There is so much death around us. It is extraordinary though, isn't it; how carefully nature hides it from sight. The odds of spotting a dead bird, bat, squirrel, snail, frog are so much lower than the surround-sound of their life and living with which they inform our own

With such a voluptous exuberance of life enveloping us, perhaps we should be forgiven our disregard of mortality and finitude. How different might everything be if we could predict the date of our death like we do with birth

Not only is India unique with the number of saints it has in lore & recent times; more unique is that many of these saints as recent as the 20th CE have predicted precisely the time of their death. Ramana Mahrashi, Swami Vivekananda, Sathya Sai Baba, even the Saint of Kanchi

With all our determininsm, our present understanding of consciousness that's an extraordinary fact that one can't quite wrap one's head around. How does a biologically determined consciousness predict accurately the day of its death?

If we knew when we'd die even if not precisely but with just a fair degree of accuracy; how different would our notions of morality be. Would we be so possessive of love; would we be monogamous; have children; would we have a religion at all; wars?

It is not death that we fear. It is dying. It isn't the terror of obliteration; it is instead, the terror of the ways by which we are extirpated. A prolonged, exhausting, consistent erosion of the self, our sense of self, our sense of the world and of the world's sense of us.

I am convinced that if death was not inseparably linked with the dramatic suffering that precedes it, our approach to existence would be vastly different. Religion, as we know it, would not be. And without religion; whither morality?