By Sadhguru – Founder, Isha Foundation

Sadhguru: You have no first-hand experience of death; you never met a dead person; nor did you at anytime see a dead person, you only saw dead bodies; you never met somebody who died and came back and who told you about their death.

So you have not heard it, you have not seen it, you have not experienced it. But still, somewhere you started believing that there is something called ‘death.’ Death is a fiction created by ignorant people. Death is the creation of the ignorant and unaware. If you are aware, it is life, life and life alone.

If one has to experience the eternal nature of life, one must kill death. If death is alive, then there is no eternal life. Only when you put death to death, there is eternal life. If we look at life and death as a happening in terms of your experience, one thing that we can look at is your breath. Your inhalation is life, your exhalation is death.

When life began for you as you know it today, when you were born as a child, the first thing that the child does is: one gasp of an inhalation. And, if you look at your life, what is the last thing you are going to do? You may say, ‘No, I am going to think about God. I am going to say, Shiva.’ No. The last thing that you will do is exhalation. You exhale now; if you do not take the next inhalation that means you are dead.

Right now I want you to experiment and see. You take one big exhalation and one big inhalation and see how your body and your mind is. You will find the exhalation to be more relaxing. In fact, whenever you get tensed up, when things build up too much in you, the natural mechanism in the body wants to exhale. This is what you call as a sigh. It relaxes                             you a little bit.

It relaxes you a little bit. If your mind had not banished death as evil, if your traditions and cultures had not taught you that death is evil — it should be avoided — you would breathe in a completely different way. Right now, if you observe, for almost ninety-nine percent of the people, their exhalation is never complete. Because their mind has rejected death, their exhalation will not happen totally. They will inhale, but exhalation does not happen totally. This is one of the reasons why, over a period of time, you build up so much tension within the system that it is reaching a point of snapping, mentally and physiologically.

So between life and death — life needs a certain tension, otherwise you cannot keep it going. Death is utter relaxation. In the very process of life, if you know the relaxation of death, then life is an utterly effortless process.

[Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, a yogi, is a visionary, humanitarian and a prominent spiritual leader. An author, poet and internationally-renowned speaker, Sadhguru’s wit and piercing logic provoke and widen our perception of life. www.ishafoundation.org]