"You cling too much in death; you don't allow it to happen, you close all the doors, all the windows. Your lust for life is at the optimum. The very idea of dying frightens you from the very roots.

"But death is a natural phenomenon and absolutely necessary too – it has to happen. If the leaves don't become yellow and don't fall, the new leaves, the fresh and young will not come. If one goes on living in the old body, he will not be moving into a better house, fresher, newer, with more possibilities of a new beginning. Perhaps he may not take the same route as he has taken in his past life, getting in a desert. He may move into a new sky of consciousness.

"Each death is an end and a beginning.

"Don't pay too much attention to the end. It is an end to an old, rotten, miserable life style, and it is a great opportunity to begin a new life, not to commit the old mistakes. It is a beginning of an adventure. But because you cling to life and you don't want to leave it – and it has to happen by the very nature of things – you fall unconscious.

"Almost everyone, except those few people who have become enlightened, dies unconsciously; hence they don't know what death is, they don't know its new beginning, the new dawn.

"Meditation is your own exploration.

"You are searching to know exactly what constitutes you: what is false in you and what is real in you. It is a tremendous journey from the false to the real, from the mortal to the immortal, from darkness to light. But when you come to the point of seeing the separation from the mind and the body, and yourself just as a witness, the experience of death is the same. You are not dyinga man who has meditated will die joyfully because he knows there is no death; the death was in his clinging with life.

"You say, Sagar, 'I feel a strong connection between death and meditation.' There is. In the ancient scriptures of this land, even the master is defined as death because his whole function, his whole work is to teach you meditation."