

In the same way, if you are raised to a still higher consciousness, this waking world will become dull, while things like spiritual truths and the master will become alive and real! When you disconnect from the body and rise into higher conscious-ness, the master and the superconscious energy will become a gross reality.

When the second death happened, the intense enlightened presence straightaway caused him to connect strongly to it.

Understand, as you sit now and here, what is stopping you from connecting with the enlightened energy of the master and merging with it? Only your own logic and reasons.

As you sit here, there are still doubts in your unconscious like, 'If I drop my possessions and surrender, the master may take it away!' The other problem is, presently, as of now all other things in this world also appear as reality, and you think the master is also real to that same depth.

You experience me as the same frequency as the rest of the material world. In the case of the second dying person, all his outer world things became inac-cessible to him at the time of death. He could not sign his checkbook or drive his car! Whatever was holding him back in the material world was automatically being taken away from him. When he looked around, only I, the enlightened energy was there! He saw the strong light energy and just held on to me! The surrender automatically happened to him because I was there at that moment. Even in his case, if he had seen me while he was alive, he may have struggled to surrender and connect to me! Only when everything was taken away from him, there was nothing to hold him back from connecting to me.

There is a beautiful story in the Bhagavatam which is a beautiful account of the enlightened master Krishna's life:

There was once a rich devotee. He asked Krishna, 'I want more wealth and possessions.' Krishna granted him his wish. There was also a poor lady, who had a cow and a small house. Krishna once visited her house, ate the food she served, blessed her and left. That very same day, her cow died.

Somebody asked Krishna about the strange happening of how a rich person got more wealth while the poor lady was deprived of her only source of income! am responsible, because it is a promise; it is my commitment to whoever hears these words directly from me.

When I started sharing this technology, I realized that the people I shared it with, not only experienced peace at the end of their lifetime, but their life itself became intense, joyful and ecstatic once I shared it with them.

Understand, both life and death become blissful when deeply engraved memo-ries are removed from your being. Your health becomes better, you start attracting wealth and better relationships because the frequency of being itself is different.

You will be relaxed in the nirvanic body when this peacemaker is placed inside you. You then have the freedom: to take one more birth as a conscious being or get enlightened and never again assume a body.

There is a beautiful story in the Upanishads, the sacred Vedic texts:

A rishi called Jadabharatha somehow became attached to a deer he had rescued. He was living the life of a renunciate but he got attached to this deer.

From morning till night, he used to spend his time taking care of that deer. When he was dying, he was not able to forget the animal. He started worrying about the deer, 'Oh! Who will take care of the deer? What will happen to it after my death?'

When he died, in the next birth, he was born as a deer.

Beautifully the verse in the Upanishad says that whatever you think in your last moment – you become that!

Some people think very cleverly, ‘Let me live my whole life the way I want to live. In the last few moments, I will remember god and chant His name and enter heaven somehow.’ Please be very clear, only that which you thought of in your whole life, will come up when you leave the body. Don't think that at that last moment you can play the game! No!

Actually, when you leave the body your whole system will be in such agony, because 80 or 90 years of your life will be run through in a fast-forward mode. All that will be seen are the scenes being fast-forwarded. Whatever experience you had intensely, only that will come up before you. Your spiritual experiences will come up in multicolor.

Please understand that ‘thoughtless awareness’ is the strongest experience you can have in your life. Even for a single moment, if you had that experience, it is enough. Naturally, when you leave the body that will come up. That will act as a light and you will be able to move into the Consciousness. they will just take it to light the dead body, that's all. The fire just continuously burns the bodies as they arrive. Sometimes I would see that two to three bodies are burnt at the same time, so many bodies keep coming!

Especially in the evenings, the bodies will be more in number. From the place where the person dies they will walk carrying the dead body, chanting mantras such as, 'Ram naam satya hai, Ram naam satya hai' (Lord Rama's name is the ultimate and eternal truth). By evening they will reach Manikarnika Ghat.

The scene there, the very experience of just being there, I cannot describe to you verbally. You have to be there to experience it!

To tell you honestly, by just being there, the fear of death just disappeared from my system. You see so many bodies continuously being burned every day. You feel, 'I am also going to go like this one day ... all right', that's all! You feel there are so many people giving you company! It is like one more trip that you make, that's all. You don't feel lonely about death at all.

In your life, you may see one or two bodies being burnt, so you still have the fear of death. But at Manikarnika Ghat, there will be no ritual done. They will bring the body and straightaway dip it in the river Ganga three times while chanting, 'Ram naam satya hai, Ram naam satya hai, Ram naam satya hai'. By this time, the fire will be ready, and the wood will be arranged. They will bring the body straight from the water and burn it, that's all!

One strange thing that you see there is that none of the relatives will stay there and do any further rituals. The moment they dip the body in the Ganga and place the body for burning, they will go away, that's all! The people who maintain the ghat will take care of the rest. You will not know how long it will take for the body that you brought to be burnt completely. There will be a queue and bodies will be burning continuously.

