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The joys of death.
in view of my Journey to life beyond, to contemplate. on my Real Self, to get rid of all vacillating thoughts, to cut asunder the net of ignorance and illusion, and to concentrate my thoughts steadfastly on the Great Reality, my own true Self. Death is my great friend and benefactor who relieves me from this tottering frame, and provides for me a magnificent mansion. Rejoice with me on this occasion, give up all sorrow and affliction, I have done my duty, discharged my obligations. Allow me to retire and pass away in happiness to regions of light and Joy."
This preparedness to meet death with Joy has at times been miscalled suicide. Suicide is cowardly, sinful. Suicide results from a womanly weakness to fly away from physical suffering. It is caused by the false notion that death will end all sufferings for ever: in utter ignorance of the basic fact, the real truth, that all physical suffering is self-created. The body is dead inert matter, it is bereft, devoid, incapable of suffering. A clod of earth, a piece of stone, a block of wood, a rod of iron, has no sense of suffering. The pure soul is above pain, or suffering. It is the embodied soul, the soul encased, caged, imprisoned in the body which experiences the sense of pain, anguish. torture, because of the mistaken notion of its identity with the body. When the false notion is removed, the soul is disillusioned, there is an end of all sense of pain and torment. A soldier on the field of battle, carried away by patriotic sentiments, faces the canon, and meets the bullets with a shout of triumph and not with a cry of anguish. So does the philosopher who has realised the Truth, and even so the martyr to a cause. True it is that "The mind is its own place, and makes a hell of heaven, and a heaven of hell." Preparedness to meet death is quite different, from causing death as a forcible refuge from physical pain.
The Readers' Digest for October 1935, publishes a note by Chalotte Perkins Gilman, a noted author and lecturer, one of the twelve greatest American Women:
"Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or broken heart' is an excuse for cutting off one's life while any power of service remains. But, when all usefulness
Shatabdi Granth ]
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