Not as good as mine surely?
Death does not end identification with what is identified as âmeâ. Death is just the shedding of the physical body, such that the astral body becomes the âphysicalâ for you. (here physical means the body that I can feel and touch and see). Death is an absolute non-event for the person who dies. But it is a big event for those who have been left behind (our parents, husbands and wives, our friends etc).
Death is such a tremendous non-event that some people dont even realize that they have died for some time. Then through deduction they realize that âI must have died because I can do certain things that I could not do before like walk in air, pass through closed doors etcâ.
But psychological death is another matter. Dying to one little thing is another matter. Having your will not be done and not responding to this through a reaction is another matter.
Why would someone on the âastral planeâ be passing âthrough closed doorsâ? ⌠Still hanging around the house?
I wish I knew this to be true.*
Then you go on to say that some dead people, through deduction, realize that, âI must have died because I can do certain things that I could not do before like walk in air, pass through closed doors etcâ.
This is a far-fetched belief, but if you can retrieve it and hold on to it, you can postpone waking up until you die.
BTW all living people âwalk in airâ, seeing as how we canât live without it.
[Ceklata] I wish I knew this to be true.*
Let me explain what I mean when I say that death does not end identification. The mind is indestructible, but the physical body is destructible. At the time of death, the physical body is shed, but where will the mind go ? It remains linked to the Higher Self of which it is an emanation/reflection. Also, in the aftrelife in heaven or elsewhere, you will have a body exactly like your earthly body (except that you will be able to choose what age on earth you want to look like. If you want to look like you were 18 on earth, then that will be the fixed appearance for you in the entirety of your afterlife.
Also, more importantly, each and every one of your ideas or identifications and conditioning will be there exactly like it was on earth. But because birds of the same feather live together in heaven, you will not have much of a chance to have your ideas challenged by others, because you will go to a place where almost everyone will be similar to you as regards the fundamental ideas (like whether God exists or not, my religion is the greatest, the world is just/unjust and so on and on). you will live with people like you because the afterlife (and especially heaven) is a place of resting and gathering strength, not challenging yourself and your false ideas and all that. All that happens on the earth. Even without any kind of teachings, our ideas ar5e challenged all the time by opposing ideas, which force us to re-think our ideas, and get rid of those ideas that you have discovered as false, with or without any teachings.
Do you mean that after dying K went to heaven and started to talk to his heavenly followers about the comfortable but nonsensical belief in the afterlife? Poor guys, they must be as confuse as the terrestrials ones. Unless he chose to stay at the age he was in 1927 because then he must be having some fun with his brother. It´s JK, one never knows ⌠Love this other dimension, the cyberspace, really challenging.
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This all sounds very much more like Hell than Heaven, donât you think?
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I too think so and that´s the reason why it is so important in all the genuine teachings attentiveness, in order to slow down the mind´s activity and to avoid the perception to become a thought adding more content to consciousness that then it is ruminated and so on. It´s very much like what K says, difference is that he talks on a universal stream of thought that manifests itself in our brains that goes on in others when we die whereas @saurab says that the âpersonâ remains and after a period of rest reincarnates again with the same content that hasn´t been cleansed or overcome since âheavenâ doesn´t offer that opportunity, it only can be done as being alive in this world. At least that´s how I understand it even though, after reading K´s writing from 1927 that someone posted, where he talks about meeting his brother after his death, very happy because he was free from the body, I´m not sure about what K really believed. Thing is that in 1975 it would seem that he still considered the afterlife as a possibility since he tells DB in one of these dialogues that he could have stayed with the TS or tried to contact his brother but that he didn´t and he wonders why, so âŚ
In the 1975 discussions K didnât talk about the âafterlife as a possibilityâ, he merely said that he didnât feel like trying to contact his brother (i.e. out of desperation and illusion). His question to himself (in the third person) was why the young K didnât feel motivated to act in the way that many people do when they face loss.
The personal âmindâ (i.e. the personality), according to K, is purely made up of memory, and so is not indestructible at all. The only continuity it has is as part of the continuity of thought - of the general consciousness of humanity - which K says has its own continuity so long as total insight has not occurred.
Consciousness is its content, according to K: that is, a personâs fears, desires, hopes, sorrows, belief, etc. In essence these contents are common to all human beings; and so such consciousness is continued in the brains of other human beings once the particular body has died. This consciousness is put together by thought and psychological time, which are material movements in the material brain. No material form can last forever.
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Well, that´s your assumption, true is that he enumerates several possibilities and contacting his dead brother is one of them.
Yes, that´s also my interpretation of his question to himself.
What about his writing after his brother´s death? A hallucination, a plain, convenient, manipulative lie or that too was written by someone else?
I wonder if Saurab will listen to us or just stick with his strange vision of an afterlife.
Anyone who hasnât âdiedâ psychologically canât help but believe theyâll survive physical death. What I find âstrangeâ are those who believe theyâve died psychologically.
Yes, that´s what I was going to say to @anon78228991 but paraphrasing Ramana M., he used to say that as long as we take for real the separated entity everything else, karma, reincarnation, heaven, etc. is also real.
