Death has a right on our physical body. We can’t stop it from consuming its due, but we don’t have to give it more than that. Let’s understand what this means.

We exist at three levels: physical, mental and spiritual. Among these levels, death has no right over our spiritual existence. For the soul death is an inconsequential event, like the discarding of old clothes. When we don’t know our spiritual identity, we assume that we are our bodies. So death seems like the destruction of our entire self, a feeling that, the Gita (02.19) indicates, arises from ignorance.

Does death have a right over our mental existence? No, but we often give it that right unnecessarily. 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 remembering Krishna internally and by serving him externally. If we practice such devotional engagement daily and diligently, our mind will gradually 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 daily devotional service, we can prevent death from taking more than its due.

Bhagavad Gita Chapter 02, Text 19

Neither he who thinks the living entity the slayer nor he who thinks it slain is in knowledge, for the self slays not nor is slain.

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