In India they say the messenger of death is very ugly - dark, black - comes sitting on a very big ugly buffalo...

Everything returns to its original source, has to return to its original source. If you - understand life then you understand death also. Life is a forgetfulness of the original source, and death is again a remembrance. Life is going away from the original source, death is coming back home. Death is not ugly, death is beautiful. But death is beautiful only for those who have lived their life unhindered, uninhibited, unsuppressed. Death is beautiful only for those who have lived their life beautifully, who have not been afraid to live, who have been courageous enough to live -- who loved, who danced, who celebrated.

Death becomes the ultimate celebration if your life is a celebration. Let me tell you in this way: whatsoever your life was, death reveals it. If you have been miserable in life, death reveals misery. Death is a great revealer. If you have been happy in your life, death reveals happiness. If you have lived only a life of physical comfort and physical pleasure, then of course, death is going to be very uncomfortable and very unpleasant, because the body has to be left. The body is just a temporary abode, a shrine in which we stay for the night and leave in the morning. It is not your permanent abode, it is not your home.

So if you have lived just a bodily life and you have never known anything beyond the body, death is going to be very, very ugly, unpleasant, painful. Death is going to be an anguish. But if you have lived a little higher than the body, if you have loved music and poetry, and you have loved, and you have looked at the flowers and the stars, and something of the non-physical has entered into your consciousness, death will not be so bad, death will not be so painful. You can take it with equanimity, but still it cannot be a celebration.

If you have touched something of the transcendental in yourself, if you have entered your own nothingness at the centre -- the centre of your being, where you are no more a body and no more a mind, where physical pleasures are completely left far away and mental pleasures such as music and poetry and literature and painting, everything, are left far away, you are simply, just pure awareness, consciousness -- then death is going to be a great celebration, a great understanding, a great revelation.

If you have known anything of the transcendental in you, death will reveal to you the transcendental in the universe -- then death is no longer a death but a meeting with God, a date with God.

So you can find three expressions about death in the history of human mind.

One expression is of the ordinary man who lives attached to his body, who has never known anything greater than the pleasure of food or sex, whose whole life has been nothing but food and sex, who has enjoyed food, has enjoyed sex, whose life has been very primitive, whose life has been very gross, who has lived in the porch of his palace, never entered it, and who had been thinking that this is all life is. At the moment of death he will try to cling. He will resist death, he will fight death. Death will come as the enemy.

Hence, all over the world, in all societies, death is depicted as dark, as devilish. In India they say that the messenger of death is very ugly -- dark, black -- and he comes sitting on a very big ugly buffalo. This is the ordinary attitude. These people have missed, they have not been able to know all the dimensions of life. They have not been able to touch the depths of life and they have not been able to fly to the height of life. They missed the plenitude, they missed the benediction.

Then there is a second type of expression. Poets, philosophers, have sometimes said that death is nothing bad, death is nothing evil, it is just restful -- a great rest, like sleep. This is better than the first. At least these people have known something beyond the body, they have known something of the mind. They have not had only food and sex, their whole life has not been only in eating and reproducing. They have a little sophistication of the soul, they are a little more aristocratic, more cultured. They say death is like great rest; one is tired and one goes into death and rests. It is restful. But they too are far away from the truth.

Those who have known life in its deepest core, they say that death is God. It is not only a rest but a resurrection, a new life, a new beginning; a new door opens.

The Art of Dying, Chapter 1

Life is already there bubbling within you. It can be contacted only there. The temple is not outside, you are the shrine of it. So the first thing to remember if you want to know what life is: never seek it without, never try to find out from somebody else. The meaning cannot be transferred that way. The greatest Masters have never said anything about life -- they have always thrown you back upon yourself.

The second thing to remember is: once you know what life is, you will know what death is. Death is also part of the same process. Ordinarily we think death comes at the end, ordinarily we think death is against life, ordinarily we think death is the enemy, but death is not the enemy. And if you think of death as the enemy it simply shows that you have not been able to know what life is.

Death and life are two polarities of the same energy, of the same phenomenon -- the tide and the ebb, the day and the night, the summer and the winter. They are not separate and not opposites, not contraries; they are complementary to each other. Death is not the end of life; in fact, it is a completion of one life, the crescendo of one life, the c1imax, the finale. And once you know your life and its process, then you understand what death is.

