By Eknath Easwaran
Chapter 2, verse 30
The Self of all beings, living within the body, is eternal and cannot be harmed. Therefore, you should not grieve.
In my village, where death was not uncommon, most people on their death bed would send for my Grandmother just to have her sit by their side. They would hold her hand or look into her eyes, which said, “There is no death.” For her, the dissolution of the body was not death at all. At the time of samādhi, this is the realization the lover of God attains. When he becomes united with the Lord in his heart, he goes beyond identification with the body. The physical nexus is cut once and for all, and afterwards, though he looks after the body very carefully, he knows that it is just an instrument to be used to convey the truth of immortality to all those ready to receive it.
The body is not me; it is only the jacket which I wear. When this jacket is torn and tattered, the time has come for me to throw it away and put on a new jacket. Sri Krishna asks, “What is there to grieve about? What is so tragic about putting on a new jacket? Do you want to keep an old jacket that lets in cold air, makes you uncomfortable, and can no longer be used to serve others?”
When you are able to go deep into meditation and rise above physical consciousness, it will seem as though you can just take off the body as you would take off a jacket and leave it on the hanger until you finish meditating. If sometime in meditation you go very deep into your consciousness, after going home you may even find that you have left your jacket at the āshram. Mystics in India have been victims of this divine phenomenon at the most inopportune times. Once, while walking on the streets of Calcutta, Sri Ramakrishna heard a song about the Divine Mother, or saw someone seated in meditation with eyes closed, and had such a sudden transformation of consciousness that he dropped his dhoti. The dhoti is wrapped very gently around the hips. It is not meant for sudden attacks of higher states of consciousness; it is meant for the secular way of life. I can imagine Ramakrishna’s embarrassed disciples gathering around him and asking, “Blessed One, where is your dhoti?” and he, in sublime simplicity, answering, “You ask me where is my dhoti? I ask you where is my body!”
Body consciousness is the obstacle to divine awareness, and every day we must ask ourselves what is likely to decrease our identification with the body. Whatever increases physical consciousness cannot be an aid to the spiritual life. Overeating, for example, intensifies body consciousness. Every time we are tempted to eat something because of an advertisement or an old samskāra, we should ask ourselves if the body needs it or if it will merely stimulate the palate. Once we start retraining our sense of taste, which is in the mind, we can enjoy green salad and fruits as the greatest of delicacies. Skipping a meal, especially when we have eaten a little more than is necessary at the previous meal, is another way of lessening body consciousness. Other aids for lessening physical consciousness are giving up harmful habits such as smoking, drinking, the use of drugs, and overindulgence of any kind. The Gita does not ask you to do this for puritanical reasons; it says that if you want to rise above physical consciousness, these are the things you have to throw away. Once this obsessive physical identification has been broken through, you feel so good, so high, all the time that you cannot imagine using any artificial aid to be a few inches high when you are now almost the height of the cosmos.