by Tyler K | Jun 20, 2020 | Sapiens, What happens when we die
“There is no heaven or hell, or spiritual plane, or even eternal void you go to when you die. Just an infinitude of an inevitable conscious experience of self-worlds. Eternal hell could never exist, nor eternal heaven. Nothing ever remains in the same place forever. The experiencing world NEEDS contrast. If the up line means you’re happy and the down line means you’re sad then If you were always going up you wouldn’t have anything to relate to happiness to give it its meaning of happiness. No down line to know what up is or what it means at all, it wouldn’t be happiness anymore. You only know you’re happy because you’ve been sad. Everything is bound to change and it would need to be naturally.
This is the part we often refuse to accept in my opinion. We want imperturbable happiness and can’t get it and wonder why. You can’t stare at just one color and see difference, you need the contrast of other colors. So how could these spirits just self experience in one place (heaven or hell) never moving from that place/ state with no contrast for eternity? Seeing only one color is equal to experiencing void. If you only saw all white (heaven (eternal bliss)) or all black (hell (eternal suffering)) there would be absolutely nothing to see. We lose touch with what it means to be happy because sadness gives happiness its meaning and purpose. Without sadness how could we know the value of happiness? And vice versa. We are truly only able to see and feel by contrast and change.
This belief of heaven and hell is founded on the idea that God created these beings under these circumstances (as if God had no influence or connection to the situation at all… yet he/shes god theirself) and made it up to god’s subjects to decide, putting the decision on Gods subjects, fully knowing of their sinful nature as he created them that way and if they failed which is likely since god made them sinful, they deserve to suffer eternally in hell? What kind of God would we be worshipping then? God would be too intelligent to create sinful beings just to command them to worship and be like his ONLY unattainably divinely perfect son god has EVER had (disowning the rest of existence as gods children) and condemning the beings God made in sinful nature for not acting in divine ways like his son when god theirself created them in that way. That makes absolutely no sense if god is supposed to be all knowing and of the highest intelligence?
I don’t see God as watching from the sidelines in the void saying to itself “ooo lets see what that guy’ll do” at the ready to deliver divine justice. Hah no. I see God tilling the fields personally. I see god blowing the breeze. I see god on the frontlines AS nature. That is why I do not believe in a heaven and hell beyond your present state of experience. So I really can’t get with this idea. Because I’ve felt so much from personal experience that contrasts christianities primal belief that God is seperate from you. God would never create a situation where there is eternal suffering, because God/Nature is the one experiencing it. Who else other than god/nature could actually experience it? There’s noone-nothing else here? So what you truly are is the primordial source of any arisal. The inextinguishable. I believe our experience may blend into the next, moving on from one painting to the next. Not that your experience is now lost in void. There is nothing to be experienced in the void. It’s impossible to not experience anything, even if you’re not conscious of yourself as yourself. But since there are countless self experiencers being born into the world in every moment, it’s unnecessary to worry about losing self experience to the void, for you are self experiencing now aren’t you? And the same self that sits in you sits in all self experiencers.
Self /god/nature is at the center of everything. So when you die I feel the individual you simply dies, or fades from experience. Though you can’t experience void of experience. So inevitably there is evercoming self experience. However it happens though I am not sure. Too many unclear variables from my limited relative perspective. On the premise that happening-consciousness are universal constants,,I feel it’s more like this: Red has its place as a color in the spectrum of colors. Although it shows its unique characteristics to the world it still blends back into the spectrum of everything from before its birth and after its end. Yet between its beginning and end, it colors and lights the world with its particular brush stroke, (your conscious experience-expression). Just because there isn’t red in a painting, doesn’t mean red is dead. It’s just not being experienced right now, but this blue painting is! My main point is you can’t experience non-void, and you can’t experience the same feeling/experience (heaven or hell) forever. The only thing that’s left standing is an inevitability of experience.”
by Vesela M | May 31, 2020 | Sapiens, What happens when we die
“The process of dying has been explained in detail by many indigenous tribes and ancient sciences. I have chosen to read and study Tibetan Buddhism, Vedic Teachings, and Tantric Practices. This is an attempt to present, in short, my understanding of the process of dying and rebirth according to the teachings I mentioned above. If you want to read more, I highly recommend the Tibetan book of living and dying by Sogyal Rinpoche. The human organism is sustained by 5 elements-earth, water, fire, air and space. Once we die, the elements dissolve into the macro universe. Together, with the elements, in specific order the ego, intellect, conceptual mind disintegrate as well-stripping everything away from us-senses, emotions, feelings, rational thinking until nothing else remains but our true nature/consciousness/soul/ higher-self/spirit-whatever you need to call it.
