And if you accept it gradually, then you will be continuously in pain and suffering. If you accept it without any complaint, not in helplessness but in understanding, it becomes suchness. Then you are no longer worried, then there is no problem – because the problem was arising not because of the fact, but because you couldn’t accept it the way it was happening. You wanted it to follow you.

Remember, life is not going to follow you, you have to follow life – grudgingly, happily, that’s your choice. If you follow grudgingly you will be in suffering. If you follow happily you become a buddha, your life becomes an ecstasy.

Buddha also has to die – things won’t change – but he dies in a different way. He dies so happily, as if there is no death. He simply disappears, because he says a thing which is born is going to die. Birth implies death, so it is okay, nothing can be done about it.

You can be miserable and die: then you miss the point, the beauty that death can give to you, the grace that happens in the last moment, the illumination that happens when body and soul part. You will miss that because you are so much worried, and you are so much clinging to the past and to the body that your eyes are closed. You cannot see what is happening because you cannot accept it, so you close your eyes, you close your whole being. You die. You will die many times, and you will go on missing the point of it.

Death is beautiful if you can accept, if you can open the door with a welcoming heart, a warm reception: “Yes, because if I am born I am to die. So the day has come, the circle becomes complete.” You receive death as a guest, a welcome guest, and the quality of the phenomenon changes immediately.

Suddenly you are deathless: the body is dying, you are not dying. You can see now: only the clothes are dropping, not you; only the cover, the container, not the content. The consciousness remains in its illumination – more so because in life many were the covers on it, in death it is naked. And when consciousness is in total nakedness it has a splendor of its own; it is the most beautiful thing in the world.

But for that, an attitude of suchness has to be imbibed. When I say imbibed, I mean imbibed – not just a mental thought, not the philosophy of suchness, but your whole way of life becomes suchness. You don’t even think about it, it simply becomes natural.

You eat in suchness, you sleep in suchness, you breathe in suchness, you love in suchness, you weep in suchness. It becomes your very style; you need not bother about it, you need not think about it, it is the way you are. That is what I mean by the word imbibe. You imbibe it, you digest it, it flows in your blood, it goes deep in your bones, it reaches to the very beat of your heart. You accept.