ACCORDING TO THE YOGAVASISHTHA

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Death And After

(ACCORDING TO THE YOGAVASISHTHA)

 

Lila said: “Tell me in short, Goddess Sarasvati, something more with regard to death, as to whether it is happy or painful to die and what becomes of people after they are dead and gone from here.”

 

The Goddess replied: “Dying men are of three sorts and have different results upon their death. They are, those who are ignorant, and such as are versed in Yoga, and those that are abstemious and religious.

 

“Those practising the Dharana Yoga may go wherever they like, after leaving their bodies, and so the reasonable Yogi is at liberty to roam everywhere. (It consists in mental meditation and bodily patience and endurance.)

 

“He who has not practised the Dharana Yoga nor applied himself to acquisition of knowledge, nor has certain reservoir of virtues for the future, is called the ignorant lot and meets with the pains and penalties of death.

 

“He, whose mind is uncontrolled and full of desires and worldly cares and anxieties, becomes as distressed as a lotus torn from its stalk; in fact, it is the subjugation of inordinate passions and destruction of inordinate desires and anxieties, which ensure our true felicity.

 

“The mind that is not guided by the edicts of the Sastras, nor purified by holiness, but given up to the society of the wicked, is subjected to the burning sensation of fire within himself at the moment of death.

 

“At the moment when the last gurgling of throat chokes the breath, the eyesight is dimmed and the countenance fades away, then the Jivatman also becomes hazy in its intellect.

 

“A deep darkness pervades the dimming sight and then starts to twinkle before it in day-light. The sky appears to be obscured by clouds, and presents a gloomy aspect.

 

“An acute pain traverses the whole frame and a fata morgana dances before the vision; the earth is turned to air and the mid-air seems to be the habitation of the dying person.

 

“The firmament revolves before him, and the tide of the sea seems to bear him away. He is now lifted up in the air, and now hurled down as in a state of dream.

 

“Now he thinks as if he is falling in a dark pit and then as lying in the valley of a hill; he wants to tell aloud his sufferings, but his speech fails him.

 

“He now finds himself as falling down from the sky and now is whirled in the air or wind. He is now riding swiftly as in a car, and now finds himself melting as snow.

 

“He desires to acquaint his friends of the torments of life and this world; but he is carried away from them as rapidly as by an aeroplane.

 

“He whirls about as by a rotary machine or turning wheel and is dragged along like a beast by its halter. He moves about as in an eddy and is carried around as the machine of some engine.

 

“He is borne in the air as a straw, and is carried about as a cloud by the winds. He soars high like a vapour, and then falls down like a heavy watery cloud pouring out in the sea.

 

“He passes through the endless space and revolves there, to find as it were, a place free from changes to which the earth and the ocean are subject, (i.e., a place of peace and rest).

 

“Thus the rising and falling spirit roves interruptedly, and the soul breathing hard sets the whole body in sore pain and agony.

 

“By degrees, the object of his senses becomes as faint as his failing organs, as the landscape fades to view at the setting of the sun.

 

“He loses the memory of the past and present, is at a loss to know the quarters, after the evening twilight has passed away.

 

“In his fits of fainting, his mind loses its powers of thinking; and he is lost in a state of nescience at the loss of all his thought and sensibility.

 

“In the state of faintness, the vital breath ceases to circulate through the body; and at the utter stoppage of its circulation, there ensues a collapse much like swooning.

 

“When this state of apoplexy joined with delirium has reached its climax, the body becomes as stiff as stone by the law of inertia, ordained for living beings from the beginning.”