Ninety-nine. Love and death are intimately bound to one another. To understand what love is, we must first understand what death is. The experience of love makes us forget death. For love is rooted in the very depths of death. Our ego prevents the dormant bud of love within us from blooming. Love exists only in the existence of the beloved; when the beloved dies, love too perishes. Our sense of self creates a wall between us and our love. We tell ourselves that we shall find our love only when our beloved comes to us. In thinking this way, we betray ourselves—as though love were something lost, or something that could be lost. This is a kind of sickness, for we ourselves have built a wall between ourselves and our own love. It is the wall of ego, behind which lies hidden our treasure called love, which we continually search for in the beloved. Our ego will not let us seek love; it blocks our sight of it. From birth to death we wander searching for love, yet we do not find it. And in all this time, love peers at us many times over, but the moment we think we have grasped it, we realize we are in a kingdom of illusion. What we reached for, believing it to be love, has no existence at all. We return to ourselves empty-handed and bowing our heads. When we draw near to nature, when we touch the droplets of rain, when we immerse ourselves in the sea, when the dawn awakens us with exquisite birdsong in boundless tenderness, when the moon's light drifting from that distant sky wraps our being in a strange intoxication, when the noonday sun that steals the world's breath leaves us thirsting—in none of these do we perceive love. The reason is this: there lies a great distance between our hearts and ourselves; feelings cannot traverse it. Our ego has secretly severed the connection between our hearts and us. Now we deceive ourselves at every moment, and yet we continually convince ourselves that we are not deceived at all. We merely think about love, we nurture it in our imagination, in our dreams, but we do not know what the experience of true love is, what it feels like. We have lulled our true love to sleep while we search for love in the realm of fancy. To shake off one's ego—this is what death is. Only by dying to one's ego can we experience love. Not in the death of our body, but in the death of our ego lies the possibility of experiencing love. This is the only way we can find true love. For our ego is the chief obstacle to love.
# On the Immortality of Self and the Death of Ego
The death of our body does not bring about the death of our selfhood. Even when our body perishes, our sense of self—our “I-ness”—persists within the fabric of this world-existence. At the very depths of our selfhood dwells that immortal essence, eternally present. When our body dies, our selfhood merely abandons the shell of the body as one might shed a worn husk, only to inhabit another vessel. The old shell crumbles away. To strip the ego—the sense of self—from one’s body and brain is to bring about the death of our selfhood. The difference between myself and my ego exists only within a shell, a shell constructed by ego and mind—something with no external substance, resting merely upon a hollow notion. When the old shell is forsaken, a new one comes into being. When our selfhood dies—when our ego perishes—we lose nothing in truth. Instead, we discover a new self, we find our authentic essence. In such a moment, our selfhood merges with an absolute existence, becomes one with the very being of creation itself. Thereafter, when this body of ours passes away, it becomes merely an event, as though nothing new has occurred at all. This transformation in our consciousness imparts a different meaning to our life—it revolutionizes the meaning, purpose, destination, manner of living, and nature and aim of our work. Perhaps even those desires and longings by which we once gazed upon our life, those very cravings themselves undergo a metamorphosis.
When we surrender to true love, that ego of ours, the pride of self, all such things dissolve from within us. The very substance of that selfhood vanishes from within, leaving behind an immense and peculiar emptiness. A profound silence envelops us from all sides, and it seems as though within me there exists no “I,” as though I am but a vast void. Then we are able to behold our love, yet in doing so we lose ourselves. When we love someone in such a way—breaking ourselves completely, offering an entire sense of self—that person pervades our whole being; so completely that it seems as though without them nothing exists, nothing at all, not even myself. One who loves in such manner becomes secondary even to oneself; the beloved becomes the primary concern. Only when we can lose ourselves can we truly love, can we bestow love upon our beloved. Divine love transcends all else. The love we bear toward our dear ones—that is love for those near to us, but divine love is something far beyond all such attachments. In every form of love, the ego acts as a distortion, a corruption; the ego truly obstructs the path of love.
Ninety-three.
