42 - Death & Resurrection

"Die before death and resurrect now." (Sufi saying)

People are beginning to ask more questions about death and its process. This is because today people are more bent on confronting feelings honestly, rather than dismissing them out of fear. While all the investigations on spiritism of our forefathers in the beginning of this century, and the testimonies of people who have lived to recount their experiences in a "clinical death" are not considered by many as evidence of survival after death, it doesn't make sense to our minds to assume that a person has achieved and attained in a lifetime can be wiped out in a moment of utter annihilation. The programming of the universe, while often paradoxical and not altogether consistent to our way of thinking, still does not make more sense than that!

Admittedly, if one has left works of art or inspiring thoughts of pioneered break-throughs in science or technology, one survives indirectly through one's creativity that may indeed seed further achievements relayed by others. Besides, one's personality does indeed spill over that of those who love us by an uncanny osmosis, which links humanity by dint of a kind of interdependence in a network like that of the terms of an equation. Yet the individual - individuality - does it not mean something irreplaceable in its uniqueness?  Mutations in nature are triggered off by individuals; the forward march of civilization is impelled by the genius of a few exceptional beings. If indeed, their incentive has meant so much to so many, how could one postulate that their special contribution is now replete?

Nature optimizes its chances of progress, of beatings its records. Perhaps our misconceptions about death are due to our preconceptions about our body, or matter in general. In as much as the body acts as a scaffolding for the building of the superstructure of our being, one might infer that if it collapses while the building is being is build, the completion of the building would be halted. who can claim that the building is ever complete?  What sense for nature to leave a building half build?  If we consider the body as the support system, then indeed it would collapse. What sense in all that went into it in the beginning?  Is it tenable that the programming works that way?  No, this doesn't make sense.

Matter never dies: it undergoes changes, gradual ones (as radiation, osmosis, aging) and also sudden ones, as in a quantum leap (water into steam, the jump of an electron from one orbital of the atom to another, what we call death).

In the evolutionary leap from the inorganic to the organic, the electrons within the atom rearrange themselves more meaningfully and efficiently as a support system for the advance of intelligence and consciousness than in the previous arrangement. Hastily observed, the devastating eclipse in the in-between stage could easily be misconstrued as a falling apart. Never does the same water flow under the same bridge, yet the river remains. Judged from the point of view of the particular drops, it looks as though they have eluded one's gaze.

If a magnetic field structuring metal filing into a pattern were to undergo a momentary de-polarization and then get polarized, perhaps with different voltage, the metal filing would dispense, then reform again, no doubt differently. The reality of the frequency pattern of the magnet is more importantly attributable to the magnet; the outer pattern of the metal filing is secondary. The reality of our body is not visible structure, but what Dr. Rupert Sheldrake calls the "morphic resonance", which is more basic than the building blocks and survives their demise, while mutating over the aeons of time. If you take a computer apart, just examining the chips, it would be difficult to figure out the software. If you know the software, however, you are in possession of the key that would enable you to make upteemed computers. Grasp the soft ware of the universe and even the intention behind that software. If after death you have freed yourself from the support system, you don't need the hardware anymore.

After the quantum leap we call death, then the protons and electrons of the body get scattered in the universe. Owing to the limitation in the speed of light, that cannot communicate by the kind of signaling that we encounter in the universe in its explicate state, but they are still interconnected, say the physicists, in a "non-local" state, the implicate state, while conforming to our ideas about causality. Since each sub-atomic particle stores some information (in its spin) and they still are interconnected, forming together the network that acts as a support system for our minds and consciousness, "Death, where is thy sting?" (a reference to the French physicist, Dr. Jean Charron). If you have experienced even a flash of out-of-body travel, you will realized that indeed, one can continue to see without eyes, hear without ears, displace oneself without wings, communicate without language signals and understanding, without involving the brain. 

While one may grasp splendor as it transpires through a scene of beauty, one can moreover grasp splendor directly, irrespective of or bereft of its physical support system. While one's understanding is usually based upon the assessment of a situation, one may, moreover, grasp meaningfulness directly, a kind of feed-forward instead of a feedback. Although the stress of a challenge will mobilize one's latent power to achieve, one gains a still greater power by renouncing the fruit of action; this is the epitome of unconditional love.

