"Three times it happened that accidentally somebody started talking about death – and Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, fainted, became unconscious. The fear must have been very great.

"We make our graveyards outside the city, so that we don't come across the graveyard every day in the marketplace. It is out of fear.

"In my childhood, I loved to go to anybody's funeral; it didn't matter who had died. My father and my uncles were disturbed. They said, 'The man was a stranger, he was not in any way related to us. Why should you waste your time following his funeral?'

"I used to follow the funerals of beggars too. I said, 'I have learned much, following many people who have died. The strangest thing I have learned is that, even when the man is on a funeral pyre, those who have come to say good-bye to him are not even sitting looking at the funeral pyre. Their backs are toward the funeral pyre, and they are talking about all kinds of things, except death – because it is difficult to avoid the question that if everybody dies sooner or later, my number is also going to come.

"A famous poetic statement is: 'Never ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.' When somebody dies and the church bell tolls, 'Never ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.'

"Every death reminds you that you are here only for a few days, perhaps tomorrow will not come for you. The end is coming closer and closer every day, and beyond death is nothing but an unknown world, unfamiliar – no friends, no family, no society. You don't know what is going to exist for you, because you have always been in the crowd. Death will make you alone.

"So only those who know the art of being alone while they are alive remain conscious when they die; otherwise, the shock is so much that before death ninety-nine percent of people, or perhaps more, become unconscious. And to die unconsciously is to miss such a great opportunity, because death reveals to you life in its utter nudity.

"This is one of the most important questions anybody can raise."