Death is an organic, integral part of life, and it is very friendly to life. Without it life cannot exist. Life exists because of death; death gives the background. Death is, in fact, a process of renewal. And death happens each moment.

The moment you breathe in and the moment you breathe out, both happen. Breathing in, life happens; breathing out, death happens. That's why when a child is born the first thing he does is breathe in, then life starts. And when an old man is dying, the last thing he does is breathe out, then life departs. Breathing out is death, breathing in is life -- they are like two wheels of a bullock cart. You live by breathing in as much as you live by breathing out. The breathing out is part of breathing in. You cannot breathe in if you stop breathing out. You cannot live if you stop dying. The man who has understood what his life is allows death to happen; he welcomes it. He dies each moment and each moment he is resurrected. His cross and his resurrection are continually happening as a process. He dies to the past each moment and he is born again and again into the future.

If you look into life you will be able to know what death is. If you understand what death is, only then are you able to understand what life is. They are organic. Ordinarily, out of fear, we have created a division. We think that life is good and death is bad. We think that life has to be desired and death is to be avoided. We think somehow we have to protect ourselves against death. This absurd idea creates endless miseries in our lives, because a person who protects himself against death becomes incapable of living. He is the person who is afraid of exhaling, then he cannot inhale and he is stuck. Then he simply drags; his life is no longer a flow, his life is no longer a river.

If you really want to live, you have to be ready to die.

The Art of Dying Chapter 1

 

 

 

The Art of Dying

 

One night the poet, Awhadi of Kerman (a very great Muslim poet) was sitting on his porch bent over a vessel. Shams-e-Tabrizi, a great Sufi mystic, happened to pass by.

Shams-e-Tabrizi looked at the poet, at what he was doing. He asked the poet, 'What are you doing?'
The poet said, 'Contemplating the moon in a bowl of water.'

Shams-e-Tabrizi started laughing, with an uproarious laughter, a mad laughter. The poet started feeling uncomfortable; a crowd gathered. And the poet said, 'What is the matter? Why are you laughing so much? Why are you ridiculing me?'

Shams-e-Tabrizi said, 'Unless you have broken your neck, why don't you look directly at the moon in the sky?'

The moon is there, the full moon is there, and this poet was sitting with a bowl of water and looking into the bowl of water at the reflection of the moon.

Seeking truth in scriptures, seeking truth in philosophies, is looking at the reflection. If you ask somebody else how you should live your life, you are asking for misguidance, because that man can only talk about his own life.

And never, never, are two lives the same. Whatsoever he can say or impart to you will be about his own life -- and that too only if he has lived. He may have asked somebody else, he may have followed somebody else, he may have been an imitator himself. Then it is a reflection of a reflection. And centuries pass and people go on reflecting the reflection of the reflection of the reflection -- and the real moon is always there in the sky waiting for you. It is your moon, it is your sky, look directly. Be immediate about it. Why borrow my eyes or anybody else's eyes?

You have been given eyes, beautiful eyes, to see, and to see directly. Why borrow understanding from anybody? Remember, it may be understanding to me, but the moment you borrow it, it becomes knowledge to you -- it is no more understanding. Understanding is only that which has been experienced by the person himself. It may be understanding for me, if I have looked at the moon, but the moment I say it to you it becomes knowledge, it is no longer understanding.

Then it is just verbal, then it is just linguistic. And language is a lie.
Let me tell you an anecdote.

A chicken farmer, dissatisfied with the productivity of his flock, decided to use a bit of psychology on his hens.

Accordingly, he purchased a gay-colored, talking parrot and placed him in the barnyard. Sure enough, the hens took to the handsome stranger immediately, pointed out the best tidbits for him to eat with joyous clucks, and generally followed him around like a bevy of teen-age girls following a new singing star sensation.

To the delight of the farmer even their egg-laying capacities improved.

The barnyard rooster, naturally jealous of being ignored by his harem, set upon the attractive interloper, assailed him with beak and claws, pulling out one green or red feather after the other. Whereupon the intimidated parrot cried out in trepidation, 'Desist sir! I beg of you, desist! After all, I am only here in the capacity of a language professor!'

Many people live their life as language professors.

That is the falsest kind of life. Reality needs no language, it is available to you on a non-verbal level. The moon is there; it needs no bowl and no water, it needs no other medium. You have just to look at it; it is a non-verbal communication. The whole of life is available -- you just have to learn how to communicate with it non-verbally.

