WHEN DEATH COMES KNOCKING BY, LIFE HOLDS THE KEY ... 1

Every death knocks on our door seeking to wake us from our earthly sleep. But such is our sensory infatuation that we refuse to see death in the true light and cling to life with redoubled vigour. Yet, death gives its periodic knock on our door, consistently trying to shock us out of our stupor and quicken us to life's ultimate purpose, Self-realisation, by the transcendence of life and death.

Life and death are the dual syndrome that hide from us our true identity, our infinite, unborn, undying, divine Self. They act as a consciousness cover over our essential existence, playing with name and form, thoughts and moods, action and reaction in an endless saga where freedom is another name for bondage and liberation a liability of flesh and form.

Man clings desperately to life even as it slips away every moment. The ephemeral pleasures of life and their concomitant pain somehow darken his horizons and he fails to detect life's ultimate objective. A prisoner caught in the web of his dreams, he ceaselessly creates his own cocoon from where he refuses to budge even as the elements advance avalanche-like to bury him in the icy chill of death. Such is his myopia that he thrives in his microcosm in his own minuscule manner and holds sway over his domain as if the microcosm were the universe of being. 'Man, the infinite dreamer dreaming finite dreams' --- this is how Swami Vivekananda had defined man. The finite man is the Infinite Man's own creation and denies himself his own infinite status, such is the phenomenon of Maya where the infinite has to perforce fit in, so to say, for the universal sport to carry on. But this is a temporary arrangement and radically opposed to the call of 'essential dimensions' for which it must render account, and herein comes the call of the Atman and the return to primeval beginnings whence sprang the universe with its multiplicity of name and form. The cosmic starting point is some way off the shore of infinite consciousness and there is no concurrence of the two. In fact the two do not simultaneously exist, only one does. When this is evident, that is not and when that is realised, this has vanished into thin air and the air has vanished too. Everything has been resolved to their essence which now is. Hence, there is no question of duality of reality. Reality ever is a singularity, that is, if such a term may be applied to it for its connotation in physics would lend it a different meaning and for the fact that even singularity implies plurality in its horizon. In Brahman there is no trace of any duality or multiplicity. Simply non-duality exists, existence is.

But the folly of it all is that man has forgotten his divine status and needlessly suffers his terrestrial predicament. Sages and saints arise periodically to remind him about his lost inheritance, the empire of the Self, but he will not budge from his futile phenomenal dream such is his hypnotism, such the force of inertia. A rude jolt, a terrible destruction, a death, every now and then shocks him into a sense of semi-awakening but all is lost soon like a ripple on the surface of water that drifts afar and then dissolves into nothingness in the water mass whence it had sprung. It is the Self in man that witnesses it all and it is the man in oblivion that somehow has to suffer the threefold misery here on earth. There seems to be a contradiction here but actually not, for the witnessing act of the Self is a reflexive act on Itself and the sufferance of the embodied soul, so to say, is the appearance of sufferance in ignorance, painful no doubt but valid only as in a dream. However, taking things as they are from the phenomenal standpoint, it is very helpful for the bound soul to suffer hurt, hindrance and hits from all quarters for it to realise that this earthly avenue is but a blind lane and sooner or later the dead end of life will come, colliding the chariot of the body to its impending doom. Lest such an hour visits one taking one unawares, and inevitably it will, it is prudent to prepare for this eventuality called death, the earthly terminus, when all that one has acquired is laid to dust and one's mortal coil is cast into its elements to be dispersed by the four winds.

But how must one prepare for death and why so? This is a question that has absorbed the best minds down the ages in all climes but nowhere more so than here, the land of the highest philosophy where the Vedas were sung by the sages of yore and whence sprang the Upanishads to delve deep into the fundamental problems of life and existence and to seek the solutions thereof. Let us tarry awhile to clarify some of the background concepts before we proceed. Our patience will be rewarded with the highest wisdom of the Vedas. Jai Ramakrishna!