Death – Be Truly Life Oriented

Sadhguru: A significant thing that every human being has to do is to structure their psychological and emotional framework around the most fundamental fact of their life – their mortality. Only when you do this will you naturally become eligible for a spiritual process, to a dimension beyond the mundane. The nature of your logical mind is such that it would like to eliminate death completely from its scope of thought. This is why most people are structuring their psychological process around a nonsensical idea of immortality – as if they are forever. Every day, there is no reminder in their thought that this is a limited amount of time and that you are just a baton carrier from the previous generation to the next. Right now, it takes a lifetime for people to understand that they are mortal; they need a heart attack or the appearance of a malignant lump somewhere to remind them.

You need to celebrate and enjoy every moment of your life because the goddamn thing does not wait for you even for a moment. So it is extremely important that you make this into a joyful and fantastic process. If you were immortal, you could enjoy a hundred years each of depression, anxiety, madness and misery and then on the 500^th anniversary, you could become joyful. But that is not the case. You are mortal and it is ticking away.
If you think you will be here forever, you will ignore life completely, entangled in your own psychological nonsense which has nothing to do with reality. But suppose you knew you were going to die in the next one hour, you would notice every little bit of life. You would not miss anything.

This is not a morbid message, it is a life-oriented message. You will be truly life-oriented only if you know that life is a very limited amount of time. Being unpleasant and depressed is death-oriented, isn’t it? You have time and room for all these things only because you think you are immortal.

There is no time for frustration, for depression, for anxiety or for anger. There is no time for any unpleasantness in this life. If you think you will be here forever, you will ignore life completely, entangled in your own psychological nonsense which has nothing to do with reality. But suppose you knew you are going to die in the next one hour, you will notice every little bit of life – you will not miss anything.

You can truly enjoy and joyfully walk through this life only if you know that you are mortal. If you are constantly reminded of this, then this whole life process will unhinge itself from the psychological nonsense and physicality, and will want to experience everything. It will become super-alert. Your life will naturally look for something beyond. A spiritual process will become a natural process of growth for you – not something that you have to be kicked into.

Editor’s Note: Download the video “Unraveling Death”, in which Sadhguru explores the intricacies behind death and dying, from the time of entering the womb to exiting the body.