As we move in time the dust of experiences, of knowledge, of lived life, of the past, collects. That dust becomes our ego. Accumulated, it becomes a crust around you which has to be broken and thrown away. One has to take a bath continuously – every day, in fact every moment – so that this crust never becomes a prison. The ego is afraid to love because in love, life comes to a peak. But whenever there is a peak of life there is also a peak of death – they go together.

In love you die and you are reborn. The same happens when you come to meditate or to pray, or when you come to a master to surrender. The ego creates all sorts of difficulties, rationalizations not to surrender: “Think about it, brood about it, be clever about it.” When you come to a master, again the ego becomes suspicious, doubtful, creates anxiety. Again you are coming to life, to a flame where death will also be as much alive as life.

Let it be remembered that death and life both become aflame together, they are never separate. If you are very, very minimally alive, at the minimum, then you can see death and life as being separate. The closer you come to the peak, the closer they start coming. At the very apex they meet and become one. In love, in meditation, in trust, in prayerfulness, wherever life becomes total, death is there. Without death, life cannot become total.

But the ego always thinks in divisions, in dualities; it divides everything. Existence is indivisible; it cannot be divided. You were a child, then you became young. Can you demark the line when you became young? Can you demark the point in time where suddenly you were no more a child and you had become young? One day you became old. Can you demark the line when you became old?

Processes cannot be demarked. Exactly the same happens when you are born. Can you demark when you are born? When life really starts? Does it start when the child starts breathing – the doctor spanks the child and the child starts breathing? Then life is born? – or is it when the child got into the womb, the mother became pregnant, the child was conceived? Did life start then? – or even before that? When does life exactly start?

It is a process of no ending and no beginning. It never starts. When is a person dead? When the breathing stops? Many yogis have now proved it on scientific grounds that they can stop breathing and they are still alive and they can come back. So the stopping of the breathing cannot be the end. Where does life end?

It never ends anywhere, it never begins anywhere. We are involved in eternity. We have been here since the very beginning – if there was any beginning – and we are going to be here to the very end, if there is going to be any end. In fact, there cannot be any beginning and there cannot be any end. We are life – forms change, bodies change, minds change. What we call life is just an identification with a certain body, with a certain mind, with a certain attitude, and what we call death is nothing but getting out of that form, out of that body, out of that concept.