On Death in the Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita, translates as The Song of God and is a classic spiritual text of India.  It is embedded in the epic The Mahabharat which tells of the story of the Avatar Lord Krishna. Translations used here for the Bhagavad Gita is that of Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, published by Signet Classics.  Original copyright of The Vedanta Society of Southern California.

The greatest transition we make is from life to death.  In this post, I am examining what this particular spiritual text offers us in the way of knowledge of this most crucial passage.

Chapter 2 The Yoga of Knowledge (P. 44)

Death is certain for the born.  Rebirth is certain for the dead.  You should not grieve for what is unavoidable.

Before birth, beings are not manifest to our human senses.  In the interim between birth and death, they are manifest.  At death they return to the unmanifest again.  What is there in all this to grieve over?

Chapter 7 Knowledge and Experience (P. 85)

Men take refuge in me, to escape from the fear of old age and death.  Thus they come to know Brahman, and the entire nature of the Atman, and the creative energy which is Brahman. Knowing me, they understand the nature of the relative world and the individual man, and of God who presides over all action.  Even at the hour of death, they continue to know me thus.  In that hour, their whole consciousness is made one with mine.

Chapter 8 The Way to Eternal Brahman

(P.87-88)

At the hour of death, when a man leaves his body, he must depart with his consciousness absorbed in me.  Then he will be united with me.  Be certain of that.  Whatever a man remembers at the last, when he is leaving the body will be realized by him in the hereafter; because that will be what his mind has most constantly dwelt on, during this life.


(P. 89)

When man leaves his body and departs, he must close all the doors of the senses.  Let him hold the mind firmly within the shrine of the heart, and fix the life-force between the eye-brows.  Then let him take refuge in steady concentration, uttering the sacred syllable OM and meditating upon me.  Such a man reaches the highest goal.  When a yogi has meditated upon me unceasingly for many years, with an undistracted mind, I am easy access to him, because he is always absorbed in me. Great souls who find me have found the highest perfection.  They are no longer reborn into this condition of transience and pain. All the worlds, and even the heavenly realm of Brahma, are subject to the laws of rebirth.  But, for the man who comes to me, there is no returning.

Love and Death

. . .from Chapter 4 Love and Death, in Love and Will by Rollo May

The confrontation with death - and the reprieve from it - makes everything look so precious, so sacred, so beautiful that I feel more strongly than ever, the impulse to love it, to embrace it, and to let myself be overwhelmed by it. My river has never looked so beautiful . . .Death, and its ever present possibility makes love, passionate love, more possible. I wonder if we could love passionately, if ecstasy would be possible at all, if we knew we'd never die.

from a letter by Abraham Maslow, written while recuperating from a heart attack...        

. . . To love is to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive  ---to grief, sorrow and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before. . . .

When we "fall" in love, as the expressive verb puts it, the world shakes and changes us, not only in the way it looks but in our whole experience of what we are doing in the world.  Generally, the shaking is consciously felt in its positive aspects--as the wonderful new heaven and earth which love with its miracle and mystery has suddenly produced.  Love is the answer, we sing. Aside from the banality of such reassurances, our Western culture seems to be engaged in a romantic--albeit desperate--conspiracy to enforce the illusion that that is all there is to eros.  The very strength of the effort to support that illusion betrays the presence of the repressed, opposing pole.

This opposing element is the consciousness of death.  For death is always the shadow of the delight of love.  In faint adumbration there is present the dread, haunting question, Will this new relationship destroy us? When we love, we give up the centre of ourselves.We are thrown from our previous state of existence into a void; and though we hope to attain a new world, a new existence, we can never be sure.  Nothing looks the same, and may well never look the same again. The world is annihilated; how can we ever know whether it will be built up again? We give, and give up, our own centre; how shall we know that we will get it back? We wake up to find the whole world shaking: where or when will it come to rest?

The  most excruciating joy is accompanied by the consciousness of the imminence of death--and with the same intensity. And it seems that one is not possible without the other.

. . . Sex and death have in common the fact that they are two biological aspects of the mysterium tremendum.  Mystery--defined here as a situation in which the data impinge on the problem--has its ultimate meaning in these two human experiences. Both are related to creation and destruction; and it is therefore, scarcely surprising that in human experience, they are interwoven in such complex ways. In both, we are taken over by an event; we cannot stand outside either love or death--and, if we try to, we destroy whatever value the experience can have.