Yoga

Saṃsāra refers to the cycle of death and rebirth. It is the natural cycle of creation, maintenance, and dissolution that all material things undergo.

There’s something that you will never forget in your life. I know I haven’t. It’s the first time you see a dead body—the first time you meet Death.

Death plays a pivotal role in the history of yoga—the original objective of practice was ending rebirth. At some point between the earliest Vedas and the time of the Buddha a thousand years later, the doctrine of karma changed people’s priorities.

In the Bhagavad Gītā, Sri Kṛṣṇa offers insights throughout the text and explicitly addresses death in some key passages.

What to speak of death, even life is appreciated differently by people with varying values. Seers have stated that those who don’t pursue a spiritual goal are dead while living.

For students of yoga and anyone who inquires into the magnum mysterium, a brush with death through some circumstantial event, in a dream, or standing at a hospital bedside, serves to amplify the experience of living.