70 - Preparing for Resurrection

            Our notion of death is perhaps the most nonsensical of all our notions! Exploring the software of the Universe, physicists never cease to be amazed by the intelligence of the planning. How could we possibly believe that all that has been gained not only by our know-how but by the uniqueness of each of our personalities should get lost from the bounty of the universe?

            If we are unaware of our immortality, we will think that we die. It is all in our way of looking at things. Our fear of death is linked with our failure to grasp more advanced paradigms of thinking: the first step in learning how to resurrect consists in widening our sense of identity which eventually avers itself to be co-extensive with the universe.

            We commonly think of ourselves as a distinct individual but if we are updated with the holistic view of our day and age, we realize that every fraction of the totality carries virtually the entire code.

            If you envision yourself as the keyboard of a piano most of whose keys are scotch-taped so you can only play a simple melody, and should you then realize that you could tear away more and more of the scotch-tape and awaken many-splendored features of the investiture of the universe latent in you, you will exult in self-validation.

In addition to the holistic paradigm, we need to consider the transcendental one. Our commonplace thinking thinks in terms of categories: mind, body, perhaps the soul, that mysterious unknown. The consequence is that our thinking breaks up in a dualistic or pluralistic view: the body dies, hopefully the soul continues to live - two categories.

            The advanced way of thinking is in terms of polarity: I am also my body. In our spiritual beliefs, we are so old-fashioned! We still think in terms of one time-dimension. If we shift into the new paradigms, and are able to extrapolate between two or more dimensions of time, then we may envision ourselves as a pendulum of which one pole is moving in space-time, and the other remains unchanged. In between these two poles there are numberless transitional stages. Information imputed from our perceptual interface with the physical environment is processed upwards so that ultimately the quintessence is recycled into that level of our being where meaningfulness prevails over perception - eventually into the software of the universe.

            As we shift our sense of identity upwards, our feeling of the process of becoming merges into a sense of being a continuity in change. Indeed the very cellular structure of our bodies - particularly our faces, that configures our emotional attunements and insight will imprint the fabric of the subtler levels of our being; for example, our electro-magnetic field, the sparkling of our aura, the morphogenetic field that acts as a template of our body and further upwards in degrees of subtlety in infinite regress. Thus our bodies will outlive the dispersal of the building blocks of our body, the electrons and protons that survive and carry some bytes of memory. This could be illustrated by the fact that not one cell of our body is today the same cell as a few years ago, yet we think it is the same body. This is because its basic structure survives the disruption of the cells.

            Consequently we can consciously and willfully fashion as a sculptor in a creative way our bodies of resurrection - that is our celestial bodies that maintain the gist of the countenance that sometimes transpires through our face when we are aware of the bounty and thinking of the universe coming through us.

            By identifying with our self-image, that is a fallible notion of ourselves, we are obstructing the shift in our thinking that enables us to by-pass our transiency which is the condition of our learning how to resurrect. The resulting miss-assessment of our involvement in our problems stands in the way of our realization because we are ultimately our realization and it is this transcendent dimension of our being that survives its support system.

            This would require then that we would need to stretch our minds beyond their middle range. We would see what the implications of our problems are from the point of view of those involved in them, and while surveying ourselves with a birds eye view in the context of the cosmic drama in all its compass, grasp the dovetailing of our lives and beings with theirs.

            In this perspective, our way of looking at ourselves and our participation in the human drama will aver itself to be just the kind of thinking that will prepare us for the experience of resurrection: we cease to limit our assessment of our problems to causation in a linear fashion in the arrow of time, or succumb to the conditioning of our personality, but grasp as Speiser says: A pre-causal stage out of which the programing of the universe arises behind the apparent universe of our own self-image. Then we see ourselves in the universe, not just on Planet Earth or in our personal dramas (our storms in our tea-cups) and interrogate ourselves: what are we doing on Planet Earth, what is our place in the universe?

            The body then, rather than being our space-suit on Planet Earth that we will discard at death is seen as a support system. Truly enough, Pegasus could not reach the Olympias, but imprinted upon his rider, Bellerophon, the thrust that hoisted him aloft. The bodiness of Pegasus was transmuted into energy.

            Admittedly while many of the recollections in Dr. Moody's Life After Death and sequels could be accounted for by the residual exercise of brain functions, the out-of-body overview of the physical shroud gives us some clues as the aftermath of this episode: Life after life.

            I quote Shams Tabrizi the mentor of Mevlana Jelal Ed Din Rumi:

  "I walk without feet and fly without wings, and see without eyes and hear without ears..."

  and may I add: and think beyond the mind.

            However we cannot be creative be it of a work or art or of ourselves just by willing it. We have to be moved and shattered and bewondered and bemused.