Where our heart lies empty, how can we attain fullness without bowing that emptiness before love? We may ask ourselves: why should we yield to the person we love, why confess our defeat, why expose the frailties that arise in us toward them? Because if we reveal them, we fear we shall be bound, diminished, locked in smallness—and our ego, from behind, holds us back from that necessary surrender. Yet we do not see: without bowing, how shall we ever fill our void? When we are parched, we need water, not a river! When we sit by the riverbank and imagine that we will not fill our own vessel, that the river itself will come and fill it for us—are we not then dwelling in the kingdom of fools? Does the river have any need to come of its own accord and pour itself into our cup? Is the thirst ours or the river’s? Where the river has already spent itself, already given all, we have only to bow and fill our own vessel from its abundance. Yet here we sit, waiting in hope that the river itself will come and pour into us!
If we cling to our ego thus, shall we ever know true love? We must first understand: it is not the river that thirsts—it is we. The river holds abundance enough to quench my thirst; the need is mine, the emptiness surrounds me, therefore it is I who must go to the river to still my thirst. If we wish to fill our vessel, we ourselves must bow and fill it. There is no loss in this, only gain—and all that we gain is entirely our own. Even if we stand in the river’s midst, its waters will not rise to our lips unless we know how to receive them. The river will not come of itself and pour into our mouths; yes, it surrounds us, flows around us, but we ourselves must draw it near. Here lies the question of ego. When such feelings stir in us, we can be certain: our ego is the one that bites and holds us back, preventing us from moving forward. There is no other cause—only ego. Love, too, has spread itself all around us; the Creator dwells in our midst, even within us, but we must step out from our I-ness, turn ourselves away from the mind’s games, surrender the emptiness of our heart to love itself.
# Love’s Only Path
There is but one way to attain love—the way the Creator walked, the way our beloved have walked before us. What holds us back is a false self, a self that in truth has no existence at all. Love lies trapped in every heart, bound to this phantom self. We are not loving anyone; we are holding love captive within ourselves. Our ego prevents our love from spreading forth. Our ego hurls a thousand questions before us so that we cannot lay ourselves bare. We could quench our own thirst at any moment, if only we wished. Our greatest impediment is our inability to bow before our own love. A thousand hearts sit scattered around us, pouring forth their love, yet we cannot receive it—because we have never learned to bow. We are our own problem; we are our own numbness. For whenever the question of bowing before ourselves arises within us, we meet with a thousand rigidities. Another self emerges before our eyes and shames us, saying, “I—bow? I? Better to die than to bend myself!” Our pride then convinces us that annihilation would be preferable to humbling ourselves.
We hear it all around us: break if you must, but do not bow! We counsel one another this way, and we treat each other accordingly. Even when we remember our Creator, this pride asserts itself powerfully within us; we do not know how to bow completely before Him. This poison has spread through our blood, so we cannot separate it from ourselves. Strange as it may sound, our pride has now become a measure of courage! It appears heroic, as though it were something glorious that we all aspire to possess. But the fear of bowing before oneself is truly a form of cowardice. A timid soul cannot bend out of terror at losing itself. He is a coward precisely because a brave person never fears losing himself—for the brave always know they have nothing to lose. This is why the sapling never breaks in the storm, while the mighty trees fall—those with hard and rigid trunks. The reason is simple: the great trees never know how to bend; they wish to stand with heroic defiance, expending all their strength against the wind, and so they shatter in the fierce tempest. But the small trees, knowing how to bow when necessary, yield to the wind during the storm, and when it passes, they remain standing, alive.
When violent storms sweep through our lives, we must learn from the small trees. We must understand how they know to bend. When the storm comes, let us bend too. For the storm that we imagine we are fighting—it has actually come to cleanse us. After the tempest passes, we will see clearly how alive everything has become, how transparent, how pure. If we do not learn to bend, the storm will depart, yes, but we will break, and we will never rise again. Humility brings us everything; it saves us from the grip of a corrosive ego. Rigidity, inflexibility—these are truly the marks of old age, whereas humility, flexibility, a childlike heart—these grant us vitality, authenticity, they illuminate life. Mental rigidity prevents a person from being pliant; it keeps him hard. A child is always humble; he knows how to bend. He forgets anger so easily and knows how to reunite, carrying nothing lasting in his heart. A child falls a thousand times, but rises swiftly each time he falls. When a person loves someone, when he is saturated with genuine love, he becomes like a child. Then, like a child, he learns through repeated falls to rise again, to bend before love, his inner being remains humble, and all the fears and numbness within him—the very things that could break him—vanish away.
