Is Death Always There, or Is Life Itself Death?
Questioner: One of my friends, she is young, she is quite young, seventeen-eighteen years old; I met her somewhere in Rishikesh some five years back. She had a very, I don’t know, it looks like a serendipity. She lost her brother, and then the next year, she lost another aunt’s son. Like this, she lost her aunt; then she lost another aunt.
In the last 10 years, she told me today, please ask this from Acharya ji. She has lost around seven to eight of her familiar lines like people you know, all brothers and all aunts eradicated from the face of the earth. She was asking me what the cause was. And I wanted to understand the deeper meaning of this pattern like I mean, how do you explain such phenomena?
Acharya Prashant: There is no deeper meaning. The meaning is obvious. The meaning is the same as it is to the rest of us. Life is death. Death is there in front of us all the time. It’s a matter of chance, the unfortunate chance that it struck a particular family in this way. There is no deeper significance contained in this. It can happen with me tomorrow, with you tomorrow, and acting as if it is an especially wild kind of misfortune is to be naive.
The sword is hanging over everybody’s head. It can fall here or there. Nobody is conspiring against anybody, and nobody has been blessed with special fortune. There is a random chance it falls here; it falls there. I am not talking of cases in which, let’s say, the family atmosphere is so toxic that it compels a couple of members to commit suicide. I am not talking of such cases. I am talking of accidental deaths. Accidental deaths are exactly that: accidents.
Questioner: So, it could happen to me, but then the rule of nature, her family.
Acharya Prashant: That’s all. One thing they could learn from it. We could learn from it. We do not know whether the sun will rise tomorrow; the bell tolls for The, so it’s not those five, six, or ten people who have gone. We should see our own departure in their funeral fires. We, too, are going, going, gone in the physical sense. This thing that we live in, believe in, breathe in, time is such a limited thing, and we call this limited thing our life. So we can better make good use of it.
In fact, it’s also obvious, no? Firstly, we love for a limited duration. Secondly, we do not know even what that limited duration is. What is certain is, nobody is going to live for two hundred and forty years.
Questioner: Nobody is going to get out alive.
Acharya Prashant: Yes, nobody is going to get out alive, and nobody is going to live even two hundred years. You are going to live for 60-70, 90 years may be, and even that is uncertain. The whip can be cracked any day. So that should make things glaringly obvious to us. Don’t waste time. Firstly, you have little of it, and secondly, you don’t know how little.
When you operate from the right place, you’ll see the world very differently. The way people go about their business, the way we go about life, eat, drink, try to be merry, catch hold of a person from the opposite gender, breed a family, have two or three kids, and then send them to the school and then arrange their marriage or try to arrange their marriage and then expect them to further the cycle. What nonsense is all this?
Questioner: What can I do? I don’t want to come back to this world.
Acharya Prashant: We are not here for that obviously not here for that. Away from suffering, there is a duty; there is responsibility.
Once you begin liberating yourself from it in the personal sense, you start realizing you have a massive responsibility now to your soldiers. It’s not as if you realize that all this is Maya and falseness and, therefore, escape away to your own blissful and joyful solitude. That is not going to happen.
Once you see this for what it is, once you know you have zero or close to zero personal stakes left here, you find that a very onerous duty called dharma is being entrusted to you. And that is to bring the same realization to these beings who are in it and being slaughtered every day.
I’m not talking just of animals; I’m talking of every person who goes to his office every day, every person who attends to his business every day, the man, the woman, the doctor, the patient, the housewife, the kids. Slaughterhouse. And you cannot evade that responsibility. You have to bring others out, and that alone is some kind of liberation from suffering. So, if you suffer, you do not need joy or bliss. You need duty. Duty not in the social or institutional sense, you understand the duty I’m talking of…
Questioner: Duty of the larger cause, the ultimate cause I guess.
Acharya Prashant: Duty of the only cause, the only cause. And, only that helps others and only that takes you away from your personal confinement. It’s like the password out of your personal prison. You are in your cell, and the way out is d-u-t-y and dharma. So, that allows you to unlock the door, which otherwise is unbreakable. You go out and help others emerge out of it and as long as you are helping others, as long as the intention is to not retreat to the cell to enjoy all the physical benefits one gets in the cell. You will maintain your freedom, but outside, there is insecurity and tiredness as well. They can make you want to retreat to the comforts of the cell.
Questioner: I call it the cold cage.
Acharya Prashant: But it’s a very welcoming cage. So, one wants to go back because the tendency to retreat to the cell is contained in every cell of the body. These are called cells, for some reason, cells in the sense of prison cells. So, we are carrying so many cells in the body itself.
Questioner: The memory of servitude right?
Acharya Prashant: Exactly, so they want you to go back to the cell, and there is, I said, you are battered outside. It’s not easy, it’s not easy just tolerating your freedom and it’s not easy for others to tolerate that someone is pushing them towards freedom.
You don’t want to tolerate your own freedom. They want to tolerate being pushed to freedom. So, there is a lot of incentive to yield to yourselves. But as long as you continue with the duty, you will remain free of suffering. The day something takes precedence over duty, suffering will return.
So there are no formulae or mantras, but if there could be any or one, this probably would be that.
Choose the right duty, the right battle, and the right cause, and be absolutely committed to it. Think not of victory. Think just of perseverance. You are not here to win. You are not here to not to quit. Just continue without even having any goal insight because the battle is endless. The goal is always limited. Continue without any hope of victory or any final target in the vision. Just continue, continue until you end.
