Verses 2.26–2.30🔗

When you understand what Kṛṣṇa is saying in these verses you get over any fear of death. In fact you will celebrate death. Sometime ago, when I was delivering a discourse in India, news arrived that my father had died. I continued with the discourse. Later that night, many of our disciples traveled with me to Tiruvannamalai where the body lay. If you see the videos of this event, you will find that my mother never once cried. She is a very traditional person, brought up in a rural environment that sets great importance on social behavior. When one’s husband dies one is naturally heartbroken; especially as in the case of my mother and father, who were very close to each other.

His departure would have been a great loss to her. She understood the meaning of these verses of Kṛṣṇa without my ever having to explain them to her. When I told her my father, her husband, is now in the energy form that is eternal, she trusted my words implicitly and joined me in celebrating his release. We are not talking about philosophers and saints here. We are talking about ordinary people whose lifestyle was all about fear of death and grief at death. They understood very easily what Kṛṣṇa is saying. They understood that the spirit lives on after the body perishes and death is indeed an event to celebrate and not to grieve.

It is only the scholars who have a mere intellectual understanding of what Gītā says with no trust in Kṛṣṇa, and still suffer from the fear of death. Kṛṣṇa’s words are not about logic; they are about trust in the Master. Death is inevitable for the born, jātasya hi dhruvo mṛtyur; and birth is certain for the dead, dhruvaṁ janma mṛtasya ca. Whether the spirit lives on after the body perishes and locates itself in another body may be a debatable point to some. Kṛṣṇa says that this is not a reason to lament death, na tvaṁ śocitum arhasi (2.27). In either case, death can be a passage that one can look forward to.

We all know death is inevitable. Yet for many It is a wonder. Kṛṣṇa says, ‘One sees It as a wonder—āścarya-vat paśyati, another speaks of It as a wonder—āścarya-vad vadati, another hears of It as a wonder. Yet, having heard, none understands It at all—śrutvāpy enaṁ veda na caiva kaścit (2.29)! Listen. Bringing the dead back to life is not a wonder or miracle. The real wonder and mystery though, is the transformation of individuals instilling in them the truth of completion to live integrity, authenticity, responsibility and enriching, and causing these four powers of words, thinking, feeling and living as reality. This indeed is the miracle that only a true Master can perform.

I tell you, mystery school is nothing but the Master’s inner space with his vast responsibility—whoever comes inside, in whatever form is processed, transformed and released! Integrity, authenticity, responsibility, enriching—these are the real wonders of transformation. Many of us do believe that life is a wonder; truly so. Life is wondrous! We do not understand how life is created. We may have a biological explanation as to how a new life is created. Even today there is no absolute proof as to how the Universe was created. All one has are theories such as Big Bang etc. What was there before the Big Bang? No one knows, how the first life form originated.

Again, there are only theories. From time immemorial what happens after life, or more correctly, after death has been the human quest. The cycle of life and death is a mystery and a wonder. While Quantum Physics and Molecular Biology are making rapid advances in this area, yet there is no ‘scientific’ proof, as the logical mind would demand. Those who are authentic enough to accept and be complete with the truth of the eternal nature of the spirit are the fortunate, the blessed. Those who fight and grieve are the wretched, the miserable, the incomplete. You cannot fight life or death. They are both beyond you, out of your control.

You can marvel at them and be happy and joyous. Or you can keep questioning and doubting them, and be miserable. This is the choice and free will you have. Fear of Unfulfilled Desires The illustrious King Yayāti lived for hundreds of years. Bhāgavatam, the great Hindu epic, says that when Yama, the god of death, came to Yayāti at his appointed time of death, Yayāti begged to be allowed to live on. Due to his deep incompletions with life, he said he had not lived life enough and he needed more time. Yama relented and said that if one of his sons would give Yayāti the rest of his life, then he could live that long.

Using the life span of his son, Yayāti lived many more years but with more and more incompletions. Finally the realization dawned on him that no matter how long he lived, his incomplete desires would never cease and that his completion would never happen through material enjoyment. Yayāti completed with his root pattern and gave himself up to Yama once he realized this truth. It is not death that frightens us. It is leaving our incomplete desires and unlived life that frightens us. The problem is that we do not know how to live a fulfilled life in the space of completion. All our desires are partially fulfilled or incomplete because, before they are fulfilled, we move on to other desires.

