Salvation for birth and death (Mahabharata Notes #21)

It is not an original insight that all religions, to some extent, offer salvation for death. A religion that does nothing to alleviate human angst over death cannot go very far. However, the only religion that perceive birth and death as both sides of the same coin, as far as I know, originates from ancient India. No other religion has such philosophical depth and sophistication. 

Isn't it funny? We all tend to take birth for granted and want to wish death away so that life has a beginning but not an end? It is the most natural, most instinctive idea shared by all mankind. I get a mental image of a cannon shooting out person after person after person for a few million years, piling up in the eternal afterlife. Hmm. It must be an expanding universe.

Thus, it is extraordinary that the Hindu priests at some point realized that birth and death are tightly bound together as cause and effect -- few things in nature are so pure and direct -- and dreamed up a scheme in which death is also the cause of birth. They must have loved the aesthetics of circles. 

Death may not cause birth, but birth absolutely is the cause of death. 

Isn't it funny that nobody else in the world talks about this universal truth? Those priests some thousands of years ago not only thought about it but also put it in their scripture. If you want to avoid death, you gotta avoid birth in the first place. This is the kind of airtight logic you can't get from even the most sophisticated theologians in any other religion. 

Therefore, it is only natural and logical that the ultimate salvation offered by the Bhagavan is total liberation from birth and from death. The all-encompassing god of the universe, through the avatar of Krishna, says kindly that everyone is free to believe in any god they want and make sacrifice to any god they want to obtain favors from. They stay in the cycles of birth and death doing their thing, even if the Atman permeates all of them anyway. However, once you become aware of and devote yourself to the Bhagavan, that's it, that's the end of your deaths ... and your births. The ultimate solution is the absolute salvation.