The Bhagavad-gita (13.09) indicates that the wise contemplate seriously the inevitability of death in our present existence. The Gita integrates this pessimistic-seeming contemplation into an optimistic worldview that explains how all of us, as eternal spiritual beings, have a right to immortality. We have lost that right because of being covered by materialistic passions and pursuits, just as people lose the right to see because of being covered by blindfolds.
Just as blindfolded people find blindness unnatural, we find our vulnerability to death unnatural. This conflict between our aspiration for immortality and our perception of mortality – like the conflict between the blindfolded people’s longing to see and awareness of their inability to see – has the potential to spur us into spiritual action for reclaiming our immortality.
Unfortunately, we neglect this conflict by subconsciously denying our mortality; we imagine that we will not die, at least not in the near future. Our lack of concern about our mortality perpetuates our self-imposed death sentence. We are like blindfolded people who deny that they have blindfolds and so do nothing to remove them, despite having the power to do so.
We have the power to remove the blindfolds, that is, rise beyond the death sentence. How? By raising our consciousness to the spiritual level. Death can destroy only our material body, not us as souls. By practicing devotional service, we can go entirely beyond the arena of death. When by sustained devotional practices we develop our love for Krishna, we can attain his eternal abode that death can never reach.
Bhagavad Gita Chapter 13 Text 09
“Humility; pridelessness; nonviolence; tolerance; simplicity; approaching a bona fide spiritual master; cleanliness; steadiness; self-control; renunciation of the objects of sense gratification; absence of false ego; the perception of the evil of birth, death, old age and disease; detachment; freedom from entanglement with children, wife, home and the rest; even-mindedness amid pleasant and unpleasant events; constant and unalloyed devotion to Me; aspiring to live in a solitary place; detachment from the general mass of people; accepting the importance of self-realization; and philosophical search for the Absolute Truth – all these I declare to be knowledge, and besides this whatever there may be is ignorance.”
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