Birth and death are jugglery of maya.

Death is separation of the soul from the physical body. Death becomes the starting point of a new life. Death merely opens the door to a higher and fuller form of life. Birth and death are jugglery of maya. He who is born begins to die. He who dies begins to live. Life is death and death is life. No one comes, no one goes. Brahmn or the eternal alone exists.

Just as you move from one house to another, the soul passes from one body to another to gain experience. Just as a man casting off worn-out garments takes new ones, so the dweller in this body, casting off worn out bodies, enters into others which are new.

Life is a continuum. Death is necessary for further evolution. Dissolution of the body is no more than sleep. Birth is like waking up. Death brings new life. A man of discrimination is not afraid of death. Death unlocks the door to a wider existence. The soul is a circle whose circumference is nowhere but its centre is in the body. Death means the change of this centre from one body to another.

The supreme soul or paramatman is deathless, decay less, timeless, causeless and space less. It is the source and substratum for body, mind and world. There is death for the physical body, a compound of five elements. The eternal soul is beyond time, space and causation.

To free yourself from birth and death, you must become body-less. Body is the result of karmas or actions. If you free yourself from raga-dvesha, or likes and dislikes, you will be free from karma. If you annihilate ignorance through knowledge of the imperishable, you can annihilate the ego. The root cause for this body is ignorance. He who realises the eternal soul, which is formless and attribute less, infinite and unchanging, frees himself from death.

The individual souls or jivas build various bodies to display their activities and gain experience from this world. They enter the bodies and leave them. The process goes on. This is known as transmigration of souls. The entrance of a soul into a body is called birth. The soul’s departure from the body is death.

Man has always tried to know what happens after the death of an individual. Science has been struggling to unravel the mystery of what lies beyond death. Experiments have yielded many interesting facts. Natural death, it is said, is unknown to unicellular organisation. When life on earth consisted of these creatures, death was unknown. The phenomenon appeared only when from unicellular the multicellular evolved.

Laboratory experiments have shown that whole organs such as thyroid glands, the ovary, suprarenal gland, the spleen, heart and kidneys isolated from the body of a cat or a fowl, can be kept alive in vitro to show increase in size or weight due to the appearance of new cells or tissues.

It is also known that after the cessation of an individual part of the organisation can continue to function. The white corpuscles of the blood, if cared for, can live for months after the body from which they were withdrawn has been cremated. Death is not the end of life. It is merely cessation of individuality. Life flows on to achieve the universal till it merges in the eternal.

Beauty Tips

•  For attractive lips, speak words of kindness. 
•  For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people. 
• For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry. 
• For beautiful hair, let a child run his or her fingers through it once a day. 
• For poise, walk with the knowledge you'll never walk alone. 
• People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; Never throw out anybody. 
• Remember, If you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm. 
• As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others. 
• The beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure that she carries, or the way she combs her hair. The beauty of a woman must be seen from in her eyes, because that is the doorway to her heart, the place where love resides. 
• The beauty of a woman is not in a facial mole, but true beauty in a woman is reflected in her soul. It is the caring that she lovingly gives, the passion that she shows, and the beauty of a woman with passing years only grows!

Nanak’s Quest For The Beloved

 It was a dark, moonless night. Suddenly there was thunder and lightning and it began to rain. The village was asleep. Only Nanak was awake and the echo of his song filled the air.
    Nanak’s mother was worried because the night was half gone and the lamp in his room was still burning. She could hear his voice as he sang. She knocked at his door, ‘‘Go to sleep now, my son. Soon it will be dawn.’’ Nanak became silent. From the darkness sounded the call of the sparrowhawk. ‘‘Piyu, piyu, piyu!’’ it called.
    ‘‘Listen, mother!’’ Nanak called out. ‘‘The sparrowhawk is calling to his beloved; how can i be silent, i will call my beloved too…i will have to sing for lives upon lives before my voice reaches Him, for He is far away.’’ Nanak resumed singing.
    Nanak practised no austerities, meditation or yoga; he only sang, and singing, he arrived. His singing became meditation – his purification and his yoga.
    Endless meditation, if halfhearted, will take you nowhere; whereas just singing a simple song with all your being merged in it, or dance a dance with the same total absorption and you will reach. The question is not what you do, but how much of yourself you involved in the act.
    Nanak’s path to supreme realisation, to godliness is scattered with song and flowers. Whatever he has said was said in verse. His path was full of melody and soft, filled with the flavour of ambrosia.
    The moonless night described at the beginning was an incident from Nanak’s life when he was about 16 years of age. When the Japuji was conceived, Nanak was 30. The Japuji was his first proclamation after the union with the beloved. The sparrowhawk had found his beloved; the call of ‘‘Piyu, piyu’’ was now over. The Japuji contains the very first words uttered by Nanak after self-realisation; therefore they are special.
    Before the birth of the Japuji, Nanak sat on the banks of the river in darkness with his friend and follower, Mardana. Suddenly, he removed his clothes and walked into the river. Mardana called after him, but Nanak plunged into the depths of the river. Mardana waited and when Nanak did not return, he became anxious. Running back to the village, he woke up everyone. It was the middle of the night, but a crowd collected at the riverside because everyone in the village loved Nanak.
Three days passed. Though everyone thought him to be dead, on the third night Nanak appeared from the river. The first words he spoke became the Japuji. So goes the story – true because it gives the essential truth; false in the sense that it is only symbolic. When Nanak disappeared in the river, the story goes that he stood before the divine.
Now, this is a story; what it symbolises must be understood. First, unless you lose yourself completely, until you die, you cannot hope to meet God. Whether you lose yourself in a river or on a mountaintop is of little consequence; but you must die. Your annihilation becomes his being. As long as you are, he cannot be. You are the obstacle, the wall that separates you. This is the symbolic meaning of drowning in the river.
    You too will have to lose yourself; you too will have to drown. The three days in Nanak’s story represent the time required for his ego to dissolve completely.