This is a good symptom, very significant, that as your meditation is deepening, your joy is deepening, your happiness is deepening, a strange thing happens…. Because logically you must have thought that when meditation deepens, happiness deepens, joy becomes greater…then every morning getting up with the fear of death seems to be absolutely illogical, irrelevant – because even before your meditations, before coming to me, you were getting up without the fear of death. There are millions of people who will get up every day, but they will not be at all afraid of death because their consciousness never goes to that depth where they can feel in their sleep that the ego is dying. But being a woman, naturally you are more afraid.
Meditation will take that fear away and meditation will also take away the idea that one is man and one is woman, because those things belong to the body. Consciousness is transcendental; it is neither male nor female.
“There is only one thing I want,” she told him. “All I want is a solid gold boy scout knife.”
He offered her yachts, cars, mink coats – but she insisted on a solid gold boy scout knife. The stunned suitor went away and had one especially made.
A week later he brought it, and asked her, “Is this all you want to make you happy? What are you going to do with it?”
She opened a huge chest and put the knife in amongst hundreds of other gold knives.
“Why?” he asked.
The girl replied, “Well right now I am very young and beautiful and everyone wants me. But some day I’m going to be old and ugly – and can you imagine what a boy scout will do for one of these?”
This is the way people live – so unconsciously! The greatest unconsciousness is that which makes you believe that you are your appearance, your body. It does not allow you to know it is not your appearance that constitutes your inner witness. That witness can see the body as separate from itself, it can see the mind as separate from itself, it can see the ego and everything separate from itself.
The moment the witness awakens in you…and meditation is nothing but nagging the witness to wake up. Meditation is a woman! She goes on nagging and finally the poor fellow, the witness, has to wake up!
Once the witness has awakened you have come to a point of transformation. Now you will not be identified anymore with all that is mortal. Now you will know from your inner sources with absolute unconditional certainty your eternity, your immortality. And unless a man knows that he is deathless, the fear somehow lurks in his mind.
You can try to forget it. It is easier to forget it when you are young, because you can go on doing all kinds of foolish things when you are young. But when you are old and left alone – because the young fools are doing their own things, nobody takes care of you, nobody even bothers whether you exist or not – then one finds oneself in a deep depression. Except death, there is no future. Life has passed away; one cannot go back, and ahead…ahead is only death.
Ronald Reagan was addressing a massed gathering of American farmers. He began by telling a couple of jokes to try and get the men of the land on his side.