**Ninety-nine.**
Do we know why we are afraid? Why we fear to surrender to love? Because when we approach the one we love with the intention to bend, our ego speaks to us from within, saying: if we bow, if we show humility, what becomes of our dignity? We will lose, we will become small before another. The person who is always vigilant to protect his status has, in truth, nothing that is truly his, nothing that is truly his dignity. He who fears defeat doubts his own success. The person who is inwardly defeated by himself—only he constantly feels the need to display his victory to the outer world. We are always told from around us: do not let people break you, do not bend, do not lose; in truth, only a coward can be such a person. This is not courage; it is not heroism. A coward always lives in fear of losing his dignity, his reputation. He thinks: if I bend, all my honor will be destroyed. He alone is truly dignified and brave who has no fear of losing his dignity, his fame, or anything else. Paradoxical as it may seem, what we truly possess we never fear losing; what we do not possess, or have never possessed—that is what we fear losing, and that fear keeps us imprisoned. In other words, we are afraid of losing something that is not ours, something we have not earned or conquered.
# Fear and Surrender: On Love, Courage, and the Divine
Fear of losing any bond arises only when we try to claim it in the wrong way, or when we possess something we have not truly earned. The fearless one never entangles himself in conflict; he carries himself within his own existence and finds himself reflected in all existence. The storms, in truth, are our own—they do not rush toward us but issue from within us. The fearless person is certain of this: that all existence is himself, that he is merged with the whole, that he is not separate from it. If we do not learn to bend, if we cling to our ego, then the love that dwells within us will turn upon ourselves and destroy us. If we cannot immerse ourselves in the current of love for those near to us, our beloved, those we cherish, how then shall we drench ourselves in the love of the Creator? How shall we bow before Him? Our loved ones are our neighbors, while the Creator dwells far beyond them. We must traverse every layer of the path to reach the proximity of the Creator. The Creator has walked the very same path that our love has taken, advancing ever forward along it. Only by traversing those stations one by one can we reach the Creator. Surrender to the Creator is the end of the journey; there is no path beyond it. The path of love culminates in the path of the Creator. And when we bow before that culmination, we shall never need to retrace the path we traveled to reach Him. This is the time of our merger with the Creator, our dissolution into His being, this is the time of becoming adorned with all His infinite attributes—from which flows the beginning of all existence, of which we are but an infinitesimal particle.
If we know how to lose ourselves, how to bow before our own being—if we can gather the courage, even once, to do so—then we are truly courageous, truly heroic. Then we can overcome our ego, our false dignity, and our fear. Then we learn to live a life that transcends all ages, where time has no dominion. The Creator’s existence knows no age. When we merge into the Creator’s being, from that moment we are eternally young, for youth is not born—it is woven into the very fabric of our existence. When we reach such a moment, nothing remains that we can call our own. Only the Creator dwells within us; all of us dissolves into that omniscience. Those who die the death of true love never return, but those who embrace ordinary death return again and again. What does this mean? Those who lift themselves toward greatness in their lifetime—after their death, another such person, or one like them, rarely comes into being, for becoming such a person requires immense spiritual labor. On the other hand, one need not be wholly unremarkable like the ten ordinary people around us. Such people are not unique. Rather, nearly all those we see around us are of this kind—people who, when we look at them, seem nothing out of the ordinary, who inspire no particular reverence. After such people die, countless more like them come into being, and will continue to come. But after a great one, an extraordinary one, or a genius departs this world, perhaps not another like him will appear for a hundred years. In our own lifetime, we may never encounter such a one again.
Ninety-nine.
