If you do not understand death, you will never know life, nor can you handle life, because life and death are like inhalation and exhalation. Q) But what does knowledge of death have to do with living well? Whatever you take from anyone must be returned at some point. You may assume too many things about yourself, but you must return what you have gathered. You may attach much significance to your birth, life and death, but as far as Mother Earth is concerned, it is just recycling. You have to return and recycle what you picked up. It is not some great drama, it is a natural process. The dead bodies of birds, insects, dogs and human beings is just soil being put back to soil. Now suppose you dropped your whole fifty or sixty kilograms, what is the big deal? If you know life the way it is, and you are not lost in the heaps that you have gathered, shedding the body is not such a big thing. Suppose you are overweight and we helped you drop ten kilograms, would you feel terrible and cry about it? Definitely not, most people are ecstatic when they drop ten kilograms. The soil that you have gathered and made into this body, as well as your identities, have become so strong that losing it looks like a terrible thing. When I say your identification with what you have gathered – the very body that you carry is just a piece of earth. Imagining that you could become like that one day could be scary for you because your identification with what you have gathered has become so compulsive. What was flying yesterday is dead and dry today. Otherwise, even when you see a dead pigeon, it will remind you of your own mortality. If you want to fall dead at an appropriate time, you need to do sadhana so that you can determine when you will fall dead. We do not want to fall dead when we are still able to create, contribute and make things happen. It is just that it should not happen untimely.

If you are here for too long, people will wonder when you are going! Death is a tremendous relief. Right now, because of the way you are, you may think it is a terrible thing, but if you were to live for a thousand years, you would see death as a relief. But what is there to be afraid of? Death is a wonderful thing. If you were not mortal, there would be no fear in you because even if you were cut into pieces, you would still not die. Sadhguru: Mortality is the basis of all fear. Q) But Sadhguru, death upsets me so much, even if it is a pigeon on my balcony or a dog on the highway. When you have completely lost perspective as to who you are, how do you think you will grasp anything about the nature of life or death? In that micro speck, the city you live in is a super-micro speck. In this speck of a Solar System, Planet Earth is a micro speck. If this Solar System, in which we are, evaporates tomorrow morning, no one will even notice it in this Cosmos. We know all the trappings about life, but what do you know about life as such?įundamentally, this situation has come about because you have lost perspective as to who you are in this Universe. If you were like any other creature, maybe you would be unable to think about all this, but once one is endowed with human intelligence, how can you just ignore such a significant aspect of your life? How can you avoid it and live on as if you are going to be here forever? How is it that after living here for millions of years of life, human beings still do not know a damn thing about death? Well, they know nothing about life either. Why tomorrow morning? One small thing now and you could be off the next moment.

Breath is a bit more immediate in its requirement, but in the same category as food and water.ĭeath is such a fundamental aspect, because if one small thing happens, you can be gone tomorrow morning. With certain mastery over prana, one can exist beyond breath for substantial amounts of time. The real process is of the life energy, or prana, that controls physical existence. This relationship goes even beyond the breath. They exist together, inseparably, in the same breath. Life and death are happening all the time. Within a few moments, every cell in your body will start screaming for life. If you do not get this, just do an exhalation, hold your nose and do not do the next inhalation. You exhale now, and if you do not take the next inhalation, you will be dead.

And the last thing that you will do in your life is an exhalation. Upon birth, the first thing that a child does is to inhale, to take in a gasp of air. If you as much as breathe a little more consciously, you will notice that with every inhalation there is life, with every exhalation there is death.

I am dead to you meaning