Is There Still An ‘I’ When I Die?

Shekhar Kapur in Conversation with Sadhguru

Shekhar Kapur: I’m going to ask you a silly question, please bear with me, but it’s something that always comes up…

Sadhguru: No, I’m used to silly questions.

Shekhar Kapur: Alright. [Sadhguru laughs] What happens to one’s life energy once the body is gone? Do I still exist as ‘I?’ Do I have a soul? Is there reincarnation? Or is it just my ego that is saying, “Even when I let my body go, there is an ‘I’ that still exists?” Is there individuality after the end of the body, or does this ‘I’ lose its identity and become part of the larger universe? This is a question I can’t answer. Would you answer it for me so I can tell people that I’m quite wise now?

Sadhguru: [Laughs] I know what you’ll do with this. [Both laugh] So, essentially, you’re saying, you want to know what happens after death.

Shekhar Kapur: Yeah. I’m just playing a more intellectual argument about it, that’s all; but the fundamental question is that. [Laughs]

Sadhguru: What I would say is, some things you know best only by experience. [Both laugh] Are you ready?

Shekhar Kapur: Yeah.

Sadhguru: You’re not ready for the experience. You just want to know for entertainment; maybe to make a movie on it, or just to talk at the next party that you’re in.

Shekhar Kapur: So, humor me, and let’s talk about it a little bit.

Sadhguru: Okay. [Laughs] See, right now you’re looking at me, through the window of your eyes…

Shekhar Kapur: Yes.

Sadhguru: If you close the window, do you still exist?

Shekhar Kapur: I still exist.

Sadhguru: So, you are clearly saying you are much more than the body, isn’t it?

Shekhar Kapur: Yes.

Sadhguru: And you also know, very clearly, that you slowly accumulated this body.

Shekhar Kapur: Yes.

Sadhguru: Or in other words, what you call as ‘my body’ is just a bit of loan that you have taken from Mother Earth, just a piece of the planet. She’s pretty generous with the loan; but when the time comes, she wants to collect it atom by atom. What is being perceived as death is just this. But most people who have taken a loan, unless there was a law to compel them, they wouldn’t want to pay back the loan. It’s a general tendency in the world.

Shekhar Kapur: I like that transactional analysis. [Both laugh]

Sadhguru: So, you took a loan from the planet. But when the time comes that this body is going to be taken from you, you are terrorized because you think you are being taken away. You are not being taken away. What Mother Earth is asking back is only the piece of planet that you gathered in the form of this body. If only you were constantly aware – not just intellectually – that “I am not this body, this is just mine, this is just a gathering; I’ve accumulated this, I’ll use it, and when it’s necessary, I’ll drop it” – if this awareness was there all the time in your life, death would be just like changing clothes.

It’s actually simpler than that. [Laughs] The question is only if you are willing or unwilling – but whichever way, the loan will be collected. If you are a yogi, you will pay it back gracefully. If you are an ignorant person, they will confiscate your property [laughs] because you are illegally holding it beyond a certain time. So, what happens after? Your physical body has to go to the earth because it belongs to the earth. But there is a subtler body which is like a scaffolding. Only because the subtle body is there as a scaffolding, you can build this gross body. You eat a banana, a piece of bread or brinjal, and it becomes body because there is a subtler scaffolding. The physical body is gathering around the subtler body. When the physical body falls, the subtle or etheric body is still on. It still has some information.

Suppose you became old, the energies became feeble and you left, this kind of life energies would rest for some time without too much activity. But suppose there was still a substantial amount of information or karma stored, if the energies were still intense and you broke the body, either by accident or otherwise, and you left, then it would take a long time for the energies to become feeble. If you had a physical body and a discriminatory mind, let us say, you would have worked out your karma in the next 10 years and made the energies feeble. But without a physical body and discriminatory mind, these 10 years may telescope into 1,000 years.

This is the reason they always told you, “You should never die of suicide, murder or accident.” Then, your limbo situation is very, very long because you have no discriminatory mind and we don’t know where your tendencies will lead you to. Plus the chances of finding another womb are very little because unless you come to the right level of intensity, you are not suitable to take on a new body. So, if you died of old age, everything was fine with your body but the energies became feeble, you went to bed and never woke up again, you may get back into another womb within 48 hours. But a person who died by breaking his body may take much longer, depending upon the level of intensity of life energies and how much of information or karma is still there to be worked out.

We are going into areas which need much more elaboration to be properly understood. That’s why we usually just joke about it and skip it. We usually don’t talk about it because it might lead to all kinds of imaginations – which is not needed. And you can make horror movies because lots of people have a wild imagination anyway.

Shekhar Kapur: Or a movie on tendencies…

Sadhguru: [Laughs] No, they’re anyway all existing by tendencies. When we talk spirituality, we’re essentially talking about moving from functioning through tendencies to functioning through discriminatory process, or from compulsiveness to consciousness. That is the key from bondage to freedom.