Is love a matter of belief? Because love is exactly the same thing as death. I am not being clever about it - this just seems so obvious. When we love one another the whole problem of death is resolved. Surely love is its own eternity. But probably we have never stopped to consider and deliberate on the fact that we are content to live far away from love, to remain far away from each other. All the reasons for why this is so are quite irrelevant. The fact alone is enough. For the very deliberation and careful, affectionate observation of the fact changes the fact. And if we hold hands while we do this, so much the better.
[Pause]
All of this is far beyond argumentation and explanation. There is but one consciousness. Us being close to each other or us being distant from one another makes no difference to it. The fact is unassailable. Do what it will, thought cannot break it up without causing immense sorrow, which is what comes about when there is any division as pleasure and pain, as me and you, as man and woman, as young and old, as clever and stupid, as friend and enemy, as past and future. Love is only the death of thought which is the ending of time. And without thought in the picture, death now has a totally different meaning because it is no longer separate from life and love.
James: The personal âmindâ (i.e. the personality), according to K, is purely made up of memory, and so is not indestructible at all. The only continuity it has is as part of the continuity of thought - of the general consciousness of humanity - which K says has its own continuity so long as total insight has not occurred.
Saurab: You may forget certain memories from your present life and all your memories from your past lives, but they are retrievable either through meditation or through past life regression. The reason why memory is indestructible is that every thought, every feeling (yes even feeling) and every action throughout the time you have lived since you were created as an âindividualized holy spiritâ or atman (as the hindus put it) lives in the causal body, for as long as it is not processed intelligently after which it fades away with time. After you die, you can upon request in heaven re-experience certain things from your past lives that are important for your further spiritual growth.
Memory is of two types: active and passive. active memory is remembered more often with psychological overtones. this memory can, through processing intelligently, become passive memory or âsettled memoryâ. After some time settled memory fades away, but active memory does not fade away with time. you remember it even in the next birth (not the event but the symbol of the event). So if you have not forgiven your wifeâs bad behavior to you, in the next birth you dont remember what your wife did to you, but perhaps the idea that women are not all that good, or the idea that maybe you should be careful who you marry or whatever other idea that you had created in response to your unforgiveness in the birth when it happened.
The Book of Life (as is mentioned by Christians) is not a book but a 3-dimensional video (unlike youtube which is flat) in which is recorded every single thing you did or thought or FELT ever since you were created by God. Now the question may arise as to how you could re-feel what you did thousands of years ago ? That is because you dont just see / hear the video. you âbecomeâ what you were then and RE-EXPERIENCE everything. you can pause the video, fast-forward, rewind and play from a certain point to a certain point and so on. These you can do in heaven through God given powers. So the gentleman who was saying that heaven sounds like hell does not know the half of it. There are so many things you can do in heaven that the mind boggles.
So, memory can fade away from the causal body of a person which is what happens with all memories for an enlightened person, but it never disappears from the Book of Life EVER.
What about false memories? Can we relive them too?
Memories we have about stuff that didnât actually happen the way we remember it.
Research shows that a lot of our memories change over time.
I, for example, remember seeing a tiny, miniature deer under a bush when visiting the local nature park as a child. However, no such species of deer exists in that area - It was most probably a dream I had after watching a nature documentary (who knows?)
As far as I know, Vedanta considers the causal body as the basic ignorance, i.e., not knowing the ârealâ because of the lack of discernment leading to mistake the image, thought or concept with the âthingâ which means that direct perception, the link or intimation with ârealityâ has been lost, now we are functioning and living in the realm of thought which is ignorance including all what is considered as knowledge acquired that way, caught in it and suffering because of it. (I´m putting it very simply)
It is called the âcausalâ body because it is what causes the appearance of the subtle (mind or thought) body as well as the gross (physical) body for the simple reason that it cannot survive without grasping form so, it cannot be spoken of indestructibility but of mere continuity hence, some of us to consider what you say as rather a hell, especially since in your first comment you claimed that the only possibility in âheavenâ is to rest but not to drop acquired knowledge, ideas and opinions because they are not challenged which leads to go on with the cycle endlessly. What remains is knowledge, universal knowledge, hence, K´s insistence in reading the book that we are, each one of us, provided we can see as a fact that our brain is not our personal brain but mankind´s brain so that anyone has access not only to the whole thing or knowledge but also to the process, how it comes about and so on.
What you call âsoulâ is simple, ordinary awareness, a mere reflection of pure awareness that we use to be aware of âthingsâ making out of âthingsâ concepts with which then we deal completely out of ârealityâ. When it is said awareness it is said intelligence, love ⌠lots of words for a single thing and yet, according to K, this too can be overcome.
No doubt that the things mind can do either in âheavenâ or in this world are so many and so interesting that mind boggles, might that be the problem, what keeps us going on and on? Because there is not end for this, is there? Unless, as K states, the whole thing to be seen as for it is, a huge display of firework that can´t be compared neither to pure awareness nor to what is beyond it that can´t be spoken.
It´s not memory what fades away from the casual body for the enlightened person, it is the very casual body, the basic ignorance what fades away. Right? And this is true death, without turning back.