Information is built up at the cost of the expenditure of its support system: energy (negentropy). This is precisely what is meant by resurrection. Besides, we need to distinguish between the knowledge that we attain by processing and interpreting the input from outside (that is, reacting to circumstances and adapting ourselves with conditions), and a kind of pre-cognizance irrespective of the feedback of experience. In philosophy it is called proto-critic knowledge. Imagine the mind, having built its constructs on experiencing other than itself, now discovering meaningfulness within itself, because our minds isomorphic, homologous with (that is, of the same nature as) the mind of the universe and co-extensive with that global mind we call the mind of God. Even as the global mind, so our mind, which actuates that mind is self-generating. A good example in Greek mythology is Bellerophon abandoning his steed, Pegasus (the support system of the mind), who could reach no further and proceeded on his way to the Olympus!

"The tendency of the soul is to reach to the highest spheres to which it belongs, but is cannot rise from the lower regions until is has left behind all earthy attachments", said Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan. Do you ever feel that your body cannot contain you or constrain you or live up to the thrust of your mind or withstand the exhilaration of your soul?  These are the vistas attained in farther reaches of the mind where illumination flashes as realization. Here mediation will help one have a foretaste of life after life.

Imagine that you have awakened from your commonplace perspective, having shaken off that perspective like a snake of its skin, and you remember having been caught in that bind in the mind. For one who values splendor, the software of the universe is more thrilling than the hardware. I have a hunch that after death, if one has awakened, while still getting flashes of the manifestation of the divine intention transpiring from a distant perspective, one highlights that intention grasped directly, so that its manifestation is secondary and in the twilight of consciousness. You may prepare yourself for this in meditation with open eyes by as the Sufis say, always looking for the hallmark of the divine intention behind all occurrence.

Imagine that you are attuned to the splendor that manifests as and through the forms of the universe. You will not suffice yourself with its inadequate expression in the forms your perceive in the universe, however beautiful. Suppose you have been cultivating mastery and now touch upon the magic that mobilizes the marvel of existence. You will exult in that power and not try to appropriate it for your own covetousness. Suppose that you are dancing with joy, not withstanding all the frustrations and wounds wreaked upon you by the limitation whereby the divine perfection in your being suffers in the existential condition. You will demure from building your joy upon precarious circumstantial conditions.

Suppose that you have reached a peace, not the peace of withdrawal from strife, but the peace in the vacuum of the existential realm out of which all activity emerges. You won't have to seek the cave or escape life.  Suppose you are shattered by the ecstasy of unconditional love. You will love those who make themselves unlovable by acting loathfully and obnoxiously, even though you do not approve either of their behavior or their intentions or their attunement. The children of the world will spit at your face and tear your hair, poke our your eyes and trip you over, and you will still love them, for "they know not what do".

According to some testimonies, at the eleventh hour, at the moment of death, one's life on the Planet comes to a head. That which was accomplished, that which one failed at , one's assets and one's defects or foibles, the harm one did to others, one's resentments for those who offended one, the ruthless and inexorable unexpected we call fate, one's love and enmities hopes and disappointments, struggles and satisfactions, all interweave into an evanescent kaleidoscope pattern upon the screen of the mind.

The dint of the interfacing and interacting of the plethora of elements flashing over the over the threshold between the unconscious and the conscious issues enacted in one's life pattern and the challenges met or mis-matched by our resourcefulness, or what we made of our resourcefulness, suddenly zooms into perspective. As Dr. Kubler-Ross once pointed out, one is assailed with the remorse of not having done those things one could have done, but more desperately, for not having become what one might have become. I like to add "how one could have been if one would have been what one might have been." Here lie the crucial issues, particularly the latter. Obviously, it would have been wiser to have dealt with this earlier. Let us deal with the paramount issue now: our personality. Three parameters strike us: 

1. unfurling the resourcefulness lying dormant in our heritage from the whole universe as much in its enormous compass as at all its levels;
2. customizing these levels creatively according to our own bent or peculiar genius by rearranging them, fluctuating them like variations on a theme, and confronting and sharpening these by the encounter with the challenge of our lives;
3. transmuting them so as to extract the essence of them, like the perfume out of flowers.

