Death anxiety has been a common theme here at the shroomery and for good reason as the reality of death is something we all have to face and come to terms with. Our views on death can influence how we live our lives in a very profound way and it is a great weight on our psyche. For instance, if one views death to be the permanent extinction than what is there more to life than indulging in temporary pleasures and hedonism? The more meaningful things in life might lose there significance. If one takes death to be an eternity then are they not off the hook when it comes to facing their own existence and the question of whether or not life has any purpose? The materialistic reductionist view of reality seems to becoming more common, is sensuality and immorality also on the rise? Seems obviously so to me.
Most people wont take Meher Baba's claim to be God very seriously however his writings and discourses speak for themselves and I believe if anyone reads them they would certainly gain some insight. Here is a compilation of some of the things Meher had to say about death.
For those who read this I would enjoy your insights and opinions. Do you relate to this in terms of your own experience upon contemplating death?
This excerpt is from the book 'Listen Humanity' and can be found here; https://www.ambppct.org/Book_Files/LH.pdf ;
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The immersion of the individual in the routing of life causes him to be seriously disturbed by the sudden experience of death, particularly when it takes away someone who has been near and dear to him. When the sight of death becomes too frequent, as in time of war or during an epidemic, the individual's mind tends to protect itself by retiring within a shell of habit and routine. Familiar actions, faces, and surroundings, which require no thought or adjustment, become at such times a buttress to his emotional balance.
But even this wall of cultivated indifference crumbles when the hand of death snatches away someone who has entered deeply into his inner life—someone who perhaps acted as a pivotal point upon which his emotions turned. At such a time his unquestioning attitude towards life is disturbed and his mind becomes deeply preoccupied with an intensive search for lasting values.
The life of each person is deeply enmeshed in this mystery of death. But it is a mystery which accents thought instead of dulling it, for if anything makes a man think intensely about the true nature of life, it is the recurrent theme of death.As the tale of life is told it pauses frequently to contemplate the gaping holes left bydeath. There is no way to avoid the thought provoking impact of that inescapable presence.
Although none escapes the intensive search for the hidden secret to the meaning of death, few can lift the veil and unravel the mystery. For most it remains a soul-searching enigma which causes deep restlessness; for some it offers a wide field for imaginative speculation; for the few, it yieldsits secret.
Many refuse to accept death as the simple, final extinction of the individual, but this reaction is more often a form of unreasoned wish than a matter of unshakable conviction. Even so, this instinctive rebellion should not be lightly dismissed, for much of the vigor of this blind protest against the seeming fact of death springs from an obscure but still functioning intuition. However, this intuitive reaction does not approach the more secure position achieved through reasoned belief based on faith in the authority of a seer, or on the direct perception of those who know.
When a sensitive individual is first faced by a death of deep significance in his circle of close friends, he is usually struck by the transitory nature of all forms of life. Confronted by the undeniable impermanence of the body, yet unfortified by knowledge of some sustaining permanent principle, he often falls into a mood of deep despair or supercilious cynicism. If life is inexorably doomed to extinction, he reasons, there can be little meaning in the frantic efforts to achieve. In turn, this thought leaves him in a vacuum of purpose which may lead him either to a state of supine inaction, or may precipitate him into reckless rebellion. To him, existence seems to be conditional, intermittent and vanishing, while extinction appears to be unqualified, inescapable, and permanent.
When such a grim conclusion has been reached, whether consciously or unconsciously, the individual is tempted to rain death and destruction upon others, or to invite it upon himself, merely because death appears to be more lasting than life. The recklessly destructive desperado and the determined suicide belong to this type. They cannot accept life as having any real value, because their initial, unthinking faith in the value of life has been uprooted by the rude shock of death.
If death is accepted as real, and longer in duration than life, then life is degraded below meaninglessness. Even then, such values in life as truth, beauty, goodness, and love can claim some intrinsic worth despite their fleeting existence. But in practical fact, all keenness for the pursuit of even these momentary values is gradually replaced by a sense of hopeless apathy, for one hears constantly a background whisper which says that they too are doomed to vanish one day.
If the cat, while stealthily drinking milk, knows that someone is waiting outside their door with a club, she can hardly relish the flavor of her surreptitious meal. Similarly, a man who comes to know that all his achievements must soon be brought to naught, can hardly have his heart in his efforts. If he stops to reflect that all the people he loves are earmarked for early conversion to dust, then his spontaneous enthusiasm gradually dries up and he is forced to consider what he is striving for. If he tries to cling to those loved ones despite his new awareness; all the desperateness of his ensuing efforts becomes only a sacrifice to vanity.
