The Fact of Death

Ben,I remember when you first showed up here and now I return to find you an admin! Very nice to see you again. I look forward to reading your thoughts on free will. I've found an interesting Blog on the subject I've been perusing by the Inveterate Bystander:  Mind Shadows: Free WillI suppose I would put it that it's the identification of consciousness with the organism that is the source of the division or the illusion of a self separate from the arising of the total universe. In Buddhism all that arises or is born must pass away or die. Only the birthless never dies. The death that we fear may be our salvation, which releases us from our dream of separation. This of course is the goal of Tibetan Buddhism, to awaken at death to the "ground luminosity" of primordial consciousness.Looks like I'll be around for a little while at least.lfen

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the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve; and,
like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are
such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a
sleep. -- Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV

Robin,Awareness of death is an important issue. I think folks also may distract themselves from it and ignore it. I know that some schools of Buddhism use meditating on mortality and death as a way to motivate aspirants. It may not be knowledge of death per se but rather what our response is to that knowledge.lfen

Robin,I've got to leave for work shortly but the motivation is to give up attachment and to look deeply into one's nature, that is to start meditating earnestly instead of enjoying the fleeting pleasures of "wine, woman, and song"!There is a form of practise in Tibetan Buddhism performed in the charnal ground and the Buddha seems to have taught a form of meditation where one regards ones body as dead and rotting. This is also a preparation for the inevitable. In the Bardo Thodol the teachings mistranslated as the Tibetan book of the dead, the practise is to be prepared to enter the clear light of one's original nature rather than cling to sense pleasures etc.lfen

Faith,You've asked some good, but difficult to answer in brief, questions. This book which I found in my library has an interesting paragraph where the author narrates his near death experience as he was experincing a massive heart attack. He survived though his heart had to be restarted over 70 times. The book is really about his recovery and his discovery that he needed to eat a higher fat diet to keep his cholestral down. I mention the book because he mentions finding himself in a light space that he recognized as where he had always been. The realization that he couldn't be with his fiance led him to struggle to stay alive rather than accept the peace he found in this clear light space. This was not an after death experience though. This could be some dying brain process and the Tibetan could have explored it in someway. He gives no indications of knowing anything about Buddhism but his discription of his experience is very consistent with the Tibetan teachings.Eat fat, be healthy : understanding the heartstopper gene and when a low-fat diet can kill you
Author: Bayan, Matthew J.
Publisher, Date: New York : Scribner/Simon & Schuster, Inc., c2000.Popular Buddhism has a number of different "realms" including hells, heavens, and Pure Buddhist lands. The idea is that merit leads to rebirth in heavens or better Pure and bad actions leads to suffering in hells but in all cases the price is eventually paid. I think this is something taught to help people with life.My interest is in what is currently being called in English the non dual teachings. The Buddha was a reformer of Vedic Hinduism. He said that he came to teach that life was suffering and that there was a way to be free of that suffering. He refused to answer questions about whether people survived death, or if there was or was not a God. Popular Buddhism does have deities and yet some schools of Buddhism deny there is a God. The non dual school in Hinduism founded by Shankaracharya believes there is a God. I don't see this as any essential conflict but two compatible ways of explaining the same state of affairs.The obscurity of Buddhist language results from a number of things. First it is trying to describe something that can't really be described so it ends up trying to point beyond language to something that is non verbal. There are also issues with translation and many western philosophies use language in a way that can be very obscure also.For westerners I keep recommending Bernadette Roberts book AN EXPERIENCE OF NO SELF. Bernadette is an American raised in a Catholic family who spent some years as a contemplative nun in a convent. She achieved a state she describes as unitive which is to say she had surrendered her will to the will of God. She left and raised a family.
One day meditating in a small chapel her mind became more silent than it ever had before. The closing of the chapel brought her out of her state and she went home to fix dinner. When I read her book I was excited because she was writing of the Buddha's experience but using modern language. She herself finally read some about the Buddha and felt he was someone who had the same experience she did.The non dual teacher Wayne Liquorman and his teacher Ramesh talk about the illusion of a separate self as the divine hypnosis. For a few people that sense of being a separate self is dispelled and they experience themselves a part of the total functioning of the universe.
This is a state without a subject hence without an object and therefore impossible to accurately model with language that uses nouns, verbs, and subject object sentence structure. What the Buddha essentially taught was that this awakening also means there is no one to suffer. This is the nirvana Buddhism talks about and it is nivana and not heaven that is the end of Buddhism. The body and mind come into existence and therefor pass out of existence. Buddhism sees there is an uncreated that never having been born never dies. It is prior.
Wayne Liquorman who is in a Hindu lineage is more specific. He and his teacher teach that, "Consciousness is all there is. All there is is consciousness." I don't think this is accurately described as pantheism though I can see how it can be mistaken for it.This is all I feel up to writing tonight. It's bed time for me.I particulary recommend Roberts' book as being the most accessible on this subject.lfen

