VIII: 5

[Krishna Jaya]

Chapter 8, Verse 5

 

“Whoever, in their final moments,

Think of me

In truth come into my being.

At the time of death,

They come unto me.”

 

Swami Shivananda:

 

You who practice profound meditation on God throughout your life will be able to meet death with an unruffled mind.  Your whole mind will be absorbed into him.  You will not allow any outside impressions wherein there is an iota of selfish desire to sink into your subconscious mind.  Then you can think of the Lord exclusively at the time of death and enter into his very being.

 

Sri Aurobindo:

 

Here Krishna lays a great stress on the thought and state of mind at the time of death, a stress which will with difficulty be understood if we do not recognize what may be called the self-creative power of the consciousness.  What the thought, the inner regard, and the faith, Shraddha, settles itself upon with a complete and definite insistence, into that our inner being tends to evolve.  This tendency becomes a decisive force when we go to those higher spiritual and self-evolved experiences which are less dependent on external things than is our ordinary psychology, enslaved as it is to outward nature.  There we can see ourselves steadily becoming that on which we keep our minds fixed and to which we constantly aspire.  Any lapse of the thought, any infidelity of the memory means always a retardation of the evolution, a fall in its process, and a going back to what we were before insofar as we have not substantially and irrevocably fixed our new becoming.  When we have accomplished that, when we have made it normal to our experience, the memory of it remains self-existently, because that now is the natural form of our consciousness.

 

The thought of the Gita here is by no means on a par with the indulgences of popular religion.  It has nothing in common with the crude fancies that make the last rites of the priest an edifying ‘Christian’ death after a profane life, or the precaution of a death in sacred Kashi a sufficient machinery of salvation.  The divine becoming on which the mind has to be fixed firmly in the moment of physical death must have been one into which the person was growing inwardly during the physical life.  If birth is a becoming, death also is a becoming, and not by any means a cessation.  The body is abandoned, but the soul goes on its way.

 

A Friend:

 

I have always believed that the state of your consciousness is what matters at the time of death.

No matter what kind of a life you have had, if you have Peace and Love in your heart, that's what counts.

The thing is…

 

How you get to that point in the last instant?

It is by constant practice.

 

[There are many things we can substitute in our lives. If we want less dairy in our diet, we can try nut milk. If we want to stop putting lots of carbon dioxide in the air, we can sell our car and get a bicycle. But there's no substitute for Sadhana. Fortunately, there are so many Sadhanas for so many different temperaments. Some people do Sadhana without even knowing it's Sadhana! 

 

Ki Jai!!]