Intrigued by death

Students : Sir, what will happen after death?

Me: All questions about death are meaningless — and especially for a young person like you. You have not even lived your life. Why do you ask that silly question? A person who is living has no time to ask such questions.

Only a person who is not living asks, “What will happen after my death?” There is no such thing as death at all. What do you think will die? This body disintegrates into its constituent elements, so nothing is lost. If you burn it, the ashes enrich the soil and aid germination. If you bury it, the worms live on it. If you throw it into the river, it becomes food for the fishes. One form of life lives on another form of life and gives continuity to life. So, life is immortal.

But that is not going to help anybody who is caught up in the fear of death. After all, ‘death’ is the fear of something coming to an end. The ‘you’ as you know yourself, the ‘you’ as you experience yourself — that ‘you’ does not want to come to an end. But it also knows that this body is going to drop dead as others do — you experience the deaths of others — so that is a frightening situation because you are not sure whether that (‘you’) will continue if this (body) goes.

So, then, it projects (an afterlife). This becomes the most important thing — to know whether there is an afterlife or not. Fear creates that, so when the fear is gone, the question of death is also gone.