Death, Dying and Next---- Thoughts & Speculations

[thelerner]

I'm in a firm, Don't Know state when it comes to death & afterlife. I'm open to possibilities, with Protector's death as an off switch as likely as any.

 

Working with dreams I've had some, one especially powerful dream where I was dying, realized I'd taken my last breath, realized I was experiencing my last heart beats. A very lucid and realistic dream, I panicked a bit, then decided to relax into the phenomena.

 

I got to re-experience that a bit 2 months ago. I'd gone into my doctors office complaining of chest pain. He did an ekg, it came out normal diagnosed it as indigestion. Next day I went the emergency room for more chest pain, ekg was mostly normal, blood test came back normal, due to pain that morphine didn't fix I was allowed to stay in the hospital over night, which I did at my wife's insistence.

 

Much pain and no sleep that night, in the morning EKG very bad and blood test showed bits of heart protein floating in blood- not good. Bad news, bit of my heart closing down, good news surgery was available in 45 minutes. Not open heart, angioplasty with tubes, cameras, wires and equipment going in through large arteries. They could go in through groin or arm. Since I have 2 arms, I told'em use them.

 

Your drugged but kept awake during the process. Not unlike my dream I heard the doctor say 'This isn't going well'. That was not welcome, its not that far from 'what's the time? let's call it.'

 

I certainly felt, 'this sucks' but I was pretty calm. It could have been the drugs but I quickly fell into a state of thankful for what I'd had and lets see what's next. Often my preamble before meditation is 'I'm not my body, that's what I inhabit, I'm not my thoughts, they're like clouds passing, I'm not my emotions, possessions, past, present etc. etc. ...' I've repeated that hundreds if not a thousand times. When push comes to shove, maybe it was effective. (oh and it was just one clogged artery, others were clear, thus after stint I'm quite healthy, thank you)

 

Anyway I'm still here. Got a hole in the upper thigh. The surgeon had to pull the apparatus's from the hole in my arm and restring it through there. More importantly in life, I faced death calmly and with gratitude. That's something.. no matter what happens, or where you go.

 

I've always felt we meditate to gain enough silence/emptiness to glimpse the unfiltered truth. Certain masters before have, and often reported vastly different experiences. How much do our preconceptions play?

 

What do I think about the afterlife? Dunno. Open minded. Let the universe decide and keep the faith, a measure of hope too, because there's an off chance, you get .. what you expect. And I prefer experienced woman to virgins, but most of all my paradise is a beach on Hawaii with a camp fire, wife and kids, friends, dancing, drinks..

[KenBrace]

Human body is a very funny thing that tricks us into thinking we're alive

The cells in our whole bodies get renewed constantly and we loose our memory

As we walk around, our old bodies get turned to dust and we forget unimportant memories, like, what we ate a month ago

After a while, our cells develop faults and we create inferior copies of ourselves, organs fail and we develop diseases like cancer. This process is called old age.

Billions of years ago we began our lives as single cell organisms. We were passive and just absorbed minerals that floated by us. The cells multiplied many many times and their code began to change. It was very random and some cells developed an ability to move. The movement was random but after few changes the cells developed an ability to seek out food by actively moving to wards specific locations. The need to move and eat other organisms began the need for a development of complicated nervous systems.

From being single cell organisms we moved onto being multicellular organisms. We grew and we developed a need for a brain because we wanted to eat meat. There are many living things that live and eat without having a brain and some of them live for centuries or more. They mostly live in the ocean in the coral forests and such places. We live on land and our need for food and our advanced brains led to a need for cooperation, and so, we became social.

From a single cell to a full human, not much space for a heaven there. In our minds we created new worlds and the world we think we live in, we can experience only through our brains. We don't even get the full picture from our senses alone, when we look at something, the brain has to translate what we're looking at and fill in the gaps in things that don't make sense. If our brains get destroyed then it's game over. Though, our minds change and reshape the brain so we're never the same as we were before. We think we are still the same person but to be the person we are today, the person from yesterday has to die. So, it's kinda like a perpetual state of rebirth we're living in that has to stop eventually.

When it stops, there will be nothing. We are like software, if the hardware doesn't work then there's just nothing software can do since it lives inside it.

Soooooooooooooooooooo yeppppppppppppppppppppppp

 

I agree with the software, hardware annalogy. A spirit is physical though so you still have hardware. I know where you're coming from with the talk about the brain, but I don't think that the brain is the ultimate source of consciousness.

Edited July 1, 2014 by KenBrace

[KenBrace]

I think that the spirit and physical body intereact in a way that we don't really understand. How the physical brain interacts with the spirit is something that baffles me.

