Osho,
You have talked much about death and dying. I understood you to have said that people are afraid of death itself because they can’t really conceive that it is going to happen to them.
Am I fooling myself when I feel tremendously excited at the thought of death? It feels that – if the event were prepared for with one having attained as much consciousness as possible, with loving friends around and an aesthetic environment – it could be the most amazing thing going.

Death itself has no existence. What actually happens is the transformation of consciousness from one form into another form, or, finally and ultimately, into formlessness.

The whole question is whether one can die consciously, or the routine way – the unconscious way.

Nature has made a provision that before dying the person becomes completely unconscious, goes into a coma, so he knows nothing. It is simply the greatest surgery possible. If the surgeon is going to remove a small part of the body, he has to make the patient unconscious; otherwise there is every possibility that the pain will be too much and unbearable. And in pain and agony, the surgery may not be successful either.

What surgeons are doing, nature has been doing for millennia, and its surgery is far bigger. It takes the whole body away, not a part; it takes the consciousness to another form.

Only if you are almost enlightened – just on the border of enlightenment – can you remain conscious, because the whole process of enlightenment is creating distance between you and your body, you and your mind. If the distance is enough, then you can remain aware and anything can happen to the body – you can watch it, as if it is happening to somebody else. Then it is really an amazing, exciting phenomenon, but not before that.

To say it in other words: To die beautifully one has to live beautifully.

To die amazingly and in excitement, in ecstasy, one has to prepare one’s whole life for ecstasy, excitement, amazement.

Death is simply the culmination point, the crescendo of your life. It is not against life. It does not destroy life.

That’s why I said death does not exist as conceived. It really gives the body another chance to grow. And if you have grown fully then there is no need for another chance; then your being moves into the ultimate being. You are no more a separate small dewdrop, but the whole ocean of existence.

P.D. Ouspensky, in his book Tertium Organum – one of the most significant books – has many statements that are beautiful, but this statement is the most significant of them all. In ordinary mathematics – and he was a mathematician – the part is part and the whole is whole; the part cannot become the whole, neither can the whole become the part.