Is death beginning or end of life

Is death beginning or end of life? I have been contemplating on this ever since I had experienced a pre and post death experience in our family. I had received a call from my father-in-law soon after he was diagnosed with a dreaded disease that he wanted to let his life go unceremoniously without any attempt from any of us to give him a course of treatment. He insisted on talking to me and until I said we were ready to do whatever he wanted us to do, he was not willing to stop talking. He wanted himself to be discharged from the hospital, get home and die peacefully in a serene setting.

Fortunately, my wife and mother in law were agreeable with his request and decided to give him palliative care as opposed to aggressive radiation or chemo therapy treatments. I struggled a lot whether it was a right decision and later came to the conclusion that only the soul that resides in his body had the right to make that choice whether to let go the frame or not. Every time we are given an opportunity to get a frame, it is a mandate for us to extinguish all the outcome of our bad actions, thanks to the grace of the Universal Absolute. The one who gives that frame and an opportunity to learn lessons has the right to take it away at a time and place of His choice.

It is the lack of continuity that makes us look at the birth as the beginning and the death as the end of life. In the Western civilization, the death is described as “end of life’ situation. Is birth really the beginning and is death really an end? Is human mind capable of handling the stress if it were to be gifted with a treasure of continuity with all our previous actions? While the philosophical teachings tell us that the salvation is to achieve awareness from forgetfulness, isn’t true that forgetfulness (a blessing) allows human beings to have a fresh look and construct a new beginning towards salvation?

We are born to learn not to be born again. Similarly, forgetfulness is given to us to learn afresh how to rebuild our thoughts towards awareness. Fear of death dominates our lives throughout our existence as mortals. It is time for us to think that death is an opportunity to unlearn something we learned already and relearn something new. If we have achieved complete awareness, death results in our merger with our origin and if we have not achieved, it is an opportunity to make a new beginning.

Our entry, existence and exit are all happening as designed with us having no control over it. But we do have a free will to make our existence a pleasant experience with a) thoughts that are very well developed with our discriminative faculty, b) actions that are done skillfully, lovingly and selflessly with no specific expectation of results including service to the fellow beings and c) words that, i) express gratitude to those who help us, ii) be soothing to those who are suffering and iii) praise the Universal Absolute who gave us the opportunity to relearn. Let the waves (thoughts) make noise as they are designed to do and let us enjoy the silence of the deep ocean (Atma). Let us learn to consider the pleasure and pain equally and let go the ever growing organism (EGO) to shrug the dualism. Let us thrive on the unity of the fellow beings and enjoy the universe that is wired perfectly for our needs.

When a disciple asked Ramana Maharishi for Deeksha, He told him, “Go home”. The disciple was furious and later understood that Maharishi was asking the disciple to dig for his origin. Let us understand that the instrument (mind) that causes our suffering is the medicine for our cure towards salvation. Let us learn to structure it right every time we get a green card to reside in this beautiful planet.

 

Dear Soulsong,

Thank you for your first response to this post. Religion means something that binds to the origin. But when it is used to make the human beings as slaves instead of making them explore answers, it becomes obsolete and redundant. That is why people resort to exploring their inner Self on their own. We are a repository of knowledge if we are Self-knowing. Our perception of the world changes when we are Self-knowing.

Viswa

 

Dear Sister Saisakthi,

What an excellent response from you for my post. I don't know whether to start this response with "thank you" for adding so much value to this post by your insightful response or to thank you for nominating this post. Thank you for both.

I am so delighted to know that you enjoyed reading this post early in the morning. Thank you for your kind words on my father-in-law's exit from this world in an orderly fashion. I have learned a lot of lessons out of his calmness, fearless attitude towards death, polite but firm decision to let his life go, his sense of fulfillment of what he did in his life, his way of saying good bye, etc.

Forgetfulness is given to us by the Lord to make a fresh beginning and He takes the onerous burden of keeping track of our Karmas and letting us handle with courage as long as we have equanimity to treat pleasure and pain equally.

Past is history, future is mystery and present is a gift and that is why it is called present. Learning to live in the present moment is an attitude we have to develop as entry and exit is beyond our control. Leading an ideal and purposeful life is not something we do for the benefit of the world but for our own salvation.

Equanimity is a key element in spiritual growth and we have to learn to treat pleasure and pain equally. Life is live a river and the two banks are pleasure and pain. If our objective is to reach the Ocean (Atma), we should not overflow into either one of the banks. In the month of December-January, we see people singing the praise of the Lord in the street early in the morning. If we carefully notice them, they would be singing in praise of the Lord with one hand playing cymbals and the other playing thambura. Isn't it a perfect reflection of life where we experience pleasure and pain alternatively (like those symbols), playing our life (thambura) to the tune or direction (praise) of the Lord?

Viswa

 

Dear Symala,

You are a very humble person and hence you always say your knowledge of spirituality is limited. I always think those who have so many questions seeking answers are the ones who make more progress than the ones who write concepts of spirituality. I am only hoping that by writing all these things, someone will write something that would trigger me to make further spiritual progress. Please don't hesitate to write anything that comes to your mind.

All I was trying to convey in this post is "Death is not necessarily an end of our life, if we understand that who we are is our inner "Self". It travels a long distance until it shrugs off all its encryption. The entry and exit is not in our hands but how we make our existence meaningful while we are here is entirely in our hands. Our entry happens because of the gift we receive from the Lord in the form of a physical frame and exit happens because we are ready to move on after we become "Self knowing" or is ready to get into another frame to research further.

Thank you for your kind words about my father in law. Everyone played their role perfectly including my father in law, mother in law and wife and I learned a very good lesson out of it. Life teaches more lesson to us if we bother to watch carefully.

Viswa