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SWAMI SHANKARANANDA
S. SHANK: The way we can help anyone who is afraid of death is to move through it. I know you have had many encounters with death, and with people around you, and those close to you dying, as I have. And I have never seen anyone not survive death.
L.M.: You mean the person who dies?
S. SHANK: I'm intentionally putting it that way. I have never seen anyone die. That means, I have never seen anyone not survive death.
L.M.: Then what is death?
S. SHANK: Death is the illusion; death is the barrier; death is the veil; and death is the partition between two rooms. It is creating the illusion that when we leave this room, or this body, now we are dead. Now we are no longer visible to the world. But death is nothing but the reemergence of that nonphysical reality, which is our greater self.
L.M.: Can we should we-learn to enjoy death?
S. SHANK: Yes, if we can enjoy birth, then we can enjoy death. Because they are the same. To enjoy birth means to come consciously into this world. Very few have mastered that. Most of us experience the veil, or maya, coming down the minute that we enter the physical dimension.
L.M.: We experience the many, the world of duality.
S. SHANK: The Vedic statement of this is that the one becomes the many. To become, to experience the many, we have to let go of the remembrance of the one. Now Confucius said that he had long been perplexed by how most people weep when someone dies, and they rejoice when someone is born. He said the reverse should obtain. Because if you knew what lies ahead of you in this life, would you not have cause to weep? And if you knew that your sufferings were at an end when you die, would this not be a reason for rejoicing?
L.M.: It is all our attachment to things and to perceptions that bind us to the world. At death we get relinked with the eternal.
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