I have no idea. But I don’t think we’ll get at it that way. This is first of all a question of psychological anonymity, isn’t it? Is this any different from psychological death?
Obviously(?) not, as trying to obtain these things as goals, would be a kind of confusion.
No, what I mean is that we shall not learn anything about this by listening to the words of other people. The words, the explanations, the descriptions, the entreaties, the subtle arguments, the rational or the irrational statements, the stories, the manifestos and even the most carefully delineated yet passionate poetry - none of this is the way into death or love or anonymity. We can’t use that which is present in order to explain that which is absent.
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That would be the ‘maturation’ (blossoming) of the human being? If there isn’t this ‘freedom from the known ‘, the brain at death will cling to the past?
Do you see the difficulty when we say something like this? It assumes there are degrees of maturity or even degrees of being a human being. Death is about no longer being a human being. Right? Are we ready for that? What I mean is, are we ready to face the prospect of no longer being a human being?
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The ‘contents’, the ‘you’ and ‘me’ and the attachment to them creates the fear which makes it impossible to enquirer into this thing we call ‘death’. Death can’t be ‘faced’ if there is any fear of it? The image we have created of it is false, the image IS the fear?
Yes; this is what I understand K to have meant by the flowering of the human mind. The emptying of the contents of consciousness (which makes up consciousness) - which is the ending of psychological time and psychological thought - is the drying up of the stream of sorrow, violence, illusion. When the brain is empty (of psychological contents), then there is space; the space of the mind (universal mind).
According to K, that space of the mind is no “thing”; and intelligence and love (compassion) are no “thing” also. So we might say that a brain that has the space of no “thing”, and with it intelligence and love, is the true flowering of the human being.
That is my understanding. The brain at death will of course disintegrate with the body, but according to K those contents (of consciousness) that have not been emptied (i.e. that still “cling”) will continue - in the brains of other human beings as they are born.
I don’t know exactly how this happens; perhaps it has to do with the nature of the ‘subtle matter’ of thought (which has its own continuity relatively independent of any particular brain)? Subtle matter would of course be a “thing” - unlike the space of the mind - and like all “things” must have its own continuity of cause and effect. If a temporal afterlife exists (as people like Saurab believe) then this too would have its continuity of cause and effect, because it is composed of memory and imagination (which are “things”).
Nothingness, space, is not continuous like matter and memory. K says that it is timeless (not continuous).
Yes… As I understand it, the image we have of death (which is fear) is part of the contents of consciousness. So, in the emptying of the contents of consciousness (i.e. the dying to those contents) the fear of death, and death itself, is also emptied. When the psychological contents (i.e the observer) is no more, then death is also no more. K calls this “the timeless”.
So if the mind is ‘empty’, it can be free at the moment of physical death, the energy can ‘survive’ the shock of that event and not become again part of the ‘stream’? That is how I see it. The ‘freeing’ of that energy may serve some purpose that we can’t know…in the ‘immensity’? But that ‘emptying’ (which takes energy) must take place while the body is still alive, otherwise the ‘attached’ energy reincarnates again after the physical death? ‘Life’ is then, a sort of ‘purifying’ or ‘refining’ or transforming process? Interesting.
This is very speculative of course; but as I understand it, the mind that is empty of psychological contents is no longer the mind as we ordinarily understand it. Such a mind is not the particular or personal mind, and so is not identified with the stream of consciousness. For this ‘non-local’ mind, time and continuity no longer have any psychological validity; so when physical death occurs ‘death’ as such has no significance (i.e. to the ‘non-local’ mind). Such a mind is already free from death. But what exactly happens from the point of view of this ‘non-local’ mind when the local body and brain disintegrate is impossible to say.
Perhaps - certainly K seems to suggest this. But, of course, it is not a purpose that can be comprehended from the point of view of consciousness (i.e. the ordinary limited, local mind). All that the local mind can do is daily empty itself, without resistance, of its contents.
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Yes true but while the ‘local’ mind may have its own selfish reasons for doing so, ‘enlightenment’, etc, there may be an actual ‘global’ function that ‘emptying the mind’ serves’… “Many are called but few are chosen” for some reason comes to mind. A mystery.
Yes. K sometimes spoke about how by emptying of the contents of consciousness we make room for a new dimension (of mind) to infuse consciousness; and that the “global” function of this emptying - the mystery of it - is related to the nature of compassion:
if you through insight liberate the content you add something incalculably valuable. That is the greatest morality: to be free of that content, to give a new meaning to life which is love and compassion, with its intelligence. (Brockwood Park, Talk 3, 1981)
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The esoteric work of the Alchemists: turning ‘lead’ into ‘gold’!
