Welcome to this contemplation on death.
To begin with,
I want to invite you to find a very comfortable position,
Whether you're laying or sitting or perhaps walking.
Just take a moment to land a little bit more into your body by just becoming a bit more aware of the feelings,
Sensations,
The warmth or cold,
The tremors or tinglings or tensions.
Just taking a few breaths to become present with your body.
Not trying to change anything but just becoming a bit more curious,
A bit more open to what is already there.
And in that way,
Stepping into a space of acceptance,
Presence.
It can be very pleasant to take a few deeper inhalations and exhalations.
And do that from a kind of spaciousness,
Not to kind of force your lungs open but to kind of increase the space.
It's a very different energy when you're doing it from spaciousness or from kind of a should.
So breathing a little bit deeper,
Kind of feeling your way out into the expanse of space inside of your chest.
Perhaps a bit more consciously letting the skin,
The muscles,
The tendons,
The ligaments of the face relax.
And also with that movement,
Letting the shoulders drop a bit more down.
And just allow that release into gravity to fall through your entire body,
Making you more relaxed.
And then just allow the words that I'm going to speak to touch you.
Let whatever stirs something in you do its work.
And some of the quotes that somehow don't touch you,
Just ignore them.
Treat them like birds in the sky that you're not really paying attention to.
So mostly for this meditation or contemplation on death,
I really want you to focus on yourself and your presence and your beingness,
And allowing the words to kind of pluck the strings of your heart wherever they succeed in touching you.
So death is a stripping away of all that is not you.
The secret of life is to die before you die and find that there is no death.
I'm telling a simple thing.
One day we have to die,
Isn't it?
Then why not die adhering to what the sages and saints have said?
If you die desiring the body,
The next day will be the day you die.
Will you have waking or sleeping to see it?
Waking,
Sleeping and consciousness,
They are going to disappear.
You know it.
Then what the saints and sages have said,
Why not die adhering to that only?
You have to die.
This is certain.
It means your being will become no being.
Then see what your being is.
It's going to disappear.
The sage Kabir said,
If your heart yearns,
O dear,
Know the truth,
Or else suffer.
If your heart yearns,
O dear,
Know the truth,
Or else suffer.
Why are you pouncing on the body identity?
What the Satguru has said,
Fall into that.
Instantly you will become the entire scene and the entire consciousness.
Being in this body,
One has to plead like an insect lying in the desert.
Because of the suffering.
I'm not an insect rolling in the desert.
I am the whole.
The awareness and the body will get separated.
This much only.
What else will happen?
One who knows this,
Becomes the whole.
The state of liberated being can be reached only by dying.
But this dying does not consist in the destruction of the body.
One should understand that true death is the extinction of the ideas I and mine.
If a human considers that they are born,
They cannot avoid the fear of death.
Let them find out if they have been born,
Or if the self has any birth.
They will discover that the self always exists.
That the body that is born resolves itself into thought,
And that the emergence of thought is the root of all mischief and ignorance.
Find from where thoughts emerge.
Then you will be able to abide in the ever-present inmost self,
And be free from the idea of birth,
Or the fear of death.
In the final hours before his death,
Ramana Maharshi left behind a message that resonates deeply with his followers.
When asked by a devotee how they should cope with his impending passing,
He replied calmly,
They say I am going away.
But where can I go?
I am here.
I have a friend named Emmanuel.
Some of you may have met him through his books.
He is a spook,
A being of light that has dropped his body.
Emmanuel shares a lot of great wisdom.
He is like an uncle to me.
I once said to him,
Emmanuel,
I often deal with the fear of death in this culture.
What should I tell people about dying?
And Emmanuel said,
Tell them it's absolutely safe.
He said,
It's like taking off a tight shoe.
This body is not me.
I am not caught in this body.
I am life without boundaries.
I have never been born,
And I have never died.
Over there,
The wide ocean and the sky with many galaxies all manifests from the basis of consciousness.
Since beginningless time,
I have always been free.
Birth and death are only a door through which we go in and out.
Birth and death are only a game of hide and seek.
So smile to me and take my hand and wave goodbye.
Tomorrow we shall meet again or even before.
We shall always be meeting again at the true source.
Always meeting again on the myriad paths of life.
Sometimes people ask you,
When is your birthday?
But you might ask yourself a more interesting question.
Before that day which is called my birthday,
Where was I?
Ask a cloud,
What is your date of birth?
Before you were born,
Where were you?
If you ask the cloud,
How old are you?
Can you give me your date of birth?
You can listen deeply and you may hear a reply.
You can imagine the cloud being born.
Before being born,
It was the water on the ocean's surface,
Or it was in the river and then it became vapor.
It was also the sun,
Because the sun makes the vapor.
The wind is there too,
Helping the water to become a cloud.
The cloud does not come from nothing.
There has been only a change in form.
It is not a birth of something out of nothing.
Sooner or later,
The cloud will change into rain or snow or ice.
If you look deeply into the rain,
You can see the cloud.
The cloud is not lost.
It is transformed into rain.
And the rain is transformed into grass.
And the grass into cows and then to milk and then into the ice cream that you eat.
Today,
If you eat an ice cream,
Give yourself time to look at the ice cream and say,
Hello cloud,
I recognize you.
Let what comes,
Come.
Let what goes,
Go.
Find out what remains.
