Like life, death too is a complex question, and moreover an exceedingly delicate subject, charged with emotion and with fear. If man were only a body, death, extinction, the inescapable threat of total annihilation would be a looming horror. And yet sooner or later all of us must face our own bodily passing. ‘To die, to sleep – no more;’ says Hamlet, and the ancient Tamil saint Tiruvalluvar is of the same mind: ‘Death is falling asleep, birth is waking from sleep.’ Others regard death as a release, a liberation from the mortal shell, through which the soul may move on to the next stage of its spiritual path, or return to its living source. This return is reintegration into the eternal and harmonious divine world, for the soul knows no death.
And yet attachment, our worry for those we love, the road that leads to dying, or indeed our uncertainty about existence after death, still fill us with unease. We want an explanation that would make death comprehensible or even acceptable, the very death that some regard as one of the greatest experiences of life.
One usually first faces the fact of death when loved ones and relatives pass away. Such an event prompts an immediate reckoning and deep reflection, and the instinct for life most often rails and protests against death. Faced with the irrevocable, the first response, welling up from the depths, is often aversion or abandon, but the second is far more considered. Our achievements, our knowledge, our family, all that we have gathered and loved in life, stays here when we go. Legend has it that Alexander the Great left orders to be laid on his bier with both hands showing from beneath the shroud, so that all might see that even the lord of the world departs from life empty-handed. But shaking off attachments, the ballast of the ego, is not dread but joy, the joy of faith in moving on, the certainty of spiritual growth.
From this point of view death is not merely the complete and final cessation of the biological organism's vital functions. However wretched a man's health or social circumstances, if he discovers the inner sources nourished by the eternal connection, he will always find consolation. We are identical with our inner self far more than with our bodily nature, our thoughts, or the opinions others form of us. If we regard the soul as eternal, death is only the destiny of the body, and at the same time a chance to move on along the pilgrim's road that leads towards eternity.
I do not measure out the pilgrimage in steps, but in the length of the inner path…
There are those who imagine this moving on as an instant transmutation, as if with the end of the body they became one with the universe at once, just as when a jar breaks the space enclosed in it becomes one with the whole of the air. For others death is a significant point on a gradual path of growth that leads through many births and deaths. Others again wake from death only for the Last Judgement, and the unbeliever not even for that.
Near-death experiences usually speak of peace, light and love, which gives encouragement to overcome the dread of death. And this is no cheap cult of death, for the recognition and acceptance of polarity makes us more complete. If we accept only one pole – in this case life – as natural, then our image of fullness is incomplete. Man's image of death depends, too, on his degree of intellectual and cultural enlightenment. In archaic times life and death stood very close together, both of them organic and natural phenomena. The spiritually advanced man, perhaps even one living in full enlightenment, is once again at peace with both life and death. Between the two, on the borderland of unbelief, in ignorance or half-ignorance, the situation is most difficult…