Osho Quotes on Death – Your birth was the beginning of death

Osho Quotes on Death

Your birth was the beginning of death. Since then you have not been doing anything except dying — every day, continuously — although the process is very slow. It may take seventy years or eighty years to reach your grave, but you have been moving towards it since you left your cradle… consistently… never taking a single holiday, never going astray. There is no way of going astray! Whatever you do, wherever you go, you are going towards the graveyard. One day you were not… one day you are again not — although you existed for seventy years.
Birth and death are simply devices, because neither birth is true nor death is true. We have been before birth, so how can birth be true? And we will be after death, so how can death be true? Only one thing is true: the consciousness that comes with you through birth and goes with you through death — perhaps birth is a door, and death too! Perhaps they are the same door, just your direction is different.
If you can have just a glimpse of yourself you will know you have never been born and you have never died. Yes, birth and death have been happening around you but not to you. The body was dying, the mind was dying; the body was being born, the mind was being born again, but you have remained eternally the same.
At the moment of death all your knowledge of the world will be lost into thin air. Only one thing will go with you, and that one thing is being constantly ignored — that is your self-knowledge, your self-realization. In fact, this is the only ignorance — ignoring yourself.
To know life in its insecurity is to know life in its immense beauty, is to know life in its authenticity. To know life in its insecurity, without any fear, is to transcend death, because life never dies.
Have you ever consciously looked at death? Have you ever gone to the cemetery and sat there and thought about the people who are lying in their graves? No… you will go only one time and one way — you will not come back. Why are graveyards and cemeteries and funeral grounds made outside the city, out of the way? — so that you don’t have to come across them. In fact, the graveyards should be made exactly in the middle of the city, so you have to come across them many times every day, knowing perfectly well that the people who are sleeping in those graves were also one day living just like you, and one day you also will be lying in the same kind of grave.
Remember, if the fear of death disappears then all other fears disappear automatically, because all other fears are nothing but by-products of the main, basic fear — the fear of death. Go into any of your fears and ultimately you will come to the rock-bottom, and that will be the fear of death. You are afraid of losing money? Go deep into it and you will find that money somehow gives you a feeling that you are more protected, that you can resist death more than the poor man; hence you are afraid of losing money. If you are powerful, politically powerful, it gives you an appearance, as if you have conquered death.
Time is mind. Time is death. Going beyond time is going beyond mind and beyond death.
It is always death that comes before your desires are fulfilled. Even if you live for a thousand years your desires are not going to be fulfilled.
And that’s what sannyas is all about. It is to accept the insecurity of life, it is to accept death, it is to accept that everything can disappear at any moment. Your love, your friendship, you, everything is only for the moment. The next moment the petals will wither away, all will be gone.
From birth to death man is a long sleep, sometimes dreaming with eyes closed, sometimes dreaming with eyes open, but dreaming all the same, all the time.
Each one has to carry his own cross, each one has to prepare for his own ultimate death — I don’t mean physical death, remember. Physical death has happened to you many times; millions of times you have died physically. That is not true death because the mind continues, enters into another womb, starts another game; again the whole story is repeated. You go on moving in circles; that is not true death.
The true death is known only by the devotee who comes to a point when he CANNOT live without God, it is impossible to live without God. When this impossibility arises, that one cannot live without God… this is what Jesus means, by ‘carrying your own cross’. Of course, nobody else can carry it for you. This death is so deep that nobody can help you. This death is so much of the interior that nobody can approach it from the outside. You cannot be murdered, you can only commit suicide — about THIS death, about THIS internal disappearance, about THIS subjective annihilation, cessation.
It happens to every meditator: the more you meditate the more your inner voice says, “Let the ego die.” The more you meditate, the more you become aware that a certain death is going to happen. And you know only one kind of death, so naturally you misinterpret; you think, “I am going to die.” You are not going to die, only the ‘I’, the ego, the personality is going to die, is going to disappear.
But each time somebody dies, something in you becomes shaky. Each death is a small death to you. Never send somebody to ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. Each death is your death. Even when a dry leaf falls from the tree, it is your death. Hence we go on protecting ourselves.