Death Is a Teacher
Questioner: Namaskar sir. Over the last three years, I was twice in the cremation ground. I was conducting the funeral of my mother and then my father after two years. So during that time, the gravity of the immortality of the soul and everything, was definitely there. And these verses and your teachings, they gave me a different outlook. I did not continue to look at the concept as "my father or my mother are immortal in the soul form." Now the conception has changed.
But as time has passed, there are two things that I see in my day-to-day life. Those of us who continue living — parts who are members of the family — we feel a very intense sense of everything being very mundane and a very strong sense of empathy and indifference towards things. And I also feel it in my work, even though I changed my line of work, tried to align it more with a good work or right work. It's in the field of disaster resilient infrastructure these days. But I'm not able to charge the work itself with a sense of, with a very strong sense of purpose. So that's one. And I seek psychotherapy also, but there they treat it as a very normal thing in the aftermath of bereavement. So they're like, this is very natural. This happens to most of us.
And the second thing was, as I pay more attention to your teachings, I also feel that in day-to-day dealings, especially in work, in the outside world, we have to challenge our learned ways of dealing with things. And there are a lot of disruptions start coming, and it seems like if we are disturbing the patterns too much or lessons that we learned about what the right personality should be, what is considered impressive, effective, efficient, all those things. So, is this also expected on this path?
Acharya Prashant: Please see, we said that the way you want to know the fact of the world is by observing things as they are. And whenever it would happen that the fact would expose itself, announce itself, hit you, it would be an instance of disruption of an assumption. Whenever facts meet assumptions, it is the assumption that stands to face disruption, not death.
Death is a very stark fact. It disturbs us exactly because it challenges the assumption on which we base our day-to-day life.
We live, we act in forgetfulness of death. The ego wants to think that it is indestructible, that it is the self. As we say, "Aham" wants to believe that it is 'Atma' and 'Atma' does not die. Therefore, the ego wants to live in the forgetfulness of death. That's how we conduct our day-to-day routine, assuming ourselves to be the truth and therefore assuming ourselves to be immortal.
Faced with the fact of death, that assumption is shattered. So there can be two options then: behave as if the assumption still stands unhurt, as if you have seen nothing, and carry on with life as it always has been; or you could see that —
Death, grief, bereavement — they have come as fact checks, as teachers to tell you that you have been living in some gross unfounded belief.
As we all do, most people want to turn back to normalcy as soon as possible after a brief period of bereavement. And that's what they go to psychotherapy for. They say, "We want to get back to normal." That's like saying, "We want to quickly forget the hint of the truth that came to us. Can you help us go back to our dreams, to our stupor, to our innate normal consciousness?" And that's what is called, as we said, as normalcy.
You can choose to reclaim your normalcy or you can choose truth. Death came to tell us that whatever we have founded our lives on, is very fragile. Now, we can accept the lesson or just discard it. It depends on us. Your normal work, your relationships, your worldview — all these will obviously appear hollow after you are struck with the fragility of everything.
To me, that's an opportunity to move into something else, something higher after a lesson has been taught, an expensive lesson. Why would one not want to use the lesson? Why would one want to continue as the uneducated student when previously was — sorrow comes to teach? Losses are suffered so that we may see that whatever we cling to can be lost very easily.
In Mahabharata, there is the instance of the Yudhishthira-Yaksha Samvad. So the Yaksha is a mythical creature and it is said that when the Pandavas were passing through the period of exile in the forest, once they went to fetch some water one after the other and none of them returned. So Yudhishthira went after them and found all of them lying unconscious by a water body, a lake. And then the guardian of the lake; he said, "you either answer all my questions or you too will drop dead like your brothers."
So Yudhishthira said, 'Fine.' A beautiful set of questions, we all deserve to read them. One of the questions is, "What is the most intriguing thing about humanity?" That's a Yaksha Prashna, and Yudhishthira responds that men encounter death and yet carry on as if they have seen nothing. They know they will die, and yet they behave as if they are immortal.
So, we could continue to behave as if we are immortal. The admission of vulnerability does not lie in mere words. If you really know something, it has to show up in your actions, thoughts, deeds. Only then can you claim that you really know something, right?
We want to live as the body, and yet we want to be immortal. Now, this is a gulf that can't be bridged. On one hand, we have a great stake and a great temptation in behaving as the body. On the other hand, even as we want to live as the body, we want to be deathless. These two cannot go together. Death comes to tell that if you will live as the body, this is what you will end as — 'Ashes.'
Do you like that? If you like that, carry on with your usual business. If you do not like that, then you need to ascend your life to a higher dimension. It's an incongruent mass. The ego, split by inner contradictions, wants to proclaim to everybody and itself, "I am immortal." And yet every day it encounters proof of its mortality. So, it is continuously afraid, proclaims, "I'm afraid of nobody because I am truth itself, I am Atma, what can happen to me?"
And yet everything it does, every little piece of fact, proves to it that you are extremely vulnerable, totally fragile. Your life is that of a clamoring mosquito — gone. And that bundle of contradictions is what the life of the average human being is: claiming immortality, yet afraid of mortality, striving to be immortal in all kinds of distorted ways possible.
Death comes to educate us. Let's learn the lesson.
One thing I can, kind of, assure you of — it'll be very difficult for you to return to your old ways. It requires a very deep kind of dishonesty to unsee after you have seen, to unrealize after you have realized. If you have seen something, realized something, now you are condemned, burdened to live what you have realized. You cannot be the same ignorant mind again.
Something has been seen. Maybe you are enjoying the bowl of soup till now — once you have seen the fly in it, you may still continue to sip, but can you continue to enjoy? It will require, as we said, deep-seated dishonesty and a very perverted sense of taste to still enjoy the soup. You won't be able to. So, you better get yourself a fresh bowl. Great changes have been known to come after one has witnessed death. There would have been no Buddhism in the world had the young Siddhartha not chanced upon death one day.
Death is a liberator, not so much to the one who has died but to the one who is still alive.