In the early stages of one's life, the first seems to prevail; in the middle of life's struggle, the second; at the autumn of one's life, the third. One needs to learn to resurrect before death. This requires pruning, assessing priorities, freeing oneself from a lot of ballast, most importantly, identifying oneself with the perfume extracted from that flower that was our personality, with its many idiosyncrasies: it petals that will need to fall apart so that perfume may prevail. 42 - Death & Resurrection

"Die before death and resurrect now." (Sufi saying)

People are beginning to ask more questions about death and its process. This is because today people are more bent on confronting feelings honestly, rather than dismissing them out of fear. While all the investigations on spiritism of our forefathers in the beginning of this century, and the testimonies of people who have lived to recount their experiences in a "clinical death" are not considered by many as evidence of survival after death, it doesn't make sense to our minds to assume that a person has achieved and attained in a lifetime can be wiped out in a moment of utter annihilation. The programming of the universe, while often paradoxical and not altogether consistent to our way of thinking, still does not make more sense than that!

Admittedly, if one has left works of art or inspiring thoughts of pioneered break-throughs in science or technology, one survives indirectly through one's creativity that may indeed seed further achievements relayed by others. Besides, one's personality does indeed spill over that of those who love us by an uncanny osmosis, which links humanity by dint of a kind of interdependence in a network like that of the terms of an equation. Yet the individual - individuality - does it not mean something irreplaceable in its uniqueness?  Mutations in nature are triggered off by individuals; the forward march of civilization is impelled by the genius of a few exceptional beings. If indeed, their incentive has meant so much to so many, how could one postulate that their special contribution is now replete?

Nature optimizes its chances of progress, of beatings its records. Perhaps our misconceptions about death are due to our preconceptions about our body, or matter in general. In as much as the body acts as a scaffolding for the building of the superstructure of our being, one might infer that if it collapses while the building is being is build, the completion of the building would be halted. who can claim that the building is ever complete?  What sense for nature to leave a building half build?  If we consider the body as the support system, then indeed it would collapse. What sense in all that went into it in the beginning?  Is it tenable that the programming works that way?  No, this doesn't make sense.

Matter never dies: it undergoes changes, gradual ones (as radiation, osmosis, aging) and also sudden ones, as in a quantum leap (water into steam, the jump of an electron from one orbital of the atom to another, what we call death).

In the evolutionary leap from the inorganic to the organic, the electrons within the atom rearrange themselves more meaningfully and efficiently as a support system for the advance of intelligence and consciousness than in the previous arrangement. Hastily observed, the devastating eclipse in the in-between stage could easily be misconstrued as a falling apart. Never does the same water flow under the same bridge, yet the river remains. Judged from the point of view of the particular drops, it looks as though they have eluded one's gaze.

If a magnetic field structuring metal filing into a pattern were to undergo a momentary de-polarization and then get polarized, perhaps with different voltage, the metal filing would dispense, then reform again, no doubt differently. The reality of the frequency pattern of the magnet is more importantly attributable to the magnet; the outer pattern of the metal filing is secondary. The reality of our body is not visible structure, but what Dr. Rupert Sheldrake calls the "morphic resonance", which is more basic than the building blocks and survives their demise, while mutating over the aeons of time. If you take a computer apart, just examining the chips, it would be difficult to figure out the software. If you know the software, however, you are in possession of the key that would enable you to make upteemed computers. Grasp the soft ware of the universe and even the intention behind that software. If after death you have freed yourself from the support system, you don't need the hardware anymore.

After the quantum leap we call death, then the protons and electrons of the body get scattered in the universe. Owing to the limitation in the speed of light, that cannot communicate by the kind of signaling that we encounter in the universe in its explicate state, but they are still interconnected, say the physicists, in a "non-local" state, the implicate state, while conforming to our ideas about causality. Since each sub-atomic particle stores some information (in its spin) and they still are interconnected, forming together the network that acts as a support system for our minds and consciousness, "Death, where is thy sting?" (a reference to the French physicist, Dr. Jean Charron). If you have experienced even a flash of out-of-body travel, you will realized that indeed, one can continue to see without eyes, hear without ears, displace oneself without wings, communicate without language signals and understanding, without involving the brain. 

While one may grasp splendor as it transpires through a scene of beauty, one can moreover grasp splendor directly, irrespective of or bereft of its physical support system. While one's understanding is usually based upon the assessment of a situation, one may, moreover, grasp meaningfulness directly, a kind of feed-forward instead of a feedback. Although the stress of a challenge will mobilize one's latent power to achieve, one gains a still greater power by renouncing the fruit of action; this is the epitome of unconditional love.

