Amrit Sadhana

Terminally ill patients on life support should have the right to die if they want to, Germany’s highest civil court said recently in a landmark ruling on assisted suicide, reports Reuter.

After years of debate over euthanasia, the Federal Court of Justice ruled that those caring for the patient should cut off life support if the patient willed it.
Cheers broke out in the courtroom in the southwestern city of Karlsruhe when judges read out the decision, which legal experts and doctors hailed as a watershed ruling.
Intellectually we all understand the importance of letting a person with terminal illness die peacefully, but our moral values wouldn’t let us do it. Particularly if the person concerned is our near and a dear one. In the medically-advanced age it has become a serious concern of many. Patients on their deathbeds can be kept alive on ventilators and other machines but they live as vegetables. Is this kind of life worth living? Isn’t it a torture to the patient as well as those who attend on him/her?
It requires great courage and a scientific approach to look at this problem objectively. Choosing to die should not be confused with suicide though, for those who want to commit suicide are emotional people. In a fit of depression or due to an emotional turmoil, they end their life recklessly. Whereas euthanasia is choosing your death in a fully aware and a conscious state. It is taking responsibility for calling it a day.
Osho has always supported “the right to die” as one of the basic human rights. He contends that euthanasia, or the freedom to choose your death, should be accepted as a birthright of every human being. He suggests to make the process of dying a beautiful spiritual experience, the crescendo of life.
Here are some of his suggestions:
w Every hospital should have a place for dying people, and those who have chosen to die should be given special consideration and help. Their death should be beautiful.
w Every hospital should have a teacher of meditation. The person who is going to die should be given one month for the preparation, and if he changes his mind he can go back, because nobody is forcing him.
w Euthanasia will be carried out with the permission of the medical board. One month’s rest in the hospital — every kind of help that can be given to the person to become calm and quiet... all friends coming to meet him, his wife, his children, because he is going on a long journey. He has lived long, and he does not want to go on living, his work is finished.
w And he should be taught meditation in this one month, so that he can practise meditation while death comes. And for death, medical help should be given so it comes like a sleep — slowly, side by side with meditation, sleep going deeper. We can change thousands of people’s deaths into enlightenment.
Why has euthanasia suddenly become the hot topic? The reason is very interesting. It has almost become the need of the hour.
To quote Osho, “With medical science progressing people are living longer. Scientists have not come across any skeleton from 5,000 years ago of a person who was more than 40-years-old when he died. Five thousand years ago the longest a person was going to live was 40, and out of 10 children born nine were going to die within two years — only one would survive — so life was immensely valuable.
“And Hippocrates gave the oath to the medical profession that you have to help life in every case. He was not aware, he was not a seer. He had not the insight to see that a day could come when out of 10 children, all 10 would survive.”
Now, it can be argued that there is a risk of misusing this right, but this risk lies in every new experiment. We do not discard them because of it. We would rather find a positive solution to it.

— Amrit Sadhana is in the management
team of Osho International Meditation Resort, Pune. She facilitates meditation workshops around the country and abroad.