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the surgical hall, and my friend was lying down. As we entered he got up, and all the fifteen people started trembling. They could not believe their eyes that a dead body...! But the problem became real because a real dead body got up! So my friend who was pretending jumped up and he said, "There are really ghosts! Just look at that body!"
There had been some misunderstanding: that man was in a coma. Some servants had brought him in the night so they put him in with the dead bodies. Then he came back to consciousness, so he stood up. When he saw these people he thought it must be morning and now it is time to get up and ask what is going on. Even I could not manage at first to work out what had happened, because I had sent only one. This second man...! We closed the doors and started to leave. The man was shouting, "Wait, I am alive! Why I am being put here?"
We closed the doors. We said, "It is not our business," and we left. It was difficult to convince my friend who had been lying there that it was not a ghost, that the other man was just a mistake. He said, "But never a next time! It was good that he stood up only when you all had come. If he had stood up when I was lying there alone I would have died! I could not have survived."
If you go on digging at the roots -- which are ugly, which nobody wants to see.... That's why words like `sex' or `death' or `money' have become taboos. There is nothing in them that you cannot discuss at the dining table, but the reason is that we have repressed them deep down and we don't want anybody to dig them out. We are afraid.
We are afraid of death because we know we are going to die, and we don't want to die. We want to keep our eyes closed. We want to live in a state as if "everybody else is going to die, but not me." That is the normal psychology of everybody: "I am not going to die."
To bring up death is taboo. People become afraid because it reminds them of their own death. They are so much concerned with trivia, and death is coming. But they want that trivia to keep them engaged. It functions as a curtain: they are not going to die, at least not now. Later on... "whenever it happens,
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