The person who finds the beloved does not find her in dream, but in reality. Not everything we see in dreams do we obtain; we do not obtain it as we see it, and often we obtain none of it at all. A hungry man searches for food all day long, and when he goes to sleep at night, even in sleep he dreams he is eating, yet the food of dreams does not fill his belly, does not restore his body to health, and yet it brings him the peace of sleep—he sleeps with some ease, assured that he is no longer hungry. We dream only of those things we have not attained. A beggar dreams of palaces, because he has never been able to build one; a poor man dreams of wealth, because wealth is absent from his life. Thus do we seek solace for our deprivation through our dreams. Dreams are unreal, deceptive, mere consolation and a sickly satisfaction—nothing more. The food we eat in dreams cannot fill our empty belly. Perhaps our repressed desires find fulfillment in our dreams. But in reality there is no place for them. A dream can only bring us a good night’s sleep. When we yearn for something we do not possess, such longing will gradually torment us with countless afflictions, until we attain it in reality.
When all our desires die, what will we do after death when we return again? Yet we do return, because our dreams remain incomplete. We are so immersed in worldly comforts that even when death comes upon us, our desires do not die. Our desires call to us from behind, *Where are you going? Come back!* No one brings us back to this earthly world; rather, we return of our own accord, driven by the force of our desires—our desires compel us to return. We come back again with those old habits, those old needs, we cross the bridge of our own desires to return once more, perhaps in a different body this time, but we return. Our ancient cycle turns in circles. Our existence, so long as it has not developed and ripened in full measure, returns again and again. That death which begets a new birth is not true death; such death is incomplete. Without the attainment of proper knowledge, complete death is impossible. Wisdom is something that cannot pass from one hand to another.
# On Wisdom, Life, and the Art of Dying
Our hair greys naturally with age, yet mere passage of years cannot render a person wise. Wisdom comes only when all desire has withered away, when not a single longing remains to stir the heart. Everything in nature decays eventually, tastes death—and with this decay, the desires of only those who understand what wisdom is, what yearning means, will also perish. Only such a person attains true wisdom. That alone is true death wherein no desire lingers to pull one back toward another birth. The manner in which we die is not the true path of death, for true death is an art. And here lies a profound question: how can we seek art in death when we have never viewed our own life as art? For us, life has been a sorrowful event, and so death has never appeared to us as artful. This is why, whenever we undertake something new, we rarely pause for a moment to ask ourselves why we do it, what necessity drives it. And when someone poses such a question to us, we realize we ourselves do not truly know what we are doing. Though we fashion a suitable answer in advance—something presentable to offer when asked—in our hearts we know there is no real answer to give, not even to ourselves.
We have given our lives a defined shape. We have polished and buffed them, made them shine and glitter as if they were ablaze. But do we know that if we were to stop this polishing this very moment, from now on we would become pure gold? We continue doing countless things to render our lives artistic, yet none of these comes anywhere near true artistry. Authentic, existential life lies in the complete opposite of all this, beyond everything. Life is as artistic as death is artistic. If we know how to live artistically, we shall embrace death artistically too. If we do not know how to live rightly, we cannot possibly die rightly either. Death is the crown, a beautiful consummation—but how can it unfold rightly if we have not lived rightly all along? How can the ending be in order when everything before it has been chaos? Death is the crown upon our life, the diadem we receive upon the completion and success of our work. Death is the fruit of our life, the harvest that comes at the close—and it will be precisely what we have sown throughout our days. Death is the flowering essence of our existence, the culmination of a lifetime. Thus, at life’s end, we are given into our own hands the very fruit we have gathered all our lives.
Ninety-Nine.
When our entire life wastes away on the very path we have been treading, how can the death of such a life ever be artistic? How can sweet fruit ever grow on a tree whose trunk itself has rotted? We may well ask ourselves: what is the secret of an artistic life? The root of an artistic life lies in living with complete, full consciousness. Not in fear of darkness, not in sleep and slumber, but rather in wakefulness and consciousness — this is what constitutes an artistic life. Whatever we do — even if it is something so trivial or insignificant that it vanishes with the blink of an eye, something we might forget within a moment — we must receive it with awareness. Who knows? Perhaps that small or trivial deed might become the most reliable act of our life, might bring some new meaning to our existence! Perhaps that seemingly insignificant act is the very foundation of all our deeds! If we walk alone down a path and suddenly encounter someone on the street — someone with whom we might spend the rest of our life in the blink of an eye — who knows? Perhaps that seemingly insignificant person becomes our life’s companion! For this reason, in every moment, in the seeming insignificance of every instant, we must walk with consciousness. Not drowsily, not in sleep. We need only see the step immediately ahead and walk it; there is no need to think about the one after. We must think intently only of the step before us. Counting each moment’s steps, we must walk with complete, full awareness.
