What you call as ‘my body’ is just a bit of loan that you have taken from Mother Earth, just a piece of the planet. She’s pretty generous with the loan; but when the time comes, she wants to collect it atom by atom. What is being perceived as death is just this. But most people who have taken a loan, unless there was a law to compel them, they wouldn’t want to pay back the loan. It’s a general tendency in the world.

You are terrorized because you think you are being taken away. You are not being taken away. What Mother Earth is asking back is only the piece of planet that you gathered in the form of this body. If only you were constantly aware – not just intellectually – that “I am not this body, this is just mine, this is just a gathering; I’ve accumulated this, I’ll use it, and when it’s necessary, I’ll drop it” – if this awareness was there all the time in your life, death would be just like changing clothes.

The question is only if you are willing or unwilling – but whichever way, the loan will be collected. If you are a yogi, you will pay it back gracefully. If you are an ignorant person, they will confiscate your property  because you are illegally holding it beyond a certain time. So, what happens after? Your physical body has to go to the earth because it belongs to the earth. But there is a subtler body which is like a scaffolding. Only because the subtle body is there as a scaffolding, you can build this gross body. You eat a banana, a piece of bread or brinjal, and it becomes body because there is a subtler scaffolding. The physical body is gathering around the subtler body. When the physical body falls, the subtle or etheric body is still on. It still has some information.

Soul is eternity…