Believable to the person who had the experience? or believable to people who hear about it? Few people are interested in the nondual teachings. The question of how people believe things leads us to see that people don't have trouble believing in a good many things. I am guessing that many of the people who develop an interest in the nondual do so because of an experience(s) they have had.I don't get why people want to wear funny clothes and pay a lot of money to whack little balls with expensive steel sticks into little holes in the ground but there is a lot of money being made and spent by a lot of people in pursuit of just such an activity. I consider it an insane activity but I'm not saying golfers are crazy just that I'm not a golfer. I don't get how people can believe the words of other people are the communication from the source of the Universe but millions of Jews, Christians, and Muslims find it easy enough. Just the variety of human beings I'd say.lfen

Robin,When Ramana Maharshi was dying his devotees were grief stricken and pleaded with him not to leave them. His reply to them was to ask in puzzlement, "where could I go?".Now he was not referring to his body, or his thoughts and feelings, as he did not identify himself with those things but with what he, as many Hindus do, called the Self, the awareness of being. For him the world or universe was something that arose in him, that is to say arose in consciousness. He didn't think that he had ever gone anywhere although that body called Ramana moved through the landscape. His body ceasing to function was just another event, another phenomena in the vast complex phenomena of the universe. Who he was remained what he had always been. Nothing changed.lfen

Jar,This is not orthodox at all but it's statements with those implications attributed to Jesus that have I think led some people to hypothesize a teacher that experienced awakening but was then killed before he could establish his teachings or bring awakening to others as a transmission so that his teachings entered into the western tradition as misunderstood by the people of his time.Unfortunately those times were so turbulent and violent that I don't see how anything can be reliably established. The Buddha taught thousands for decades after his awakening and was supported by the rulers of that area so that the transmission was much better preserved even though it was orally transmitted for several hundreds of years before being written down.lfen

Another approach to faith is acceptance. Acceptance of What Is. It IS after all so why not accept it. That acceptance includes our reluctance or resistance to accepting.So accept that you regret at times and then allow it too to pass.lfen

Every action you take is selfish? You never exhibit patience? You've never experienced humility? You have never done an act of kindness but have always tormented and hurt other sentient beings?I think you should add proud, boastful, and deluded to your list of accomplishments!Korzbski down to Albert Ellis call this the fallacy of the Is of identity.Is the atmosphere of the planet earth blue? Or is it that at certain times of day looking up through it it appears blue to our eyes due to the way the sunlight passes through it?You are using language in a very common way and everyone understands what you mean and yet there are several errors compounded here. The problem is what is a human being?We can describe the physical body at given points in time. We can describe moods, behaviours, etc. This "I" is a locus that we refer a complex variety of things to. But what is this locus? In the end it is simply a sense of being that refers to a particular body/mind organism.That organism like all organisms has a life cycle. What is control? I suggest that it is system feedback. The system controls it's behaviour by complex neural networks whether that behaviour is remaining upright while walking on two legs or choosing how to behave towards a human being unconscious in a wrecked car.How is that system programmed? Some systems are programmed to see an opportunity to steal a wallet. Some systems are programmed to call emergency help (I typed 911, then thought I don't know if that reference would be clear, probably because of movies and tv but maybe not). Some systems might be programmed to verbalize "prayers" addressed to one name or another.lfen

If you won't accuse me of copyright infringement how about if I say
the point of acceptance could be "be still and know that I am God"?lfen

I'm actually impressed. When you drop the evangelist rhetoric I find you very clear minded. And you are correct that this is what I discern the crux to be and it's in this region that I'm running into the unknown. It's here where I'm groping with problems. You could say this is the bleeding edge of my process of attempting to understand.A quick little background that would have to be expanded in a different thread is that my philosophical ruminations deal with the relationship of consciousness to the matter/energy space/time universe. And although there are one or two who post here who think consciousness will fall out easily from brain organization, for me there is still the problem of qualia, the inside of experience. How does light of a certain frequency appear for example red? where does redness come from?So on the one hand I try to understand what the brain researchers are discovering and I stay open to the possibility that consciousness is an emergent property of neural organization. On the other hand I am drawn to the nondual tradition that views consciousness as fundamental to the universe. The Buddha did not identify this awareness with deity whereas Hindu advaitist do.All three of these approaches share the notion that what we experience as the unitary nature of the self is an illusion. They deny a permanent self.I agree with you that: From Buddha to Ramana to Bernadette Roberts and other contemporary nondual teachers the "I" sits at the root of it all and the approach of nondual, my approach, diverges from plain English and experience.The Buddha among a few others spent years observing his "mind" before he awakened. The sense of the I as unitary and irreducible is extremely strong, extremely dense even when analyzed it remains.I'd have to recheck out Roberts' book The Experience of No Self to quote her so I'll try to just give a summation. After the conviction that I am "so and so" a self leaves the human consciousness is left with experiencing what IS. Roberts had spent some years as a Catholic nun and remains a Christian in her understanding of her experience so she talks about what remains as God in Christian terms. Ramana would talk about it in Hindu terms ususally. A Sufi would talk about it in Islamic terms. A Buddhist wouldn't use deity language.What remains after the sense of self goes is not subject or object hence the non dual reference. It is an experience recounted by people over time and culture and religion.I'll end by saying that Ramana specifically denied that the sense of "I am" was the body. The root of the problem he said was identification with the body. Hence the question most characteristic of him was to direct the people who came to him to seek to know "Who am I?"lfen

