Why This Heedlessness of Death?

This life is a journey. When you travel—by train or plane, for instance—you think of yourself as a traveller who is seated in a vehicle for a limited period. But suppose you forget this fact and take your journey to be your destination itself and start demanding to have all the facilities that you have only at home, your journey will become very difficult. That will be the case even if you are travelling by first class! But this is precisely the problem with most of us as we journey through life. We want to obtain things like perfect peace and joy here that can be had only in another world—in Paradise. Death is an announcement of the fact that the different things that we had been given while we were in this world was not because they were our right or privilege but because they were part of our ‘test paper’ of the exam of life. The arrival of death is the end of this exam period. As soon as this period is up, all the things that we had received as part of our exam will be taken away from us and we will be left all alone. This enormously serious situation that all of us will one day face is a warning. It tells every person: “You must prepare now itself for the stage of life after death by leading the right sort of life. If you enter that stage without having made the necessary preparations, you will suddenly find yourself completely without any support. You will discover that whatever you had in this world has been parted from you and that now you have nothing whatsoever of what you require in your new stage of life.”