This is where the practice of meditation can help one remain connected to the source and not get lost in the many layers of illusion that the dying mind will create. Without the familiar physicality, the mind is very powerful. As each thought can easily become reality, every irritation or bad habit, or fear can send the dying person into a helpless and scary spiral of load sounds, colors and hallucinations. If you lose connection with your true essence and give in to the projections of the mind you will be reborn back to the cycle of samsara. You will have many many opportunities presented during the process of dying to escape the cycle of life and death. That’s why the moment of death is considered to be extremely important. We can even, suggest that we live to prepare to die.”
by J-ban | May 28, 2020 | Sapiens, What happens when we die
“A friend who has worked in hospice care once told me that people either die saying, ‘Oh God’ or, ‘Oh shit.’ I had witnessed two deaths by the time she told me that, my step-mother’s and my grandmother’s. Both ‘Oh shit’s’. My grandmother’s final words from her deathbed were, ‘That’s all?’ I don’t know who she was talking to, whether it was us or her God. It might have been that she was responding to someone or something that had, in the final breath of her life, finally revealed to her the purpose of life. And she was like, ‘That’s it?! Just that?’ The way it felt, knowing her choices from a young age had been dictated by historical fate and circumstance, was that she was saying, ‘I’m out of time already? That’s it, game over?’
That same hospice friend also said that the last sense to go was the sense of sound. That for a few minutes after clinical death, the deceased may still be listening. Moments after my grandmother passed, as my Orthodox Jewish aunt quickly covered her up with a white sheet, my mom pulled it down again brusquely, saying she wanted to look at her mother and say a few things to her. The two had a little fight right then and there. After a long life on the planet, the last thing Elfi would’ve heard was the adult version of what she witnessed countless times as the mother of these two: my strong-willed mother, the elder of her four brothers and sisters, and the next-oldest sibling, Judy, fighting over her dead body. Sheet up. Sheet down. Sheet up. Sheet down. My grandmother’s face skin jiggling stoicly as if she was feigning sleep.
But it didn’t matter. Elfi was now hovering on the other side of the room, looking out the window, a 20-year-old version freshly released from an 80-something year-old body 60 years too late. The voices of my mom and Judy faded into the background as she surveyed the world ; as if she’d realized, just after death, that she had needlessly sacrificed all of her own wants and needs for those of her husband, her kids, and later for her “shoulds.” She had “should” all over herself from the moment she had accidentally become a mother through her first sexual experience. The Elfi hovering near the window was the last iteration of my grandmother as her own person, the last time she felt more excited about what was ahead of her than what was behind.
Though all of us age, not all of us get older. Getting to know people, you can sometimes find that they stopped at a certain time, their spirit stuck in one spot while their body keeps moving like a Swiss train, staying on schedule with its fate and eventual terminus. Therapists see this all the time, and it could be said that their job is to dislodge the stuck spirit like guiding a fish around a dam, allowing it to rejoin the flow of life that has been rushing by.
I’ve seen it repeatedly in people who have been abused as kids or sexually assaulted. Maybe the offense happened repeatedly between the ages of 8 and 12, and though the person has since gone on to have kids and even grandkids of their own, to have what appears to be a mature adult life from the outside, their sentiments, their preferences, their way of being in the world is stuck swirling in an eddy at 12. Events happen to them rather than with or near them. They are victims of the world rather than active participants and co-creators.
No amount of trying to help someone stuck in victimhood will work because, if things improve, it will challenge their identity, the way they see the world. And if that happens, they won’t know who they are anymore. Terrifying. So best to keep complaining about that shitty neighbor or husband or friend, or to keep that shed as it is, full of stuff that needs to be moved, sold, or thrown away. To have something to be a victim of. Something to bump up against to prove you exist.