The “insight” is in part, into the futility of attachment… as a means to ‘immortalize’ my self. All that I have attached myself to , people, places, things, my accomplishments etc will all eventually disappear. Can that be seen, understood, now?
Is it accurate to say that “we make room for a new dimension (of mind) to infuse consciousness”, that, “you through insight liberate the content”, and “you add something incalculably valuable”?
Can I, we, you, do anything, or are I, we, you, just ciphers? Wouldn’t it be that the emptying, liberating, and adding is what occurs when the illusion of agency, the one who does things, is seen for what it is?
Is attachment something I do, or is it what happens when there is no awareness of how desperate attachment is…especially attachment to the image of I?
Can that be seen, understood, now?
Awakening from the nightmare of the human condition is awakening from I.
Is it being faced…? the word ready brings in my expertise and that which I presumably lack!
Being a human being did not help - it is nothing but an ideal, so it appears and proved to be - through our words and so called actions so far.
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Yes, I was probably too excited to get the words out carefully enough.
Excited about death! That’s actually how I feel about it.
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Psychological death is the ending of the me , the ending of the past from moment to moment.
Haji, it seems that within me there is a being of total order and a being of total disorder. When one is there, the other is not. They are not intermingled. They are totally different. The one does not contain elements of the other. In that way, they are not two separate elements within the same field. They can’t even communicate with each other. They have no consciousness in common.
I can try to control and play around with disorder - as a human being that’s what it means to think and to feel and to express oneself and to get hurt and to get over getting hurt - but whatever I do I am only ever playing around within an idealised existence. For example, I have an ideal of you which makes both of us far more important than we actually are. And probably you have an ideal of me. And I feel we are both very tired of all this, not just personally, but wholly exhausted from being a human being. It seems to be an exhaustion that goes back centuries into time, a deeply ancient weariness. It must be something almost left over from the dinosaurs, it is so ancient and sluggish.
And then you say, ‘Being a human being did not help,’ and I am out of it. I am immediately out of the whole of that human being field, all that nonsense and mess. No-one has told me such things before. Therefore, there is only that which is being said. There is no human being behind it as either speaker or listener.
This now feels like ‘death’ is exactly the right word for it. For any other word takes us right back into that human being mess.
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[Housekeeping note: this is a repost from another thread, but is more suited to this thread so is being shared here.]
All historical cultures have attempted to make peace with death in different ways.
Plato talked about how at death each person must drink the waters of Lethe (a river in Hades that compels everyone who drinks of it to forget everything they have previously known, to forget their entire existence in fact, so that when they are reborn they know nothing of their past lives).
The ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh is about someone who could not accept the death of a dear friend, and who travels the world to understand Death, as well as Death’s younger brother Sleep. He fails, and learns to accept that death come for everyone.
Unlike the Mesopotamians, the ancient Egyptians believed that a way to transcend death lies open to human beings (or at least for a few human beings), through a continuous survival in an afterlife. Some of their greatest buildings are tombs, and their greatest (or at least most famous) technology was the incredible mummification of human remains, preserving the dead body for indefinite periods of time. A selected few (generally rulers and the elite) were mummified in this fashion so as to keep them “alive”, and entombed in coffins bearing markings taken from the Book of the Dead (or the Book of Going Forth By Day), which provided instructions for the entombed person to find their way through the passage way of death (with the help of the god Osiris).
So K’s approach is in some ways the complete reverse from that of the Egyptians: he rejects the principle of a future life, because he rejects the whole principle of a psychological future even in ‘this life’ (i.e. in the life ‘before’ death).
So death is not something only for the Pharaohs, or for the elite. Death is for the ordinary person. And death is not something to pay attention to only at the point when the heart stops beating and the brain ceases to receive oxygen. But rather, the Book of the Dead - metaphorically speaking - is to be read now, while still living.
K sometimes retold the old Indian story (from the Katha Upanishad) about Nachiketa, a story about a child who is accidentally sent by his father to see Death. As K tells it, Nachiketa visits different teachers and asks them each about what death is - some say that death leads to rebirth, while others say that death is annihilation - and he wanders on until eventually he reaches the house of Death (who then instructs him about the nature of thought, time, the self and the ending of the self).
However, the part that K pays particular interest to is the prologue of the story, where it mentions that Nachiketa’s father - as a Brahmin - has been giving away his worldly goods, a custom that the Brahmins of the time were supposed to carry out every five years, so that they do not permanently accumulate anything.
The implication of the story for K (as I recall) is to not accumulate anything psychologically; but to die daily to all one’s reactions, one’s antipathies, one’s desires, one’s hurts; so that each day is a new day - so that each day one ‘re-incarnates’ completely afresh.
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