Have a good sleep and when you return I hope you will clarify this as I can't make head nor tails of it. lfen

I use Firefox and typically have several tabs going so I don't bother to log out of EvC. As it was I wasn't even at my keyboard but had popped out to pick up a few groceries and then stopped by the library for a couple of books. Just a few minutes ago I checked my email and saw I had some responses awaiting. In short my browser was online but I was off somewheres in the real world. oh, man, you had to ask that?That's about as hard as questions get.I don't know what mind is, or even if it exactly is. still trying to find a way to talk about that one. But in the context of the Buddha's meditation I was using mind to refer to his observing his consciousness how thoughts, memories, fantasies, feelings, desire, aversions arose, and interacted.I'll move on to your continued post.lfen

It could be a comma would have preserved the sense of that sentence or it could be I should have worded it differently. I'll try this and see if it's clearer:After the conviction that I am "so and so" (that is to say after the conviction that I am a self) leaves the human consciousness (consciousness no longer has a sense of being an entity self) consciousness now simply experiences What IS.Dang, I forgot to check out Roberts book while I was at the library. She writes much better about this than I do. One of my main interests here is to just introduce these notions to westerners. Evos and Creos are typically dualist and have not heard this viewpoint. Your questions are very helpful to me in learning how to present this material.Historically Zen made an early impression on the West. Zen is orthodox Mahayana Buddhism but it's approach though very dramatic obscures it's teachings particularly if people don't know Buddhism and the history of the Chan/Zen school. In short I think Zen in the West has led to more confusion than understanding. Well I'll see how I do with this, no guarantees. I'll try a concise overview.As I understand orthodox Judeo/Chritianity it is dualistic. God is separate from what he created. I'd say at the moment mainly becuase of yours and Faith's post I probably have a better understanding of Calvinism than I do of other sects. So Christianity sees the suffering of human beings as a result of the Fall and that the solution lies in Salvation and eventually a new life in Heaven.Non dualist are addressing the same suffering and problems that all humans face so that is shared. That is we suffer, we do things we shouldn't do, etc. I'm not going to even try to include the Buddhist viewpoint in this as it just makes it too confusing. I'll stick with nondual(advaita) Vedanta because I think you can relate more clearly to a theistic expression.In Vedanta there is God, Sanskrit: Brahman. The individual in all their suffering is consciousness that is identifying with action in the drama of life and has lost awareness of it's true nature. All there is is God (we can call this Consciousness and some of the Upanishads and Ramana also use capital "S" Self to refer to this}. The manifest universe can then be likened to God's thoughts or dreams or imagination. What Judeo/Christianity identifies as sin this system would identify as a nightmare. Instead of salvation the cure is awakening. Consciousness wakes up and realizes that it is not the individual but the source of the individual.Now please keep in mind that this is a bad bad model. But I thought that if I approached it the way I wanted to it would take too long and you were wanting a quick way in.As Ramana was dying his devotees, and Ramana was regarded by many as an incarnation of Brahman pled with him not to leave them. Ramana's reply was to say, "Where could I go?". Ramana had repeatedly taught that the universe was in Consciousness, not consciousness in the body.
I'm using capital and lower case c to make a distinction but it's one I can't really define.The point wasn't that Ramana felt his body, or personality was the source of the Universe. He no longer identified with those things. He had awakened to and realized that he was never a separate anything and that all there IS, IS.Berndadette Roberts spent years in a Catholic convent contemplaing God and subjugating her will to God and seeking union. When she felt she had done that she left and raised a family. Her book The Experience of No Self begins with her sitting in a chapel and entering into a silence. When the chapel was closed she went home.She found herself struggling with her mental states and after some days when she looked within herself she was stunned to find she could no longer find the center that she called "self". Somewhere towards the end of the book she says something like, "God is What Is and All that is. All that is except for the self."So what is the self? And the answer is that whatever it is it's not real. It's an illusion and yet an illusion that is up to much mischief and suffering.lfenABE: I'm just adding a link that goes into more detail if it's of interest to anyone. Advaita Vedanta - WikipediaThis message has been edited by lfen, 05-07-2006 08:22 PM

Well put.