"Birth was the beginning of Death"

Your birth was the beginning of death. Since then you have not been doing anything except dying — every day, continuously — although the process is very slow. It may take seventy years or eighty years to reach your grave, but you have been moving towards it since you left your cradle… consistently… never taking a single holiday, never going astray. There is no way of going astray! Whatever you do, wherever you go, you are going towards the graveyard. One day you were not… one day you are again not — although you existed for seventy years.

Birth and death are simply devices, because neither birth is true nor death is true. We have been before birth, so how can birth be true? And we will be after death, so how can death be true? Only one thing is true: the consciousness that comes with you through birth and goes with you through death — perhaps birth is a door, and death too! Perhaps they are the same door, just your direction is different.

At the moment of death all your knowledge of the world will be lost into thin air. Only one thing will go with you, and that one thing is being constantly ignored — that is your self-knowledge, your self-realization. In fact, this is the only ignorance — ignoring yourself.

Remember, if the fear of death disappears then all other fears disappear automatically, because all other fears are nothing but by-products of the main, basic fear — the fear of death. Go into any of your fears and ultimately you will come to the rock-bottom, and that will be the fear of death. You are afraid of losing money? Go deep into it and you will find that money somehow gives you a feeling that you are more protected, that you can resist death more than the poor man; hence you are afraid of losing money. If you are powerful, politically powerful, it gives you an appearance, as if you have conquered death.

The true death is known only by the devotee who comes to a point when he CANNOT live without God, it is impossible to live without God. When this impossibility arises, that one cannot live without God… this is what Jesus means, by ‘carrying your own cross’. Of course, nobody else can carry it for you. This death is so deep that nobody can help you. This death is so much of the interior that nobody can approach it from the outside. You cannot be murdered, you can only commit suicide — about THIS death, about THIS internal disappearance, about THIS subjective annihilation, cessation.It happens to every meditator: the more you meditate the more your inner voice says, “Let the ego die.” The more you meditate, the more you become aware that a certain death is going to happen. And you know only one kind of death, so naturally you misinterpret; you think, “I am going to die.” You are not going to die, only the ‘I’, the ego, the personality is going to die, is going to disappear.But each time somebody dies, something in you becomes shaky. Each death is a small death to you. Never send somebody to ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. Each death is your death. Even when a dry leaf falls from the tree, it is your death. Hence we go on protecting ourselves