This does not mean we must see every minute detail of what is happening around us. What matters is that we walk the next step rightly. There is no need to look in all directions, no need to concern ourselves with what is happening around us, for such awareness would never be exhausted even in a lifetime. If we look carefully at our own lives, we will understand that in our existence, everything is accident. Whatever transformations have come to our life have arrived through accident alone — some sudden mishap has entirely overturned our lives. Perhaps we were going somewhere, but on the journey we met someone — a woman or a man — and in a moment’s conversation, love for that person took root in us. We were so anxious about this person that we could not delay, we did not want to lose them, so we married them, we had a household, children, everything. Yet in a single moment’s decision, in the span of a moment, our entire life somehow transformed. The path we were walking, the work we were doing, the destination we were heading toward — all of it changed. We went somewhere else entirely, our life’s very purpose was completely overturned. It could have been for the better, or for the worse. Does this not happen in our lives?
# On Living with Consciousness
Must we always move in balance in all things? Is there truly a need for such a thing? Do all the great transformations that have entered our lives come as a result of our deliberate, harmonious action? How conscious were we of these things as they unfolded? We must see everything as it truly is—whatever comes before us must first be examined, must be considered. Before any decision, before any undertaking, we must think with firm resolve and discernment. If we live this way, we shall discover that our life has been transformed into a kind of beauty, that a clarity has blossomed within it. We shall become like a sculpture—our whole being, all our attributes refined into a singular, unique human form. We shall become our own craftsman. If we live consciously, we shall see how the inner mechanism of our nature has shaped us precisely as it needed to. It has stripped from us all that is superfluous and unnecessary, has left nothing useless, nothing defunct within us. The chisel of our soul has cut away all excess and brought forth the true essence of our entire life. One day we shall realize that we have come home—to a dwelling where we can live in profound awareness.
If we can live with such complete consciousness before our body’s death, only then shall we live rightly, and only then shall we receive a proper death—an artful death. For death surrounds us, death plants its countless claws all around us, and all of these are incomplete deaths, deaths that have not occurred aright. None of us is dying consciously; none of us is dying properly. Therefore we do not truly meet death; therefore we must return to where we were before. When we fail to do something rightly, that task must be done again and again—we must repeat it. The Creator grants us opportunity after opportunity to live. For the Creator is never in haste; He is merciful toward us. And so whenever we fail, He sends us back to the world again, gives us the chance to die rightly. We shall only unite with the Creator when we have fully exhausted all the experiences of His creation, of this life. We are like a child who is sent back to the same class again and again, until at last he has completed all his lessons properly.
Ninety-Seven.
The door to love’s dwelling will remain closed to us for as long as we cannot experience this life’s moments fully—stripped of expectation, free from the hunger to possess. The artistry of life lies in moving through it successfully. The person who can experience life’s journey with true mastery—for them there remains nothing more worth knowing in this world. For everything that could be learned from this world, they have learned it all. They have passed through every trial they sought, every ordeal has taught them well, and now the highest summit of that knowledge stands open before them. They have risen above the common realm of learning. Having learned all that this world had to teach them, they need not return to this world again—the path of this world has been closed to them. We must live in such a way that this is our last birth, and we must die in such a way that this is our last death—and there will be no death after. If we are born again, we must face once more this world’s same experiences, we must embrace death anew. Therefore we must live so that we are not born again. Only then will we not face another death.
