Q: Sir, what will happen after death?

UG: All questions about death are meaningless -- and especially for a young person like you. You have not even lived your life. Why do you ask that silly question? Why are you interested in that? A person who is living has no time to ask such questions. Only a person who is not living asks "What will happen after my death?" You are not living. First live your life, and when the time comes.... Let us leave it like that. I am not interested in that kind of philosophy.

Nothing will happen. There is no such thing as death at all. What do you think will die? What? This body disintegrates into its constituent elements, so nothing is lost. If you burn it, the ashes enrich the soil and aid germination. If you bury it, the worms live on it. If you throw it into the river, it becomes food for the fishes. One form of life lives on another form of life, and so gives continuity to life. So life is immortal.


But that is not going to help anybody who is caught up in the fear of death. After all, 'death' is fear, the fear of something coming to an end. The 'you' as you know yourself, the 'you' as you experience yourself -- that 'you' does not want to come to an end. But it also knows that this body is going to drop dead as others do -- you experience the deaths of others -- so that is a frightening situation because you are not sure whether that (`you') will continue if this (body) goes. So then it projects (an afterlife). This becomes the most important thing -- to know whether there is an afterlife or not. Fear creates that, so when the fear is gone, the question of death is also gone.

You can't experience your own death. That is why I tell some of those people who are so much interested in moksha, liberation, that every one of you, all of you without exception, will attain moksha just before you die.

(Laughter) But you can be sure it is too late then: the body is in a prostrate condition and can't renew itself. That death can happen to you now -- it is a thing that happens now.

You have no way of knowing anything about your death, now or at the end of your so-called life. Unless knowledge, the continuity of knowledge, comes to an end, death cannot take place. You want to know something about death: you want to make that a part of your knowledge. But death is not something mysterious; the ending of that knowledge is death. What do you think will continue after death? What is there while you are living? Where is the entity there? There is nothing there -- no soul -- there is only this question about after death. The question has to die now to find the answer -- your answer; not my answer -- because the question is born out of the assumption, the belief, that there is something to continue after death.