I thought to myself, 'Let me try to sit here and see what goes on. 'I sat at the Ghat. In just an hour's time, I felt that death is no more a strange incident which happens once in a while only for some relative or friend. I was sitting there watching bodies arriving one after another. It was like any other queue, that's all. Different sizes, genders, ages, and communities of people arrived to be consumed by the same burning flame.

When you continuously see dead bodies being burnt you actually lose respect for death! As of now, you have too much of respect, too many ideas about death. That is the problem. Death is actually nothing but this. The breath that goes inside the

We do not just have one body. The physical body is just one of the seven bodies we have. It is only the gross body that can be felt and seen in space-time. However, we actually have seven layers or bodies or planes of existence. Since these layers have a subtle existence they cannot be seen or felt by the ordinary eye. A simple representation of the seven bodies is shown below.

Each of the bodies holds a corresponding emotion. For example, the pranic body holds all the desires that arise in life. The mental body holds all the feel-ings of guilt experienced in life. The etheric body holds the experiences of mental pain felt in life. When the spirit leaves the body it crosses all the seven body layers. The phys-ical body dies. But, the remaining six bodies do not totally die. If you are holding a lot of desires in your life, all those unfulfilled desires are held in the pranic body. So even though the physical body dies, the pranic body does not die. When the life force leaves the pranic body, the being experiences tremendous suffering. When you leave the physical body, your consciousness will be torn from the body and you will immediately fall into coma. According to doctors, coma is the automatic mechanism to make you not to feel the pain. It is automatic anesthesia. If the pain becomes too much, you can't bear and you automatically fall into coma.

When you move from the first body layer to the second body layer, all the unfulfilled desires, all the ways in which you wanted to live but did not live come up. When this happens, it is almost as if ten people are standing in a room kicking a football around. What will happen? Just like how the football is kicked from corner to corner, your consciousness will be kicked from all corners. In each corner, some desire will be standing and kicking it. At the time your consciousness is trying to leave the body, all your desires will be forcing you to re-enter the body so that you can enjoy them further and fulfill them.

On one side, the desires will be forcing you to enter the body again so that you can live and enjoy, while on the other side, the body will say, 'No! I am tired. I can't host you anymore, just leave!' That is what causes the pulling and pushing at the time of death. The pulling and pushing is nothing but the fight between your desires and your body.

Somehow, you manage to move away from the pranic body, and enter next into the mental body. When you enter into the mental body all your guilt rises. All the guilt about the way you felt you should have lived your life but never lived, all the mistakes committed, all the regrets, everything comes up.

Please understand, desire is about the future and guilt is about the past. But actually, both are one and the same. The way in which we want to live is desire, and the way in which we wanted to live but didn't, is guilt. Guilt is nothing but reviewing our past decisions with updated intelligence. Like this, step by step, you move through different body layers.

The less the unfulfilled desires, the lighter is the pranic body and the easier it is to leave this body. Similarly, the less the guilt, the lighter is the mental body and the easier it is to leave this body.

One more thing, when the desires, guilt and pain are less intense, you not only have an easy death with less suffering but you also age gracefully. Ageing gracefully is what vanaprastha sannyas is all about. Being able to live in fulfill-ment in the latter part of life is the tremendous gift of vanaprastha sannyas.

All the guilt that we collect over our lives rises as we pass through the mental body. Then we come to the etheric body which is related to all our sufferings. All the suffering that we went through during our life is stored here.

The first four bodies are related to the physical body-mind system. They store all the engrams related to desires, guilt and pain experienced during that lifetime. The fifth body is experienced during deep sleep and when leaving the body. The sixth body is associated with happy memories and the seventh body is beyond sorrows and happiness, the ultimate consciousness. In the same way, when you move away from the physical body to the pranic body at the time of death, this whole physical world will become unreal and be seen in black and white. All your achievements, your pride, your efforts, your sorrow, your happiness, everything will no longer have any meaning and will appear in black and white. You will wonder, ‘Why did I do all this work? Why did I think of all this as a base for my life?’

Let me explain why this happens. When you are alive you invest in your person-ality. You build up your personality based upon a few pillars – money, name and fame, relationships, pride that you have a big community, support circle, and so on.

When you move from the physical body, all these pillars, all these founda-tions will be completely shaken. You can’t sign your name on your checks any more. Your signature is not accepted. Your bank balance is no more related to you. You can’t handle your bank account. Your car will not be useful to you. At the most, only the ambulance will be useful!

Only the conscious glimpse can come with you. Whatever has been the foundation for your being will be shaken. When the foundation is shaken, natu-rally you won’t have anything to hold on to.

As of now, this whole world will appear in 4D. All this talk about spir-ituality, meditation, growing the inner being, consciousness etc. will appear as black and white. That is why, when I call people for meditation, they tell me, ‘I don’t have time to meditate. Let me finish all my work and then come. I have a few more years to think about it.’

Be very clear, never say, ‘I don’t have time to meditate.’ Be very clear to yourself and say, ‘I don’t feel that it is that important in my life right now.’ If you are not ready to meditate and say, ‘I don’t think meditation is so important in my life,’ then you are honest. But if you say, ‘I don’t have time,’ then you are just fooling yourself. Everyone has got the same 24 hours on hand to do what they feel they should. It is not that the few who are meditating are jobless. It is just a question of priority, of what you really want in your life. If spirituality and meditation appear as black and white to you now, you will not divert your energy in that area, that’s all.

