Why This Heedlessness of Death?

Death is the name of that special moment when someone passes out from one phase of a life and is transferred into another one. It is like a passenger getting off from a train at one station and from there boarding another train, thereby continuing with his journey. Many people are very particular about planning the journey of their every day, being mindful of the limited number of hours that they have that day. They are very particular about their daily schedule. Why, then, is it that when we have only a very limited time on this planet, most of us do not properly plan the journey of our life? For instance, why don’t we think that in a few days or years we have to die, so what is the use of wasting our life accumulating unnecessary material things, things that we cannot take along with us when we die? These issues can be properly understood only when we study them in the light of God’s creation plan. When God created a human being, He created him as an eternal being. Every person brings with birth itself the awareness that he is an eternal being. His journey does not end at death. Rather, he continues to be, to exist, even after death. Every person lives in the consciousness of his eternalness. Our programming tells us that we are eternal beings with eternal personalities. This sense of our eternalness generally stands as a block in our awareness of the fact of our mortality. Our programming leads us to imagine death as something that happens to others but that will never happen to ourselves. In line with this programming, people consider this present life as never-ending, while actually it is only temporary. Just as a student spends only a temporary period in an examination hall and then returns to his actual home, a person has come into this world only temporarily and will then be taken back to his real home—which is the eternal world of the Hereafter. Given this, for the proper planning of life we need to develop ‘anti-programming thinking’. We should think against ourselves, in particular against our instinctive tendency of not