Reference: DEATH: An Inside Story
“As we have responsibilities for the living, we have responsibilities for the dead.” ~ Sadhguru
8.1 Why Are After-death Rituals Needed
Death rituals are not just to assist the dead person in his or her journey, they are also for the benefit of those who are left behind. If the person who dies leaves a lot of unsettled life around us, our lives will not be good.
Death is a process that happens over a period of time. Life exits the body in stages. We can do something for the deceased up to fourteen days after death. We want to help them in such a way that they do not hang around for too long and dissolve quickly. If there is any positive or negative energy around, adolescents are the first people to absorb it. It is like loose software hanging around and adolescent life naturally tangles with that. In Indian culture, after the body is disposed off, there are elaborate processes to clean the person too.
Today, these rituals have become even more important because almost everyone on the planet is beginning to die in unawareness, without the necessary understanding of the life mechanism within themselves. Unfortunately, these rituals also have become largely commercial, with some kind of ritualistic circus being conducted.
8.2 Runanubandha—The Web of Debt
RUNANUBANDHA
With everything that our five sense organs come in touch with, in some way, knowingly or unknowingly, consciously or unconsciously, we establish a certain bond with it. This is not just with the people around us but also with the very land that we walk upon, the air that we breathe and just about everything that we see, hear, smell, taste and touch. This is because none of these things happen without investing a certain amount of energy in it. In traditional terms, this is called runanubandha. It is a term which refers to the body’s memory, which comprises of genetic memory and memory of intimate physical connect. It is this memory which is said to bind a parent and a child, a husband and a wife or any other intimate relationships.
BODY MEMORY
Body memory is a certain kind of physical memory that you carry within you. It is different from the genetic factors that are transmitted from parent to child. You pick up body memory through physical contact. The body remembers any kind of intimacy you have with any physical substance. This is the reason why, traditionally, in India, people greet each other with folded hands because they do not want to acquire that extra memory that can create bondage and impede their Liberation process. Contact with certain types of substances also has more of an impact than others.
SEXUAL CONTACT
Another way you develop runanubandha is through relationships. Even if you just as much as hold someone’s hand, you develop runanubandha. Of all the relationships, sexual relationships have maximum impact in terms of the amount of memory that they leave upon you, compared to any other kind of substance you come in touch with. This is not a question of guilt or ridding yourself of guilt. Guilt is a social phenomenon. What you feel guilty about essentially depends upon the norms of the society you live in. If you feel guilty about something in one society, you may not feel guilty about the same in another society. This is not about social conditioning—this is an existential reality.
DISSOLUTION
You must break this relationship with the dead person for you to be able to live well, because the nature of life is such that at times you can become susceptible; then both the right and wrong kind of things can enter you. If this runanubandha is not properly broken it can weaken your body and your psychological structure in such a way that you will not only suffer from grief, it will also lead to certain derangement of life. This is why Indian culture evolved many methods in the rituals that were performed after death to consciously dissolve the runanubandha.
8.3 Kalabhairava Karma—An After-death Ritual at Isha
MEMORY AND SUFFERING
Everything that you know as life right now is in some way an imprint of a certain memory. There is the evolutionary blueprint, or genetic memory, that produces the human form, the skin color, the shape of the nose, etc. Beyond that, each human being is different in some way because of individual Karmic Memory. These memories are present in the mind, body and the energies of a person and play out in so many ways. A human being has the most complex memory that enhances his abilities as well as his suffering. He can remember a million small things and suffer a million times over. That is torture!
IMPRINTS OF THE DEAD
After a person dies, maybe they have attained mukti or they have gone somewhere else, we don’t know, but either because you were born to them or you were in touch with them in some way or the other, their memory imprints are on you. These imprints are not just in your mind but also in your body and energies as well. This will start to work within you in many unconscious ways. We don’t want to become unconscious of them; we just want to carry it a little loosely on us. So with these death rituals, we do some things to free the departed but it is also important to free the living. Some distance from memories must happen.
KALABHAIRAVA KARMA
This is an after death ritual done at Sadhguru’s Yoga Center. This greatly aids and assists the journey the departed being has to make. All it requires is a photograph of the dead person and a piece of cloth used by them. It would be good if the blood relatives of this person are present while the ritual is being performed at the Yoga Center. We do not know where all the memories of the person who died are stuck. So we do whatever best we can. One simple thing to do is that you take a whiff of their memory and put it in a place which is naturally about disentanglement. So we burn the photograph and the piece of cloth, and tie the ashes in a cloth to the tamarind tree outside the Dhyanalinga entrance to take care of whatever is left. Kalabhairava Karma is not a dig-and-clean process. We just mop up the surface so that nothing holds as far as possible. For most cases, this itself is enough.
8.4 The Scope of Kalabhairava Karma
CONDITION AFTER DEATH
Once you drop the physical body, you don’t have the discriminatory mind, so there is no comprehension of language. And there is no sound or silence. So there is no question of this person understanding this or that. That is for the living. With rituals, you can draw the being to something, you can direct the being in a particular direction, but you cannot talk to it.
PURPOSE OF RITUALS
The best thing is to make that ‘life bubble’ thinner and leave it. It will find its own way to a better place. Rituals should only be concerned about peeling that life off attachment as much as possible. If possible, all the way, but at least as much as you can make it into a thinner bubble than what it is. What will happen, how it will be reborn is not for you to worry about.
DIAGNOSIS
Now, once someone is dead, people are very interested in knowing where the departed person is—in heaven or hell or whatever. Some people claim to be able to tell you that. You can determine whether a being is comfortable or in struggle. Accordingly, you can do certain rituals for that being. This is possible, but determining geographically where it is is rubbish because there is no ‘geographical where’.
