Death and the Deathless

 by Swami Nishchalananda Saraswati

Every embodied living thing dies. This is a cosmic law. One evening I was walking in the fields near the Ashram. It was autumn and everywhere I saw plants dying away. And I realised that this process of birth, growth, ebb and finally death happens to everything, including us as humans. We can’t escape this inexorable process. And then I realised that what was more fundamental is the Intelligence or Energy or Force which drives this whole process. What is it that lies behind a fading flower? Every living thing is, in a sense, an apparition in this Intelligence.

Even though we may be apparitions, as humans we have various faculties that other living things on this planet don’t have. One of them is the faculty of subjectivity: to be able to know that we exist and to be able to reflect on our own existence. Out of this comes the intellectual and intuitive faculties.

How does this help us? As embodied beings composed of flesh and blood, not much, if anything! But our faculty of self-reflection and intuition allow us, if it is sufficiently subtle, to realise what we are and what we are not. Despite appearances and our sensory experience, we are not only our body; nor are we only our personality. Then what are we? Fundamentally we are something beyond the senses and the mind.

Like all embodied beings, we can’t escape death. But we can realise what we are in Essence and it is this that is immortal. It has been said that death is the most certain thing in life. Yes, death is certain. Who would deny it? Yet we live our lives (at least, on a superficial level) as if death didn’t exist, as if the body is immortal. Yet fear of death will always be there – lurking in the subconscious, surfacing occasionally when we are unoccupied (which in modern life is not often!), or in our dreams when our guard is temporarily down.

Yet acceptance of death is not morbid. It is merely accepting the inevitable. And somehow accepting and even embracing death makes us more alert to the present moment. We value every precious passing moment. And if we dwell in the present moment, without denial or effort to be busy, then we can be catapulted into a deeper Awareness. We can realise That which is deathless: the fundamental Essence – call it what you will, Spirit, Consciousness or whatever – which transcends the body and the personality, but which is the Source of the body and personality.

Only when we realise this Essence can we see death in the context of a wider picture of Being, where we can see that birth, life and death are but changes on the stage of the timeless. Then we realise that our real nature is transcendental; that though the body does die, there is something that doesn’t die – something that, to quote Lord Tennyson is ‘nearer than hands and feet1’- something that cannot be seen by the eyes because it is That which gives the capacity of vision to the eyes, That which cannot be heard because it is That which gives the capacity of hearing to the ears, and indeed, It cannot be understood by the mind because It is That which gives the capacity of understanding to the mind. It is That which is beyond death and it is That which is our real, Primordial Nature.