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Main Index
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time of death you will become unconscious. One day the kernel and the shell will be separated, but at that moment you will become unconscious. If you want to understand, then start learning now how to separate the kernel from the shell -- now, while you are alive."
If the shell, the body, and the kernel, the consciousness, separate at this very instant, death is finished. With the creation of that distance, you come to know that the shell and the kernel are two separate things -- that you will continue to survive in spite of the breaking of the shell, that there is no question of you breaking, of you disappearing. In that state, even though death will occur, it cannot penetrate inside you -- it will occur outside you. It means only that which you are not will die. That which you are will survive.
This is the very meaning of meditation or samadhi: learning how to separate the shell from the kernel. They can be separated because they are separate. They can be known separately because they are separate. That's why I call meditation a voluntary entry into death. And the man who enters death willingly, encounters it and comes to know that, "Death is there, and yet I am still here."
Socrates was about to die. The final moments were approaching; the poison was being ground to kill him. He kept asking, "It is getting late, how long will it take to grind the poison?"
His friends were crying and saying to him, "Are you crazy? We want you to live a little longer. We have bribed the person who is grinding the poison; we have persuaded him to go slowly."
Socrates went out and said to the man who was grinding the poison, "You are taking too long. It seems you are not very skilled. Are you very new to this? Have you never ground it before? Have you never given poison to a condemned person?"
The man replied, "I have been giving poison my whole life, but I have never seen a crazy man like you before. Why are you in so much of a hurry? I am grinding it slowly so that you may breathe a little more, live a little longer, remain in life a little more. You keep talking like a crazy man, saying it is getting late. Why are you in such a hurry to
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