We each wish to escape the grip of death, to keep ourselves at a distance from it. Have we found anyone who is not afraid of death? If death is so terrible, why then can they not prevent their own rebirth? It is birth that delivers us to death’s threshold! When we say we wish to return again and again to this world’s beauty, does this not betray our foolishness? It means we have not yet properly grasped the rules of this life. Birth and death are the two arrows of life. By life’s own law, whoever is born must die; it is certain. Whatever has a beginning must have an ending. If there were no ending, there would be no question of a beginning. Therefore, if we wish to escape this cycle of death, we must turn away from the desire to be born again—we must close the very door of beginning. If we wish to become infinite, we must stand apart from the path of limitation. For this, we must keep striving to free ourselves from our own beginning’s path. Even the smallest experience can help close the door of our life’s beginning.
# On Anger and Consciousness
We often fly into rages—over trivial matters, small slights, inconsequential things. In the grip of anger, we do much we later regret. When the storm passes, we brood over what we’ve done, resolve to master our anger, swear to ourselves we’ll never lose control again. Yet the moment another spark ignites, we rage exactly as before, with the same force, the same blindness. What we fail to understand first is this: there is nothing to contain in anger, for it is a nature—a force of our being. Once it takes hold, we must pass through it. But we must become aware from its very inception; in the throes of anger, we must move consciously through its entire unfolding. Even when our capacity for reason and judgment suspends itself—when we lose sight of anger’s source and justification—we must remain aware of each act anger compels us to. This is possible, but only with psychological maturity. When anger arrives, there is nothing to dam it up with; we need only move through it with full consciousness. And this takes practice. Hold this truth always: what begins must end. The wave that rises falls. This will happen whether we wish it or not, whether we’re aware or not, it will pass. If we truly wish to guard ourselves from anger’s aftermath, we must become wholly conscious of those great waves that crash through us when anger swells. Whatever the urge in that moment—to strike, to shout, to wound—we must keep ourselves silent and still, and wait. We must speak nothing, let our eyes fall downward. We must, by force if necessary, remove ourselves from what kindles the fire.
Anger will come—there is no preventing it. When we are wronged or deceived, in that very moment, anger takes root within us, whether we react outwardly or not. Perhaps we do not show our hand at once, but the seed is planted from within. This is why we must wake up at that very beginning—so it never finds soil to take root. For once anger settles into a mind, we must live through it; we cannot stop it, try as we will. The mind that cannot harbor anger harbors no anger’s expression either. Such a one does not even know what anger is. Anger has no dwelling-place within them. Whatever we wish to command, we must first shut the door to its beginning; only then do its subsequent movements cease to drive us. We wish to save ourselves from death, yet we do not know the gateway through which it enters. We suppose death comes only in old age, when the body withers and medicine no longer answers. But this is merely a delusion we have constructed; to understand life this way is impossible. If at the very beginning—at the spark of conception, the genesis of the embryo, where life commences—if we could seal that door, then death too would be sealed. For to stop the beginning is to stop the end.
From the day we are born, with each day that follows, we draw ourselves nearer to death. In truth, we die every day, inch by inch approaching that final threshold. This is no event waiting at the close of life—it unfolds moment by moment, quietly, ceaselessly. Death is no sudden visitation; it is a process woven into the fabric of our living. Death is merely the ultimate conclusion of that very process. To arrest the beginning of our birth, we must subdue our desires—for it is desire that returns us again and again to this world. Desire encircles us always. Always we wish to live a little longer. We harbor the secret wish: if only we could live a few years more, we might finish building our house, complete our unfinished work—how much remains undone! And then, when our wishes have been fulfilled one by one, we ask for yet more time to go to our Creator, because we have not yet visited the temple, have not yet gone to meet our Maker there. So long as our desires remain unsatisfied, the soul finds no peace; it is this restlessness of the soul that brings us back to this world in another’s womb. Until our desires cease to torment the soul, we shall know no contentment.
Ninety-eight.
When we desire to live a little longer so as to satisfy the soul, it is the soul itself that brings us back again. We must cast aside all desire and be content with what we are, must find self-fulfillment in our own completeness—only then shall the path of return be utterly sealed. We must become so satisfied that we feel we have reached our destination, that we have no further aim, no place left to go, that here, in this life, all things have come to their end. When our destination itself ends, when there is nowhere left to journey toward, then we embrace death in perfect self-fulfillment. The person who dies in such complete contentment has no reason to return; such a one knows and embraces what might be called the artful death. The difference between the death of a wise person and that of an ignorant one lies in this: the enlightened person faces death with wisdom, while the ignorant person faces it in confusion, adrift, uncertain. Yet no physician’s eye would perceive such a difference. If an enlightened person and an ignorant one were to die in the same hospital ward, the doctor could never discern the distinction between their deaths.
