In Hindu traditions, giving 'agnidah' to the mortal remains has important significance. It is said that after death, the mortal remains should be cremated at the earliest. One of the first things people traditionally do if someone dies is to tie the big toes of the dead body together. This is very important because it will tighten up the Muladhara in such a way that the body cannot be invaded by that life once again. According to Spiritual Guru Sadhguru, a life that has not lived with the awareness that “this body is not me” will try to enter through any orifice of the body, particularly through the Muladhara. The Muladhara is where life generates, and it is always the last point of warmth when the body is cooling down.
The reason why traditionally, we always said that if someone dies, you must burn the body within a certain time frame, is because life tries to get back. This is also important for living. If someone very dear to you died, your mind may start playing tricks, thinking that maybe a miracle will happen, maybe God will come and bring them back. It has never happened to anyone, but still the mind plays up because of the emotions that you have for that particular person. Similarly, the life that has exited the body also believes that it can still get back into the body.
The Science Behind Cremation
If you want to stop the drama, the first thing is to set fire to the body within one and a half hours. Or to be sure the person is dead, they have stretched it to four hours. But the body should be taken away as quickly as possible. In agricultural communities, they used to bury, because they wanted their forefathers’ bodies, which are a piece of soil, to go back to the soil that had nourished them. Today, you buy your food from the store, and do not know where it comes from. Therefore, burial is not advisable anymore. In earlier times, when they buried in their own land, they always put salt and turmeric on the dead body so that it quickly dissipates into the soil.
Cremation is also good because it closes the chapter. You will see that when there is a death in the family, people will be crying and wailing, but the moment cremation happens, they will become quiet, because suddenly, the truth has sunk in that it is over. This goes not only for the living but also for the disembodied being who has just exited the body. As long as the body is there, he or she is also under the illusion that they can get back.
The Importance of Death Rituals (Excerpted from Death – An Inside Story)
Death rituals are not just to assist the dead person in his or her journey, they are also for the benefit of those who are left behind because if this person who dies leaves a lot of unsettled life around us, our lives will not be good. It is not that ghosts will come and catch you. But it will influence the atmosphere. It will influence those around, psychologically. It will also influence the quality of life around. This is the reason every culture in the world has its own type of rituals for the dead.
Generally, a lot of it is to settle certain psychological factors of the near and dear ones. In some way, they did have a certain relevance and science behind them too. But, probably, no other culture has such elaborate methods as the Indians do. No one has looked at death with the kind of understanding and depth that this culture has. Right from the moment that death occurs, or even before it occurs, there are whole systems to help a person die in the most beneficial way. Having looked at life from every possible angle, they want to extract the most out of everything towards Liberation or mukti. If death is going to occur, they want to make use of even that to attain mukti, in some way. So they created powerful rituals for the dying and for the dead.
Today, these rituals have become even more important because almost everyone on the planet is beginning to die in unawareness, without the necessary understanding of the life mechanism within themselves. In the olden days, most people died of infections and diseases. So people created a whole science to help them beyond their body. When they were in the body, maybe people around could not figure out what the ailment was or the person did not get the necessary treatment or something else happened and they died. So at least after his or her death, they wanted to help them in such a way that they did not hang around for too long and dissolved quickly. This is how the whole science behind these rituals evolved. Unfortunately, today, it has mostly become a meaningless ritual being done without the needed understanding or expertise.
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