Death An Inside Story Summary

A Book For All Those Who Shall Die

Introduction

Death; An Inside Story is a book that explores the topic of death and the afterlife uniquely. The book is written in a style that encourages you to entertain the possibility of an existential reality beyond the limited realm of logic and intellect. It encourages you to explore it with an open mind and not decide between true and false when it comes to something that is not in our experience.

The book elaborates on practical preparations one can make for one’s death, how best we can assist someone who is dying, and how we can continue to support their journey even after they have passed away. 

About Sadhguru

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev is an Indian yogi, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of the Isha Foundation, a non-profit organization that offers yoga programs worldwide. He is also a speaker on a variety of spiritual and social issues and has written several books on yoga and inner transformation. Sadhguru’s teachings emphasize self-awareness and self-realization. It aims to help individuals tap into their inner potential and create a more fulfilling life.

StoryShot #1: What Is Death?

Do you know you will die one day? It does not take enormous research, intelligence, or even education to know this, yet we think we have an unlimited lease of life. Death begins in us even before we are born. If you do not take the next inhalation, you will be dead within a few moments because every cell in your body will start screaming for life.

Life and death are constant, and their relationship goes beyond breathing. Death is a fundamental aspect of life that should not be ignored because one small thing can make you go tomorrow morning. Human beings still don’t know anything about death. 

Is Death a Calamity

People think that death is a tragedy, but living their entire lives without experiencing life is a tragedy. If you learn to handle your body and mind properly, life will be a pleasure or joy. People don’t want to die, but if death comes at the right time, it will be a great relief. If you know the relaxation of death when you are alive, life becomes an effortless process.

In some cultures, death is held as something that is to be celebrated, not mourned. For someone who is aware of this possibility, there is no such thing as life and death, and they are not different; they are life in a very intense form.

Stop Inviting Death

Avoiding death is avoiding life, and dodging life is inviting death. People are trying to avoid life because they think it is unsafe, but there is no safety in life itself, and the moment they start seeking security, they naturally become death-oriented.

People want an exciting life, but they think nothing new should happen to them. This is a no-win situation they are creating for themselves because whatever happens in their life, they are still on the profit side.

StoryShot #2: The process of death

According to the Yogic system, memory is an accumulation of impressions, and the most fundamental memory is Elemental Memory. These elements are manifest in all aspects of Creation and are the most fundamental basis of all Creation.

Elemental Memory governs how five elements interact and play out in life, while Atomic Memory governs how atoms and molecules of various physical substances are made and behave. Together, these two types of memory constitute what can be called Inanimate Memory.

The most fundamental layer of memory is Evolutionary Memory, which is made up of the genetic material passed on by your parents. Karmic Memory is an accumulation of all the impressions that you have gathered since birth.

The essential nature of life is that there are two seeds:

• Planted by our parents – It is programmed for certainty. The seed of physicality that was transmitted by our parents has certain rules, traits and compulsions of its own.
• Planted by the Creator – It is programmed for possibility. The Source of Creation gave us itself, and all its possibilities are encapsulated in us.

When a human being is born, certain software is set within. It is a combination of time, energy, and the information that he or she carries with them or from previous lives. This software determines various aspects of one’s life, which we will look at in a bit. 

StoryShot #3: Understanding Life and Death

The outermost periphery of a human being is the physical body, which is made up of five sheaths.

1. The food body is the outermost sheath and is made up of 2.5 or 3 kilograms of food.
2. The Manomaya Kosha, which is the mental body. The mental body is made up of thoughts, emotions, and all the mental processes, both conscious and unconscious.
3.  The Pranamaya Kosha powers and drives the physical and mental bodies.
4. The Vignanamaya Kosha is a transitory body that is neither physical nor non-physical. It is like a link between the two.
5.  The Anandamaya Kosha is beyond the physical nature. When we are in touch with this aspect beyond the physical, we become blissful, and this experience has no form of its own.

When someone drops dead, only their outermost sheaths are lost. The rest of the structure is still intact, and will seek another womb and manifest itself once again in the physical plane.

The Five Vital Energies

The five basic dimensions of prana are called Pancha Vayus or Pancha Pranas. They govern life and the separation of the physical body happens at death.

