Death and the Divine
By Sadhguru
When someone is terminally ill, but still this person is full of hope and doctors undertake all efforts to heal them, at some point you might be wondering, if anyway he has to die, shall we let him die?
Death will anyway happen; you don’t have to support it. It is life that needs your support because life is a brief happening; death is a very big one. If we use the analogy of light and darkness, light has always been glorified. If you say ‘divine,’ you say ‘divine light,’ you won’t say ‘divine darkness.’ But which is more all-encompassing? Light needs a source which burns, and whatever kind of light source, whether it is a light bulb or the sun, it will burn out one day. So light is a brief happening. When there is no light, darkness is all-pervading. It is in the lap of darkness that light happens here and there. So, which one should you refer to as divine? Light or darkness? Darkness. But darkness has always been associated with evil in the western part of the world. But in India, when an ignorant person comes, we refer to the Divine as light. When an evolved person comes, we refer to the Divine as darkness. Because when a person is ignorant if you say Divine is darkness, he doesn’t want to go because darkness is something that he has always feared. Death is something he has always feared. But when a person has evolved beyond certain limitations, if he has tasted something beyond the physical, then we always refer to the Divine as darkness.
Now, your idea of life is just to keep the physical body alive. Everybody knows the physical body is something that we borrowed from this earth, and we have to shed it one day. This physical body needs support, so every day we are eating. For somebody else, food is not going because there is cancer in his throat. So they are trying to put the nutrition directly into the stomach. Whatever they know, they are doing, and it is okay. But a point may come where there is no point in just going on stretching life in terms of making the physical body exist for a few more days at an enormous pain for this person.
We should learn to let people die peacefully; this is very important. You know in India, always we can choose?. There, people will always choose to die in their home. People don’t want to die in the hospital. Once a condition comes to this, people say, please take me home. No matter what the doctor says, the family takes them home and lets them die at home the way they want to die, which is a beautiful thing. Because existing for another one month or two won’t make any difference for anybody for that matter. Just because the only thing people know is the physical body, they don’t want to let it go.
People on the spiritual path decide when to leave and shed their body consciously while it is in full health. They leave a well body because they have known something other than the physical. So for them, dropping the physical is not a big issue. When people have not known anything other than the physical, the physical is the biggest issue. That is why sex has become such a huge thing, because for most people, the only thing they know is the physical. The Divine should enter, it is time.
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