Sadhguru
Sadhguru looks at the various
stages of death, and explores the significance of the various death rituals in
the Indian way of life.
Questioner: I wanted to know,
what is the importance of doing shraddh (rituals for the deceased)?
Sadhguru: In India, if someone
close to you dies, you are supposed to sit and watch – no one leaves a dead
body alone. If you keep the body for over two to three days, the hair will
grow. If it was a man and he used to shave, you can see this from the facial
hair. The nails will also grow. Therefore, in countries where they preserve the
dead bodies for a longer time, the undertakers clip the nails and shave the
beard. This is so because of the way life manifests. For the sake of
understanding – there is fundamental life and physical life. Physical life
energy, which is generally referred to as prana, has five basic manifestations.
These are called samana, prana, udhana, apana, and vyana.
The Stages of Death
Within 21 to 24 minutes from the
moment when a doctor would declare a person as dead, samana starts exiting.
Samana is in charge of maintaining the temperature in the body. The first thing
that happens after death is, the body starts cooling down. The traditional way
of checking whether someone is dead or alive is to feel the nose – they would
not check the eyeballs and other parameters. If the nose has gone cold, they
concluded that he is dead.
Somewhere between 48 to 64
minutes after someone is considered as dead, prana exits. Between six and
twelve hours after, udhana exits. There are tantric processes through which we
could revive the body before udhana exits. Once udhana has exited, it is
practically impossible to revive the body. Then, somewhere between eight to
eighteen hours, apana exits. Subsequently, vyana, which is the preservative
nature of prana, will start exiting and may continue to do so for up to 11 to
14 days if it is a normal death – that is if someone died of old age, because
life became feeble. For that period of time, certain processes will continue in
the body; there will still be some element of life. If someone died in an
accident, when the life within was still vibrant – unless the body is totally
crushed – the reverberations of this life will continue somewhere between 48
and 90 days.
During that time, there are
things you can do for that life. Your experience of death is that someone is
gone, but the experience of that being is that he or she has exited the body.
Once they have exited the body, you have no business with them anymore. You
cannot recognize them anymore, and if they came back, you would be terrified.
If people you love died and would pop up again, there would be terror – not
love, because your relationship is with their body or with their conscious mind
and emotion. Once someone dies, those two aspects are left behind.
The mind is just a bunch of
information that has natural tendencies which find expression in a certain way.
When someone dies, there is no more discernment, no more intellect. If you put
one drop of pleasantness into their mind, this pleasantness will multiply a
million fold. If you put one drop of unpleasantness, that unpleasantness will
multiply a million fold. It is a little like with children – they go out to
play until they are exhausted and cannot go on anymore, because they do not
have the necessary discernment as to when it is time to stop.
After death, discernment is
completely absent, even more than in a child. Then, whatever quality you put
into the mind, it will multiply a million fold. This is what is being referred
to as heaven and hell. If you go into a pleasant state of existence, it is called
heaven. If you go into an unpleasant state of existence, it is called hell.
These are not geographical locations – these are experiential realities that a
life which has become disembodied is going through.
Death Rituals
How well or how ridiculously it
is done today is a different matter, but there is a whole science of what to do
at different steps. One of the first things people traditionally do if someone
dies is, they will tie the big toes of the dead body together. This is very
important because it will tighten up the muladhara in such a way that the body
cannot be invaded by that life once again. A life that has not lived with the
awareness that “this body is not me” will try to enter through any orifice of
the body, particularly through the muladhara. The muladhara is where life
generates, and it is always the last point of warmth when the body is cooling
down.
The reason why traditionally, we
always said that if someone dies, you must burn the body within an
hour-and-a-half or a maximum of four hours is because life tries to get back.
This is also important for the living. If someone very dear to you died, your
mind may start playing tricks, thinking that maybe a miracle will happen, maybe
God will come and bring them back. It has never happened to anyone, but still
the mind plays up because of the emotions that you have for that particular
person. Similarly, the life that has exited the body also believes that it can
still get back into the body.
If you want to stop the drama,
the first thing is to set fire to the body within one-and-a-half hours. Or to
be sure the person is dead, they have stretched it to four hours. But the body
should be taken away as quickly as possible. In agriculture communities, they
used to bury, because they wanted their forefathers’ bodies, which are a piece
of soil, to go back to the soil that had nourished them. Today, you buy your
food from the store, and do not know where it comes from. Therefore, burial is
not advisable anymore. In earlier times, when they buried in their own land,
they always put salt and turmeric on the dead body so that it quickly
dissipates into the soil. Cremation is good because it closes the chapter. You
will see that when there is a death in the family, people will be crying and
wailing, but the moment cremation happens, they will become quiet, because
suddenly, the truth has sunk in that it is over. This does not only go for the
living but also for the disembodied being who has just exited the body. As long
as the body is there, he or she is also under the illusion that he can get
back.
There are many rituals to see
that you can somehow put a drop of sweetness into such a non-discerning mind so
that this sweetness will multiply many fold and they will live comfortably in a
kind of self-induced heaven. That is the idea behind the rituals – if they are
done properly.
Runanubandha
I am sure most of you have heard
of runanubandha, which indicates a physical relationship. Whenever you touch
someone – either because of blood relationship or sexual relationships, or even
if you just hold someone’s hand or exchange clothes – these two bodies will
generate runanubandha, a certain commonality. When someone dies, traditionally,
you are seeing how to completely obliterate the runanubandha. The idea of
putting the ashes in the Ganga or in the ocean is to disperse them as widely as
possible so that you do not develop runanubandha with one who has departed. For
you to continue your life, you must properly break this runanubandha.
Otherwise, as it happens in modern societies, it will affect your physical and
mental structure. Children up to eight years of age are immune to these things
– nature has given them that protection, but adolescents will suffer immensely
when we do not take care of the dead properly, because the energies of
disembodied beings are always there and the first ones that they go after are
adolescents because they are the most vulnerable. You see in the world today
how much upheaval people are going through during adolescence.
One of the reasons why
adolescence is more of a struggle today than it was in previous generations is
that we are not properly taking care of those who have departed and these
runanubandhas are all over the place. It is like loose software everywhere, and
it always affects adolescent life most.
Questioner: But what to do? How
do you grind your emotions into powder and sprinkle it? I don’t think it is
possible to cut off your emotions.
Sadhguru: Emotions are a
different, secondary aspect to life. It is the physical sameness, the
runanubandha with the dead that you want to eliminate, because this can cause
sickness and mental derangement, among other things. Emotion by itself is not
damaging. If you had a beautiful relationship with someone and now the person
is no more, it is healthy to cherish the beauty of that relationship rather
than suffer. But if the runanubandha is there, it weakens your body and your
mental structure in such a way that instead of cherishing all the beautiful
things that happened between two people, you are suffering, and not only that –
it will lead to a certain derangement of life. To avoid that, we try to destroy
the physical memory alone. It is not only that you cannot forget the emotional
and psychological memory, you should not forget it either. Someone who meant so
much to you – why should you forget them? You must cherish that relationship
forever.
This article is based on an
excerpt from the July 2014 issue of Forest Flower. Pay what you want and
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