The Illusion of Freedom

The Other Side of Death “If I had stayed alive a few days more, I would have destroyed this rulership that has repeatedly taken me away from truth. The truth is that one act of goodness is better than the whole of rulership. But I realized this only when Death took me in its grip.” Most people who are conventionally thought of as ‘successful’ in this world, have died feeling that they were the most unsuccessful of all. If whatever happens to a man when he nears death happened before, his life would have been totally transformed. Whenever anyone stands near death, the dazzling delights of the world, which he was so taken up with that he had no time for anything else, appear to him as even more unreal than a heap of ashes. Behind him is a world that he has lost and has left forever, while in front of him is a world for which he has made no preparations at all. There is absolutely no use remembering death only when it is about to overtake you. The time for remembering death is before this, when you are capable of doing evil and trying to legitimize it as good. But people are not willing to think about death then. At that time, they will do everything to satisfy their egos that they ought not to do. But when they lose all their strength and when they realize that they are in the grips of the unrelenting Angel of Death, they finally remember their mistakes. But the time for such remembrance is not while facing death, but, rather, it is when they are making those mistakes and are not ready to listen to anyone’s counsel.