The Art of Living and Dying
About This Book
The Art of Living and Dying is Osho's meditation on the twin mysteries of life and death — arguing that the art of dying consciously and the art of living fully are not two different arts but the same art approached from different angles, and that the person who has genuinely learned to be fully present in life has already learned the fundamental skill that enables the equally full presence through which death can be met with awareness rather than unconsciousness and terror. The book grew from discourses that Osho gave specifically in response to those who were dying in his community — the quality of attention and compassion in these discourses gives the book a different and more intimate quality than his more systematic philosophical presentations.
Osho addresses death from multiple angles: the phenomenological (what actually happens at the moment of death, drawing on both ancient accounts and contemporary near-death research), the philosophical (what the universal fact of death implies about the nature of consciousness and the meaning of life), the practical (what practices of awareness and acceptance prepare one most effectively for the experience of dying), and the mystical (the understanding, shared across many traditions, that the moment of death is a moment of potential liberation — the dissolution of the ego into the universal that is always available but most unavoidable at death). Throughout, the theme is consistent: death is not the enemy of life but its completion — the full stop that gives the sentence its meaning.
What You'll Learn
• Understand the life-death equivalence: Osho's core argument that learning to die consciously and learning to live fully are the same art — the specific understanding that both require the same quality of full presence, the same release of the grasping and avoiding that characterises the ego's normal relationship to experience, and the same trust in the process of the present moment
• Grasp the consciousness-at-death teaching: what Osho says about the specific experience of dying — what the transition from life to death actually involves (drawing on near-death accounts, meditative traditions, and his own understanding), what determines whether the transition is made consciously or unconsciously, and what practices prepare the consciousness most effectively for the experience
• Recognise the death as liberation teaching: how Osho engages with the understanding (present in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, in the Upanishads, in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and in many mystical traditions) that the moment of death is a moment of potential liberation — the dissolution of the individual ego into the universal consciousness from which it arose — and what determines whether this potential liberation is actualised
• Learn the grief and bereavement dimension: how The Art of Living and Dying addresses those who are facing the death of loved ones — the specific understanding of grief that allows both the full experience of loss and the recognition of what continues, and what Osho says about how to be genuinely helpful to someone who is dying
• Appreciate the non-conventional quality: how The Art of Living and Dying challenges the conventional Western cultural framework that treats death as pure loss and the enemy of life — and how Osho's consistently counter-cultural perspective on death as completion, as teacher, and as potential liberation produces a reading of the human situation that is both more honest about what death is and more genuinely consoling than the conventional alternatives
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