And it’s not just trauma that can trap a spirit safely near familiar shores. It may also be that someone has identified with a certain epoch as the highlight of their life and they’ve never left that time, they’re still there. When they were the big man or woman on campus, the head cheerleader, the captain of the football team; the person other people looked up to or wanted to be for a fleeting moment. The last time they remember being happy, being fully in the moment—which may have been the last time they didn’t remember anything at all. That fleeting moment, whether it be an experience of greatness, scoring the winning touchdown or successfully selling a business or a having hit song, becomes stamped on their soul, like a brand on livestock. It owns them, determines how they see themselves, who they belong to. The spirit of adventure, of curiosity about the world, diminishes as time and experience moves on and they are stuck, tethered like a dog to a pole outside a market, waiting for their moment to be reanimated. What we don’t realize is that the leash holding our wild, curious, resilient self in place is, in reality, just a thin tendril of frayed string.
A wild male African elephant can be over 20 feet long, 10 feet tall, and weigh 6 tons or more. And yet an elephant handler can lead it around with a small rope tied to one of its powerful legs, a leg bigger and thicker than the man himself. In training the elephants to become docile and easily controlled, the trainer starts them off when they are young and small and still easy to control, tying them with a thick chain they cannot break. As they get older and stronger and realize it’s no use to struggle, the mahout trades the chain in for a rope, and by the time the elephant is a large adult, can tie it with a strong string, knowing full well that the animal will not struggle against it, in spite of the fact that a series of hard tugs could easily set it free.
My friend Tim travelled extensively in India. He once told me the story of a fire that broke out in a small compound housing several trained elephants. It was night, and no one was around when it started. As it quickly spread through the straw on the ground and into the weak wooden walls and ceilings, the high-pitched trumpets and screams of the animals inside quickly became a chorus, a cacophony of fear. As bystanders gathered and stood at a safe distance, a local homeless girl 7 years of age ran in amidst the panicked pachyderms and easily freed all but one of them. It was easy, because they were each tied by a tiny rope attached to a leg. The learned helpless of the adult elephants nearly killed them.
The body doesn’t speak English. It speaks in symptoms, each symptom a sign of needed action. Looking into someone’s eyes, you can see the state of the world under their skin. When the whites of the eyes become yellowed, that’s the closed captioning of the liver saying, ‘Help! I’m overwhelmed. I’ve had all I can take and I’m going to throw all of my furniture into the street!’ In many pre-modern medical traditions, it’s not just outside substances that can harm the liver or any other organ. Emotions can as well. Excessive anger, repressed rage, can affect the liver, spiking blood pressure, causing all manner of harm. The Kidneys are affected by fear (even making some people pee). The Lungs, repressed grief. And so on.
And it’s not just “negative” emotions that can harm us.
An excess of ‘joy’ harms the heart. (The word for the state of someone’s heart, ‘xin,’ may also be translated as the word for ‘mind.’) We’ve all known people who seem so happy that they cannot stop talking excitedly, unable to “contain” themselves. Some part of us knows that this ‘happiness’ is pathology, perhaps even diagnosable as manic. No one can handle being around such a person for long. That’s an issue of the heart in relation to the pericardium. In modern medicine, the heart is protected by a sac that contains it. In traditional Chinese medicine, it’s the wall that protects and holds it. The pericardium is failing to contain the heart.
The whole concept of each system in traditional Chinese philosophy isn’t just about its function; it has a symbolic, energetic dimension as well. The pre-Communist Chinese modeled everything after their politics. The north star was the Emperor, never moving, ruling the heavens as they moved and circled and spun around it. The heart is the emperor of the body. The Liver is the general in charge of the army (the blood). The spleen/stomach the head of agriculture, the granary official, and so on. The universe and their kingdom were mirrors of one another, as was every aspect of life on earth. Hence the emperor being associated with heaven, and vice-versa.
Oh, I could go on and on about the symbology and story lines connecting traditional medicine to what we see in the world, but all of this here, now, is to say that the extremes of our remembered experiences can get us stuck like a record repeating itself, caught in the same groove as the turntable keeps moving around and through us.
The limitations we face are almost entirely of our own creation, and all it takes is a few sharp tugs to break the string that we perceive as a chain.
Don’t believe me? Ask someone on their deathbed.
Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who worked in palliative care for many years with people in the final light of the sunset of their lives. Over time she saw many patterns, recording them in a now-famous blog post about the regrets of the dying. (https://bronnieware.com/blog/regrets-of-the-dying/). The top five:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish I had let myself be happier.
I’ve read through this and many other articles and books about the purpose of life, what it means to live a life worth living, and I have yet to find anything that said, ‘I wish I worked more,’ ‘I wish I’d taken less time for myself,’ or ‘I wish I’d taken fewer risks.’
There’s no better way to be fully present than to put yourself in harm’s way. Releasing yourself back into the wild, the qualities that will help you to survive and thrive may not be the same as those that got you to succeed before. Where before we got food pellets for conforming and going along with the system, hunting down your own game requires curiosity, innovation, and resilience. It can be approached with fear, or the excitement that comes with opportunity. Or both.
Being fully educated and acculturated, it can be difficult to remember that you are bigger and more capable than what you’ve been taught to believe and go along with. Your education and upbringing are held within you, but they are not you. They are simply tools. When you fully realize this fact, you also suddenly see that the keys to your cage have been in your pocket, and that the door has in fact been unlocked all along.
A Taoist quote says, ‘A man is born gentle and weak; at his death he is hard and stiff. All things, including the grass and trees, are soft and pliable in life; dry and brittle in death. Stiffness is thus a companion of death; flexibility a companion of life. An army that cannot yield will be defeated. A tree that cannot bend will crack in the wind. The hard and stiff will be broken; the soft and supple will prevail.’
You are as lithe, flexible, and malleable as you allow yourself to be. The qualities needed to risk into the life ahead of you are not the qualities that got you good grades or saw you climb the corporate ladder. Rather, curiosity, flexibility and grit are what will see you through. And while the prospect of risking into the new world when you’re already mindlessly acclimatized to your reality may not sound all that palatable, the intangible rewards of the experiences you’ll have will see you die with many fewer regrets.
This is what my grandmother’s spirit was saying as it stared out the window just moments after her death, saying ‘Oh God’ just moments after saying, ‘Oh shit.’ My grandma waited until she was out of her body to learn it. You still have time.”
by Swami Satchidananda | May 7, 2020 | Sapiens, What happens when we die
“If you ask religious people all over the world, they want ‘heaven’. Each scripture of that religion tries to give us a picture of heaven. By telling the people of heaven they put down norms of behaviour expected and rituals to be done. So what is Heaven? Have you seen it or have you met someone who has spent time there to come and tell you? So it’s a kind of visualisation. I have been trying to take a rational picture of heaven. The best way to visualise heaven is to put the best of things for a long long time.
So every woman is beautiful and every man is handsome. There is no concept of aging, you will forever be young. There is no hunger or thirst so the struggle as a human beings end. You get all that you desire. Wow what a beautiful Life. Actually it seems very very boring with no struggle for anything. Imagine if you were doing this for 5 years what would happen to you. You are sure to have the most boring life with no excitement at all. Yet, in life we are enamored to ask questions or apply our minds. Still, many are prepared to believe anything because of the pain of everyday living here on Earth.
The Vedic way of looking at heaven is slightly different and follows some logic. Depending on your good work and karma, you will accumulate Punya (grace). Based on this, you go to a higher level with less or no issues. As soon as punya is used, you will need to come back to earth as Heaven is not considered a final goal. No karma can be done in heaven, only your punya will get exhausted. For karma you need to come back to the earthly plane. Sounds a bit more logical? The opposite is a not so comfortable space we call hell. For the bad actions and bad Dharma you collect Papas (negatives) you too will come back to earth after exhausting your papas. So it’s not forever, neither good nor bad. This makes sense as we always get an opportunity to change with every life…..
A vedantist does not aspire for heaven because it too has a limitation of time. Egos persist, as can be seen by the skirmishes and wars. Certainly I will not aspire to go to a place where egos persists among other things. The presence of ego created its own dynamics, much like what we see on earth. So a Vedantist seeks the highest possible goal with no limitations of any kind… That is the merger into Brahman – the universal consciousness.
I think the problem is that we do not apply our mind and take many important things as a given. In vedanta, continuous questioning is a core process of learning to acquire the knowledge of yourself. Don’t be enamoured by heaven, which is really unknown. It could be a myth – who knows?”
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