TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
"Science will someday advance to the point that it will confirm the validity of the non-dual teachings."
--Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
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[From yesterday]:
HEADLINE:
NEW YORK, N.Y. (WIVB) — RESEARCHERS IN NEW YORK SAY THAT AFTER A PERSON DIES, THE BRAIN IS STILL ACTIVE
The report: This means, according to CBS contributors, is that “in many cases they can be aware that they’ve passed away.”
[Yesterday's consideration]:
Many people claim that they looked down upon their bodies as they were "dying" and saw rescuers working to revive them and then saw themselves returning to their bodies and
"living" and claiming "it was a miracle."
Far from being "a miracle," which some describe is a commonplace event which the wisest among non-dualists have understood for thousands of years. what others describe is a con, dreamed up to further a dogma-based agenda or a financial agenda.
The explanation of what really happens at the moment of mahasamadhi and with the unmanifesting process will continue with tomorrow's post.
(First, not understanding mahasamadhi and the un-manifesting process has led on many occasions to those whose un-manifesting was interrupted and then erroneously reported to others about "an afterlife" or "a beautiful heaven" (or maybe "a horrible hell," awaiting all" of some other false belief. More significantly, it has trapped millions and trillions in the delusion of "an afterlife" and a preoccupation with earning "an eternal reward.")
Some in the Far East have long spoken of "three bodies" to help students understand the movement.
Consider . . .
1. the gross body to be the space housing manifested consciousness;
2. take the subtle body to represent something shifting beyond the personal, gross body;
3. and take the causal body to correspond to the transpersonal stage that precedes total transcendence to the Unmanifest, to the no-body and no-mind Reality.
The content of "The Vision" (available without charge above) clarified for me what happens with the three bodies and has done the same for many other seekers. Here's what was shown to me in the vision regarding the three bodies and the unmanifesting process:
"So with these three birds representing different 'bodies' / 'stages,' might they also provide some simpler understanding of the very confusing and convoluted discussions about 'the gross, subtle, and causal bodies? Hummm."
"No wait. It's clear that the representation of the physical body or gross - the elemental plant food body - is presented prior to the birds: it's that body that's left outside the arch. That's the body-cum-consciousness which needs gross food, drink and air.
"But what about the subtle body? That's the vehicle of consciousness and the vehicle of desires and the vehicle that also houses the mind and intellect, so in the vision that would be the body walking through trees and across water. I know Maharaj said that body is 'created with the emergence of the ‘I am’ idea' and 'is momentary. Real when present, unreal when over.'
"In the vision, that's also before the birds appear, so the birds aren't representing either of those 'bodies.' That leaves the causal body that many in the East consider to be a higher subtle body, beyond even the mental body that was seen moving through the arch. Seems I read that when belief in personality ends, the 'essence' of You is absorbed into the causal body or shifts to the causal body form?
"In the vision, that happens when the raven - when belief in the religious-spiritual self - comes to an end and is transformed into the gull. So that's where the birds come in. But I also read that there will eventually come an awareness of all 'others' and that there will no longer be anything 'seen' as another - as an 'other' - and that what will then seen is the unicity, Love, wisdom, bliss, everythingness, nothingness.
Then, it was recalled that Maharaj taught: "there is something that may be called the memory body, or causal body, a record of all that was thought, wanted and done. It is like a cloud of images held together."
At that point, what flashed into consciousness was "Jung" and "archetypes" and the genetic codes serving as a storehouse of images of the entire human experience." Then I went back to the readings and found this:
Maharaj: "What prevents the insight into one’s True Nature is the weakness and obtuseness of the mind and its tendency to skip the subtle and focus on the gross only."
It became clear that the gross body is required for the manifestation of consciousness but that there's so much more to grasp beyond that. It also became clear that the focus and preoccupation with the gross body had to be transcended in order for any understanding of that which is beyond the physical only to manifest.
