Continued from Invocatory Part One of Two
ii. Those who know intense fear of death seek refuge only at the feet of the Lord Who has neither death nor birth. Dead to themselves and their possessions, can the thought of death occur to them again? Deathless are they.
Commentary: All fear is rooted in the fear of death. But death can only afflict what is born, that is, what is changing: that is, what is thought. We have just seen that what is Real is unchanging, and that what is Real is us.
The Lord who has neither birth nor death is none other than this very Reality, the Heart. This Lord may go by many other names — Shiva or Vishnu or God or the Goddess, for example. But ultimately they all refer to this unchanging Reality.
In order to take refuge at the feet of this Lord, all else must be given up. This giving up is a kind of death. By dying to what is changing — to what one thought one was, but in fact is not — one realizes oneself to actually be the unchanging. What seems mortal has in fact never been born to begin with, and what is immortal cannot die. And the thought of death cannot occur to the immortals, which are those who have given up their stake in everything changing.
At any time, see all the forty verses posts that I have published so far here.