BENGALURU: Most of us want a life which has continuity, which is time and space. So, for us death is a horror, to be avoided, and life is something to be prolonged through medicine, through doctors and so on. Or, faced with the inevitability of death we say, `I will believe in something: that I will continue and that you will continue - always in space’.
So, if one can put it this way, in the womb of the unknown, time and space exist. But without feeling one’s way into the unknown, the mind becomes a slave to time and space. It took us time to get here: but does it take time to perceive anything, to see some which is not a matter of time? To see something as false, does it take time? To see the falseness of nationalism, the poisonouness of it, does it take time? Please wait a minute, do not agree. I do not mean the intellectual, verbal seeing, but the actual seeing, the actual feeling of it so that you never again touch it - surely, that does not take time? Time is relied upon only when the mind is ineffective, indolent.
And death: why is there such fear of death? Not only for the aged but for everyone there is this fear. Why? And being afraid, we have invented all the lovely comforting theories: reincarnation, karma, resurrection, and all the rest of it. It is fear that has to be understood, but do not let us go back into fear. We are trying to understand what it means to die.
Most of us want physical continuity - the remembrance of the things we have been, the hopes, the satisfactions, the fulfilments - , most of us live with the memories, the associations, the pictures on the mantelpiece, the photographs. And all that may be cut off when the physical body ceases; and that is a very disturbing thing. I have lived so long, for fifty or sixty years; I have struggled to cultivate certain virtues, to acquire knowledge; and what is the value of life if I am to be cut off from it all, to cease on the moment? So, time-space comes in.
You follow? Time, as space and distance. So for us, death is a matter of time. But that which has continuity, which knows no ending, can never renew itself, can never be young, fresh, innocent. It is only something that dies that has the possibility of a creation, a newness, a freshness. So, is it possible to die while living, to know the vitality, the energy of death, with all the senses fully awake? What does death mean? Not the death of old age, disease and accident, but the death of a mind that is fully active, that has tasted, experienced, and has acquired knowledge; which means, really, the death of yesterday.
I do not know if you have ever tried it, for the fun of it - to die to everything that you have known. Then you will say, `If I die to all my remembrances, to my experience, my knowledge, my photographs, my symbols, my attachments and my ambitions, what is left?’ Nothing. But to learn about death the mind must be in a state of nothingness, surely. Let us take one thing. Have you ever tried to die, not only to suffering, but to pleasure? We want to die to suffering, to unpleasant memories, but to die also to pleasure, to joys, to things that give you an enormous sense of vitality, have you tried it? If you have, you will see that you can
die to yesterday. To die to everything, so that when you go to the office, to your work, your mind is new - surely, that is love, is it not? Not the remembered things.So, the mind has been put together through time; the mind is time. Every thought shapes the mind in time. And not to be shaped by time, thought must completely come to an end. Not an enforced ending, not a mechanical ending, not a cutting off, but the ending which is the seeing of the truth that it must end.