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thinks anything about death. In fact he goes on saying that people who go on thinking about death are a little perverted, morbid, ill, pathological, because he tries to deny the fact of death. He is afraid of death. Anybody who brings death to his notice seems to be the enemy.
A materialistic culture, a materialistic society, tries to avoid death. Hence so many tricks have been invented. In the west, when a person dies you put a new dress on him, you paint his face, if she is a woman, then lipstick and eyebrows and everything. You make everybody feel that the person is not dead... a beautiful casket and flowers. This is just to avoid.
You don't want to see face to face that somebody who was alive a moment before is no more alive. You don't want to see death as it is. You put a mask even on death. People live masked while they are alive; when they die, then too they carry the mask. It is a trick, a technology, so that you don't face your own innermost fear. And everybody says that the dead person has gone to heaven, has gone to the world of god, that he is in paradise and will be very happy.
I was reading.... One parapsychologist, meyers, was making a great research into death and about how people feel about death when somebody nearby -- a relative, a friend, a wife, a husband -- dies. How do people feel? So he was enquiring of many people. One day he was invited to a party and he was sitting by the side of a very rich lady whose daughter had just died two or three days ago.
He asked,. 'What do you feel? Where is your daughter now?'
'Of course,' the lady said, 'she is with god and she is blissfully happy there. She is in paradise. But please, don't talk about such depressing subjects.'
Now this... you can see the dichotomy, the divided mind, the split mind. 'She is happy, blissfully happy with god in paradise,' and 'Don't talk about such depressing subjects' ! If she is really happy with god then why is it a depressing subject? And if it is a depressing subject why go on hiding it by saying that she is happy with god?
So man has tried to avoid death. That's a way of avoiding religion, because religion is nothing but
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