Don’t depend on death to liberate you from your imperfections.
You are exactly the same after death as you were before. Nothing changes; you only give up the body.
If you are a thief or a liar or a cheater before death, you don’t become an angel merely by dying.
If such were possible, then let us all go and jump in the ocean now and become angels at once!
Whatever you have made of yourself thus far, so will you be hereafter.
And when you reincarnate, you will bring that same nature with you.
To change, you have to make the effort.
This world is the place to do it. –
– Paramahansa Yogananda
….and just a ‘few years’ before Paramahansa the mystic Kabir postulated :
Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think… and think… while you are alive.
What you call “salvation” belongs to the time
before death.
If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will rejoin with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten–
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an empty apartment in the
City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next
life you will have the face of satisfied desire.
So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!
—–Kabir
