The Greatest
Conditioning

A tradition states that one should remember death often. This means we have to de-condition ourselves, remove our unawareness of death and re-plan our life based on reality.

All human beings have to die. But no one remembers this fact. What is the reason for this? All men and women are standing on the verge of death but go on leading lives of unawareness.

The real reason for this phenomenon is conditioning. When someone is born, he is born into a complete world to live in. This world stays with him at every moment. Wherever he may be, at home or on a journey, in every situation he leads his life in a worldly continuum. This continuity keeps conditioning him at all times and unconsciously man comes to believe that he and the world are complementary to each other, that he is not going to leave this world nor is the world going to be taken away from him.

All this happens unconsciously. This is called conditioning. Due to the continuous flow of events, this conditioning becomes so ingrained that no man or woman is able to think that a time might come when he or she will be separated from the present world and the present world will also leave him or her one day. This is why, even standing on the verge of death, people are totally unaware of this reality.

There is a tradition which says one should remember death often. (Sunan Ibn Majah, Hadith No. 4258) This does not mean that we have to keep repeating this word again and again. It means that we have to stem the influence of our conditioning by giving a great deal of thought to death. We have to de-condition ourselves on this subject. This de-conditioning will be possible only when man gives deep thought to this matter and re-plans his life based on reality.