How to take fear out of death

By Satyendra

Nothing can be predicted with absolute certainty, except that you are going to die one day. You have come with an expiry date and death will surely come and end your visible journey on this planet.

Every moment we are inching towards our grave but, with every passing moment our resistance also increases.

Aging and death are a natural part of life, and it is essential to approach it with wisdom and clarity.

We are scared of death because we lack clarity about ourselves.

We have no idea about who we are and what do we stand to lose when we die.

The greatest attachment that a person has is with his body. We think that we are this body. We identify with a body, with a name, with a sex and with so many other things without ever thinking once that none of these things is ‘Me’.

When we were born, this body was very small. Today it is six feet tall and weighs so much.

Nobody pushed it from inside, nobody pulled it from outside. Then how did it grow so much?

Actually, it is the material produced by mother earth that we have eaten and deposited in our system. It is the earth transferring itself to our physical being but, erroneously we start believing that this body is not earth, it is ‘Me’.

A loan given by Mother Earth

Body is just an accumulation.  It is a loan given by Mother Earth on which she does not charge any interest but recovery is one hundred percent. The body has to go back to earth.

Mind is also nothing but an accumulation.  An accumulation of impressions that we gather from our family, society, school and our environment.  Mind does not have an independent existence.

This is just a body -mind organism. This is not ‘Me’.

So, when we begin our journey towards knowing as to who we really are, then we are not scared of losing this body because then we know that this is just a body-mind organism. This is not ‘Me’.

Every night when we sleep, we die. We lose this body-mind consciousness totally. We are not even aware of our sex or our other identities.  We are in a dreamland where a different mind works. There is no logical mind there.

The world that we know in our waking state, does not exist in our sleep. We are dead. But we exist in a different dimension.

Whereas we awaken from our sleep every morning, death is a sleep which is deeper and from which this body-mind does not awaken. A deeper but not a permanent sleep. We awaken in a different dimension, and we exist.

What all you think that you will lose by dying was actually never yours. It is only your attachment that creates a false reality around you.

The more we acquire this clarity, the less frightening death will be.

(The column Spiritual Shades appears every Monday.)

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