Just think: you are sitting by the side of your beloved holding her hand and suddenly a messenger comes and says that within five minutes you are going to die. The beloved will disappear, she will not be there at all. Your hand may still be in the hand of your woman, but your hand will not feel anything at all. Your hand will be a dead hand. You will become cold, all warmth will disappear. Death is coming. Who can think of love?

That’s why only young people can afford to be in love – death seems to be far away, very distant. If it is going to happen, it is so far away there is no need to worry about it. As you grow old, love becomes difficult because death is coming closer in many ways. Your hairs are turning gray, your face is getting wrinkles, your body is becoming weak, you are losing something every day. And whatsoever you lose cannot be reclaimed again. You are dying. As you become old, love seems to be almost impossible. And if old people are always thinking about young people as fools, they have a reason to think so. The reason is, they can now see the foolishness of love.

When death is there, love is foolish, love is absurd. If there is no death then love is possible, then love is beautiful. If death is there, what is the point of love? It is only a kind of hallucination. Maybe love is a natural drug that your body secretes; it is chemical.

The old man starts thinking – as his juices start getting drier and drier, as he starts becoming a desert, he also becomes very wise and he starts thinking that love is foolish and stupid. Only young people are so foolish that they can think of love, otherwise what is the point? He can’t see any beauty anywhere any longer. He starts seeing people as skeletons, he starts seeing people as rotten bodies, as dirty things. How can you fall in love with skeletons?

Just think of your beloved as a skeleton, and hug the skeleton. Just think of the bones…. No, you need youth to befool you – that’s what the old man starts thinking. He is dying, and when death enters from one door, love disappears through another.

That’s why I say Kabir’s statement is strange and of immense value. He says:

The darkness of night is coming along fast,
and the shadows of love close in the body and the mind.

Chhavai prem tan-man men.

“My body and mind are getting overflooded with love.” This is how one should die. If death destroys your love then you have not known real love; then you were really in delusion, that love was not true love. Then you have not yet found your beloved, then you have not seen the divine in your beloved. Otherwise, as death comes closer, you will feel full of love – overflooded, overflowing.

Why? Because now you as a separate entity are going to disappear completely into the beloved. Then death is no more death, but God. And this is the miracle of meditation, that it transforms death into God. And if meditation can transform death into God, what to say about life? It naturally transforms life into great ecstasy.