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The
Fear of Death and the Four Methods of Conquering It
Page 2
The
first battle to be fought is already formidable: it is the
mental battle against a collective suggestion that is massive,
overwhelming, compelling, a suggestion based on thousands
of years of experience, on a law of Nature that does not yet
seem to have had any exception. It translates itself into
this stubborn assertion: it has always been so, it cannot
be any different; death is inevitable and it is madness to
hope that it can be anything else. The concert is unanimous
and till now even the most advanced scientist has hardly dared
to sound a discordant note, a hope for the future. As for
the religions, most of them have based their power of action
on the fact of death and they assert that God wanted man to
die since he created him mortal. Many of them make death a
deliverance, a liberation, sometimes even a reward. Their
injunction is: submit to the will of the Highest, accept without
revolt the idea of death and you shall have peace and happiness.
In spite of all this, the mind must remain unshakable in its
conviction and sustain an unbending will. But for one who
has resolved to conquer death, all these suggestions have
no effect and cannot affect his certitude which is based on
a profound revelation.
The
second battle is the battle of the feelings, the fight against
attachment to everything one has created, everything one has
loved. By assiduous labour, sometimes at the cost of great
efforts, you have built up a home, a career, a social, literary,
artistic, scientific or political work, you have formed an
environment with yourself at the centre and you depend on
it at least as much as it depends on you. You are surrounded
by a group of people, relatives, friends, helpers, and when
you think of your life, they occupy almost as great a place
as yourself in your thought, so much so that if they were
to be suddenly taken away from you, you would feel lost, as
if a very important part of your being had disappeared.
It
is not a matter of giving up all these things, since they
make up, at least to a great extent, the aim and purpose of
your existence. But you must give up all attachment to these
things, so that you may feel capable of living without them,
or rather so that you may be ready, if they leave you, to
rebuild a new life for yourself, in new circumstances, and
to do this indefinitely, for such is the consequence of immortality.
This state may be defined in this way: to be able to organise
and carry out everything with utmost care and attention and
yet remain free from all desire and attachment, for if you
wish to escape death, you must not be bound by anything that
will perish.
After
the feelings come the sensations. Here the fight is pitiless
and the adversaries formidable. They can sense the slightest
weakness and strike where you are defenceless. The victories
you win are only fleeting and the same battles are repeated
indefinitely. The enemy whom you thought you had defeated
rises up again and again to strike you. You must have a strongly
tempered character, an untiring endurance to be able to withstand
every defeat, every rebuff, every denial, every discouragement
and the immense weariness of finding yourself always in contradiction
with daily experience and earthly events.
We
come now to the most terrible battle of all, the physical
battle which is fought in the body; for it goes on without
respite or truce. It begins at birth and can end only with
the defeat of one of the two combatants: the force of transformation
and the force of disintegration. I say at birth, for in fact
the two movements are in conflict from the very moment one
comes into the world, although the conflict becomes conscious
and deliberate only much later. For every indisposition, every
illness, every malformation, even accidents, are the result
of the action of the force of disintegration, just as growth,
harmonious development, resistance to attack, recovery from
illness, every return to the normal functioning, every progressive
improvement, are due to the action of the force of transformation.
Later on, with the development of the consciousness, when
the fight becomes deliberate, it changes into a frantic race
between the two opposite and rival movements, a race to see
which one will reach its goal first, transformation or death.
This means a ceaseless effort, a constant concentration to
call down the regenerating force and to increase the receptivity
of the cells to this force, to fight step by step, from point
to point against the devastating action of the forces of destruction
and decline, to tear out of its grasp everything that is capable
of responding to the ascending urge, to enlighten, purify
and stabilise. It is an obscure and obstinate struggle, most
often without any apparent result or any external sign of
the partial victories that have been won and are ever uncertain
for the work that has been done always seems to need to be
redone; each step forward is most often made at the cost of
a setback elsewhere and what has been done one day can be
undone the next. Indeed, the victory can be sure and lasting
only when it is total. And all that takes time, much time,
and the years pass by inexorably, increasing the strength
of the adverse forces.
All
this time the consciousness stands like a sentinel in a trench:
you must hold on, hold on at all costs, without a quiver of
fear or a slackening of vigilance, keeping an unshakable faith
in the mission to be accomplished and in the help from above
which inspires and sustains you. For the victory will go to
the most enduring.
There
is yet another way to conquer the fear of death, but it is
within the reach of so few that it is mentioned here only
as a matter of information. It is to enter into the domain
of death deliberately and consciously while one is still alive,
and then to return from this region and re-enter the physical
body, resuming the course of material existence with full
knowledge. But for that one must be an initiate.
Bulletin,
February 1954
- The Mother
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