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Elias
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 Posted: 01/07/08, 10:02 pm Post subject: An incidence of dying... |
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A few weeks ago I wrote about the death of my brother-in-law in these forums. At the time, I couldn't say everything about what took place, because I was waiting for confirmation from him that he had made it through. Last night he answered, and so I will write about one of the most extraordinary deaths I ever had the privilege to witness.
Tomorrow, I hope.
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Elias
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| Posted: 01/13/08, 11:48 pm Post subject: The nothing-worth-doing syndrome... |
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I posted more about my friend's "transition" in the Ramana thread. I am going to jump back and forth between the two threads, but it is all one theme, as it turns out.
One of the effects that Jung noted about contacting the Self is that the conscious mind will lose its "tone", as attention is drawn deeply into inner reality. Energy stops being cathected outward, into objects and people. Projections are broken. Duality just collapses, at least for awhile, under the gravity of God's nearness.
I received a double-whammy in that regard, with the dying of my brother-in-law and then immersing myself in the Ramana film. If things come in three's, I am probably do for the triple-wham any day now...
What's it feel like? It's a mixture of sadness, dislocation, and loss of interest in just about everything. I've experienced it before, at different junctures, so I don't expect it to be permanent. On the other hand, if you have known first-hand the power of God, you know it can just sweep you away any old time. You could drop the body. People do, in fact, drop the body unexpectedly, on sighting God.
Meher Baba used to repeat a common Indian saying, that most people, after unmediated experience of God, will "drop the body within three days". I don't expect that, because I've been "there and back again" many many times, in different ways, and for different reasons. But God is God and each time the pull to vanish in That gets stronger, and there seems less reason to hang on to this passing scenery...
Ah, but there's hidden destiny as well, you know -- an arc of events yet to unfold, and plenty of reason to bring back what you can from "the other side", so as to act as a catalyst for changes in the mind, the dreaming, the feeling-relations, even the day-to-day round, of yourself and others.
Yet one wouldn't choose that course, say, as a "mission" for the ego. It can't be done, and those that try it have failed miserably. (Names withheld.)
Rather, "returning" is a path taken reluctantly, like being told you must forgo being with someone with whom you are deeply in love...
Yeah, it's the blues of separation...or the longing for home that soldiers feel in a war zone. (The world is a war zone, no doubt about that.)
But in the moment -- each moment considered -- it is simply that the "thrill is gone"...the excitement of engaging life to make a living, write books, take care of business, whatever... What a waste of precious time it all seems!
It is also an ongoing meditation, because you have been stunned (or stoned) by the Self. God has simply pulled back the veil and blasted you with perfect Joy. and now you are (consciously) in the dull world again, living out the rhythm of your friendships, your obligations, your aging, your thoughts, your entertainments, your new car, your household chores...etc etc.
It makes me laugh, this emptiness, because I have no doubt that emptiness is forever the true state of our busy lives. And the push-pull of juxtaposing it to the joyous "ground of being" is simply a bad joke...or like falling down and scraping you elbows on a sidewalk.
I've learned from long experience what happens next. I'll tell you about it if it happens.
~E |
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Elias
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| Posted: 01/14/08, 11:27 pm Post subject: More...the bodhisattva way vs the yoga of ascent |
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| Quote: | Those who call themselves bodhisattvas are motivated by the wish to benefit other "existences" and to lead them to enlightenment[citation needed].
The Mahayana encourages everyone to become bodhisattvas and to take the bodhisattva vows. With these vows, one makes the promise to work for the complete enlightenment of all sentient beings. Indelibly entwined with the Bodhisattva Vow is parinamana (Sanskirt; which may be rendered in English as "merit transference").
According to the Theravada tradition however, being a bodhisattva and becoming a fully enlightened Buddha (Sanskrit: Samyaksambuddha) is not possible for the vast majority of beings, so their common path to follow is to strive for becoming an ordinary Arhat (liberated from the sufferings of the cycle of rebirths; the term is applied in Theravada Buddhism to Buddhas as well). [from Wikipedia] |
The idea of the bodhisattva can't be understood, least of all by those who "take the bodhisattva vows".
