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hands are empty, I see your being is just poor. You have not attained any inner experience which gives you richness, which gives you significance.
But just by being old, you have passed through many things of course, travelled on many, many paths. Frustrated, hopeless, helpless, you stand before death; trembling, just waiting, not knowing what to do. In the West particularly, the old man has become such a helpless phenomenon, just waiting for death with nothing to do. You cannot imagine.
In the past only a few people had to wait for death, those who were sentenced to die. They had to wait in the prisons for a few days, just waiting -- it was terrible agony. But now, everybody.... Retired, you are sentenced to death. Nothing else to do, just waiting. Any moment death will come. And the agony is increased by medical science still more because they go on prolonging you. They go on giving you injections and vitamins. For what? -- to wait still more, a little longer? They go on pushing you back in the queue, but you are in the queue. What difference does it make when one has lost everything? And just waiting, just waiting, waiting to die. Never before! That's why I say that man is so helpless before death.
In the East, when death started approaching, when death knocked for the first time on the door, people became very, very happy. Death was a door, it was not the end. Something new was going to start, and it was not the enemy, it was God coming in the garb of death. They had come to know that they are not the body, they are not going to die. The bodies will be left behind and they will go on an eternal journey.
Death was not the end. Death was a meeting, a meeting with the Unknown. Death was a long, long awaited moment -- desired, dreamed, hoped. It was the last desire: to leave the body and to meet the Divine, to merge into it so totally that not even a trace of you is left behind. The body looked like a barrier, so when it was dropped, you were completely free. Death was freedom and the culmination of life, it was not just the end.
If death is just the end and you simply finish, life cannot be meaningful. How can life be meaningful
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