In order to avoid the pain which he is bound to feel at the inevitable loss of his dear ones, he may try to avoid life by adopting the viewpoint that the living are no more than on a par with the dead. The success of such a game depends upon an exact equation, for if he holds the slightest preference for the living, he will be gravely affected when the living become the dead. He is forced finally to face the fact that if death means the extinction of his beloved brothers in a blind vacuum of eternity, then the entire game of life is a meaningless tragedy. All courage, sacrifice, and loyalty to ideals become a farce, and all vital seeking takes on the cast of empty endeavor, of much effort without purpose. Fear of loss treads closely upon all earnest attempts to appropriate and inherit the significance of life, depriving it of all sweetness. In short, if death is looked upon as mere extinction, man tends to lose his balance and is plunged into perpetual gloom. All his dreams of the enduring reality of truth, beauty, and love are refuted and seem by hindsight to have been a blind groping after illusion. His previous ideal of eternity and inexhaustible sweetness, instead of filling him with hope and enthusiasm, now reproaches him with the utter senselessness of all earthly values.
Thus death, when not understood, vitiates the whole of life, and the first impulsive answer of inaction or cynicism, which the individual usually forges to meet the question, strands him in a thoroughly desiccated universe of unrelieved weariness. Nevertheless, this gradually prepares him for another attempt to find a more vital answer to the inescapable query. The human mind cannot endure such a stalemate for long, as there is an internal force which insists that the inner nature be in motion. Eventually the pressure for such motion breaks through the rigidity of such a negative concept of death. A great flood of new interrogation and discovery often breaks out, and in it the key question now posed by death becomes "What is life?" The answers supplied are countless, and depend upon the passing moods which spring from the deeply rooted ignorance of the interrogator. The first instinctive answer is "Life is that whichis terminated by death". The answer is still completely inadequate, as it involves no positive principle on which a fruitful life can be based, nor can the individual's need for development be met. Such an answer explains neither death nor life. The individual is driven to try to understand life and death along new lines.
Instead of looking upon death as the opposite of life, he now inevitably comes to look upon it as the handmaiden of life.He begins to affirm intuitively the reality and eternality of life. Instead of interpreting life interms of death, man seeks to interpret death in terms of life. Slowly, event by event, he learns totake life again in all earnestness, with a deeper affirming consciousness. As he does so, he is able to give a more constructive response to the recurring sight of death. The challenge of death is now not only accepted and absorbed by life, but is met by a counter-challenge: "What is death?" It is now death's turn to submit itself to critical scrutiny. The most unsophisticated answer to this counter-question is "Death is only an incident in life". This simple and profoundly true declaration terminated the unendurable chaos precipitated by regarding death as the extinction of life. Soon it is clearly seen that it is futile to try to understand death without first understanding life.
As consciousness gradually settles into this balanced approach to the problem, it takes on a healthy tone which makes it receptive to the truth concerning both life and death. Direct, undimmed knowledge of such truth is available only to spiritually advanced souls. The seers of all time have had direct access to the truth about life and death, and they have repeatedly given a suffering and groping humanity useful information on this point.
Their explanations are important because they protect man's mind from erroneous and harmful attitudes towards life and death, and prepare him for perception of the truth. Although direct knowledge of truth requires considerable spiritual perception, nevertheless even correct intellectual understanding of the relationships of life and death plays an important part in restoring mankind to a healthy outlook.
Above incarnate life in birth and beyond discarnate life after death, the soul is one indivisible, eternal existence. The gestation of individualization of the soul begins with the evolution of its consciousness. Consciousness begins to evolve in incarnate life, and its evolution becomes complete only in incarnate life.
Simultaneous with the evolution of consciousness through the evolution of forms (bodies), sanskaras* begin to accumulate. The evolution of form and consciousness (and with it individualization of the human ego-mind) is complete when the soul attains the human soul for the first time. But because of the accumulated sanskaras, the fully evolved consciousness of the soul remains entrapped in illusion and therefore is not directed towards the soul's self-realization (God-realization).
One point I find interesting is when he says, "When such a grim conclusion has been reached, whether consciously or unconsciously,the individual is tempted to rain death and destruction upon others, or to invite it upon himself,merely because death appears to be more lasting than life. The recklessly destructive desperado and the determined suicide belong to this type. They cannot accept life as having any real value, because their initial, unthinking faith in the value of life has been uprooted by the rude shock of death."
