The fear of death

In many parts of the world, children are told not to even utter the word 'death' inside the house, because they have a stupid hope that if you don't utter this word, it will not enter the house. This morbid fear of death is not natural.

Maybe the majority of people have subscribed to it, that is different, but the fear is not a natural process. Death is a natural process. If life happens, then death is natural. Being afraid of something natural is unnatural.

The fear of death is simply because we are not in touch with reality. The fear of death has come to us because we have gotten deeply identified with this body.

Our identification with this body has become so strong because we have not explored other dimensions. If we had explored other dimensions of experience, if we had established ourselves in other dimensions of experience, the body would not be such a big issue.

You talk of your body as if you came with it. You did not. You only gathered it. You gathered it while in your mother's womb and continued gathering it after your birth. Whatever we accumulate, we can say, 'This is mine.'

But you cannot say, 'This is me.' Now, if I take the cup from which I drink water and say, 'This is my cup,' you will think, 'Sadhguru seems to have some problem. But let me listen some more, everyone says he is wise.'

But after some time, if I say, 'This is me,' then you will definitely say, 'Let me get away from this person.' But you are doing the same thing with your body, which is why you make such a big fuss about shedding it.

Suppose you overate and gathered a lot of body during the next few weeks and then worked out and dropped some of it, you don't call it death. You gathered something and you put it back.

No big deal. You would be happy and relieved, not distressed, about it. It should be the same with death. What you know as death is just a little bit of purging.

With age, the flesh is beginning to lose its vigour, so it needs to be cleaned up. Either you put back what you gathered joyfully or you put it back crying. That is a choice you have. Death is like you picked up a spade full of soil and threw it back.

But, instead, if you look at this spade full of soil and get very attached to it, you will cry like a child when it falls off your spade. It is like a child, who picked up a little pebble from somewhere, came home and lost it. He is heartbroken.

He cries inconsolably. If all that you know is just the body, then this is what will happen to you. But if you had known something in your life that is more than the body, then shedding the body will not be a big deal for you.

(Excerpts from – "Death: An Inside Story" by Sadhguru, published by Penguin Random House). Book is available on Amazon and at all leading bookstores.