Death Is Alive – In Gita Verse 8.24 Those who know the Supreme Brahman attain that Supreme by passing away from the world during the influence of the fiery god, in the light, at an auspicious moment of the day, during the fortnight of the waxing moon, or during the six months when the sun travels in the north.
Now Krishna is saying that there are people whose death has become alive and common people like us while living, we are dead.
If we read this verse of Krishna, literally we will start thinking that if we die in a particular time we will not come back to the world. Here only we go astray. We read the scripture but never use our own wisdom.
Let me tell you Kabir’s story which will give us clarity: It is significant to remind you that Kabir lived his whole life in Varanasi. And for some strange reason, as there are many places… In Punjab there is a place called Hoshiarpur. It means the city of the wise.
There are many places – perhaps all over the world there are such places. For example in Judea, where Jesus was crucified, it was said against Jesus as if it were his fault that he was born in a small village, Bethlehem, “Have you ever heard of anybody being born in Bethlehem who is a prophet? Just because you are born in Bethlehem you cannot be a prophet. Never heard of such a thing, nobody can even imagine that in that stupid place Bethlehem, God will send his only begotten son. He could not find a better place?”
In the same way; in India it is the Hindu conception that if you die in Varanasi then there is no question of whether you were a good man or a bad man, a saint or a sinner it does not matter; if you die in Varanasi you will go directly to heaven.
So in Varanasi you will be surprised to know that the population is a very special population. As people become retired, they start moving toward Varanasi. Their time of death is coming, they have done every kind of sin, now the only chance to enter heaven is to die in Varanasi. You will find it strange…
Once Osho has been there, and he is a strange fellow, certainly. He looks at things which nobody bothers about. He wrote that – I used to stay with an old friend of J. Krishnamurti’s. And just because of J. Krishnamurti he had become acquainted with me. I was speaking to the Theosophical Society of Varanasi and he became interested in me and he said, “I live alone in a big house. Why do you stay in a hotel? Stay with me.”
So I asked him, “I look all around and there seem to be so many old people. In no other city do you see so many old people, they would have died by now. What are they doing here?”
He said, “This is a problem here. You will find old people who have come here to die, but death is not in your hands. When it will come it will come.” And you will find that a larger proportion of these old people are women, because the woman’s life span is five years longer than men’s. So there are thousands of widows, because in Hinduism you cannot marry again if you are a woman. All over the city, there are widows.
The third thing which is so dangerous is the thousands of bulls that roam the streets. It is thought, because Varanasi is the city of the god Shiva, that if you present a bull to Shiva you can ask anything and it will be fulfilled. So people bring bulls. Bulls are very cheap because they are not of much use. One bull can serve a dozen cows, so the remaining eleven bulls, if they are born proportionately, are useless. They could go to the butcher, but the vegetarian Hindus cannot sell them to the butcher. They go to Varanasi.
So you may have seen bulls, but to see the bulls of Varanasi is a totally different experience. They are very strong, and everything is available, nobody can prevent them. You will have to get out of the car and push them. They don’t listen to your horn, you have to push them aside. You cannot even beat them. If you beat them, you will be beaten immediately because you are beating Shiva’s bull. You can persuade, and lovingly push the bull “For Shiva’s sake just stand by the side and let my car pass!”
Just as it is believed that anybody who dies in Varanasi goes to heaven, in Kabir’s days it was believed – and is believed even today – that whoever dies in Maghar, which is the other side of the Ganges, becomes a donkey after death.
Kabir lived all his life in Varanasi, and before dying told his people, “Take me to Maghar. I want to die in Maghar.”
They said, “Have you become mad? You must have gone senile. Anybody who dies in Maghar gets worse than hell, he becomes a donkey. Do you want to become a donkey?”
Kabir said, “Donkey or not, I want to be myself. I don’t want to go to heaven because of Varanasi. If I go to heaven, I have to go with my own authority. I want to go to heaven from Maghar. And besides, I want to protect the poor people of Maghar, because once I have died in Maghar nobody will be able to condemn those poor people by saying that, ‘Anybody who dies in Maghar becomes a donkey.’”
Nobody can conceive that a man like Kabir can become a donkey. Wherever he dies, and wherever he lives, and wherever he is, and wherever he will be, he is in heaven.
Krishna is speaking about this spirit of such people. They don’t wait for a place or time to die to go to heaven. For them every moment is a waxing moon, or during the six months when the sun travels in the north. Their death is alive and our life is dead.
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