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| | | Book Name: The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 2 | Previous Next | |
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Now look back, think retrospectively. What has happened in these fifty years? Was it real or just a long dream? Can you make any difference... if it was real or a dream? How will you distinguish? Maybe you have dreamed all. Maybe it was just an idea in your mind. What proof have you got that it was real? What is left in your hand? Nothing... emptiness. And you call it life? And only emptiness results out of it?
Buddha says, better call it death. Now look into death -- maybe there is real life.
It is difficult, but a person who becomes interested in death, intrigued by death, the phenomenon of death, becomes a different type of person. He is a srotapanna.
The people who cling to the bank are the people who think this life is all. The people who try to understand, penetrate deeply into the life, become aware that this is not the real thing. Then they take a jump into the river which is going somewhere else -- towards death.
Meditation is an effort to die voluntarily. And in deep meditation one dies. In deep meditation, the so-called life disappears and for the first time you encounter death. That experience of encountering death makes you deathless. Suddenly you transcend death. Suddenly you know -- that which is going to die is not you.
All that can die, you are not. You are neither your body nor your mind nor your self. You are simply pure space -- which is never born and never dies.
People talk about death very rarely. Even if they talk about it, they talk very reluctantly. Even if they are forced to talk about it, they feel embarrassed -- even people who believe that the soul never dies, even people who believe that after death a person goes to the eternal god, to the paradise.
In his 'Unpopular Essays', Bertrand Russell has a telling anecdote.
"F. W. H. Myers, whom spiritualism had converted to belief in a future life, questioned a woman who had lately lost her daughter as to what she supposed has become of her soul.
The mother replied, 'Ah, well, I suppose she is enjoying eternal bliss, but I wish you would not talk about such unpleasant subjects."'
Now if really she is enjoying eternal bliss,
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