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is death. You may try to hide it and you may try to ignore it, but your inner existential state is death. Every moment you are shaken by death; every moment death is resonating within you. Your body is traveling fast towards its death. Each moment brings death a little nearer, and from all around death is watching you. You see an old man and you are reminded of death; you see a demolished house and the memory of death stirs in you; a withered flower is sufficient to bring the fragrance of death; a fountain has run dry -- again it is death looking at you. Look anywhere. Death prevails, and you are shaken by it. In this shaken state....
Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, was a great thinker of the West. He says that man's actual state is a trembling; man is shaken every moment. Some time or other just close your eyes and you will find that there is nothing but fear inside. Because of this fear, you may pray to God -- but that too will be only an extension of your fear. The masses that kneel in the churches and mosques and temples are not bowing down to any God; they are bowing down out of the fear that exists inside them. God is merely a cover-up for the fear that prevails within; kneeling is just a symptom of the warrior who is losing on the battlefield. Inside is an intense trembling. Death is standing in front of them! Frightened, man kneels and wrings his hands, begging to be saved. And this we have formalized into prayer: we face God afraid, and tell him of the death that is pursuing us; we pray for relief, and beg him to save us from death!
I have heard, in Damascus there was a Sufi master. One morning his servant came to him and asked him for his horse. "I have not much time," the servant said. "I was in the market buying vegetables for you, and somebody put his hand on my shoulder; he was shrouded in black. 'Who are you?' I asked. 'Your death! Be prepared this evening, for I am coming,' was his answer."
The master laughed and said, "You may take my horse."
The servant left Damascus immediately, and fled to Samarra. When he had gone, the master went to the city and visited the marketplace. He saw Death lurking in the corner and
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