[Once again we have a guest contributor to our bi-weekly meditation series. We thank Krishnaraj Rao from Bombay, India for sharing his personal insights.]

I have arrived at my worldview after about twenty-two years of seeking, and quite a few visions and experiences of different sorts. I'm 39 years old, by the way.

I have become convinced of one thing: Sleep is the same thing as death. Our lives are on twin tracks - the track of sleep/death, and the one that our conscious mind inhabits when we are awake. When alive, our conscious mind has a daily biological need to take a dip in the sea of our permanence. If we deprive ourselves of this need, it becomes so compelling that we may doze off even at the steering wheel, and become a danger to our lives! But after we have slept our fill, our conscious mind feels the urge to re-emerge into the "outside" world in which we live and work. This sort of straddling the twin tracks, or swinging of the pendulum, consitutes our lives.

Our lives also have a bigger swinging of this pendulum. After we have been "in this world" for a sufficiently long time, we submit to the urge to return, and after we have been "dead" for awhile, the swinging of the pendulum brings us back again.

Last year, for some weeks, I found myself returning to this thought time and again in the course of my day, with a sense of great peace and joy. One night, as my family and I were driving home in our car, I confided to my wife that, at the cost of sounding macabre, I knew exactly what death was all about, and was greatly comforted by the knowledge.

This thing about the twin tracks, I told her, wasn't something I imagined, or something I theorized. Rather, it is something that I experienced in past months, and if there was a single thing that I knew for sure without having to seek confirmation from any book or any religious guru, this was it!

Krishnaraj Rao
Bombay, India
krish@kkphotofeatures.com

Posted 5-15-05