Practising meditation is a training, somehow, of dying consciously.
At the moment of death, you have no fear then.
You are always ready.
So in one way, when we are meditating, what generally happens?
There are a few things.
One is, you are beginning meditation with an idea that the source of
divine light is in my heart or the divine light is present in my heart.
Okay.
Next thing, some thoughts may come and disturb this very pious idea.
It goes away in some cases.
Then what happens?
You lose awareness at some time and then what happens later on?
You become aware that I have lost my awareness.
Right?
And sometimes, in some sittings, you are so lost that you have no
awareness of losing the awareness and somehow from nowhere you come back.
It happens to lots of us.
And that is almost a kind of a temporary death.
And when that happens, some abhyasis (practitioners), they get so scared
and they just get up like that and say, “What happened to me?” You must have
heard some women especially crying and shouting, screaming, during meditations.
They go just berserk, somehow.
There could be many other reasons also.
So consciousness, when it collapses within yourself, in yoga, we
call it a state of samadhi.
But according to Babuji Maharaj, samadhi is just the first stepping stone; we
have to go further beyond all that, see.
Samadhi where you are losing your complete awareness at one moment and where you
are still having some level of awareness.
That's the most beautiful thing that can happen to anyone.
That is called Turiyatit state in Yogashastras.
Now, when that awareness is also collapsing that you are lost, then you
feel as if for a moment you are dead.
So in a way, practising meditation is a training, somehow, of dying consciously.
At the moment of death, you have no fear then.
You are always ready.
If it comes tomorrow, why tomorrow, if it comes now, hallelujah, so be it.
I am ready because there is no fear and you have already
experienced that collapsed state of samadhi, the consciousness.
And death is not very different from it.
In fact, death is a sudden explosion from that collapsed state of
consciousness to an enormous thing.
It's like a small amount of water in the cup suddenly becomes a huge
cloud occupying the whole sky.
So a yogi of that calibre somehow, he is everywhere.
His consciousness, his awareness is everywhere.
It's the practice that can prepare us, prepare us for such a moment.