I have known people who took such vows, and they did so in complete innocence of what process is involved in the work of a "bodhisattva". Indeed, they were (or are) neophytes in meditation and in self-understanding. But they were encouraged by their Tibetan Buddhist teachers to take this vow -- a vow for which they have idealistic feelings, but about which they are largely clueless.
You can't "vow" to be anything relative to God, Buddha, Reality, the Self...or whatever you choose to call It.
But you can discover your destiny in that regard, a path you are on before you even know about it. And when you do find that beneath your common life you are on this path, there is nothing the least bit idealistic about it. It is just damn hard work, born of a sentiment that is part of your primordial makeup, even before you are born into this world.
I realized I had this predisposition the first time I got "sent back" to the body, after my initial spiritual experiences in my late teens and early twenties. It was two-fold: it had to do with making conscious the structure of my own psyche, and it had to do with inserting that new way of seeing into my relationships, so as to undo the social contracts which tend to suppress and make unknown the reality of God in which we are all arising.
I was a "right brain" creative type, who loved music, poetry, art...and the mysteries that intuition can uncover in the worlds of dreaming, meditation, and prayer. Indeed, the development of my "right brain" self was rapid and pretty much unobstructed, to the point where I discovered I had a clear path out of here, if I wanted to take it, via the surrender to the ascending spirit. Leaving the body via the sahasrar was simply a return to a profoundly familiar state.
The experience of this ascent didn't even have to be engineered with meditation. It would happen spontaneously, unexpectedly, at particularly intense moments. Suddenly I would vault out of my body and find myself seeing everything from above, with a feeling of boundlessness and inviolable certainty. (I described some of these experiences in some bio material that was posted on this site back in the late 1990s.)
That was fine -- like knowing the secret door out of a haunted house, but also knowing it wouldn't be necessary to use it.
You see, there was a troubling aspect to being in the world: although God is accessible to the few who learned the yoga of surrender, God is also obscured by the mechanics of the left-brain by which the Western world has constructed itself. And, as a man of the West, I have carried that construct and all its (mistaken) assumptions in myself.
So what happened was that I discovered I had a built-in disposition to investigate the "unconscious" of the left-brain side of myself, to see how it was put together, and to learn how to penetrate it with the power that was my natural gift: the right-brain spiritual intuition.
I thought this might take a few years at best. It turned out to take decades. And it is still ongoing. There were many tasks that arose in this "work" of mastering the left side of consciousness. One of them was the battle with false gurus -- misguided men who have threatened, by their machinations, to drag many many others down into archaic cults, further obliterating our real knowledge of God/Buddha/Self. Another task had to do with tackling the power complex in business: I found myself almost effortlessly being drawn into the play of several large corporations, including Lucasfilm, where a powerfully mayavic form of the complex is at work. In every case I was invited to capitulate to something to which I could not capitulate -- and the temptation to do so was sometimes very strong. But I had my feet planted in a reality that "the princes of this world" don't understand. Or rather, they do understand it, enough so that they are moved to offer a "price" if you will give it up. (more about his later, perhaos)
In any case, my own journey has been highly individual, and the various particulars have been fitted to me as a person -- they aren't summed up in some kind of collectivized ideal about "vowing to help all sentient beings". It just doesn't work that way, bodhis. That's why you need to honor you own life, your own journey, and the mundane happenstance of all your interactions, outward and inward, physical and subtle. Your bodhisattva path is there.
My brother-in-law took his own bodhisattva path, I see that now. But he was completely invisible to all the status-seekers of formal religion and all the elites of new age philosophy. He was just an ordinary guy, living a regular life in the world as he found it. Strange how he is remembered now, by those who knew him, as somebody who was always participating in the life around him with great energy and gusto. Always helping people, always living from natural compassion, without the word "compassion" even being part of his vocabulary.
So it is that he -- a non-churchgoer -- went directly and deeply into God when he died. I wish you could have seen his eyes on his deathbed. They communicated astonishing cohesiveness and wisdom. He had really pulled all the parts of himself together, in a most remarkable way.
I mentioned in an earlier post how he was joking and laughing the day before he died. According to his wife he was full of good humor right up until the end. He had already found his release...all that needed to be accomplished was the passion and ordeal of dying.
May it be the same for each of you.
Elias |
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