That's what meditation is all about -- to be in a space where language does not interfere, where learned concepts don't come in between you and the real.

When you love a woman don't be bothered about what others have said about love, because that is going to be an interference. You love a woman, the love is there, forget all that you have learned about love. Forget all Kinseys, forget all Masters and Johnsons, forget all Freuds and Jungs. Please don't become a language professor. Just love the woman and let love be there, and let love lead you and guide you into its innermost secrets, into its mysteries. Then you will be able to know what love is.

And what others say about meditation is meaningless. Once I came upon a book written by a Jaina saint about meditation. It was really beautiful but there were just a few places by which I could see that the man had never meditated himself -- otherwise those places could not be there. But they were very few and far between. The book on the whole, almost ninety-nine per cent, was perfect. I loved the book.

Then I forgot about it. For ten years I was wandering around the country. Once in a village of Rajasthan, that saint came to meet me. His name sounded familiar, and suddenly I remembered the book. And I asked the saint why he had come to me. He said, 'I have come to you to know what meditation is.' I said, 'I remember your book. I remember it very well, because it really impressed me. Except for a few defects which showed that you have never meditated, the book was perfectly right -- ninety-nine percent right. And now you come here to learn about meditation. Have you never meditated?'

He looked a little embarrassed because his disciples were also there. I said, 'Be frank.
Because if you say you know meditation, then I am not going to talk about it. Then finished! You know. There is no need. If you say to me frankly -- at least be true once -- if you say you have never meditated, only then can I help you towards meditation.' It was a bargain, so he had to confess. He said, 'Yes, I have never said it to anybody. I have read many books about meditation, all the old scriptures. And I have been teaching people, that's why I feel embarrassed before my disciples. I have been teaching meditation to thousands, and I have written books about it, but I have never meditated.'

You can write books about meditation and never come across the space that meditation is. You can become very efficient in verbalizing, you can become very clever in abstraction, in intellectual argumentativeness, and you can forget completely that all the time that you have been involved in these intellectual activities has been a sheer wastage.

I asked the old man, 'How long have you been interested in meditation?' He said, 'My whole life.' He was almost seventy. He said, 'When I was twenty I took sannyas, I became a Jaina monk, and those fifty years since then I have been reading and reading and thinking about meditation.' Fifty years of thinking and reading and writing about meditation, even guiding people into meditation, and he has not even tasted once what meditation is!

But this is the case with millions of people. They talk about love, they know all the poetries about love, but they have never loved. Or even if they thought they were in love, they were never in love. That too was a 'heady' thing, it was not of the heart. People live and go on missing life. It needs courage. It needs courage to be realistic, it needs courage to move with life wherever it leads, because the paths are uncharted, there exists no map.

One has to go into the unknown.

Life can be understood only if you are ready to go into the unknown. If you cling to the known, you cling to the mind, and the mind is not life. Life is non-mental, non-intellectual, because life is total. Your totality has to be involved in it, you cannot just think about it. Thinking about life is not life. beware of this 'about-ism'. One goes on thinking about and about: there are people who think about God, there are people who think about life, there are people who think about love. There are people who think about this and that.

Mulla Nasrudin became very old and he went to his doctor. He was looking very weak so the doctor said, 'I can say only one thing. You will have to cut your love-life to half.'

The Mulla said, 'Okay. Which half? Talking about it or thinking about it?'

That's all. Don't become a language professor, don't become a parrot. Parrots are language professors. They live in words, concepts, theories, theologies, and life goes on passing, slipping out of their hands. Then one day suddenly they become afraid of death.

When a person is afraid of death, know well that that person has missed life. If he has not missed life there cannot be any fear of death. If a person has lived life, he will be ready to live death also.

The Art of Dying

Question 1:

HOW CAN WE PREPARE OURSELVES FOR DEATH?
DON'T accumulate anything whatsoever: power, money, prestige, virtue, knowledge, even the so-called spiritual experiences. Don't accumulate. If you don't accumulate you are ready to die any moment, because you have nothing to lose. The fear of death is not really fear of death; the fear of death comes out of the accumulations of life. Then you have too much to lose so you cling to it. That is the meaning of Jesus' saying:

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

I don't mean become a beggar, and I don't mean renounce the world. I mean be in the world but don't be of the world. Don't accumulate inside, be poor in spirit. Never possess anything -- and then you are ready to die. Possessiveness is the problem, not life itself.

