Quarterly Newsletter
Death Means Separation, Not Complete Annihilation
Excerpted from SADHANA the Path to Enlightenment, Yoga the Sacred Science, volume 2 by Swami Rama
Abhinivesha is the inordinate, abject fear of death. Your greatest fear is that you will die. Even though you know that no one has ever lived on earth forever, you remain under the pressure of the fear of death and pain. Your mind remains more occupied with the fear of death than with death itself because you don’t understand what it is. You hesitate to even talk about death because it is too terrifying to you. Not only do you worry about what will happen to your wealth and all the objects and people you love if you should die, you wonder what will happen to you after death and where you will go. You can only imagine what type of world the subtle world is and you worry about going to hell. You can rest assured there is no such authority that sends you to heaven or hell. These are just mental concepts meant to create fear in your mind and heart, and you should resolve such fears here and now. That which is going to happen is going to happen, and that which is not going to happen will never happen. In either case, why worry? No matter how much you cry or worry about it, you are sure to die. Death is an inevitable natural phenomenon everyone has to accept. I learned from experience that it is better to be more curious about it than afraid.
Many people think death is the greatest of all tragedies, but to a fortunate few the idea of dying is a matter of fact, like the end of a school year. Life is a series of changes and death is one of those changes. Nothing happens to you when you die because your subtle existence is not subject to change; only your form changes. Death is nothing but a habit of the body. The body is matter, and it is the dharma of all matter to change, die and go to decomposition.
In order to understand death it is essential to look beyond the physical body to the other levels that make up the complex human organism. You see yourself only at the superficial level of the body and have accepted without question that you are limited to the body. When you say I, you are referring to your physical body. Your body is everything to you and you look after it as though it were your greatest friend. You don’t realize this friend of yours is very weak. If you continue to identify solely with the body, you will also become very weak. When you study yourself and come to know yourself from within you will find you are something entirely different than what you thought you were.
It is not just the body that defines a human being. Yoga gives a more complete definition: a human being is an individual soul, jiva, having a life force with certain vehicles or instruments. You have an individual unconscious mind and a conscious mind, and you are a breathing being with a physical body. Beyond the body is the mind, and the soul is even deeper than the mind. It is not the mind or the body that experiences the waking state and the gross world of external objects. There is only one who experiences and that is the individual soul or jiva, also called atman. The individual atman is to be distinguished from the Atman that is the pure light of knowledge or truth that dwells in the space within every human being’s subtle heart and pervades the entire being. This Atman manifests prana (the life force), mind, senses and body, and this is how you exist. It is a force that comes directly from the center of pure consciousness.
ISBN 978-81-88157-68-6, $18.98, paperback, 304 pages
April 2012
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