Everything returns to its original source, has to return to its original source. If you understand life then you understand death also. Life is a forgetfulness of the original source, and death is again a remembrance. Life is going away from the original source, death is coming back home. Death is not ugly, death is beautiful. But death is beautiful only for those who have lived their life unhindered, uninhibited, unsuppressed. Death is beautiful only for those who have lived their life beautifully, who have not been afraid to live, who have been courageous to live – who loved, who danced, who celebrated.

Death becomes the ultimate celebration if your life is a celebration. Let me tell you in this way: whatsoever your life is, death reveals only that. If you have been miserable in life, death reveals misery. Death is a great revealer. If you have been happy in your life, death reveals happiness. If you have lived only a life of physical comfort and physical pleasure, then of course death is going to be very uncomfortable and unpleasant because the body has to be left. The body is just a temporary abode, a serai in which we stay for the night and have to leave in the morning. It is not your permanent abode, it is not your home.

So if you have lived just a bodily life and you have never known anything beyond the body, death is going to be very, very ugly, unpleasant, painful. Death is going to be an anguish. But if you have lived a little higher than the body – if you have loved music and poetry, and you have loved, and you have looked at the flowers and the stars, and something of the non-physical has entered into your consciousness – death will not be so bad, death will not be so painful. You can take it with equanimity, but still it cannot be a celebration.

If you have lived something of the transcendental in yourself, if you have entered your own nothingness at the center, the center of your being – where you are no more a body and no more a mind; where physical pleasures are completely left far away and mental pleasures also: the pleasures of music and poetry and literature and painting; everything is left far away, you are simply just pure awareness, consciousness – then death is going to be a great celebration, a great understanding, a great revelation.

If you have known anything of the transcendental in you, death will reveal to you the transcendental in the universe – then death is no more a death but a meeting with existence, a date with existence.

So you can find three expressions about death in the history of human mind. One expression is of the ordinary man who lives attached to his body, who has never known anything greater than the pleasure of food or sex, whose whole life has been nothing but food and sex, who has enjoyed food, has enjoyed sex, whose life has been very primitive, whose life has been very gross, who has lived in the porch of his palace, never entered it, and who had been thinking that this is all life is. Then at the moment of death he will try to cling. He will resist death, he will fight death. Death will come as the enemy.