You can find three expressions of death in the history of the human mind. One expression is of the ordinary man who lives attached to his body, who has never known anything greater than the pleasure of food or sex, whose whole life has been nothing but food and sex; who has enjoyed food, has enjoyed sex, whose life has been very primitive; whose life has been very gross, who has lived in the porch of his palace, never entered it, and who had been thinking that this is all life is. At the moment of death he will try to cling. He will resist death and he will fight death. Death will come as the enemy. Hence in all societies all over the world death is depicted as dark and devilish. In India they say that the messenger of death is very ugly – dark, black – and he comes sitting on a very big ugly buffalo.
This is the ordinary attitude. These people have missed; they have not been able to know all the dimensions of life. They have not been able to touch the depths of life and they have not been able to fly to the height of life. They missed the plenitude and they missed the benediction.
Then there is a second type of expression. Poets and philosophers have sometimes said that death is nothing bad, death is nothing evil; it is just restful – a great rest, like sleep. This is better than the first. At least these people have known something beyond the body; they have known something of the mind. They have not had only food and sex; their whole life has not been only in eating and reproducing. They have a little sophistication of the soul; they are a little more aristocratic and more cultured. They say death is like great rest; one is tired and one goes into death and rests. It is restful. But they too are far away from the truth.
Those who have known life in its deepest core, they say that death is of the divine. It is not only a rest but also a resurrection, a new life and a new beginning; a new door opens.
When a Sufi mystic, Bayazid, was dying, people who had gathered around him – his disciples – were suddenly surprised because when the last moment came his face became radiant, powerfully radiant. It had a beautiful aura. Bayazid was a beautiful man and his disciples had always felt an aura around him but they had not known anything like this. So radiant!
They asked, “Bayazid, tell us what has happened to you. What is happening to you? Before you leave us give us your last message.”
He opened his eyes and he said, “God is welcoming me. I am going into his embrace. Good-bye!”
He closed his eyes and his breathing stopped. But at the moment his breathing stopped there was an explosion of light. The room became full of light and then the light disappeared.
When a person has known the transcendental in himself, death is nothing but another face of the divine. Then death has a dance to it.
∞
The illusion of death is a social phenomenon. This needs to be understood in a little detail.
You see a man dying and then you think he is dead. Since you are not dead you have no right to think this way. It is very foolish on your part to conclude that the man is dead. All you ought to say is, “I am not able to determine whether he is the same person in the way I knew him before.” To say anything more than this is dangerous and is crossing the limits of propriety.
All one ought to say is, “Up to yesterday the man was talking, now he no longer talks. Before he used to walk, now he walks no more. Up to yesterday, what I had understood as his life exists no more. The life he lived up to yesterday is no more. If there is any life beyond that, then so be it; if there isn’t, then be that as it may.” But to say “The man is dead” is going a little too far; it is going beyond limits. One ought to simply say, “The man is no longer alive.” As one once knew someone to have life he no longer has it.
This much of a negative statement is fine, that what we knew as his life - his fighting, his loving, his eating and his drinking – is no more, but to say the man is dead is making a very positive assertion. We are not just saying whatsoever was present in the man exists no more, we are saying something has happened over and above this: the man is dead. We are saying the phenomenon of death has also occurred. It might be fine if we said that the things that were happening around this man before are no longer happening. We are not only saying that but also that a new phenomenon has been added: the man is dead too.
We who are not dead, we who have no knowledge of death, crowd around the person and pronounce him dead! The crowd determines the man’s death without even asking him, without even letting him vouch for it! It is like a one-party decision in court; the other side is absent. The poor fellow has not even had a chance to say whether he is really dead or not. Do you follow what I mean?
Death is a social illusion. It is not that man’s illusion. The fact of the matter is that outwardly we feel he is dead but this is a social determination, which is wrong. Here the phenomenon of death is being determined by those who are not qualified. No one in the crowd is the right witness because no one really saw the person dying. No one has ever seen a person dying! Never has an act of dying been witnessed by anyone. All we have known is that until a given moment a person was alive and then he was no longer alive. That’s it; beyond this there is a wall. So far no one has ever seen the phenomenon of death.
