Prahlāda Mahārāja is recommending that before growing very old, from the childhood, receptive state, one should learn this Kṛṣṇa consciousness. Otherwise, he says:
- ko gṛheṣu pumān saktam
- ātmānam ajitendriyaḥ
- sneha-pāśair dṛḍhair baddham
- utsaheta vimocitum
- (SB 7.6.9)
He has analyzed the life, that our duration of life may be for one hundred years. Out of that, fifty years we spoil by sleeping, because at night we sleep ten hours, twelve hours. There is twenty-four hours duration of day and night. So supposing that I sleep for twelve hours, day and night, then actually I live fifty years, because sleeping is death. That is also daily death. The sleeping . . .
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.