# An Enlightened Death
An enlightened person dies in fullness, while an ignorant person dies in incompleteness. Until his final breath, an ignorant person begs doctors, loved ones, everyone around him for help to stay alive. But a wise person embraces death with tranquility. In 1950, a wealthy man in America died believing that if his corpse could be preserved for another thirty years, in thirty years some medicine would be discovered that could bring him back to life, and he could live again. Every day, ten thousand dollars were spent on him so that no part of his body would decay, so his blood vessels would not be damaged. To accomplish this, he was kept frozen in a specially constructed, fully air-conditioned house. If the electricity were to cut out for even a moment, his body would begin to rot. So the preservation process was monitored with utmost care. He was kept that way until 1980! Man desires anything but death, yet he must accept death nonetheless. We continue all our efforts to avoid dying. We go to astrologers, visit holy men, we even tie amulets around our bodies as if death could not touch us. Alas, despite all this, no one can stop our death!
How fragile must our intelligence be that we are haunted by the thought that a piece of amulet or a sentence from a scripture—words we have written with our own hands—through these few lines we might finally escape death, that inexorable truth? If the Creator decided right now to take us, could He not do so? Merely growing old does not mean becoming wise. Wisdom means acquiring the knowledge that there is nothing in this world worth acquiring or hoarding, and that our life is as fragile as a termite mound. Being wise means casting off all desires and seeing them as beneath material things, finding love. Simultaneously, acquiring the understanding that love can never be touched, yet it remains to be felt until our final breath. Nature uses us merely as a small class or fragment of its whole. However wealthy we may be by the measure of money, in the end money is nothing but a scrap of paper. To nature, the difference between a tiny insect and us is nil, because for nature’s own survival, for sustaining the cycle of life, the cycle of creation, a small insect is as necessary or unnecessary as we are—neither less nor more.
# The Illusory Seat of Power
No matter how high we sit in the halls of society, by day’s end we feel it in our bones—that throne of ours cannot lighten the weight of our unfulfilled longings, our powerlessness, our discontent. It brings no added satisfaction, does not erase our dissatisfactions. We cling to our ego, yet we see plainly: there is no peace of mind in this sense of “I.” Perhaps we dwell in lofty buildings, but we know—the poverty within us never truly vanishes. Perhaps through our labors we have acquired all that we desired; perhaps our basket of achievements overflows. Yet when we come to know that these acquisitions are, in truth, worthless against life’s deeper essence—that they have carried us far, far away from the path of light, from the path of wisdom—only then shall we find the one true course worthy of a life’s endeavor. We must discover this path ourselves; it is not something learned through another’s words. The game worth playing in life must be learned through our own journey, by our own steps. To a wise man, this world is nothing but a child’s plaything. The wise have no place here; there is nothing left for them to learn, no work left undone.
When an enlightened soul has gathered all the world’s experiences, he becomes wholly unburdened, utterly detached. Desire itself crumbles within him. To such a one, the earthly realm is a cemetery. An enlightened soul is one who sees himself as already dead—who, before the world’s dying, chooses voluntary death, who regards himself as departed. And when a person dies while yet living, death holds no terror, no novelty. There is nothing left to preserve, no plea for life’s continuation. An enlightened soul receives each experience of life with his understanding and waits for death, yet even so, he savors everything life offers with fullness, and dissatisfaction can never take root within him. He does not even know the word dissatisfaction, for he knows not how to be dissatisfied, what brings such want. He has risen beyond both satisfaction and its absence. When at last death’s boat comes to his shore to bear him away, he welcomes it with joy—whereas when death arrives before an ordinary person, he clings to it, begging for more time, hoping that a few more days might bring him some measure of happiness. He is unsatisfied with life, believing perhaps that a little longer living might finally grant him the joy that all his years could not. Yet the very life that has failed him so long—how can it suddenly deliver him in its final moments?