The book opens to a lot of promise. It puts evocative questions such as "what happens after death?" and whether "death is the end of life" as is naturally believed to be. With 4 deaths in the family over the last 18 months, I have been looking for some of this stuff. It starts well. It starts with the Savitri Satyavan story - which is familiar. It offers fantastic thoughts and points : "there is nothing which gets truly destroyed. everything gets transformed from one form to some other form". The eight standard physics. Energy can not be made nor can it be destroyed. The sum of energy in the universe is a constant. One just needs to know how to harness the energy which is in abundance in this universe. That thought is echoed in the book.
But, the book then gets into all the advaitic thoughts. It quotes a lot of stories from after life incidences which I have heard and read about.
At the end of the book, I did not get a handle on how to understand death. There are a lot of thoughts and points here. But, the essence is "death is not the end and it is a mere continuum into another form" gets repeated in so many words and so many pages throughout the book.
Where the soul goes, how the rishis understood all this and so on and so forth are all put over here. But, none of that has helped me understand the "why" of death. Why does it occur so very suddenly? So very violently at times? What really happens after that? Why are we unable to communicate to people who are "dead"? How do we communicate? How can we understand "death" while we are alive? After all, Ramana Maharishi was supposed to have understood "death" while he was a mere boy and that incident was the one which drove him to Tiruvannamalai...So, what happens when you die? And, how can you die before you really are dead?
I did not get a clear handle on these. Probably, one needs a lot more maturity to figure this...
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