Death is Total Ending

So for us death is total ending, the ending of your attachment - right?-ending all that you have collected. You cannot take it with you. You may like to have it until the last minute, but you cannot possibly take it with you. So please listen.

So we have divided life into dying and living. And this division has brought about great fear. And out of that fear we invent all kinds of theories, very comforting, may be illusory, but it is very comforting, illusions are comfortably neurotic. So is it possible, please I am asking you this question, is it possible, as we live, to die to things that we are attached to?

Do you understand my question? I am attached to my reputation - God forbid - I am attached to it. And death is coming along, because I am getting older and I am frightened, because I am going to lose everything. So can I be totally free of the image, of the reputation that people have given me? Do you understand? So that you are dying as you are living. I wonder if you understand this? So the division between the living and dying is not miles apart, it is together.

I wonder if you understand this please. And if you understand the great beauty of it that each day, or each second there is no accumulation, no psychological accumulation, you have to accumulate clothes with money and so on, that's a different matter, but psychologically there is no accumulation as knowledge, as attachment, saying, `It's mine'. Will you do it?

Will you actually do this thing so that this conflict between death and living with all its pain and fear and anxiety comes totally to an end, so that you are - the brain is incarnated? Do you understand? I wonder if you understand all this. The brain is being reborn afresh, so that it has tremendous freedom.

- J.K., New Delhi 4th Public Talk 13th November, 1983