A person who has all along taken his life to be nothing but eating, drinking, sleeping, moving about, quarreling, loving, making friends and creating enmity – all of a sudden, at the moment of death even he finds life slipping away through his fingers. What he had understood to be life was not life at all. There were just acts, visible in the light of life. Just as objects are seen in the presence of light, the person, in the same way, had seen certain things when the light within him was present. He had eaten food, made friends, created enmity, built homes, earned money and risen to a high position – all these were things seen in the light of life. Now, at the moment of death, he finds them slipping away.
So now the person thinks he is gone, he is dying and that life is lost forever. He has seen other people dying before and the social illusion that man dies is stuck in his mind as well. So he feels he is dying. His conclusion is also part of that social illusion. He comes to feel he is dying just as others before him have died.
He sees himself surrounded by his loved ones, his family and relatives crying bitterly. Now his illusion begins to become confirmed. All this creates a hypnotic effect on him. All these people – the situation is just ideal – the doctor at his side, the oxygen ready, the whole atmosphere of the house changed, people in tears . . . Now the man seems certain of his death. The social illusion that he is dying grips his mind. His friends and relatives around him begin to cast a hypnotic spell on the man that he is just about to die. Someone feels his pulse. All of them convince the man he is about to die – that whatsoever has been done before with a dying man they are now doing the same with him.
This is social hypnotism. The man is now fully convinced he is about to die, that he is dying, that he is gone. This hypnosis of death will cause him to become unconscious, frightened and horrified; it will make him shrink, feeling “I am about to die, I am about to die. What shall I do?” Overcome with fear he will shut his eyes and in that state of fear he will become unconscious.
In fact, falling unconscious is a device we use against things we are afraid of. You have a stomachache, for example, and if the pain becomes unbearable you will fall unconscious. That is just a trick on your part to switch off your mind, to forget the pain. When the pain is too much, falling unconscious is a mental trick – you don’t want to suffer the pain any longer. When the pain doesn’t go away, the only other alternative is to switch off one’s mind. One ‘turns off’ so one remains unaware of the pain.
So, falling unconscious is our unique way of dealing with unbearable pain. Remember, however, there is nothing like unbearable pain: you only feel pain as long as it is bearable. As soon as the pain reaches the point of becoming unbearable, you are gone; hence you never feel unbearable pain. Never believe a word of it if someone says he is suffering from unbearable pain, because the person talking to you is still conscious. Had the pain been unbearable he would have been unconscious. The natural trick would have worked and he would have lost consciousness. As soon as a person crosses the limit of endurance he falls unconscious.
Even minor illnesses frighten us and we become unconscious – what to say about the terrifying thought of death. The very idea of death kills us! We lose consciousness, and in that unconscious state death occurs. Hence, when I say death is an illusion I do not mean it is an illusion that happens either to the body or to the soul. I call it a social illusion – one that we cultivate in every child. We indoctrinate every child with the idea, “You are going to die, and this is how death occurs.” So by the time a child grows up he has learned all the symptoms of death, and when these symptoms apply to him he just closes his eyes and becomes unconscious. He becomes hypnotized.
Contrary to this is the technique of active meditation – a technique of how to enter death consciously. In Tibet this technique is known as Bardo. Just as people hynotize a man in his dying moment, similarly, people involved in Bardo give anti-hypnotic suggestions to a dying man. In Bardo, people gather around a man in his dying moments and tell him, “You are not dying, because no one has ever died.” They give him anti-hypnotic suggestions. There will be no weeping, no wailing; nothing else will be done. People will gather around him and a village priest or monk will come and say, “You are not dying, because no one has ever died. You will depart relaxed and fully conscious. You will not die, because no one ever dies.”
The person closes his eyes and the entire process is narrated to him: now his life-energy has left his legs, now it has left his hands, now he cannot speak, and so on – and yet, the man is told, he still is, he will still remain. And all around him these suggestions are given. The suggestions are simply anti-hypnotic. That means they are meant to make sure the person does not grab on to the social illusion that he is on the verge of dying. In order to prevent him from doing that, people use Bardo as an antidote.
The day this world has a healthier attitude towards death, there will be no need for Bardo. But we are a very unhealthy people; we live in a great illusion, and because of this illusion the antidote becomes essential. Whenever anyone dies, all his loved ones should make an attempt to shatter his illusion that he is dying. If they could keep the person awake, if they could remind him at each and every point . . .
