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his own shadow all his life, who wasted his whole life escaping from a shadow. And the man did not even know as much as his gravestone does -- because the gravestone is in the shade and does not run, hence no shadow is created."
We also run. We may wonder how a man can run from his shadow, but we too run from shadows. And that which we run away from starts pursuing us itself. The faster we run, the faster it follows because it is our own shadow.
Death is our own shadow. If we keep running away from it we will not be able to stand before it and recognize what it is. If that man had stopped and seen what was behind him, perhaps he would have laughed and said, "What kind of a person am I, running away from a shadow?" No one can ever escape from a shadow; no one can ever win a fight with a shadow. This does not mean, however, that the shadow is stronger than we are and that we can never be victorious; it simply means that there is no shadow, that there is no question of being victorious. You cannot win against that which does not exist. That's why people keep facing defeat by death -- because death is merely a shadow of life.
As life moves forward, its shadow moves along with it too. Death is the shadow that forms behind life, and we never want to look back, to see what it is. We have fallen, exhausted, so many times -- after having run this race again and again. It is not that you have come to this shore for the first time, you must have been here before -- maybe it was not this shore; then some other shore. It may not have been this body; then some other body -- but the race must have been the same. The legs must have been the same; the race must have been the same.
Through many lives we live, carrying the fear of death, and yet we are neither able to recognize it nor to see it. We are so scared and frightened that when death approaches, when its total shadow closes in on us, out of fear we become unconscious. Generally, no one remains conscious at the moment of death. If, even once, one were to remain conscious, the fear of death would disappear forever. If, just once, a man could see what dying is like, what happens in death, then the
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