Death is inevitable

The first thing to be understood about death is: if you have known love you have known death, if you have known meditation you have known death. Death does not bring anything new. It is new only for those who have not loved and who have not meditated. […]

These are the three points to become enlightened: one is meditation, another is love, the third is death. And death is the greatest because death is the most natural. Love… may happen, may not happen. It is not an inevitability. Millions of people decide to live without love. They live but they never love; so it is not a necessary phenomenon, it can be avoided. And meditation – you have to go into it, you have to make efforts, you have to search and seek – it is arduous. Very few people go on that adventure. Love is more natural in that sense, because it is something built-in in your being.

Meditation is not so built-in. People miss even love, so what to say about meditation? Even fewer people go in the direction of meditation.

But death is inevitable: you cannot avoid it, you cannot choose it. It is there. Each and everyone has to go through it. It is absolute, there is no shirking. All that you can do is either you can go into it dancing or you can go into it reluctant, clinging to life. If you are reluctant you will miss the experience of death. If you go joyously you will have the experience of death. To miss the experience of death is to miss God, because in death love and meditation bloom automatically. Death takes your body away – suddenly ninety percent of your life evaporates. Death takes your mind away, then the remaining ten percent is also gone. Only the witness is left – this is what meditation is. Death takes all your attachments away, all your lusts away, and when all lust and all attachments are gone love-energy is pure. It is no more a relationship, it becomes a state of being. Death simply cleanses your love and your meditativeness. Your awareness and your love are both bathed, and they come out absolutely clean and purified in death. If you go joyously death can become your samadhi. […]

Death makes no difference. Death is absolutely immaterial. If you have loved me, if you have been in tune with me, you will remain in tune with me. Death will simply make it more intense because the barriers will be taken away. The body is a barrier, the mind is a barrier: when all the barriers disappear there will be great melting. And the disciple comes to know his first experience of God as melting into the Master; that is the privilege of a disciple. Then the second melting happens into God.

The first is melting into the Master, because the Master has been a God to the disciple, the Master has been a symbol of the divine. The first experience will be of melting into the Master, becoming one with the Master, and the second experience will be melting into God, and this is easier.

To melt from you directly into God is difficult. The enormity of it is such that you may shrink back.

You need a Christ between you and God, because the Christ is human and divine – that is the dual nature of the Christ or the Master. He is like you, you can hold his hands. Once you hold his hands, slowly, slowly you find that his hands are disappearing and you have entered unknowingly into the enormous, into the infinite. But by that time you cannot shrink back, by that time you have already tasted – you are drunk.

God is like an ocean… you may feel afraid. The Master is like a small spring; you need not be afraid.

You can dance with the spring, you can let the spring fall on you, you can allow the showering. But in that very showering slowly, slowly you will be gone. And then you will be ready to go into the ocean, into the enormous, into the infinite.

Osho, The Wisdom of the Sands, Vol 1, Ch 6

Quote published in The Book: An Introduction to the Teachings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
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