1.  Samat Prana or Samana Vayu is in charge of maintaining the temperature of your body. By activating this Prana, you can create a shield around yourself so that the external elements don’t bother you so much any more.
2. Prana Vayu is in charge of your respiratory process and your thought process. Prana Vayu is related to the Earth, which is the only planet in the solar system with an active intellect.
3.  Udana Vayu means to fly. Yogic practices can help you activate this prana and make you less available to gravity.
4. Apana Vayu is in charge of your excretory system and the sensory function. If the excretory system is not efficient, the body becomes impure, and this inertia will slowly be transmitted to the mind.
5. Vyana Vayu is the aspect of prana that knits all these billions of cells into one organism. This is why Tibetan monks’ bodies do not decay for months after their death. 

StoryShot #4: The Gateways of Exit

The pranic system in the body comprises 114 energy channels and their points of intersection, known as chakras. The activation of these chakras greatly determines the quality of life led by the person. People on the Yogic path can simply sit in the open and leave because they know the science of how to leave the body.

• For a very gross person or someone leaving in fear, the Muladhara Chakra is the most likely place they will exit the body.
• One who exits through the Swadhishthana Chakra can be reborn with extraordinary creative prowess, a genius of organization, a great business person or a great general, or a sensitive poet or devotee who can inspire many.
• If someone exits through the Vishuddhi Chakra, they will possess incredible perception of this world and the beyond, as well as an absolute sense of dispassion and fearless involvement in all aspects of life.
• When one leaves the body through their Sahasrara Chakra , from the top of their head, it means that they were fully conscious.

StoryShot #5: The Quality of Death

In recent times, there has been growing awareness about the quality of death, and people are creating ‘death goals’ as well. However, they are working with a very superficial understanding of the quality of death, as such.

In India, deaths were classified according to how they occurred. This has an impact on what happens after death and what kind of assistance can be provided to the person who has died.

In a natural death, the information that runs the life runs out, and the person becomes feeble. The person’s last few moments become peaceful, wonderful, and perceptive because they are not being forced out of their body.

When you are eighty and still want to romance someone, your Prarabdha Karma will not run out. If you live to be a hundred and still want to sit on the street side and watch women walking by, your Prarabdha Karma will not run out.

There is another kind of death, called Iccha Mrutyu, which is the transcendence of the cycle of birth and death. This is considered the highest kind of death, and is the ultimate goal for every spiritual seeker.

Predictions of Death

People often ask astrologers and fortune-tellers how long they will live and when they will die. If life follows a certain rationale, then it is possible to predict death. It is very limited and highly exaggerated.

One’s death is usually set in relation to one’s solar cycles, which are approximately twelve years each. If you have the necessary perception and look at a person, you can easily determine which segment of the solar cycle he or she will go in. There are many Indian historical stories where people have chosen a certain time to go. Bhishma, for example, hung around until his solar segment came.

Predictions are basically estimates of the probability of an event occurring, based on certain things, which could turn out to be accurate. With elaborate calculations, one can say how many years your body will last. But if you start doing Inner Engineering, you can surprise the guy making the prediction.

Certain animals can sense death, including dogs, cats, cobras, and many other carnivorous animals. Human beings can also develop a keen sense of smell for these kinds of things. Modern science has found that humans have a unique ‘death smell’ which can be used to train dogs to find human cadavers. You can smell a ghost because it is just a subtle physical form that can be smelled. Dogs can do this, too, and they start barking when they smell a ghost.

StoryShot #6: Understanding Suicide

Suicide has become a growing epidemic of our times, with more people dying of suicide than homicide and war put together. There is no good or bad reason to commit suicide, people just need a reason, and they can make any reason a good enough one.

Most people feel suicidal because life isn’t happening the way they want. If you understand that you are nothing, you will be glad that things are happening to whatever extent they are, and that everything is working out well.

People commit suicide because they don’t know how to handle life. They are trapped in a situation they don’t know how to handle, so they think the best thing to do is end life.

About 5 percent of people commit suicide because of incurable diseases, 2 – 3 percent because they are trapped in horrible situations, and 10 – 15 percent because they feel trapped in a society that is ruled by money. About 20 percent of people who commit suicide are being tortured by the world, and they need to be treated compassionately.