The more you possess, the more you are afraid to lose. If you don't possess anything, if your purity, if your spirit is uncontaminated by anything, if you are simply there alone, you can disappear any moment; whenever death knocks on the door it will find you ready. You are not losing anything. By going with death you are not a loser. You may be moving into a new experience.

And when I say don't accumulate, I mean it as an absolute imperative. I'm not saying don't accumulate things of this world but go on accumulating virtue, knowledge, and so-called spiritual experiences, visions -- no. I am talking in absolute terms: don't accumulate.

There are people, particularly in the East, who teach renunciation. They say, 'Don't accumulate anything in this world because it will be taken away from you when death comes.'

These people seem to be basically more greedy than the ordinary worldly people. Their logic is: don't accumulate in this world because death will take it away, so accumulate something that death cannot take away from you -- accumulate virtue, punya; accumulate character, morality, knowledge; accumulate experiences, spiritual experiences, experiences of kundalini, meditation, this and that; accumulate something that death cannot take away from you.

But if you accumulate, with that accumulation comes fear. Each accumulation brings fear in the same proportion...then you are afraid. Don't accumulate and fear disappears. I don't teach you renunciation in the old sense; my sannyas is an absolutely new concept. It teaches you to be in the world and yet to be not of it. Then you are always ready.

I have heard about a great Sufi mystic, Abraham Adam. Once he was the Emperor of Bokhara, then he left everything and became a Sufi beggar. When he was staying with another Sufi mystic he was puzzled because every day the man was continuously complaining of his poverty.

Abraham Adam said to him, 'The way you abuse it, it may be that you have bought your poverty cheaply.'
'How stupid you must be!' the man retorted, not knowing to whom he was talking, not knowing that Abraham was once the emperor. He said, 'How stupid you must be to think that one buys poverty.'

Abraham replied, 'In my case, I paid my kingdom for it. I would even give away a hundred worlds for a single moment of it, for every day its value becomes more and more to me. No wonder then that I give thanks for it while you lament it.'

The purity of the spirit is the real poverty. The word 'sufi' comes from an Arabic word 'safa'. Safa means purity. Sufi means one who is pure in the heart.

And what is purity? Don't misunderstand me, purity has nothing to do with morality.

Don't interpret it in a moralistic way. Purity has nothing to do with Puritans. Purity simply means an uncontaminated state of mind, where only your consciousness is and nothing else. Nothing else really enters into your consciousness, but if you hanker to possess, that hankering contaminates you. Gold cannot enter into your consciousness.

There is no way. How can you take gold into your being? There is no way. Money cannot enter into your consciousness. But if you want to possess, that possessiveness can enter into your consciousness. Then you become impure. If you don't want to possess anything, you become fearless. Then even death is a beautiful experience to pass through.

A man who is really spiritual has tremendous experiences but he never accumulates them.

Once they have happened he forgets about them. He never remembers, he never projects them into the future. He never says that they should be repeated or that they should happen again to him. He never prays for them. Once they have happened they have happened. Finished! He is finished with them and he moves away from them. He is always available for the new, he never carries the old.

And if you don't carry the old you will find life absolutely new, incredibly, unbelievably new at each step. Life is new, only the mind is old; and if you look through the mind, life also looks like a repetition, a boring thing. If you don't look through the mind.... Mind means your past, mind means the accumulated experiences, knowledge and everything.

Mind means 'that through which you have passed, but on to which you are still hanging.'

Mind is a hang-over, dust from the past covering your mirror-like consciousness. Then when you look through it everything becomes distorted. Mind is the faculty of distortion.

If you don't look through the mind you will know that life is eternal. Only mind dies -- without mind you are deathless. Without mind nothing has ever died; life goes on and on and on forever. It has no beginning and no end.

Accumulate, then you have a beginning, and then you will have an end.

How to prepare yourself for death.... When I say 'how to prepare for death', I don't mean preparing for the death that will come in the end -- that is very far away. If you prepare for it you will be preparing for the future and again the mind will come in. No, when I say prepare for death, I don't mean the death that will come finally, I mean the death that visits you every moment with each exhalation. Accept this death each moment and you will be ready for the final death when it comes.

