What is the difference between death and sleeping? There is no difference. Just like at the present moment we are sleeping, say, for twelve hours or eight hours or ten hours and getting up in the next morning, and death means we shall sleep for seven months continually, and when we get up I see another body. That is birth and death. That is birth and death.
Death means you give up this body. "You" means the soul. And you carry yourself with your subtle body—mind, intelligence and ego. According to your mental situation you enter into the womb of a mother injected by the semen of your father, you get an opportunity to grow another body. It takes about seven months to grow that body. So during this period, I mean to say, quitting this body, entering into another body and to develop that body, come to the consciousness point of view, it takes seven months. So death means sleeping for seven months.
So this sleeping, our daily sleeping, is also a sample of death. We are experiencing for twelve hours only or ten hours only, but this death means you'll have to sleep for seven months, then when you wake up you'll see that you have got another body. That's all. Just like you are getting every moment a different body, similarly, death . . . birth and death means to change this body and to get another, new body.
Vāsāṁsi jīrṇāni yathā vihāya (BG 2.22). The Bhagavad-gītā says that just like we change one set of garment which is not usable—we throw it away and take another set of garment—similarly, when this body is old enough, it cannot be pulled on, the machine has gone wrong, it cannot work anymore, that is called death. You stop breathing, but you are transferred, transmigrated to another body. So death we are experiencing daily.