"What fear can there be about life?

"Life has to be lived so totally and so intensely that you can squeeze each minute's juice without leaving a single drop behind. Only such a life is authentic, great. Only such a life does not come to an end in death. Such a life comes to the door of the divine at the moment of death.

"Death is a complex experience – just as life is. Perhaps more complex, because life is spread over seventy or eighty years and death is condensed into a single moment, a split second. Because of its condensed nature, it is a miracle that those who have not lived only experience death and those who have lived fully experience an eternal release into the universal consciousness. For them death becomes a friend.

"But begin with life, because life is the beginning and death is the end. If you are afraid from the very beginning you will not give nourishment to the rosebush, you will not give water, you will not care about it, you will not come close to it, you will not shower your love on it. The rosebush is going to shrink, and without roses it is going to die – without ever having experienced any beautiful moment of blissfulness or ecstasy. It will simply shrink; it will never know that it had the possibility of tremendous beauty and the fragrance of roses. Naturally the state of such a rosebush is very depressive. It will die in anguish without knowing what life was. It will know only death.

"This is a simple logic to be remembered. If you don't live life fully you will have to experience death, which is just a fiction, but you will feel it almost more than your actual life – because you have never lived life, it has been just a faint, faraway echo. At the most it consists of the same stuff as dreams are made of – but you have never lived actually, you have never loved actually, you have never danced actually, you have always remained apart. Wherever there was a life source to rejuvenate you, you did not allow yourself the rejuvenation."