Start dying each moment to the past. Clean yourself of the past each moment. Die to the known so that you become available to the unknown.

With dying and being reborn each moment, you will be able to live life and you will be able to live death also.

And that's what spirituality is really all about: to live death intensely, to live life intensely; to live both so passionately that nothing is left behind unlived, not even death.

If you live life and death totally, you transcend.

In that tremendous passion and intensity of life and death, you transcend duality, you transcend the dichotomy, you come to the One. That One is really the truth. You can call it God, you can call it life, you can call it truth, samadhi, ecstasy, or whatsoever you choose.

The Art of Dying, Chapter 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Life is always in the now. There is no other moment to it. Only one moment exists – this moment – all else is just a projection of the mind. Only today is, and only today remains. Tomorrow never comes, it cannot come because it doesn’t belong to reality. Only today comes, goes on coming, because today belongs to reality.

Tomorrow is your dream. And you need a dream because you are not rooted in reality. This has to be understood. Why are dreams needed? When reality is available, why do you dream?

A man fasts. The whole day the body suffers; the hunger is there. He suppresses the hunger because he is on some religious fast, a religious ritual. To satisfy the ego he makes the body hungry – so that the ego can feel that he is religious, something special, not an ordinary man, a saint, a sage, not an ordinary sinner.

To feed the ego you make the body hungry. You starve the body. Ego is a dream – the body is the reality. The whole day you have been fasting; in the night you cannot sleep because the body goes on asking for food. It is a need, it is a necessity. You feel restless, you turn from one side to another, you cannot go to sleep. Food is a need, but rest also is a need.

So the mind creates a dream...
You are an honored guest in a great feast given by the king; you are eating delicious food, you go on eating.... Of course the body doesn’t get nourishment, but there is a false notion that you have eaten well; now you can go to sleep. In the morning you will be hungry, more than ever, but at least the dream helped you to rest and relax. One need, the need for food, could not be fulfilled, but another need, the need for rest, could be fulfilled through the dream.

If you are tense you will need dreams, because they help you to relax. If you are not HERE, you will need a dream of being THERE, because you have to be somewhere. If you cannot be here then you will feel suspended in the sky, uprooted, unanchored, just hanging in the middle. That will give you a very restless, uncomfortable feeling. So... a dream: ”I may not be here, but I am going to be there.” The dream helps you to rest and relax.

If you cannot be in the 'now', then you create a future. The future is needed. The future gives you a consoling sleep, it relaxes you. Millions of things are there which you cannot fulfill right now, and if there is no future you will be too much burdened by unfulfilled desires. A future is needed so you can at least say to yourself: ”If things are not as they should be, at least there is tomorrow. Don’t get panicky, things will be better tomorrow.” You can hope, because there is time. Hope needs space, desire needs space, ambition needs space to move.

Look at the trees – they don’t dream. They don’t need to, they are already here, in the now – fulfilled, flowering. Listen to the birds – they are singing NOW, they are not preparing to sing tomorrow. Except for man, nobody is preparing for tomorrow. This day is so beautiful, who bothers for tomorrow?

If this day is ugly and it is inconvenient to live with it, a beautiful dream of the future is needed as a substitute for reality. Otherwise you will feel so much anguish – intolerable. You will not be able to live! The more desire you have, the more future you need, the more ambitions the more future you need. For needs, this moment is more than enough. Today is enough. Jesus said to his disciples, ”Look at the lilies. Look in the field – the flowers are flowering, and they are so beautiful that even Solomon in all his grandeur was not so beautiful.”

Solomon is the greatest king in the mythology of Jews – the richest man ever on earth, and the wisest man also. The wisest, the richest, the greatest emperor in the world was not so beautiful as these ordinary lilies in the field. ”Look!” said Jesus to his disciples. ”These lilies must be carrying a secret within their hearts.” What is the secret? The secret is, lilies are here and now. Solomon may have been very very wise but he was not here and now.

All beauty is here, and all life is now.

Tomorrow is death, tomorrow is no life. But why do we live in the tomorrow? It looks absurd: How can you live in the tomorrow? – but you live there. You never live here; that’s why you look so dead.

How can one live in the tomorrow? Jesus said to his disciples, ”Take care of this moment. Live today, and tomorrow will take care of itself. Don’t worry for the morrow because the moment you are losing in worrying about tomorrow is the real moment. And tomorrow is never going to be there.”

