Mysterious Wall

Futility Of Desire

If you have understood the futility of desire, the utter stupidity of desire, if you have seen it through and through – that no desire can ever be fulfilled, that it promises and it promises greatly but it never delivers the goods, that all desires are deceptive, that it is because of our unintelligence that we go on being victims of desires; if you have seen it through and through and you die with no projection in the mind, with no seed of desire, then all seeds are burned.

It is because of this that Patanjali has called the ultimate state of samadhi, nirbeej samadhi, seedless samadhi – if you can die with all the seeds burned, there will be no sprout anymore, there will be no other births.

Then where do you go? You don’t fall asleep. In fact to attain a state of seedless samadhi one has to be absolutely awake, one has to be a buddha, because the seeds of desire are burned only in the fire of awakening. So if you die without any desire, you die in utter awareness, you see death happening.

And remember again, by “death” I mean you see the disconnection happening – slowly slowly, the soul is becoming separate from the body. Slowly slowly, it is becoming uprooted from the body, it is becoming freer from the prison. And one moment comes when you are totally free from the prison, outside the prison cell called the bodymind mechanism.

Then you remain eternally awake. Then you remain in the universe, diffused in the ocean of life, but eternally awake. It is not a state of sleep.

You ask me, When I am dead, am I really dead?

Ram Jethmalani, the real you will not be dead, but Ram Jethmalani is going to be dead, because Ram Jethmalani is nothing but the name of the combination of soul and body; it is the name of the identity. We feel identified with our bodies; we think we are our bodies, our minds. Remember, the mind is only a part of the body, the subtle part, the invisible part. If we are identified with the bodymind mechanism, then certainly this identification is going to die.

Ram Jethmalani is bound to die, but there is something in Ram Jethmalani which is not going to die. You have to become aware of it. And the only way to become aware of it is to be more meditative, to be more of a witness. Start watching your body, start watching your mind; don’t get involved, remain aloof, distant, cool. Just as one sits on the bank of a river and watches the river flow by. You don’t say, “I am the river.” So it is with the body, watch it. Become more and more of a witness. And as witnessing grows and becomes integrated, you will be able to see Ram Jethmalani disappearing even before death.

In meditation the ego dies, the ego disappears. Once the ego has disappeared, once you have seen yourself as an egoless entity, then there is no death for you.

We can say it in another way: it is the ego that creates the illusion of death. And ego itself is false, hence death too is false. We cling to the false, that’s why we have to suffer from death.