Succour for the Suicidal

When people think they have a God-given purpose, they become too important in their own thought process and become tyrants, who cause pain to themselves and everyone else. So don’t be stupefied by your own psychological drama.

People who threaten to commit suicide are doing it only to get attention. If you approve of this, then every time there is a little difficulty, people will try to kill themselves. 

The Consequences of Suicide

For a person to die suicide is a terrible way to go, but in terms of life, it does not matter how they broke their body, because the Prarabdha Karma was still on. It matters how one worked towards death, whether a smoker, drinker, or drug addict because the existential has no moral compass. It is about life and the ingredients of life, not about social or psychological judgments.

You need to understand that when you kill the physical body, you are only killing the Annamaya Kosha and the conscious parts of the Manomaya Kosha. You cannot end the body completely, because the subtler portions need something else altogether. If your suicide is timed such that your Prarabdha Karma is almost over, then it is as good as a natural death. If you don’t live properly, you will get a disease and die.

StoryShot #7: Preparing for a good death

If death is inevitable, why spend time and energy preparing for it? Death is the very last moment of your life, so make it happen most gracefully and wonderfully.

Most people create fear at the moment of death. With a little bit of preparation, guidance, and even a bit of help, it is possible to untie the knots of everything that has accumulated at that final moment.  People on the spiritual path often choose the time, date, and place of their death. If they have created the necessary awareness within themselves, they can leave the body consciously and walk away without damaging it.

Sleep, Ojas, and Death

There are certain preparations for death that one can do, involving sleep and the generation of ojas. The Shiva – Shakti principle states that everything in the physical Universe has to go through this cycle of dynamism and inertia.

Sleep is like death, in that you wake up with the same old goddamn body, but you go to sleep and wake up to find the body has shrunk. If you can move from wakefulness to sleep while remaining fully conscious, you may get off the bus.

You can try this with your sleep tonight. If you can be aware at the moment you are going from wakefulness to sleep, you will be awake in your sleep, and if you can bring some quality to those last few moments, that quality will continue.

StoryShot #8: Why Do People Fear Death?

Dead bodies are absolutely safe, yet people are afraid of them. You did not come with your body, you only gathered it. If you overate and gathered a lot of body during the next few weeks and then worked out and dropped some of it, you wouldn’t call it death, you would be happy and relieved.

Life is a term loan from a bank that you must pay back. With some tricks, you can extend the term to twelve years, fifteen years, or twenty years, but no one has stretched life that much until now.

How to Deal with the Fear of Death

Right now, you are limited to this body, and you fear losing it. If you explore other dimensions of experience, however, the body will become an easy thing to handle, and life or death will not make such a big difference.

Confronting your fear of death can bring tremendous clarity and transformation in one’s life. Fear is not a situation, it is a consequence of a certain situation within you. You have to take charge of your physiological and psychological processes.

There are certain practices that you can still do and certain kinds of ambiances that you can create around you so that you can gradually take control of your faculties even at the moment of death. One of them is to remind yourself about death. Shoonya meditation is not an implant but reminds you of death. If you practice this twice a day, every day, you will no longer fear death. 

StoryShot #9: Assistance for the Dying   

The Laying Out of the Body

Even after death, it is good to place the body in a north-south alignment, with the head to the north. This will help the dead person to not linger around the space trying to get back into the body. When you place the body in a north-south alignment, the being will be pulled away from the body, and a certain distance arises between the being and the body.

Tying the Big Toes Together

The next thing to do after death is to tie the big toes together because the body is still trying to draw energy from the outside. If you put your big toes together, your Muladhara Chakra and anal outlet will always be tightly closed. This is because an open Muladhara Chakra and anal outlet can cause negative situations.

Washing and Clothing the Body

In certain communities in India, the first thing they do after someone dies is stripping the body naked and wash the body with water. This is done to facilitate the complete withdrawal of life from the body.

Things Not to Do

There are some things you should not do around a dead body, such as sleeping near it. Death is a process that is still on for quite some time. Food will draw the life energies from a dead body and if you cook or eat near a dead body, you will be eating your own relative in some way. Eating makes a person vulnerable to influences, so you must bring down the number of times you eat so that you retain the integrity of the system. Avoid unnecessary touching of the dead body.

