Life Is Death, Death Is Life

Swami Sivananda

Death is separation of the soul from the physical body. Death becomes the starting point of a new life. Death merely opens the door to a higher and fuller form of life. Birth and death are jugglery of maya. He who is born begins to die. He who dies begins to live. Life is death and death is life. No one comes, no one goes. Brahmn or the eternal alone exists. Just as you move from one house to another, the soul passes from one body to another to gain experience. Just as a man casting off worn-out garments takes new ones, so the dweller in this body, casting off wornout bodies, enters into others which are new. Life is a continuum. Death is necessary for further evolution. Dissolution of the body is no more than sleep. Birth is like waking up. Death brings new life. A man of discrimination is not afraid of death. Death unlocks the door to a wider existence. The soul is a circle whose circumference is nowhere but its centre is in the body. Death means the change of this centre from one body to another. The supreme soul or paramatman is deathless, decayless, timeless, causeless and spaceless. It is the source and substratum for body, mind and world. There is death for the physical body, a compound of five elements. The eternal soul is beyond time, space and causation. To free yourself from birth and death, you must become body-less. Body is the result of karmas or actions. If you free yourself from raga-dvesha, or likes and dislikes, you will be free from karma. If you annihilate ignorance through knowledge of the imperishable, you can annihilate the ego. The root cause for this body is ignorance. He who realises the eternal soul, which is formless and attributeless, infinite and unchanging, frees himself from death. The individual souls or jivas build various bodies to display their activities and gain experience from this world. They enter the bodies and leave them. The process goes on. This is known as transmigration of souls. The entrance of a soul into a body is called birth. The soul’s departure from the body is death. Man has always tried to know what happens after the death of an individual. Science has been struggling to unravel the mystery of what lies beyond death.Experiments have yielded many interesting facts. Natural death, it is said, is unknown to unicellular organisation. When life on earth consisted of these creatures, death was unknown. The phenomenon appeared only when from unicellular the multicellular evolved. Laboratory experiments have shown that whole organs such as thyroid glands, the ovary, suprarenal gland, the spleen, heart and kidneys isolated from the body of a cat or a fowl, can be kept alive in vitro to show increase in size or weight due to the appearance of new cells or tissues. It is also known that after the cessation of an individual parts of the organisation can continue to function. The white corpuscles of the blood, if cared for, can live for months after the body from which they were withdrawn has been cremated. Death is not the end of life. It is merely cessation of an individuality. Life flows on to achieve the universal till it merges in the eternal.