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translates itself into this stubborn assertion: it has always been so, it cannot be any different;
death is inevitable and it is madness to hope that it can be anything else. The concert is
unanimous and till now even the most advanced scientist has hardly dared to sound a
discordant note, a hope for the future. As for the religions, most of them have based their
power of action on the fact of death and they assert that God wanted man to die since
he created him mortal. Many of them make death a deliverance, a liberation, sometimes
even a reward. Their injunction is: submit to the will of the Highest, accept without revolt
the idea of death and you shall have peace and happiness. In spite of all this, the mind
must remain unshakable in its conviction and sustain an unbending will. But for one who
has resolved to conquer death, all these suggestions have no effect and cannot affect his
certitude which is based on a profound revelation.

The second battle is the battle of the feelings, the fight against attachment to everything one
has created, everything one has loved. By assiduous labour, sometimes at the cost of great
efforts, you have built up a home, a career, a social, literary, artistic, scientific or political
work, you have formed an environment with yourself at the centre and you depend on it
at least as much as it depends on you. You are surrounded by a group of people, relatives,
friends, helpers, and when you think of your life, they occupy almost as great a place as
yourself in your thought, so much so that if they were to be suddenly taken away from
you, you would feel lost, as if a very important part of your being had disappeared.

It is not a matter of giving up all these things, since they make up, at least to a great
extent, the aim and purpose of your existence. But you must give up all attachment to these
things, so that you may feel capable of living without them, or rather so that you may be
ready, if they leave you, to rebuild a new life for yourself, in new circumstances, and to do
this indefinitely, for such is the consequence of immortality. This state may be defined in
this way: to be able to organise and carry out everything with utmost care and attention
and yet remain free from all desire and attachment, for if you wish to escape death, you
must not be bound by anything that will perish.

After the feelings come the sensations. Here the fight is pitiless and the adversaries
formidable. They can sense the slightest weakness and strike where you are defenceless.
The victories you win are only fleeting and the same battles are repeated indefinitely. The
enemy whom you thought you had defeated rises up again and again to strike you. You
must have a strongly tempered character, an untiring endurance to be able to withstand
every defeat, every rebuff, every denial, every discouragement and the immense weariness
of finding yourself always in contradiction with daily experience and earthly events.

We come now to the most terrible battle of all, the physical battle which is fought in the body;
for it goes on without respite or truce. It begins at birth and can end only with the defeat
of one of the two combatants: the force of transformation and the force of disintegration.
I say at birth, for in fact the two movements are in conflict from the very moment one

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