For dreams you are losing life. Needs don’t need them, but desires need them. For example, you are hungry, you can eat; if you are thirsty, you can drink. There is not much trouble about it. There would have been no trouble and there would have been nothing like poverty in the world if man remained true to his needs. Then everybody has more than enough. The Earth has plenty. The sky is not poor, the rivers are rich, the oceans vast – life has tremendous treasures. Not a single bird sleeps without food, not a single tree remains thirsty. Everything is more than is needed. Life is affluent, very luxuriant – if you stick to the needs. But if you start desiring, then life becomes poor.

If you are hungry you can eat and feel satiated – and there is nothing like satiated hunger. It is a deep prayer, a gratefulness. I tell you, not by fasting will you become religious, but when hunger is satisfied. In that moment of satisfaction a gratefulness, a gratitude arises, a prayer. You feel fulfilled.

You can thank God. Never by fasting do you become religious. How can you become religious by destroying your body and being violent towards it? That is the way of the murderer, the torturer, the sadist, the masochist, the somehow perverted.

When you have eaten well, eaten rightly and the food suits you, in that moment a prayer arises, not only from your mind but from your body also. Satiety is a prayer. You were thirsty and you have drunk to the full. Now suddenly nothing is needed. You are absolutely perfect in that moment. You are a god, a fulfilled god. No thirst... what else is lacking?

If you stick to the needs – and this is my message, that a religious man sticks to his needs. He is never against needs and never for desires. Desires are false needs. For example, if you are hungry you can eat right now, but if you are desiring a Rolls Royce, how can you get it right now? If you are ambitious for a big palace – Rome is not built in one day, a big palace will need time. You will have to exploit money. You will not only have to exploit others you will have to exploit your own needs also, because you will have to accumulate money. You will sleep hungry, because tomorrow – the palace, and when the palace is ready, then you are going to eat. How can you eat without a palace?

Tomorrow comes the Rolls Royce, and there is nothing wrong in being a little hungry for a few days, starving your needs; otherwise how are you going to have a Rolls Royce?

A Rolls Royce is neither a thirst nor a hunger, it is simply a foolish desire. When it is not there you will be waiting for it and destroying your life, and when it comes you will feel nothing has come. And you waited so long, and you killed yourself so much. The Rolls Royce is there, but you are already dead. There is no real need for it; that’s why it can never satisfy. Satisfaction comes out of real dissatisfaction.

Contentment comes out of real hunger, real thirst. You were dying, you could not do without it; only then contentment happens. Desires need the future; they cannot be fulfilled right now. If you want to be the president of a country, how can you be the president right now? You will have to pass long ladders of ambition, much time will be needed. By the time you reach, if death has not reached before, you will be already dead. People become presidents when they are already senile, past their sixties, becoming seventy, just ready for the grave. Then they enter the presidential house. And the whole life wasted, – for nothing. Even if your picture is in all the newspapers, what does it matter?

How does it satisfy? Birds are happy without newspapers, trees are happy without the radio and the television. If trees are happy and birds are happy, and they don’t bother a bit for the tomorrow, why can’t man be happy right now?

The whole of religion, real religion, is the message to drop desires and to fulfill needs. And needs are simple and beautiful. Thirst is beautiful – it comes out of nature – and then being satisfied is also beautiful. It gives a balance, a subtle tranquility. A silence happens to your whole existence.

You are at rest; no dream is needed.

If you live in the moment totally, then there is no need to worry for the future. A rightly lived childhood brings you to a right, ripe youth – flowing, vital, alive, a wild ocean of energy. A rightly lived youth brings you to the very settled calm and quiet life. A calm and quiet life brings you to a religious inquiry: What is life? Living is not enough, one has to penetrate the mystery. A calm and quiet life brings you to meditative moments. Meditation brings you to renounce all that is useless now, just junk, garbage. The whole life becomes garbage; only one thing remains always eternally valuable, and that is your awareness.

By the time of the seventieth year, when you are ready to die – if you lived everything rightly, in the moment, never postponing for the future, never dreaming for the future, you lived it totally in the moment whatsoever it was – nine months before your death you will become aware... you have attained that much awareness, you can see: now death is coming.

