DEATH

Death is the one journey for which none of us can purchase a ticket, choose a companion, or know the destination.

Yet it is also the journey that every human being, regardless of faith, philosophy, nationality, wealth or status, will one day undertake.

I have spent years watching people standing at different kinds of doors-. Over time, one question became increasingly difficult to ignore: what is it about death that frightens us so deeply, and what might death teach us about living?

If death is certain, why should we live in fear of it?

This book is my attempt to sit quietly with that question.

I have not written it to prove that one religion, philosophy or scientific theory possesses the final answer. I have written it to listen-to the ancient wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, to The Buddha and The Mahavir, to The Sikh and The Taoist thought, to Socrates, Plato and the Stoics, to the world's great mythologies and literature, and to the questions raised by modern science and our understanding of consciousness.

Somewhere between faith and doubt lies a vast territory called mystery.

That is where this book begins.

The door is there.

We have all seen it.

None of us has returned with a map of what lies beyond it.

Perhaps the purpose of this journey is therefore not to discover a final answer, but to become less afraid of the question-and, in doing so, to learn how to live more fully before we reach the door.

Mr.Harbansh Kumar Chaturvedi, Advocate Supreme Court of India.