It makes me think of all the mass killings that have been becoming more common over the recent years. Many of those responsible are intellectual type of people either studying psychology or engineering, a psychology major here in Calgary stabbed 5 students at a house party. Modern psychology more or less teaches that we are the product of DNA and genes, what implication does this have on a young adult trying to find meaning and purpose in life? Are they just mentally ill or is it partially the result of a materialistic reductionist view on life?
In the movie Black Mass based on a real Irish mobster, he begins to kill much more loosely and thoughtlessly after the death of his son. What Meher says there seems to apply to him to some degree.
In the following chapter he compares death with sleep and says that death is just like sleep except you awake in a new body. One idea I found very interesting is that he says that the real cause of sleep is not the brain but our minds and our consciousness. The modern scientific outlook always looks for a material cause of things and ignores the fact that the mind can have causal powers. Another example of this materialist bias; the other day I briefly opened 'Scientific America' magazine and read something about scientists trying to identify the empathy neuron in animals and asking why it evolved. Does empathy really have to be caused by something physically? can't it just be a natural outcome of levels of consciousness. The darwinian perspective seems to dominate scientific thinking.
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Still other authorities regard sleep as the natural condition of the brain, and they consider consciousness to be the result of activating the brain through external stimuli. Sleep, in their opinion, is therefore a relapse into the natural state of the brain which occurs on withdrawal of these external stimuli.
The essence of all these physiological explanations is that sleep isa by-product of the physical brain. This is a radically wrong conclusion. A more profound interpretation is required to do justice to the real status of consciousness and its relation to body and soul.
Throughout evolution, consciousness is developed in and through the mind and expressed through the evolving medium of physical form, but consciousness itself resides in the soul. The body is only the medium through which consciousness expresses itself.
Through the ages a single life impulse (individualized soul) gradually becomes more conscious as it expresses itself through a myriad of forms. The consciousness thus developed is the possession of the mind and it does not vanish with the disappearance of the physical vehicle. The physical form also evolves as consciousness unfolds. Bodily forms emerge one after another in continuous and ascending order so that the total consciousness might develop progressively through a fitting progression of form-vehicles. Consciousness is not a coincidental product of physiological processes, but the very reason for the existence of all forms.
The next quote is from 'The Discourses' found here, http://www.discoursesbymeherbaba.org/v3-51.php
One point I find interesting is that he says that we all subconsciously know reincarnation to be true so there is a sort of conflict between what we know intellectually with our minds and what we know subconsciously or through our intuition. I could relate to this when I was younger pondering what would happen to me after death and whether or not I was alive before I found myself in this body.. someone I sensed there is a way our conscious goes on but couldn't intellectually articulate it.
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THE worldly man completely identifies life with the manifestations and activities of the gross body. For him, therefore, the beginning and the end of bodily existence are also the beginning and end of the individualised soul. All his experience seems to testify to the transitoriness of the physical body, and he has often witnessed the disintegration of those physical bodies which were once vibrant with life. Hence he is naturally impelled to believe that life is conterminous with bodily existence.
As the worldly man considers death to be the cessation of life, he gives great importance to it. There are few who contemplate on death for prolonged periods; but in spite of the fact that most persons are completely engrossed in their worldly pursuits, they are impressed by the incident of death when confronted by it.
Apart from giving a general background to the scene of life, death also assumes an accentuated and overwhelming importance among the multicoloured ncidents of life. Death falls among the happenings which are most dreaded and lamented, and which people, in malice or anger, try to inflict upon each other as a last penalty or worst revenge; or which they rely upon as the surest way of removing aggression or interference by others. People also invite death upon themselves in token of supreme self-sacrifice, and at times they seek it with the false hope of putting an end to all the worldly worries and problems which they are unable to face or solve. Thus, in the minds of most persons, death assumes an accentuated and overwhelming importance.
The overwhelming importance of death is derived from man’s attachment to particular forms, but death loses much of its sting and importance, even for the worldly man, if he takes a broader view of the course of life. Persistence of life In spite of their transitoriness, there is an unbroken continuity of life through these forms, old ones being discarded and new ones created for habitation and expression. The recurring incident of death is matched by the recurring incident of birth. Old generations are replaced by new ones; life is reborn in new forms, incessantly renewing and refreshing itself; the streams of life, with their ancient origin, are ever advancing onwards through the forms which come and go like the waves of the ocean.
