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become the topmost musician. I am rich, I have everything, I have respectability, but that does not help me to be happy.
"Even if I had remained a beggar, as a musician I would have been blissful because I would have been myself. This surgeon seems to be somebody else; it is a role that I have played, but it is not me. These people are celebrating, and I am crying within myself that my whole life is lost."
So first, you are not a `person'; otherwise you are dead before death. And there are millions of people who die thirty, forty, or fifty years before they actually die. You are an individual, and only individuality is capable of knowing your real self. Personality has no self -- only an ego, as false as personality. Individuality has a self, a soul. The individual is a living principle of life.
If you know life you will never ask this kind of question. Knowing life authentically means you also know that it is immortal. The knowledge of its immortality is intrinsic. It is not something informed, from outside. Just living your true being in totality you slowly, slowly become aware of the immortal current of life within you. You know the body will die, but this soul, which is life's whole essence, cannot die.
In existence nothing is destructible.
And it is not something to believe in, it is a scientific truth that you cannot destroy anything. You cannot destroy even a small piece of stone. Whatever you do it will remain in some form or other.
Science enquires into the objective world and finds that even objective reality is immortal. Religion works exactly like science in the inner world and finds the dancing life is intrinsically immortal.
It will be good to remember Socrates at this point because he was not a man to believe anything. If you had asked him whether your soul would survive after bodily death he would say, "Let me first die -- because unless I die, how can I say?" And the day he was given poison is one of the most significant days in the history of man. His disciples were sitting around him and he was lying down. He told his disciples, "I will tell you what is happening. As long as I can, I will go on
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