Then the consciousness withdraws from the body, it does not leave all at once; all of the body does not die at the same time. The consciousness shrinks inside and, bit by bit, leaves each part of the body. Through various stages it withdraws, and all stages of this contraction can be recounted to the dying man as a means of keeping him conscious.
A Zen master was dying. He gathered other monks around him and said, “I want to ask you something. My time has come, but I feel there is no use dying the way everyone dies. Many have died like that before. It’s no fun. My question is: have you ever seen anyone die walking?”
The monks replied, “We haven’t seen anyone do it, but we have heard of a certain mystic who died walking.”
The master said, “All right, forget it! Let me ask you this: have you seen any mystic dying while standing on his head?”
The people around him said, “We never conceived or dreamed of such a thing, let alone saw someone dying like that.”
“All right then,” said the master, “that’s the way it will be.” He stood on his head and died.
The crowd around the master became very scared. The sight of an unknown corpse is frightening enough, but to bring down a corpse standing on its head was even more scary. The master was a dangerous man. The way he had positioned himself . . . Dead, no one dared bring him down and lay him on a bier. Then someone suggested calling his elder sister, a nun living in a monastery nearby. She was known to have set him right whenever he was mischievous as a young boy.
The sister was approached and made aware of the whole situation. She became very annoyed. She said, “He has always been mischievous like that. He hasn’t given up his habits even in his old age. So even while dying he couldn’t refrain from playing a trick!” The ninety-year-old woman grabbed her staff and came. Striking her staff hard on the ground, she exclaimed, “Now stop this naughtiness! If you have to die, die properly.”
The master quickly came down and laughed. “I was just having fun,” he said. “I was curious to see what these people were going to do. Now I shall lie down and die in the conventional way.” So he promptly lay down and died.
His sister walked away. “Now, that’s more like it,” she said. “Dispose of him.” She didn’t look back. “There is a way of doing things,” she said. “Whatsoever you do, do it properly.”
So our illusion of death is a social illusion. If you have even had a little experience of meditation – if you have even had a glimpse of the truth that you are separate from your body, if the feeling of disidentification with the body should even for a moment ever go deep within you – you won’t be unconscious at the time of death. In fact, by then your state of unconsciousness would already be broken.
No one can ever die knowingly, consciously, because he remains aware all the time that he is not dying, that something is dying in him but he is not. He keeps watching this separation and ultimately finds that his body is lying away from him, at a distance.
Then death turns out to be merely a separation; it amounts to the breaking of a connection. It is as if I were to step out of a house, and the members of the household, unaware of the world outside these walls, were to come to the door and bid me a tearful goodbye, feeling that the man they had come to say goodbye to had died.
The separation of the body and the consciousness is death. Because there is this separation, it is meaningless to call it death – it is merely a loosening, a breaking of a connection. It is nothing more than changing clothes. So, one who dies with awareness never really dies, hence the question of death never arises for him. He won’t even call death an illusion. He won’t even say who dies and who does not die. He will simply say that what we called life up to yesterday was merely an association. That association has broken. Now a new life has begun which, in the former sense, is not an association. Perhaps it is a new connection, a new journey.
But it is possible to die in a state of awareness only if you have lived with awareness. If you have learned how to live consciously, you will certainly be able to die consciously – because dying is a phenomenon of life; it takes place in life. In other words, death is the final happening of what you understand life to be. It is not an event that occurs outside of life.
It is like a tree that bears fruit. First the fruit is green, then it starts turning yellow. It turns more and more yellow until finally it becomes completely yellow and falls from the tree. That falling from the tree is not an event outside of the yellowing process of the fruit; rather, it is the eventual fulfillment of the yellowing itself.
The falling of the fruit from the tree is not an external event; rather it is the culmination of the yellowing, of the ripening it has already gone through. And what was going on when the fruit was green? It was getting ready to face the same final event. And the same process was going on when it had not even blossomed on the branch as yet, when it was still hidden inside the branch. Even in that state, it was preparing for the final event. And what about when the tree had not been manifested yet, when it was still within the seed? The same preparation was going on then. And how about when this seed had not even been born and was still hidden in some other tree? The same process was going on.
So the event of death is just a part of the chain of events belonging to the same phenomenon. The final event is not the end, it is just a separation. One relationship, one order, is replaced by another relationship, another order.