The very word death is a taboo word, more taboo than sex. Sex has by and by become almost acceptable. Now death also needs a Freud to make it accepted, so that it is no more a taboo and people can talk about it and people can share their experiences about it. And then there is no need to hide it and there is no need to force people to live against themselves. In hospitals, in old people’s homes, people are simply hanging on because the society, the culture, the law, won’t allow them to die. And if they ask that they should be allowed to die, it looks as if they are asking for suicide. They are not asking for suicide, in fact, they have become dead corpses; they are a living suicide and they are asking to be got rid of it – because the length is not the meaning, how long you live is not the point. How deeply you live, how intensely you live, how totally you live, the quality…

Science is concerned about quantity; religion is concerned about quality. Religion is concerned with the art of how to live life and how to die life. Seven years, seventy years or seven hundred years – what difference will it make? You will go on repeating the same vicious circle again and again and again. You will simply get more and more bored.

So change the focus of your being. Learn how to live each moment and learn how to die each moment, because both are together. If you know how to die each moment, you will be able to live each moment – fresh, young, virgin. Die to the past. Don’t allow it to interfere with your present. The moment you have passed from it, let it be no more there. It is no longer there; it only goes on in your memory, it is just a remembrance. Let this remembrance also be released. This psychological hang-up should not be allowed.

I am not saying that you should forget everything that you know. I am not saying that all memory is bad. It has technical uses. You have to know how to drive, you have to know where your home is; you have to recognize your wife and your children. But those are not psychological hang-ups. When you come home of course you recognize that this is your wife. This is factual memory – useful, enhances life, facilitates it. But if you come home and you look at your wife with all the past experiences with her, then that is a psychological hang-up. Yesterday she was angry, now again you look with that memory in between, your eyes are clouded by that memory. The day before yesterday she was sad or nasty and nagging – now if you look through all these psychological impressions, then you are not looking at the woman who is right now standing in front of you. You are looking at someone who is not there, you are seeing someone who does not exist. You are looking at a ghost – she is not your wife. And she may also be looking at you in the same way.

So ghosts meet, and realities remain separate. Ghosts are married and realities are divorced. Then these two ghosts will make love, these two ghosts will fight, quarrel, and do a thousand and one things, and the realities will be far, far away. There will be no contact; realities will not have any connection. And then there can be no communication, there can be no dialogue. Only realities can love. Ghosts can only make impotent gestures, movements, but with no life in them.

Drop the past each moment. Remember to drop it. Just as you clean your house every morning, every moment clean your inner house of the past. All psychological memories have to be dropped. Just keep factual things and your mind will be very, very clean and clear.