Many saints have declared their deaths, but I have not come across a single instance when the death was declared before nine months. Exactly nine months before, a man of awareness, uncluttered with the past... because one who never thinks of the future will never think of the past. They are together, the past and future are together, joined together. When you think of the future it is nothing but the projection of the past; when you think of the past it is nothing but trying to plan for the future. They are together. The present is out of them. A man who lives in this moment - now and here - is not cluttered with the past and not cluttered with the future. He remains unburdened. He has no burden to carry, he moves without weight. The gravitation doesn’t affect him. In fact, he doesn’t walk, he flies. He has wings....

Before he dies, exactly nine months before, he will become aware that death is coming. And he will enjoy and he will celebrate and he will say to people, ”My ship is coming, and I am only for a little while more on this bank. Soon I will be going to my home. This life has been beautiful, a strange experience. I loved, learned, lived much, I am enriched. I had come here with nothing and I am going with much experience, much maturity.”

He will be thankful to all that has happened – good and bad both, right and wrong both, because from everything he learned, not only from right, from wrong also. Sages that he came across, he learned from them; and sinners, yes, from them also – they all helped. People who robbed him helped, people who helped him helped, people who were friends helped, people who were enemies helped. Everything helped. Summer and winter, satiety and hunger, everything helped. One can be thankful to all.

When one is thankful to all and ready to die celebrating for this opportunity that was there, death becomes beautiful. Then death is not the enemy, it is the greatest friend, because it is the crescendo of life. It is the highest peak that life achieves. It is not the end of life, it is the c1imax. It looks like the end because you have never known life. To one who has known life it appears as the very crescendo, the very peak, the highest peak.

Death is the culmination, the fulfillment. Life does not end in it; in fact life flowers in it, it IS the flower.

But to know the beauty of death one has to be ready for it, one has to learn the art. That’s why I go on saying that I am here to teach you how to die. A master is a death. He allows you to die in him.

He helps you to die every moment to the past, and he helps you to live an uncluttered moment – this moment.

This small parable is beautiful. It says:

Money is a symbol of the future. Why do you accumulate money? – for the future. Money is future, money is hidden future; that’s why people who don’t live in the present will always cling to money.

They can afford to lose love but they cannot afford to lose money, because love is not a promise for the future. It may be good right now but what will you do in your old age? Be miserly, accumulate money, because in the future money will be helpful.

Why are people so mad after money? It is a symbol of future. Money is future. Money is condensed future in a coin, in a note. It is a promise for the future. Every note says, ”I promise that this much amount of money whenever demanded will be given to you.” It is a promise for the future.

Misers never live here-now, they cannot. They live in their money. Uwais is an enlightened master. He was offered some money. It is a symbol, a symbol for the future. He was offered some future – let me put it that way.

Already I have a coin, I don’t need it. Right now I am living, he said. And right now it is enough. I have a coin. What coin? This moment is the coin. It is a single coin, a very small coin. You can live it herenow, it is not of much use for the future. It is such a small coin, you will look foolish if you gather it for the future. A moment is so small, it is a coin. Time is a promissory note, a thousand rupee note, a one lakh rupee note, a one crore rupee note. Time is big money. A moment – it is just a drop, a small coin.

The other must not have understood. Difficult, difficult when you talk to a man like Uwais. He has a different language, you have a different language; communication becomes impossible.

And he was looking at the coin, thinking of the coin; he did not understand what Uwais is saying. He said, ”How long will it last you?” The present moment, how long can it last? It is such a small coin.

It will be finished.

”Don’t think of the moment,” say the wiser ones. They say, ”Think of the future.” Say the wiser ones: ”Don’t think of the immediate, how long will it last you? Think of the future.”

And I tell you, these ”wiser” ones are the poisoners of humanity. They have poisoned your mind completely... because the immediate is all that is there. The immediate moment is the only reality that is there. Howsoever small, it is the only reality. And your promissory notes, howsoever big amount they promise in the future, are simply promissory notes. The future never comes. No governor-general of the reserve bank can give you the guarantee for the future. Future? – who can guarantee it? who can predict it? How long will it last you? It is nothing, just a moment.

The wiser ones say, ”Don’t live the momentary life.” They say, ”Think of the future.” They say, ”Don’t live just here and now, look ahead! Think of the long range – not only of this world, of the other world also. Think of heaven and hell, moksha, Brahman, nirvana.” And I say to you, these wiser ones are poisoners. The real wisdom consists in being here and now because for the real wisdom that is the only existence, there is no other existence. It is the only existence there is.