The hangover of that past incomplete desire continues to chase us as a pattern in the present. The simple fact is that we do not know how to be complete, joyful. Please listen. Every thought, every desire you have is a commitment you have given to yourself. Every thought you complete is a word you have given to you. You have to honor it. You cannot entertain any thought of fear or greed, doubt or denial because you are literally sitting under a kalpataṛu, a wish-fulfilling tree, all the time! There is a beautiful story. Once a traveler was resting under a tree in a forest, without knowing that the tree was a Kalpataṛu.

Suddenly he had a desire, ‘If somebody brings me some food now, how nice it will be! I am so hungry.’ Immediately the food appeared before him! The man was overjoyed and happily ate the food. Then he thought, ‘If somebody gives me a cot, it will be so nice. I could lie down and sleep peacefully.’ Immediately a cot with a soft bed appeared! The man lay down happily on the cot to rest. Suddenly he had the thought, ‘Oh, God! Whatever I am thinking is happening! But it is getting dark now. What if a tiger suddenly appears and attacks me? What will happen?’ You know the rest of the story!

Understand, it was not only that man who was sitting under a Kalpataṛu tree, all of us are always under the Kalpataṛu, the wishfulfilling tree. Every thought we give to ourselves will be honored if we don’t complete with it. Now I know, everyone has a fear—Oh God! I have had so many negative thoughts. What to do? Listen: there is nobody alive who has not entertained the thought of suicide at least once! All of us have fear. What do we do if all the words which we gave to ourselves now start getting fulfilled? You don’t have to worry; you just have to complete them. Sit and declare to yourself consciously that you are not going to honor all the negative words you gave to yourself, and you are dropping them, completing them.

So listen. You cannot entertain any desire in you leaving it incomplete. It will continue to chase you as the tiger and will not let you be complete with anything you do and experience. Only when you complete, integrity, the power of words starts expressing through you. Start creating the right inner software, the right inner space, by bringing integrity as the principle of life. Integrity means not just fulfilling, but honoring the words you give to others. The first step to integrity is completing with all the negative words you created within you about you and life, and completing all of them. Listen. Completion means feeling empowered, feeling powerful, without any hangover, without feeling powerless, during and after every situation in your life!

If you are powerful, you won’t be violent. You will not be in guilt, fear or carry incomplete desires. Kṛṣṇa reveals that to be truly complete, joyful, to be eternally blissful, is to cognize the truth that you are indestructible, that your spirit lives on, and that life and death are but a mere passage. When you cognize this truth and start living it with integrity and authenticity, you will be living death. If not, you will be dead living. I have seen people who are dead living and I have seen people who lived death. Death is not an end; it is a passage of sorts. The truth is that the spirit is not satisfied with mere material pleasures.

However much you please your senses, you cannot achieve satisfaction, you cannot achieve completion. The more you enjoy through your senses, the more the need for enjoyment. It never stops. Discontentment with material pleasures alone is hardwired into the human psyche. Spirituality is the total understanding and cognition of completion with life—materially, physically, emotionally, relationally and in all senses without any incompletion and responding to life with the four tattvas, spiritual principles of integrity, authenticity, responsibility and enriching. These tattvas arise out of the space of completion. Completion makes you integrated; completion makes you authentic; completion makes you responsible; completion makes you enrich yourself and others. This completion arises out of our ability to be complete with the present moment.

The present moment is the only moment when we are truly alive, awake. Whether one believes in God or not, and accepts the inner divinity within oneself or not, is irrelevant to how one understands life after death. If, instead of believing in God, we choose to believe in science, we still need to accept that there are no answers to what we were before we were born and what we will be once we are dead. It is still unmanifest at both ends; it is still a mystery before and after, with no answers. This understanding can only come with the understanding that we live on in spirit. Kṛṣṇa declares to Arjuna, ‘O Bhārata, whatever is permanent and real was unmanifest before it became manifest in the middle—avyaktādīnī bhūtani vyakta-madhyāni bharāta and again it will become unmanifest— avyakta-nidhanāny eva.

Therefore, what is the need to lament, tatra kā paridevanā (2.28).’ Everything is in a state of becoming something else. At every moment we die and are reborn; millions of cells in our body-mind system die every day and are reborn. Yet, through all this change there is continuity. There is a continuity that we cannot see, touch or feel. What we see as manifested, as this body and mind, hides from us the process of constant change that happens within us, as well as the continuous thread that holds the whole process together. Responsibility Of The Ksatriya