Final destination

Do we really know what we are likely to think about while lying on our future death beds? There are meditation camps that simulate a deathbed experience, to make you imagine your thoughts under those circumstances. Other experiments include a process of writing your own obituary, to clearly understand which goals really matter to you. One more experiment is to imagine your 90th birthday party and flesh out details of who all are there, where are you, what's everyone talking about.

The outcomes from each of these experiments tend to surprise the person undergoing it, as clear disconnects appear between what the person has believed to be goals of her life and what final outcomes would really matter towards the end. It is likely that professional and commercial achievements that she believed to be a goal may end up appearing, at best, as only one of the various paths through which the real goals can be achieved. And these real goals, inevitably, are likely to involve some combination of happiness, equanimity, relationships and time spent with family and friends, value systems upheld, acts of helping others and self-realisation.

Indic spirituality believes in infinite existence of the self-soul. In that sense, the proverbial death bed is never a final destination. The final destination is Self-realisation. Even real goals that are clarified through the above experiments are, at best, milestones in a never-ending journey.