02.19 – Are we giving death more than its due quota?

Our physical body is the due quota of death. We can’t stop death from consuming its quota. But we don’t have to give it more than its due.

We exist at three levels: physical, mental and spiritual. Among these levels, our spiritual existence is outside the quota of death. For the soul death is a non-event, like the discarding of old clothes. When we don’t know our spiritual identity, we assume that we are our bodies. So death feels like the destruction of our entire self, a feeling that the Gita (2.19) indicates is ignorant.

Does our mental existence fall in the quota of death? It doesn’t have to, but it usually does. The mind being constituted of subtle matter is not destroyed when the physical body is destroyed by death. But practically because we let ourselves be infatuated by fantasies of physical pleasures, our mind gets attached to and entangled in the physical body. Due to this attachment, we are mentally devastated by death; we feel as if we are losing all that we have lived for. As long as we give physical pleasures more than their due, we will be forced to give death more than its due.

Fortunately, we don’t have to give physical pleasures more than their due. We can satisfy our thirst for happiness by devotedly fixing our mind on remembering and serving Krishna. By such daily disciplined devotional service, our mind will become free from infatuation with physical pleasures. It will become situated more and more on the spiritual platform and so will be less and less affected by events at the physical level like death.

Thus, by diligently giving Krishna our due quota of daily devotional service, we can prevent death from taking more than its due quota.