PURPOSE OF KALABHAIRAVA KARMA
Basically, Kalabhairava Karma is being performed, after you are dead, to mop up bits of your life that are sticking around here and there. It is being done because you are not a yogi and you are unable to do the mopping up yourself. A yogi will withdraw to the forest and die alone somewhere in the forest because he has done everything that he needs to do for his life. No one has to do anything for him later. Everything is finished. No Kalabhairava Karma is needed. When he is gone, it is a complete evacuation of the space that he occupied.
KALABHAIRAVA KRIYA
If you want to do Kalabhairava Karma for yourself when you are alive, it becomes Kalabhairava Kriya. It can be taught to people but it will need an extreme sense of discipline about who you are and how you manage your energies and system. It requires being alert to every small thing. It creates genetic distance that makes the family or the community over for them. You cannot go back to your home or village and live a social life.
SUBTLE BODY
All rituals done after death are about transporting the subtle body to the right place. When the subtle body is not well defined, as in case of plants and animals, there is no need to do anything nor is there a possibility to do something.
8.5 Training People for Death Rituals
APPLICATION OF RITUALS
To train people to conduct a ritual is so much easier than training people to do the same thing without a ritual. But when the general fabric of integrity has gone down in the social structure, then, all rituals will be under suspicion because there is room for misuse. Only if we generate people who are responsible enough to not do even one thing more than what is necessary, these things can be done.
WOMEN AND RITUALS
Women are more vulnerable to external influences in the sense that they can pass those influences to children who have little defenses. Therefore, a woman will need to take care in doing such rituals much more than a man, especially when they are capable of bearing children. Once they are past the age of bearing children, they can perform rituals as safely as men. In fact, it is far easier to help women to organize and discipline themselves than men. Women have a natural capacity to absorb order due to the deeper sense of survival instinct that is needed to fulfill their reproductive responsibilities.
PREREQUISITES AT ISHA
If you are willing to offer this service, then we can train you to do these things properly. But you should never make it your profession; it should be done only as a service. When someone has lost their body, they are completely helpless; they need help and they can be helped, but not with corrupt, contaminated hands. It needs someone who cares and someone who has the necessary sense about it.
8.6 The Death of Infants
The way life manifests in a child is different from the way life manifests in an adult, because the life in a child is still in the process of taking shape. So its death is not the same as the death of an adult.
CHOOSING PRARABDH KARMA
There is an entire system of rituals during preconception, conception, birth and thereafter to ensure that this becomes a life which will take on the maximum possibility. So if life becomes stable enough and capable enough by the time it is forty-eight months, it will choose a much bigger Prarabdha Karma.
BIGGER POSSIBILITY
Bigger possibility need not necessarily mean one is going to do well in the eyes of the society. In some way, it becomes a life that you cannot ignore. They are a bigger bubble that easily gets noticed.
CHILDHOOD MEMORY
Generally, most people will not remember anything below four years of age because infancy is a time when life has not yet decided how it wants to shape itself. It is still exploring whether to expand or contract and what to do and how much. You must interact lovingly with the child to help it expand.
DEATH OF A CHILD
In some children, sometimes the quantity of Prarabdha Karma for this lifetime is not decided properly, so they die unexpectedly. Children of extraordinary intelligence who do things absolutely beyond people’s perception tend to die before they are six because their Prarabdha Karma was not properly fixed. The body cannot sustain it and it just collapses.
8.7 The Parent–Offspring Connection in the Afterlife
There is a certain ‘life connection’ between the children and the parents, and if you make use of it in doing rituals for parents, they can be much more effective. If the child does the right things after the death of the parent, he can even liberate the parent through this connection.
CONNECTION
After four years, when the child really clicks on to the body that you provided as a parent, something clicks on within you and occupies a certain space within your own system. This is how, if we just check someone’s energy, we know whether they have had children or not. This is why, if you die, we can do something for you through your children. But the reverse is not true. You cannot use the parents to liberate their dead offspring.
8.8 The Importance of Death Anniversaries
POST-DEATH RITES
The post-death rites are known as antyeshti and are to be performed by the son of the deceased. It ensures the future welfare of the dead and frees the living from the debt or obligations they owe the parent. Some of the post-death rituals extend throughout the lifetime of the descendants, though on a progressively smaller scale. These rituals are typically performed as shraadha, on each anniversary of the last deceased ancestor. The most important reason these anniversary rituals are done in India is not for remembrance but to distance yourself from the Genetic Memory of your ancestors as much as possible.
8.9 Ancestor Worship
Our debt to our ancestors is huge. So it is customary in most cultures to express one’s gratitude to the ancestors. In some cultures, this ancestor veneration takes on a different proportion and turns to worship. However, in India, we distance ourselves from our ancestors; we don’t worship them. Ancestors taking care of you is not so prevalent in India, because not every ancestor is capable of this.
8.10 Of Heaven and Hell
The large-scale marketing of heaven and hell as destinations for the afterlife was done by the religions of the world to bring control in society. The fact is you do not go anywhere. It is just that the dimensional shift has happened from being embodied to disembodied, or from physicality to a subtler physicality. It is not a geographical shift. And the most important thing is, what happens after is not based on God’s retribution. If you really make them believe everything is going to be better somewhere, you will only mess up life here.
Existentially, there is a little bit of a basis for the notions of heaven and hell. It is because your life does not end with death; it only takes on many other forms after that. It can take on pleasant forms or it can take on very unpleasant forms depending on many factors. It is these pleasant forms that we refer to as Swarga, or heaven, and the unpleasant forms as Naraka, or hell. These are not geographic locations—they are forms taken by the being after the body is dropped. If you go beyond all forms, then we say it is mukti, or Liberation. A spiritual seeker is not interested in going to heaven or hell. They want to go beyond this duality of heaven or hell.
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