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the Pacific Ocean! But no, we are not among those. We neither climb the peak of Everest nor land on the moon nor explore the depths of the Indian Ocean -- and we are the people who believe in the immortality of the soul! In fact, we are so scared of death, that out of the fear of it we go on repeating, "The soul is immortal." And we are under the illusion that perhaps by repeating it, it will become true. Nothing becomes true by repetition.
Death cannot be denied by repeating that death does not exist. Death will have to be known, it will have to be encountered, it will have to be lived. You will have to become acquainted with it. Instead, we keep running away from death.
How can we see it? We close our eyes when we see death. When a funeral passes by on the road, a mother shuts her child behind closed doors and says, "Don't go out; someone has died." The cremation ground is put outside the town so it rarely meets your eyes, so that death won't be there, right in front of you. And if you ever mention death to somebody, he will forbid you to talk about it.
Once I stayed with a sannyasin. Every day he would talk about the immortality of the soul. I asked him, "Do you ever realize that you are coming closer to death?"
He said, "Don't say such ominous things. It is not good to talk about such things."
I said, "If, on the one hand, a person says that the soul is immortal, but also he finds it ominous to talk about death, then this fouls up the whole thing. He shouldn't see any fear, any omen, anything wrong in talking about death -- because for him there is no death."
He said, "Although the soul is immortal, I nevertheless do not wish to talk about death at all. One should not talk about such meaningless and threatening things." We are all doing the same thing -- turning our backs on death and escaping from it.
I have heard: Once a man went mad in a village. It was a hot afternoon and the man was walking along a lonely road all alone. He was walking rather fast, trying not to be scared: it is possible to be scared when someone is already there, but how can anyone be scared when there is no one around? But we do feel scared
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