To Burn or Bury

In India, agricultural families bury their dead, while Kshatriya families burn their dead. If you understand life very well, you can exit the body completely, gather everything and leave. You can also be buried, and the energies left behind can be used by other people.

Spreading the Ashes

After death, the being can take up to forty days to completely leave the body. To eliminate this, the ashes are spread out as widely as possible to make the being understand that it is over. 

StoryShot #10: Grief and Mourning

Grief is just about your incompleteness. People can be in grief even without anyone’s death because people will suffer more if they lose all their money or sustenance than if they lose their spouse, parent, or child. 

Grief can also have an existential basis to it, but this is only in those cases where a parent has lost a child below twenty-one years of age. Beyond that, it is just purely psychological.

Going beyond Grief

You must understand that your connection with people is very physical. You may have emotions attached to it, but they don’t mean anything on an existential plane. When someone dies, people think they must forsake their enmity with that person and nurture their friendship. This is stupid because after ten years you will forget them and you will eat well, laugh, make merry, and do everything. 

We must decide in our lives whether we want truth that is liberating or fancy lies that give solace. When death happens, it is time to look back and cherish what has been.

Mourning Period

The death of a person can affect another individual, depending upon the strength of the runanubandha. It is very much possible that someone who has strong runanubandha with you is in some distress or has died.

In India, people who are genealogically related to the dead person in a particular way are supposed to avoid going to temples or participating in social events or celebrations for forty days. This is because in ancient times, kulas were maintained and sustained primarily by creating Kula Devata. When kulas were maintained, everyone in the kula could benefit from one person praying or doing a big ritual, whether they were physically present in that space.

For thousands of years, people maintained their genetic track in their own way, but today, the genetic material of people is all mixed up, and society has changed. So maintaining those kinds of things is irrelevant, but there was a deep science with immense benefits in it. 

StoryShot #11: The life of a Ghosts

Ghosts are a part of the folklore of every culture in the world, but you do not understand how they came into existence or why they are even around. A ghost has a manifestation but not a body, so its memory body is still strong. Everyone is a ghost, and all beings are playing out their lives only as per their karmic structures.

They can be felt or even seen more easily, but their existence is considered undesirable because it can extend for a long time. Ghosts cannot have conscious intention because the intellect is gone, but they can function by tendency. If you happen to see ghosts, you may get paranoid because of your own inhibitions and limitations, but it has nothing to do with that being.

Ghost Troubles

Though most claims about ghost hearing and seeing are psychological projections of individual people, there is a reality beyond the physical body. Disembodied beings are incapable of holding any intentions of their own, but they can harm a person by possessing someone or by creating certain fearful situations that can be fatal.

These beings can’t possess anyone they wish, unless there is a sense of vulnerability in that person. If a person is well established, all these things will not have any power over them, but if they appear in very distorted forms, they can kill a person psychologically.

One of the things not to do is to wear metal rings on your thumb. It attracts certain forces that you may not be able to handle, and could easily bring illness, accidents or just a severe disturbance to one’s life.

 StoryShot #12: Exploring Past Lives

In the spiritual communities, past-life connections are a big-time hallucination. If you find out about your past life, and it sheds light on all the horrible things you did to me in my past life, will you become free from it, or will you become more resolved about bothering you in this life?

Children below three to six months of age remember their past lives because the memory screens between lifetimes are not set up yet. They go with whoever is nice to them because their personality has not been established yet. Breastfeeding helps establish the child’s memory cycle that this is where their life is, and it is possible that this could translate into unexplained levels of confusion in all matters of life.

Right now, most people are not able to handle what is happening in this life and the memories of this life, so why do they want to dig into their previous lives? If the past opens up, so many emotions of love, hate, resentment and affection may happen.

You are counting two things – love and affection – as positive, but actually all of them are negative, because they are happening compulsively. You should learn to respond consciously, to bring yourself to a level where your response is unbridled and seamless.

The past and the future are problems; if they open up, they will only entangle you deeper in terms of moving towards mukti, or liberation. Mukti is the aspiration of this creature to become the Creation itself.

Final Summary and Review

Rating

We rate Death; An Inside Story 4.3/5. 

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