Review By Harsimran Kaur
Rating: 5/5
Death is a termination of life; a blatant truth that we gloriously awake to every morning.
I am alive! The breaths are countable, the heart still sings the rhythmic tune with the divine, the stretch is not laborious and the morsels of the food are a palatable sanguinity.
Yes, I am alive!
But, isn’t this existence ephemeral, for every day it detangles to let loose our idiosyncrasies and accept the human body as an Irredentist to be given back to God. It’s like life is made of atoms—each splitting off to form a chain reaction that keeps the body running. The energy released through this reaction is assembled to engage the human machine in the process of existence. And, if the entire multiplicity goes wrong—doom!!
Who could have been a better interpreter of ‘why’s and how’s ‘of the irrefutable benign ‘death syndrome’ than the yogic mystic ‘Sadhguru’ himself. He is not the usual ‘sadhu-sant’ who looks impoverished or sits bare-chested on wooden planks giving dexterous sermons. A doyen who regales in laughter to describe the evanescence of life has fastidiously talked about ‘death’ in the book, ‘Death-An inside story.’
Death presumably has been an idee-fixe of the human mind; for some, it’s a favourite imprecation. Millions throng at the sanctum a sanatorium to pray for their long life; primarily because the perseverance to accept the finale of life is best left to our self-denial subtleties. Sadhguru is conscientious in reminding people of the corrigendum of considering human body as a panjandrum.
I pontificate if I am just a diffusion of energies and chakras that breathe in the experiences—both palatable and toxic—and channelize my susceptibility to the ideological self. The book presses hard to form such an opinion and live by it as death is not an abrupt closure but an imperceptible passing of each breadth from the number of inhalations and exhalations one is born with.
The book does scare you, tantalizing the nerves as one decodes the mystery of death and the cauldron full of shibboleths. The next pyre could be yours, yes, as death is an unpardonable deceit to the spirit of existence. This is all the book predisposes to covey. Concepts like ‘Mahasamadhi’ and ‘Vanaprastha Ashrana’ are absolutes no one wants to burden oneself with—but vapors as a de facto alliance with the human body. Death too is an intellect of the mind that one must learn to accept and prepare for. The subtle act of reminding oneself—it’s now, today—for tomorrow could be a deleterious landslide of trillion of cells that give it structure and lapidary.
TAKE AWAY
Are we supposed to prepare for death?
Will death transport us to heaven or hell or nowhere?
Is it good to die in sleep or its deviousness is not obligated to the deformities of time?
Is our disembodiment a consequence of our sins or what encapsulates us as a whole?
Are ghosts and reincarnation a myth or a reality?
The answers to the above are so conscientiously provided in the book.
The book is an overwhelming torch to enlightenment and distress—celebration of our distinctiveness and a perpetual turmoil of accepting death as a part of existence.
A variegated anatomy of death—absorbing and intriguing!!