What is the real goal of life? It is to prepare for a good death. Now I’m not being world-denying, but rather emphasizing that for anyone to succeed at anything they need to keep the goal in mind. A good death is based on living a good life, so they go hand in hand. It’s all interlinked. There are short term, medium term and long term goals in any expert strategist’s arsenal. The secret is to remember the long term goal and then work backwards, by having the medium term strategy to attain the long term goal and then still closer to home, have your short term goals to attain the medium. But without knowing the long term goal, the rest will likely be wasted time.
For example we may want to be successful at creating our art, whatever it is, so we begin by learning the art. We study and train, then we practice and finally we produce our end result. Similarly in life the long term goal is in all actuality to make a successful exit at the time of death. And to do that we need to be in the right state of consciousness, and to be in the right state we need to work on it all throughout our lives. We need to practice and prepare. That is the bigger picture.
By remembering the long term goal we can prioritize all the medium and short term goals so that we keep the focus and make a success of the final test. We all have to go through it, there is no denying the two certainties of life as they say – death and taxes. The fourfold struggle for us all will consist of birth, disease, old age and death. Those are the basic tests we will all face. We see all others around us getting old and dying, but we never bother to think about our own mortality, especially when young. It’s perhaps too harsh a reality to contemplate, so we put it to the back of our minds, like a tragic memory that we would rather forget, or a test we would rather postpone thinking about.
Some yogis in India, real ascetics, will actually go reside by the crematorium or burning site on the banks of the sacred river Ganges, just to keep their focus on the long term goal. It may appear a bit morbid to us, and I don’t recommend it. It is an austere path only for the very few who have already become detached and attained some degree of transcendence of consciousness. For us in the west, there is the gradual process of our own schooling, education, marriage, family, business and then retirement, and that is the recommended process for most.
But we cannot leave it too long or neglect the serious and actual real goal of this entire human form of life, namely the attainment of a successful death. And your actual time of leaving the body behind is made successful if you can maintain your focus at that very moment on your destination. And that can be done by regular practice while you are still young and whole and healthy and able to do the drill, in preparation for the final hour, the live event.
For example, in case of fire we rehearse the fire drill, so that if and when it comes, we know the drill and we act accordingly. If we leave it too late or we neglect to practice while we are still fit and not under stress or in a state of emergency already, then when the time comes, and we are in a state of emergency, the practice will kick in and mental muscle memory will assist. But that is dependent on daily training, of keeping the long term goal in mind so that your other goals fall into place accordingly. You work backwards. Know what you want to achieve and then put the pieces in place to make that possible.
In the ancient Vedanta literature, like Bhagavat Purana, there is a story in volume six, chapter one, (out of twelve volumes of that particular Purana) that tells of a man called Ajamila. He was a pious youth from a well educated family who trained in the scholarly and priestly order, but at some point he fell under illusion and became bewildered by the allures of an unchaste woman. As a result he left his pious activities and went off to live with her in a somewhat degraded life, where he used nefarious ways to acquire his money. He forgot about his pious training, had many children, ten in total, and led a life of degradation. He became particularly fond of his smallest boy, whom he named after one of the names for the divinity, calling him Narayana.
IN Vedic culture it’s considered pious to give your children the names of saints or even gods, and Narayana is one of the many names of the divinity in India, in the Vedic Sanskrit tradition. Then one day at the end, when the time came, on his death bed, he saw the agents of death coming to take him out of his body and down to lower regions of consciousness for his next life, due to his impious activities in this life. You get what you deserve. And in great anxiety he called out for his fondest son Narayana. Now because he called the name of the divinity, albeit indirectly, since he was actually calling his son, still their was a positive reaction and the agents of Narayana also appeared on the scene. They are the opposite to the other characters who had appeared, more like angels of heaven, in the western understanding.
And they stopped the other agents of death from taking the soul to a lower next birth simply because at that moment of death Ajamila had chanted the holy name. Instead they took him upward to the heavenly abodes and on to liberation, where he no longer had to come back to the material plane to receive any more karmic reactions or pay for his impious deeds. So although he was a sinful man, something from his youthful pious spiritual training stayed with him and inspired him to name his son Narayana and he got the benefit when it really counted.
Not that we can live a degraded life and then expect to pass the final test without studying or preparing for it, Rather the story illustrates the fact that whatever state of consciousness you are in at the time of death, will determine your next destination. And the state of consciousness you are able to hold as you are leaving the body will be dependent on all the practice you put in during your healthy waking life. When the crisis hits, the training and the drill kicks in. So by default Ajamila had just happened to get it right and remember Narayana, even indirectly, in name only, and he succeeded in attaining the goal of life.
But he was lucky. When the time comes and you are choking to death, unable to speak or stay conscious at the end, you will realize how tricky it can be to just keep your focus on the goal as the separation occurs. it’s not always so easy. We have so many attachments that draw the mind back, like family, children, business, reputation or possessions, and any attachment to them will simply oblige you to return to experience them. So you need to know how to let go. You need to have spent your life cultivating the higher taste for the transcendent, and see through the illusion of the temporary mundane existence in the temporary physical body. And you attain that long term goal by practice throughout your life while you are still fit and healthy.
When the time comes you need to be able to let go by remembering that you are not the body. Then you can let it go without undue attachment, as well as remember that the material possessions, both gross and subtle, like money and fame or status, are all temporary too. They are not you. If you have any attachment to them, that will act as a rope to bind you to the material plane for another lifetime. So in life we train to become detached from the result of our actions now already.
As long as you have a body you are forced to act, and that’s fine. We have to stay alive and grow and feed our offspring and so on, so we act, we endeavour, we aspire for short term and medium term goals, but we remain detached from the result. We remain aloof from the need to achieve the result or not. In this way we cultivate the ability to see the body and its byproducts and trappings as just that – trappings. Ironic word that. And we do this based on knowledge. Knowledge of matter ans spirit is what will be your sword to cut the knots that bind the immortal consciousness to the temporary cage of a body. You cut the knots of attachment with the knowledge of the bigger picture and you attain the long term goal.
“As a sleeping person acts according to the body manifested in his dreams and accepts it to be himself, so one identifies with his present body, which he acquired because of his past actions, and is unable to know his past or future lives.”
Bhagavat Purana 6:1:49 Translation by Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta
This is for every one of us. It is a drill for now, but it will be the real thing at the end, and you get one chance to succeed in this lifetime. If you fail, you take another entire lifetime to get that one chance once more. So it helps to seek out the information required to see who you really are, what life is meant for and how to make a real success of this valuable human form of life. With this knowledge, you keep the long term goal in mind, and as a result all the medium term and short term goals fall into position aligned to that. Now you know and now you can succeed. Well done. You found out. Others are still in the dark, but you have seen the light. I’ll see you on the other side.