Yet it was also clear that it was not the Am-ness that had to be forsaken but merely the tendency to focus on the gross alone. I searched for another passage that flashed into consciousness at that moment and found this:
Maharaj: "Abandon all self-concern; worry not about your welfare, material or spiritual; abandon every desire, gross or subtle; stop thinking of achievement of any kind. You are complete here and now, you need absolutely nothing."
"Yes! There it is. Confirmation of what I was concluding about the raven coming to end - bringing to an end the playing of the false religious and false spiritual roles. 'Worry not about [the] material or [the] spiritual. Abandon it all!' Yes!"
Then another passage flashed into consciousness and the readings were searched through again until this was found:
Maharaj: "Your true being is entirely unself-conscious, completely free from all self-identification with whatever it may be gross, subtle or transcendental"
as well as this exchange:
M: "Again, you take yourself to be the body."
Questioner: "Even if I dismiss this body of bones, flesh and blood as not-me; still I remain with the subtle body made up of thoughts and feelings, memories and imaginations. If I dismiss these also as not-me, I still remain with consciousness, which also is a kind of body."
M: "You are quite right, but you need not stop there. Go beyond."
"Beyond the three bodies? Is that an invitation to go to the borderline, and then move even beyond that to the void? To the nothingness?" Wow. This vision is packed chock full! So many of the final pieces of the puzzle which had been missing are now falling into place! Now to find where the borderline is and what the borderline is."
From a site visitor:
V.: “My wife has been visited at night by her deceased father who brings positive messages to her. It seems to me that those sighting dismiss your notion that there is no body or any form in an afterlife.”
F.: Your comments, along with your wife’s “sightings,” show that you have both missed the natural understanding and have been programmed to think supernaturally. There are actually two possible explanations for her “experiences”:
(1) the sightings were “real” and involved a subtle or causal body state of consciousness or
(2) the sightings were actually just mere imaginings of the types that happen in the Theta state of consciousness.
In “The Glossary of Terms Used on this Site,” one entry in December 2005 offered this, in part:
Unmanifesting: The movement of consciousness (which was temporarily manifested into a space) back into that "field of conscious-energy" from which it came.
(The erroneous beliefs in ghosts, angels, spirits, and an eternal life with a body were first given credence when the consciousness that was still manifested in some gross body became aware of subtle or causal stage manifestations of consciousness in the transition stage of unmanifesting. A woman who looked as if she'd seen a ghost approached me and told me her grandmother had just appeared to her and told her "everything is going to be OK." Fifteen minutes later, a call came that her grandmother had died fifteen minutes earlier.
That event was nothing more than manifested consciousness being aware of unmanifesting consciousness. Rather than suggesting that some "magical world" exists out there or that "bodies last forever," that event merely illustrated that consciousness can know consciousness NOW.)
Next, the advice is to only use the "three body stages" to help you picture consciousness not unmanifesting in a micro-second but fading out of the manifestation and into the unmanifest.
Many persons claim that consciousness is "the soul" and that the soul will go to another world and remanifest there into the same body it was in on earth—along with the same "mind" it had at the "time" of "death."
Of course that is impossible since dust does not regroup and since "the mind" was a complete illusion . . . the storehouse of all illusions.
While the scientists have not yet understood the explanation available fro the sages of the East, they are certain dancing around the understanding, moving closer and closer.
As for the masses ever understanding the truth about mahasamadhi and the unmanifesting process, that is not likely. There are too many supposedly "holy" and "precious" and "sacred" and "really popular" concepts based in duality - such as "a life in this world and an eternal life in the next world" and "heaven and hell" and "good and bad" and "reward and punishment," etc. - for the masses to give up their totally erroneous beliefs about this subject.
Add in
(a) the fear and
(b) the disappointment regarding unmet desires which are generated by understanding that "this is all there is for you" and
(c) add in the angst around realizing that there is "no eternal life," "no Eternal Brothel in the Sky," "no thousands of virgins, wives and whores to be at males' beck and call," etc., and
then it is clear why the actual understanding of mahasamadhi and the unmanifesting process would be anathema among the masses.
To be continued.
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