Wait for It. There Great News!

 Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Questioner: When your body dies, you remain.

Maharaj: Nothing dies. The body is just imagined. There is no such thing.

Questioner: Before another century will pass, you will be dead to all around you. Your body will be covered with flowers, then burnt and the ashes scattered. That will be our experience. What will be yours?

Maharaj: Time will come to an end. This is called the Great Death (mahamrityu), the death of time.

Questioner: Does it mean that the universe and its contents will come to an end?

Maharaj: The universe is your personal experience. How can it be affected? You might have been delivering a lecture for two hours; where has it gone when it is over? It has merged into silence in which the beginning, middle and end of the lecture are all together. Time has come to a stop, it was, but is no more. The silence after a life of talking and the silence after a life of silence is the same silence.

Immortality is freedom from the feeling: ‘I am’. Yet it is not extinction. On the contrary, it is a state infinitely more real, aware and happy than you can possibly think of. Only self-consciousness is no more.