Osho,
A few months ago my friend and I were visiting his dying father. Lots of people were around. His body was about finished. To most people he was indifferent, but when everyone left he suddenly opened his eyes and told us, “I feel like I have two bodies; one body is sick and the other is completely healthy.” We told him, “That’s right! The healthy body is the real you, so stay with that one.” He said, “Okay,” and closed his eyes. As we sat with him, the sick energy around the hospital bed changed. We couldn’t believe this new energy; it was as if we were in darshan with you…Such beautiful silence. I felt a bit strange saying these words to someone who was really experiencing this. Whatever I said wasn’t really my experience, just something I’d thought about. After we left he improved for a while, went home and died peacefully in his bed.
Osho, even though I’ve been with you for ten years, I felt so ignorant in front of this man who was ready to let go of everything with such trust and clarity and peace.

The experience that you went through always is possible when someone is dying. All that is required is a little alertness. The man who was dying was aware – not much awareness is needed for this experience.

At the moment of death your physical body and your spiritual body start separating. Ordinarily, they are so much involved with each other that you don’t feel their separation. But at the moment of death, just before death happens, both the bodies start getting unidentified with each other. Now their ways are going to be different; the physical body is going to the physical elements, and the spiritual body is on its pilgrimage onwards, to a new birth, in a new form, in a new womb.

If the person is a little alert he can see it himself, and because you said to him that the healthier body is you, and the body that is sick and dying is not you…. In those moments, to trust is very easy because it is happening just before the eyes of the person himself; he cannot identify with the body that is falling apart, and he can immediately recognize the fact that he is the healthier one, the deeper one.

But you could have helped the man even a little more – this was good, but not good enough. Even this experience of the man, of getting unidentified with the physical body, immediately changed the energy in the room; it became silent, peaceful.

But if you had learned the art of how to help a dying man, you would not have stopped where you stopped. A second thing was absolutely necessary to tell him because he was in a trusting state – everybody is, at the moment of death.

It is life which creates problems and doubts and postponements, but death has no time to postpone. The man cannot say, “I will try to see,” or, “I will see tomorrow.” He has to do it right now, this very moment, because even the next moment is not certain. Most probably he is not going to survive. And what is he going to lose by trusting? Death anyway, is going to take away everything. So the fear of trust is not there; time to think about it is not there. And a clarity is there that the physical body is getting farther and farther away.

It was a good step to tell him, “You are the healthier body.” The second step would have been to tell him, “You are the witness of both the bodies; the body that is dying is physical, and the body that you are feeling is healthy is psychological. But who are you? You can see both the bodies…certainly you must be the third; you cannot be one of these two.”