Question :

In Asthavakra 8, you said, at death, the body gets tired of you and drops you. Is it not the other way around? When karma is exhausted the Purusha drops the Prakriti. Isn’t it true? Please help to clarify.

Answer :

Death of body does not equal to the exhaustion of karma. To understand this first you need to understand what life really is?

Equation of life:

Life = Birth + Death + Birth + Death + Birth + Death +….. Infinity

In this entire equation, one really teeny-tiny part is the birth of the (current) body, and one teeny-tiny part is the death of the (current) body. You have taken thousands of such bodies in the past and will take thousands in the future.

 How can your karma get exhausted at the end of every body in the equation unless you are already enlightened? Are you? 🙂

If your karma would have gotten exhausted, your equation would end at death of every body and you would not take another body out of bondage. You would have been given a choice whether you wanted to be born or not in the physical realm of existence. Did you receive this offer of choosing?

Understand that one takes a body only because the karmas are not exhausted yet. You go through all experiences of life based on your karma account.

At death the body gets tired of you and drops you. Why?

Because the body is elastic, it has a certain range of elasticity. It cannot work beyond that particular range. This means that this body can last only 80, 90, or 100 years. If you are a lucky, the body can last up to a maximum of 200 yrs, but it is a rare occurrence. But your Karmas don’t exhaust because your wishes/desires/wants are not exhausted. If your wishes/desires/wants keep increasing, you will keep creating more and more Karma. You will never be able to exhaust all of that Karma in the 80, 90 or 100 years of this body’s span. So obviously at the end of its elasticity range, this body gives up on you. You are a lost cause for it. The body knows that you will be never be able to extinguish the chain-smoking of Karma that you are so addicted to. That’s why Gurudev said the body gets tired of you and drops you.

A wise one drops the body before the body drops him.

How can you drop the body? Not suicide but “By Meditation”…….. “By Samadhi”.

Samadhi means when you go into the deepest meditation and experience absolute pure nothingness and dissolve in the pure state of “NO MIND”.

When you experience the pure state of thoughtlessness, a deep silence overtakes you where there is no body, no mind, no intellect, no memory, no ego. You are just pure energy. That state is called Samadhi.

When you start vibrating in the pure energy of YOUR SELF, you are not bound by the body anymore. It is also called ‘dropping the body’.

So be wise! You drop the body before the body drops you!