Death, Disease & Pain

Everyone you love will die, and so will you, and almost the entire machinery of ordinary life is built to help you not think about it — nor about pain, its long rehearsal: the body's diseases and the mind's griefs, the sharp agony of loss and the slow agony of illness. The Gītā runs in the opposite direction. It exists because a man is about to face death — dealing it and grieving it — and cannot cope, and Krishna's very first substantial words to him are about mortality. So this is not a subject the text tiptoes around. It walks straight in.

Its central consolation is the most quoted in the world, and worth hearing slowly rather than as a slogan. 'This Self is never born and never dies; it did not come into being and will not cease to be; unborn, eternal, it is not slain when the body is slain' (2.20). The body is worn clothing, set down and exchanged for new (2.22). What you are, at the root, is not the thing that decays. Whether or not you can rest all your weight on that claim, it reframes the fear: the terror of annihilation may be aimed at something that was never actually on the line.

And the Gītā's consolation is bracingly gentle about grief too. Its opening move to a heartbroken man is not 'be strong' but a kind of loving correction: 'you grieve for those who need no grief, and yet you speak words of wisdom; the wise mourn neither the living nor the dead' (2.11). It points out the plain arithmetic we spend so much energy denying: 'for whatever is born, death is certain; and for whatever dies, birth is certain — so do not grieve over what cannot be helped' (2.27). The same unchanged Self that carried you through childhood and youth is carrying you now toward age; that's all this is (2.13).

It refuses, too, to let you flinch from disease and decay while you're still healthy. Genuine wisdom, it says, includes 'seeing clearly the suffering and the flaw in birth, death, old age and sickness' (13.8) — not morbidly, but with open eyes, so that the fact of decay is folded into how you live rather than ambushing you later. There is a strange freedom in looking directly at the thing you most avoid. And it does not shrink the scale of what it's asking you to face: in its most towering image, the Divine itself declares, 'I am Time, the mighty world-destroyer, here grown to annihilate these worlds' (11.32). Death, in that light, is not a private accident that happens to you — it is the very grain of things, the way the universe actually runs.

The Gītā is just as unflinching about pain as about death, and it neither promises you a life without it nor tells you to grit your teeth through it. Its counsel is stranger and sturdier: pain and pleasure alike are contacts — the meeting of the senses with the world — that 'come and go and do not last; endure them' (2.14). Physical or mental, even the sharpest agony has a beginning and an end. And it holds out a summit beyond mere endurance: the one settled in the deepest absorption of yoga is 'not shaken even by the heaviest sorrow' (6.22) — not because the pain has been made small, but because the ground they are standing on can no longer be moved. It goes further and calls this whole world, honestly, 'an abode of sorrow' (8.15) — not to depress you, but to stop you being blindsided when suffering comes, as it comes to everyone; and it traces where so much of our self-made pain is manufactured, naming sorrow the very fruit of restless, grasping action (14.16).

It draws one more line here, worth hearing in an age that romanticizes both self-punishment and the inflicting of pain on others: suffering, for the Gītā, is never holy in itself. It has no patience for those who 'torture the organs of the body' through showy, self-mortifying austerity (17.6), and it flatly calls the austerity 'undertaken to torment oneself, or to harm another' the lowest and most deluded kind (17.19). Pain is not a currency that buys virtue. And about the ultimate agony — the killing and being killed that opened this whole dialogue — it offers the same steadying view it gave of death: at the deepest level 'this Self neither slays nor is slain' (2.19). No violence reaches what you most are — even as the Gītā still asks you to take the world's pain with complete seriousness exactly where it is felt, in bodies and minds like your own.

And then it says something startlingly practical about the moment of death itself: 'whoever, at the end, leaves the body remembering Me, reaches My state' — and more generally, 'whatever state of being one dwells on at the end, that is the state one attains' (8.5–8.6). Think about what that quietly implies. The final thought is not a lottery; it is the sum of a lifetime of thoughts. What you practise attending to, day after ordinary day, is what will rise to meet you when it matters most. Which means the way you spend an idle Tuesday is, in the Gītā's eyes, already a rehearsal — and that is either a heavy thought or a liberating one, depending on how you hold it.