When a dear one dies

When a dear one dies

Look into the fact of death and you will see the whole existence dying, and that will give you a deep insight -- not only about death but about life, because it is life that brings death.

Whenever somebody like a father or a mother dies, something in you also dies. A father is not just outside; his being overlaps your being. You have come through him. He has been the vehicle to bring you to life and he occupies some inner space. When a father or mother dies, something of you also dies with them. You will never be the same again, a gap will be there. A father cannot be replaced; a mother cannot be replaced, they are irreplaceable.

So rather than crying and rather than feeling sorry because those are the tricks of the mind to avoid death. If you start crying and weeping and feeling sorry, you are creating a mist around you, a cloud, and you will not be able to see the fact of death. Death has to be looked directly in the eyes without any emotion interfering. Then death becomes meditation. No interference from the emotions — just looking directly into death.

Your father has died — this is a fact. Now whether you cry or not makes no difference, so what is the point? Whether you feel sorry for him or not makes no difference. Death has happened; you cannot undo it. So rather than wasting time, look into it. Look deeply into it, and in the death of your father you will see your own death coming, and the death of your children, and the death of your grandchildren. In the death of your father you can see the death of all your parents, your father’s father, his grandfather, and the grandfather’s grandfather.

Look into the fact of death and you will see the whole existence dying, and that will give you a deep insight — not only about death but about life, because it is life that brings death.

Death is implied in life, inbuilt; it unfolds. When the child is born, he starts dying from the very first breath that he takes. When he has taken one breath, he is one breath old — something has died. Just in the very birth, something starts dying. It will take seventy or fifty-five or ninety years for death to unfold, but it seems that life carries the seed of death in itself.

Look into this death, meditate over it without any interference from the emotions. Face it, and that very encounter will give you a deep understanding of life. Then your life can never be the same again, because what is the point then? What your father was doing is meaningless. You will be doing the same, and death will come and destroy everything. So do something which death cannot destroy.

And I say to you that there is only one thing which death cannot destroy, and that is meditation. Everything is vulnerable to death, only meditation is not. The deeper you go inwards, the further away you are from death. The further out you move, the deeper you move into death. At the innermost core there is no death. At the outermost periphery, there is only death — nothing else. Look out and you look into death. Look in and you look into the deathless. That deathlessness is what meditation is all about.

Ordinarily nobody thinks about death, but when something like this happens, a calamity — the father is no more, the mother is no more, the beloved is no more, your child has died — these rare moments have to be used, these rare moments should not be wasted.

So get out of the emotions, because it is futile. Get out of this Charlie Brown cloud and look into death. The further away you are, the more death will become a memory and you will accept it and then it will not be possible to use it. You are still close to it; it is still fresh — the wound has not healed. I can see that the wound is still there. Before it is healed, use it. And this wound can become a message to the beyond.

Just meditate about it – and love more. Love and death are very similar.

Excerpted from The Cypress In The Courtyard by Osho

Osho is known for his revolutionary contribution to the science of inner transformation, with an approach to meditation that acknowledges the accelerated pace of contemporary life.

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