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Monday Morning Greetings 2017 #37 – Death Made Simple

September 11th, 2017

While sending this article for posting, I looked at the date and just realized it was 9/11 and that by coincidence the article was on death. I liked what I wrote a lot, but not particularly for this day. I will post it to keep with the regularity of Monday Morning Greetings and offer my heartfelt prayers for those who lost and sacrificed their lives. I am from New York and was in lower Manhattan on that day so this day may have a little more significance for me. I am including a link from my diary that I wrote watching the towers fall—My 9/11 journal entry.

Death Made Simple

  1. We are eternal.
  2. Death is thus the illusion of non-existence.
  3. We fear and suffer from this illusion due to the notion that takes the self, which is eternal, to be the non-self, or body, which is temporary.
  4. This misidentification is due to false ego, the desire to be the enjoyer and controller.
  5. The real pain of death is thus not just the physical pain, which can be numbed by either coma or drugs, but more the affront to the false ego at death when all our attachments are lost at once.
  6. Our real-ego, or eternal identity, is that we are servants of God. One who fully realizes this is not affected by the death of the body.
  7. “The wise lament neither for the living nor the dead” [1] thus means that we don’t lament that people change bodies or die, but lament that due to ignorance people identify with the body and suffer.
  8. For one with spiritual understanding, the fact that everyone faces death is not an act of cruelty, but an act of God’s mercy. Death announces loudly to the soul that one is not the controller and enjoyer, helping one to overcome the false ego, which is the root cause of misery life after life.
  9. One who hears this voice and serves and accepts death as God’s mercy overcomes the false ego, becomes fearless and realizes one eternal nature.
  10. We should always remember that death is not just a matter for the end of life. We should thus die now to live. By slaying the false ego of selfish desires and embracing our real identity of selfless devotion to Krishna we will experience and live our eternal nature now.

 

 

[1] Bhagavad-gītā 2.11

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