I was attending a Hindu wedding once, and the priest did not know, you know, what chants there should be, you know, for a marriage ceremony. So half of the chants were of a death ceremony. [Laughter] I recognized them. I recognized them and then after the ceremony was over I called the priest aside and said, «What the hell were you doing there? Do you know what this means or what that means or that means?» You know, apart from these priests, the whole theories behind this: that to the priest you must give, as a gift, a calf as a donation

What really happens is this: that when you die your conscious mind is not there any more, only the subtle mind is there, containing all the impressions. So at the time of death, when the conscious mind merges into the subconscious mind, then all the impressions are carried forward.

So the dead person is as living as you are living. It has life as you have life, but in a different dimension. That is the only difference. It develops a greater clarity of mind, the departed soul’s mind, or the soul itself rather, because without that clarity it can’t determine its next birth.

Because each and every child, finding the propergenetic combinations, the chromosomes and all that business, takes birth through a vehicle. Now why all these children look different is because these different genetic combinations bring out certain characteristics of the samskaras of that particular soul when it is reborn.

Beloved Guruji, my question is about the care for the dying, and also about the caring for the soul after death. The Tibetans read The Tibetan Book of the Dead with the idea of accompanying or helping the soul with the different transitions it goes through during the first hours after death. For us, are prayers and beautiful thoughts of love in any way helpful to the departing soul, or is that more to help those help those who have been left here?

There’s a little story, I don’t know if I told it here in England, that King Akbar, the great ruler in India, wanted to find the happiest man on earth.

So start from the dual aspect and this starting comes not by mental analysis that ‘I accept this’.

But how could that mind ever comprehend, how could the wave ever comprehend the vastness of the ocean by analytical means, by the head? No. It is to be realised by the heart, the core of the personality and then the wave will know the value of the ocean.