So, even within the limits of the experience of the worldly, there is much that should mitigate morbid thoughts of death as being an irreparable loss. Sorrow of death due to attachment A sane attitude towards death is possible only if life is considered impersonally and without any attachment to particular forms; but this the worldly man finds difficult because of his entanglement with specific forms. For him, one form is not as good as another. The form with which he identifies himself is by far the most important. The general preservation and advancement of the stream of life has for him no special interest. What the worldly man craves is a continuation of his own form and other particular forms with which he is entangled. His heart cannot reconcile itself to his intellect. With the vanishing of the forms which have been dear to him, he becomes a victim of unending sorrow, though life as a whole may have replaced elsewhere the lost forms with new ones.
The sorrow of death, on closer analysis, turns out to be rooted in selfishness. The person who loses his beloved may know intellectually that life as a whole has elsewhere compensated for the loss, but his only feeling is, “What is that to me?” When a man looks at it from his own personal point of view death becomes a cause of unending sorrow. From the point of view of life in general, it is an episode of minor importance.
Impersonal considerations go a long way to fortify the mind against personal sorrow caused by death, but they do not by themselves solve the wider problems which confound even the impersonal intellect of man when he considers some of the implications of death within the limits of his ordinary experience. Problems of impersonal intellect If death is regarded as the final annihilation of individual existence, there seems to be an irreparable loss to the universe. Each individual may be in a position to give to the universe something so unique that no one else can exactly replace it. Further, there are cases of the cutting short of an earthly career long before the attainment of perfection by the individual. All his struggle towards the ideal, all his endeavour and enthusiasm for the great, the good and the beautiful, and all his aspiration for things divine and eternal, seem to end in the vast nothingness created by death.
The implications in assuming death to be the termination of individual existence run counter to the ineradicable expectations based upon rationalised intuition. Conflict between impure intellect and deeper intuition A conflict usually arises between the claims of intuition and the conclusion of impure intellect, which assume death to be the termination of individual existence. Such conflict is often a beginning of pure thinking, which immediately seriously challenges the usually accepted belief that death is the real termination of individual existence. Death as an extinction of life can never be wholly acceptable to the spiritual aspirations of man. Therefore belief in the immortality of the individualised soul is often accepted by the human mind without much resistance, even in the absence of direct supersensible knowledge about the existence of life after death.
Those who know from personal experience the immortality of the soul to be true, are few. Supersensible knowledge of the existence of life after death is inaccessible to the vast majority of persons. For them, immortality must remain an agreeable and acceptable belief but nothing more. It becomes a part of personal knowledge for those who, through scientific interest, have built up means of communication with the “other world;” or those whose special circumstances have resulted in their personally experiencing the appearance or intervention of departed spirits; or those who, through their spiritual advancement, have automatically unfolded certain latent perceptual capacities of the inner vehicles of consciousness.
Immortality of the individualised soul is rendered possible by the fact that the individualised soul is not the same as the physical body. The individualised soul continues to exist with all its sanskaras in the inner worlds through the medium of its mental and subtle bodies, even after it has discarded its gross body at the time of death. So, life through the medium of the gross body is only a section of the continuous life of the individualised soul; the other sections of its life have their expression in other worlds.
Nature is much greater than what a man can perceive through the ordinary senses of his physical body. Three worlds The hidden aspects of nature consist of finer matter and forces. There is no unbridgeable gulf separating the finer aspects of nature from its gross aspect. They all interpenetrate one another and exist together. The finer aspects of nature are not perceptible to ordinary man, but they are nevertheless continuous with the gross aspect which is perceptible to him. They are not remote, and yet they are inaccessible to his consciousness that is functioning through the physical senses, which are not adapted for perceiving those finer aspects of nature. Ordinary man is unconscious of the inner planes, just as a deaf man is unconscious of sounds, and he cannot deal with them consciously. For all practical purposes, therefore, they are other “worlds” for him. The finer and hidden part of nature has two important divisions, viz., the subtle and the mental, corresponding to the subtle and mental bodies of man. The whole of nature may therefore be conveniently divided into three parts—(i) the gross world, (ii) the subtle world and (iii) the mental world. When the individualised soul has incarnated itself in a physical body, it expresses its life in the gross world. When it drops the outer sheath, the physical body, it continues to have its expression..
http://www.discoursesbymeherbaba.org/v3-51.php
If you enjoy that it goes on for a few chapters and becomes more esoteric in which he explains exactly what happens after death of the body and the period between incarnations. He claims heaven and hell to be states of mind that are experienced because when the mind is severed from the instrument of the body it functions in a new capacity in which anything that is thought is actually experienced. I always found this vision of heaven and hell to be far more acceptable and intellectually believable.
-------------------- ..and may the zelda theme song be with you at all times, amen.
Edited by soldatheero (10/21/15 08:26 PM)
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