You see, now we are in two dimensions, the material world and spirituality. Right now, what is happening is that however many pillars we build our personali-ties and life upon, all those pillars are based on the material world which appears to be 4D. Not a single pillar is based on consciousness or our inner space. Our whole personality is built only based on the outer space – our name and fame, what society speaks about us, etc. If everyone’s opinion of us is that we are great, we think we are great. If everybody says, ‘You are useless’, we start getting depressed.

You are not the eyes. The eyes are just an instrument. Many times you can see, your eyes may be open but you are not seeing, not registering the scene you are seeing.

Just remember you are seeing through the eyes. If you look through the eyes, suddenly you will see you are witnessing everything. You are not the two ‘holes’ called the eyes. You are only seeing through the two holes called eyes.

If you feel you are the two eyes, you are caught in ego. In your dream, as long as the attention is on the objects, you will continue to dream. When your attention is turned towards yourself – that is from the seen to the seer, you will be awakened.

The moment you realize you are something beyond the eyes, your attention is turned to the seer. Then you realize that this world is made of the same stuff of which your dream is made.

As long as you think you are seeing, the whole attention is on the seen. That is what I call ego. When you step back and realize you are seeing through the eyes, the whole attention is on the seer. That is what I call innocence. Inno-cence means having a clear understanding that whatever you see in the outer world is made of the same stuff out of which your dreams are made.

These are the steps: the first is getting the idea that what you see is a dream. The next is having the shakti, the energy, to change the dream. The third is the buddhi , the intelligence to know it is a dream and so there is no need to change it!

To understand this powerful, life-transforming truth, we need to understand about this stuff of which the dream world and this world are made of. We need to know about prana, the life energy that sustains us.

Understand, the air you breathe is just a vehicle in which the prana comes in and goes out. Prana is the life force, the energy itself. Understand this one example. If a truck comes inside this campus and leaves something and goes out, the truck is like the air, the breath. The product that is delivered is prana.

One more thing: as long as the incoming breath is bringing in more prana and going out as an empty vehicle, your life will be strengthened.

If the reverse starts happening, if the air comes with less prana and goes out with more prana, it means death is nearing or the life energy is going towards more awareness into your life, you take charge of your life. In the same way, in the dream, if you start bringing in more awareness, you will take charge of your dreams and deep sleep.

Controlling life and death and controlling dream and deep sleep both require one important condition: awareness. Awareness is the main require-ment to control life and death and to control dream and deep sleep.

Bringing awareness into your dreams can not only help you control the dream and deep sleep, it can also help you control life and death.

The moment you start moving towards the dream state, the prana starts coming towards the vishuddhi, throat center. The more you move towards the deep sleep state, it moves towards the anahata, heart center.

It is the same in the case of life and death as well. The more you are alive and energetic, the more the prana accumulates and gets centered in the fore-head.

When the incoming breath is bringing more prana and the outgoing breath is going empty, your prana will be centered on the forehead. If the incoming breath is getting less prana and the outgoing breath is taking more prana, slowly the prana will slip into vishuddhi, throat center. If the incoming breath is not bringing prana at all and only the outgoing breath is taking the prana, you will fall completely into the heart center.

Actually, falling from life to death, falling from the waking state to the deep sleep state, are both directly related to prana movement. If the prana move-ments of inhalation and exhalation are handled properly, you can handle life and death as well as dream and deep sleep. Dream and sleep, life and death can all be handled by this single key, single thread called prana.

If you can be aware when you fall into the dream state, when your conscious-ness is slowly fading away, when you are falling asleep, you will be able to change the dream itself.

If you are able to change the dream, let you be very clear, the first thing you will do is you will stop dreaming. You will stop dreaming because you know the uselessness of dreams. You know you are wasting time and energy in dreams. Person who is aware of dreams will never dream. He will simply stop dreaming. Person who is aware of life will simply stop the cycle of birth and death. He will not take one more body.

You need to understand this: when I use the word death, I don't mean you will commit suicide. When I say that when you become aware of life you enter into death, it does not mean that you will commit suicide. You will stop living in

This technique has two parts: one that you do when you fall asleep, when you are lying in the bed and the second one that you do whenever you can remember during the whole day.

The first one will create more energy to do the second part and vice versa. They are complementary to each other.

First part: when you lie down, before falling asleep, just remember the area near the ajna chakra or the third eye, the center of the forehead. Do not concentrate. If you force yourself, if you start concentrating, your sleep will be disturbed and you will have a headache. Just remember that area in a relaxed way, the way you look at a flower, just casually. Slowly, you will see that you are relaxing, you are slowly dropping into the deep sleep state.

Just be aware of this movement into deep sleep, that is enough. First day, you may feel that you are not falling asleep at all and that your sleep is getting delayed by ten or fifteen minutes. Don't bother about it. Just be aware of the prana movement in the ajna chakra.

You will be aware that you are dreaming. If you want to continue the dream, you will continue. If you don't feel like it, you will come out. There will be no intensity to the dream.

14