Information is built up at the cost of the expenditure of its support system: energy (negentropy). This is precisely what is meant by resurrection. Besides, we need to distinguish between the knowledge that we attain by processing and interpreting the input from outside (that is, reacting to circumstances and adapting ourselves with conditions), and a kind of pre-cognizance irrespective of the feedback of experience. In philosophy it is called proto-critic knowledge. Imagine the mind, having built its constructs on experiencing other than itself, now discovering meaningfulness within itself, because our minds isomorphic, homologous with (that is, of the same nature as) the mind of the universe and co-extensive with that global mind we call the mind of God. Even as the global mind, so our mind, which actuates that mind is self-generating. A good example in Greek mythology is Bellerophon abandoning his steed, Pegasus (the support system of the mind), who could reach no further and proceeded on his way to the Olympus!

"The tendency of the soul is to reach to the highest spheres to which it belongs, but is cannot rise from the lower regions until is has left behind all earthy attachments", said Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan. Do you ever feel that your body cannot contain you or constrain you or live up to the thrust of your mind or withstand the exhilaration of your soul?  These are the vistas attained in farther reaches of the mind where illumination flashes as realization. Here mediation will help one have a foretaste of life after life.

Imagine that you have awakened from your commonplace perspective, having shaken off that perspective like a snake of its skin, and you remember having been caught in that bind in the mind. For one who values splendor, the software of the universe is more thrilling than the hardware. I have a hunch that after death, if one has awakened, while still getting flashes of the manifestation of the divine intention transpiring from a distant perspective, one highlights that intention grasped directly, so that its manifestation is secondary and in the twilight of consciousness. You may prepare yourself for this in meditation with open eyes by as the Sufis say, always looking for the hallmark of the divine intention behind all occurrence.

Imagine that you are attuned to the splendor that manifests as and through the forms of the universe. You will not suffice yourself with its inadequate expression in the forms your perceive in the universe, however beautiful. Suppose you have been cultivating mastery and now touch upon the magic that mobilizes the marvel of existence. You will exult in that power and not try to appropriate it for your own covetousness. Suppose that you are dancing with joy, not withstanding all the frustrations and wounds wreaked upon you by the limitation whereby the divine perfection in your being suffers in the existential condition. You will demure from building your joy upon precarious circumstantial conditions.

Suppose that you have reached a peace, not the peace of withdrawal from strife, but the peace in the vacuum of the existential realm out of which all activity emerges. You won't have to seek the cave or escape life.  Suppose you are shattered by the ecstasy of unconditional love. You will love those who make themselves unlovable by acting loathfully and obnoxiously, even though you do not approve either of their behavior or their intentions or their attunement. The children of the world will spit at your face and tear your hair, poke our your eyes and trip you over, and you will still love them, for "they know not what do".

According to some testimonies, at the eleventh hour, at the moment of death, one's life on the Planet comes to a head. That which was accomplished, that which one failed at , one's assets and one's defects or foibles, the harm one did to others, one's resentments for those who offended one, the ruthless and inexorable unexpected we call fate, one's love and enmities hopes and disappointments, struggles and satisfactions, all interweave into an evanescent kaleidoscope pattern upon the screen of the mind.

The dint of the interfacing and interacting of the plethora of elements flashing over the over the threshold between the unconscious and the conscious issues enacted in one's life pattern and the challenges met or mis-matched by our resourcefulness, or what we made of our resourcefulness, suddenly zooms into perspective. As Dr. Kubler-Ross once pointed out, one is assailed with the remorse of not having done those things one could have done, but more desperately, for not having become what one might have become. I like to add "how one could have been if one would have been what one might have been." Here lie the crucial issues, particularly the latter. Obviously, it would have been wiser to have dealt with this earlier. Let us deal with the paramount issue now: our personality. Three parameters strike us: 

1. unfurling the resourcefulness lying dormant in our heritage from the whole universe as much in its enormous compass as at all its levels;
2. customizing these levels creatively according to our own bent or peculiar genius by rearranging them, fluctuating them like variations on a theme, and confronting and sharpening these by the encounter with the challenge of our lives;
3. transmuting them so as to extract the essence of them, like the perfume out of flowers.

In the early stages of one's life, the first seems to prevail; in the middle of life's struggle, the second; at the autumn of one's life, the third. One needs to learn to resurrect before death. This requires pruning, assessing priorities, freeing oneself from a lot of ballast, most importantly, identifying oneself with the perfume extracted from that flower that was our personality, with its many idiosyncrasies: it petals that will need to fall apart so that perfume may prevail.