It is a beautiful dialogue. Uwais said: Guarantee me that I shall live longer, longer than this moment, this small coin. Can you guarantee me that I will live the next moment? Can you guarantee me that I will live tomorrow? If you cannot guarantee me that then please let me live today. If you cannot guarantee the next moment, then howsoever small this moment is please let me live it right now.

Once lost, it is lost forever, and you cannot guarantee the next. So why should I waste my small coin for bigger coins which cannot be guaranteed?

Future is never; only this moment is. Don’t listen to so-called wise ones who are really foolish. Listen to life! And listen to existence. It is better to go to the trees and listen how they live, go to the animals and watch how they live. Look all around, except at man. Man is perverted. Look at existence and see how existence lives – it lives moment to moment, with no planning for the future. That’s why it is so beautiful, it is so ecstatic. Its ecstasy knows no boundaries. From one moment it flows into the other, but it never thinks of the other. One moment lived totally automatically brings another moment, with more possibilities – because the other moment is not coming from somewhere else, it grows out of you as leaves grow out of trees.

If the tree has been healthy, lived really, then out of beautiful trees come beautiful leaves, beautiful flowers and fruits. It need not worry about them.

Have you seen any tree sitting like Rodin’s statue of ”The Thinker” with the hand on the head, wrinkles on the forehead, thinking how to bring fruits, how to flower this season again? where to go? who are the experts to ask? where to find a guru?

It doesn’t bother. Even if gurus come to them and talk to them they won’t listen. They will say, ”Go somewhere else, find some stupid human being. Here no gurus are needed. We are already okay, absolutely okay.”

When the time comes the tree flowers. When the time comes it is laden with fruits. When the time comes, fruits are ripe, ready to fall, die into the earth, create new seeds, new trees – and the circle goes on and on and on. It is eternal. From each moment is born another moment – it comes out of it. Live it as totally as possible, because through that totality another will be born.

This small coin of the moment seems to be enough for me because who can guarantee that there is going to be another moment for me to live? If you can guarantee it, I will accept your gift.

Nobody can guarantee the future.Only the present is. Live it as deeply, as ecstatically, as dancingly as possible, because from it will come the next.... I don’t talk to you about the next life because I don’t talk about even the next moment. The next life will come, I know. It comes, it always comes, why bother...? You live this life totally and the next will come out of this. If this has been beautiful the next is going to be better than this.

This moment will decide the fate of the next moment that is going to follow. There is no other way.

Death is the only guarantee. This moment lived well is the only guarantee for the next moment which is going to follow it, because it is not following really, it is coming out of it, it is an outcome. You are growing each moment. Don’t leave gaps, otherwise those gaps will hang around you. They will be holes in your being. In those holes will be wounds, and they will color your whole life to come.

Die to the past. Die to the future and live in the present.

Death is the only message that I would like to give to you – and if you can allow, millions of things will become possible to you. Let me repeat the Sufi saying: Simply trust. Do not the petals flutter down just like that? Trust life.

Trust this moment here and now and allow things to take their own shape.
You need not worry, there is no need to worry. Trust life, simply trust.

Do not the petals flutter down just like that?

Go and see a rose, and by the evening the petals are fluttering down towards the earth, going to rest. They lived their day. They enjoyed, they enjoyed the strong wind, they took the challenge, they rose high to the sky. They have spread their fragrance to the four winds – the winds have taken it already to the corners of the earth. They loved the sun, they played with it a little while. Their day is over. Now they don’t cling. Now they don’t hesitate to fall. They are ready.

A beautiful life creates a beautiful death, because death is nothing but the whole life condensed again in a seed.

Now the petals are falling. Evening has come. The sun has set, the night will take over. The death has come, the petals are falling towards the earth. They don’t hesitate. They don’t know where they are going, they don’t know whether there is any earth down there or not – maybe it is a bottomless abyss – but they don’t doubt, they don’t hesitate.

When you have lived your life, trust arises. It arises – it is an afterglow of a lived life.

Petals falling, fluttering down towards the earth. Simply trust – do not the petals flutter down just like that? And everything – God, moksha, nirvana – everything, I say to you, becomes possible.

Just trust. Just like that.
Just Like That, Chapter 10