The Remembrance of Death

The personality of one who remembers death will be transformed in every respect. His thinking will become totally Hereafter-oriented.

What is the remembrance of death? The remembrance of death is when you are able to think with complete consciousness that this living existence of yours will be all of a sudden taken away from this present world, then you will be sent to another world, where everything you have here will be taken away from you. You will be all alone in that world. You will not even be able to speak to your friends and relatives. And you will have nothing to support you. When this feeling comes to you in keen awareness, that will be the remembrance of death.

The remembrance of death is not a thing of the past, a distant matter. The remembrance of death means to come to grips with the horrible experience which you shall have to face in your life. The remembrance of death should be so part and parcel of your thinking that you lose interest in this world. Every night you should feel as if there will be no morning. Every day when you wake up, you should feel that this very morning will be the morning of doomsday. Every morning you should feel that that very evening will be the evening of doomsday. When you are in this state and you start feeling that at every moment you are standing at death’s door, when every occasion becomes a reminder of your own death, you can regard yourself as having remembered death.

This is the reality which has been expressed thus in a Hadith: “Remember death very often. This will demolish pleasure.” (Sunan Ibn Majah, Hadith No. 4258) Pleasure in this Hadith is a word which includes all desires, all feelings. One who remembers death in the real sense will, without doubt, face an earthquake in his life. His personality will be transformed in every respect. His thinking will become totally Hereafter-oriented. After thinking of death, if one leads a life as he had done earlier, it would mean that he has not truly remembered death.