from the book Aghora - The Left Hand of God

DEATH AND THE SMASHAN

You may do your best to communicate with dying people but it will not help much. They have already entered a different world. You will notice that a stage comes when the eyes begin to move rapidly and the lips form unintelligible words. If you know about death, you will know that the individual is seeing Chitragupta's account book. What a beautiful word: Chitra, which means picture, plus Gupta, which means secret. Secret pictures images no one else can see. And what is it? Only the subconscious memory, the causal body, the record of all the life's karmas. While you are in there in the subconscious seeing all the activities of your life flash before your eyes like a movie, as you review all your past mistakes, can you be at all conscious of the outside world? No. Your ego, which up until then has projected outward through your sense organs into the external world, self-identifying with the body, now projects inward into the subconscious, trying to find something to self-identify with, selecting the karmas for the next birth. So, the son or daughter may be wailing, "Oh, mother, mother, mother, please forgive me, I never knew," but it is too late, because the mother is entirely unaware of what is being said. She has had to leave all connections with her physical body.

There is a way to force a person to be alert at the moment of death. You can actually force the ego back into the conscious mind and then communicate with the dying person for a few minutes. But it is very difficult to do.

It is always best to have gone through the process of dying while you are still alive. This happens, for example, when someone dies on the operating table and is then brought back to life. The scientists who are studying death nowadays have interviewed a bunch of these people, and they have identified some of the sensations which one experiences at death: the movement of the consciousness through a dark tunnel, the roaring noise, and what-have-you.

My foster daughter Roshni once experienced this. She used to drink bhang (a preparation of milk and cannabis) every day. One day I was in a queer mood, and I gave her the bhang personally. She drank it, sat down in the armchair, and closed her eyes. Within a few minutes her pulse and her breathing had both stopped. She came out of it after a bit, and I asked her what had happened.

"I was sitting in the armchair and flying through a long tunnel. It took a long time to get to the other end, and when I got there I started to go higher and higher. I was so scared I held onto the armchair very tightly. It was a very big space, an immense space that we—the chair and I—were flying through, and I could see so many stars and other things that I can't express in words. I felt myself being attracted to a source of divinity, of love, and just then someone made me come back to my body."

And ever since that day, she has been different. In fact, she complains to me, "Why did you have to bring me back?" It was just like death, and now she knows what it will be like to die, just as those other people who have already experienced death know. And all of them will be much better prepared for death than the ordinary person, and their deaths will be much easier and better, because they know there is nothing to fear. Death is not to be feared; birth is to be feared.

"Ante mati sa gatih"—whatever you are thinking about at the moment of death determines your next rebirth. If you are aware at the moment you die and you remember God you will definitely go to Him, there is no doubt about it. It is much more likely that you will remember God at the moment of your death if you have been remembering Him regularly all during your life. This is why you must lose yourself in love for your deity so that you'll die with His or Her name on your lips. So many of our holy books advise that in today's world the greatest worship is the simple remembering of God's name. The Sufis do it this way also. But do you think it is so easy to remember God at the moment of death? Oh no!

Once there was a guru sitting under a tree with his pet disciple. As he was relaxing the guru saw a mango growing on the tree, very near the ground, and thought to himself, "How much I would like that mango! " And just in the act of asking his disciple to pluck the mango for him, he died.

The disciple didn't know what to do. He was distraught: "Guruji is gone! Now who will look after me and teach me?" Suddenly he had a thought: If it is true that you go to whatever you were thinking of at the moment of death, and since his guruji had asked him for a mango just as he died, then he must still be somewhere around the area trying to get at the mango to fulfill that last desire.

So the boy plucked the mango, and, not knowing precisely what he was looking for, inspected it carefully. He found an ant crawling on it, and from nowhere, seemingly, another thought came to him: "Why shouldn't guruji be in this insect?" He took the ant between his thumb and forefinger and crushed it.

Immediately his mentor was standing in front of him. "Thank you, my beloved boy, for what you have done for me. I was indeed trapped in that ant, desirous of tasting a mango. You have saved me from many lives of groping about in Maya." And he blessed the boy and disappeared.

This does not mean that you should go around squashing ants. You had better know what you are doing before you play around like this. The boy in this story was just lucky—or perhaps you might say destined for it. How did he know that the ant was his teacher? In fact, how did he even get the idea to investigate where his mentor might have gone? It was all the play of his guru. His guru inserted these two thoughts into the boy's mind. This is the beautiful play of guru and disciple. The guru always knows what is going on but pretends to be ignorant; the disciple is expected only to be sincere.

But if you are not in a position to know about these things then don't fool about with them. In this case, the guru himself was lucky. Suppose the boy had been a dullard, or ignored his intuition? The guru might easily have become entangled in Maya again, through even such a small desire.

Also by Robert E. Svoboda:

• Aghora II: Kundalini (Book)
• Aghora III: The Law of Karma (Book)