[Andrei]

The spirit has many bodies beyond this physical one. We have a body in each dimension, and by latest scientific standards we live in an universe with 10 dimensions ( if not 11 or 13 by some). So what you see/perceive in this dimension is just the tip of the iceberg. Death is just this machine that breaks down but the ghost in the machine does not breaks. The same way when your computer breaks down you save all your data on CD, DVD, HD or cloud. The information is saved, and as I know from looking around, the spirit always builds and creates not destroys. It is true some things need to be destroyed to make place other things to be created. So they say the second principle of thermodynamics governs the universe, but then DNA what is it? Sprit makes that the entropy instead growing positive (positive entropy means chaos) goes negative, which is called neguentropy. Neguentropy means that the information build up and organizes, which is exactly what we see in our world today. And this neguentropy does not come from this dimension, as I said the neguentropy or the creative spirit comes from other dimensions.

 

http://youtu.be/XRMn4UhReN4

Edited July 2, 2014 by Andrei

[Andrei]

We live in a 3D space and we don't even understand what time as a dimension is, because we don't see the time, what we see are only slices of time, moments, instants that flow endlessly. Immortality or transcending death means to see the time as a fourth dimension in its entirety, you see your life and all your past and future lives, because history does not have the same meaning as here, you see your entire existence since eternity.

 

[Andrei]

He is right, everything happens as scheduled:

 

[Silent Answers]

 

Human body is a very funny thing that tricks us into thinking we're alive

The cells in our whole bodies get renewed constantly and we loose our memory

As we walk around, our old bodies get turned to dust and we forget unimportant memories, like, what we ate a month ago

After a while, our cells develop faults and we create inferior copies of ourselves, organs fail and we develop diseases like cancer. This process is called old age.

Billions of years ago we began our lives as single cell organisms. We were passive and just absorbed minerals that floated by us. The cells multiplied many many times and their code began to change. It was very random and some cells developed an ability to move. The movement was random but after few changes the cells developed an ability to seek out food by actively moving to wards specific locations. The need to move and eat other organisms began the need for a development of complicated nervous systems.

From being single cell organisms we moved onto being multicellular organisms. We grew and we developed a need for a brain because we wanted to eat meat.

Does that mean herbivores and vegetarians will devolve into tree's without brains? I don't think meat has anything to do with the formation of a brain. The brain is the computer necessary for our complex thinking and making "sense" of the world. Those things without a physical brain resembling ours, still have intelligence in a different form. Plants can learn too.

 

Nice ideas for the most part.. but I wouldn't bet on them being true.

 

Life isn't random, only the details of the journey are. These bodies/machines may die but they will provide the ingredients necessary for future projects of the spirit, a force (spirit) which can never be destroyed.

 

If you still don't believe in spirit in some form - what are you doing here? (Serious question)

Edited July 2, 2014 by Silent Answers

[silent thunder]

The way I experience it...

 

I have a palpable sense of the abiding nature of essence (reincarnation) which stems from two sources:

 

first: my observation of nature...

 

Everything around me is cyclical... it's Summer again, here in North America.

The ice has melted, the animals are raising their young... again; as has happened endlessly for the present epoch...

yet even in this repetition, this is a unique Summer. Like waves of the ocean,

no two are the same, yet all are the ocean.

 

My heartbeat... the way I walk...

my breath.

 

recently I've experienced greater depth of awareness of the cycles within my form, mind and emotional body.

the cycles of intimacy and seclusion within my partnership and with my close friends

 

 

life cycles through death

repeating and yet not repeating,

 

more like constantly yielding in unique expression... raw awareness... stillness...

 

 

and second and ultimate kicker was experiencing consciousness untethered from my form.

fortunately for me, this experience came first, when I was about four years old

so I occupy the enviable position of having never experienced a fear of dying.

 

the observations on nature came much later, some time after my exposure to the Tao.

[Daeluin]

Hmmm.... when our physical yin decays what is left?

Some pattern of spiritual yin/yang, based on how we cultivated and refined all the different levels (or demensional bodies, however you want to look at it) of yin and yang while we were alive.

 

My take is we tend to focus on the physical world, and when we die our patterns are still fairly "course" and we get trapped by the fields of the earth and the solar system. Maybe some of us get further. Depending on our patterns and refinements we'll end up in various places that match our patterns. Maybe we could call this the many heavens and hells of yin mixed with yang.

 

In this state it seems we don't have the uh... leverage to correct our patterns, so we pretty much wait in these relatively unchanging realms, until we get lucky enough to have our pattern matched to the mating energy patterns of some procreating energy blossom, along with the energy patterns of whatever system we got trapped by - the energy patterns of the earth, or solar system, say.

 

Perhaps we were bad and have incredibly course patterns.... who knows, we might find ourselves going through some cycles of physical refinement as more instinctual creatures, or maybe more spiritual creatures like trees. I dunno. Or perhaps we're very spiritually aligned with our destiny and we get called back pretty quick because the unfolding times still match our patterns pretty well - ie we didn't abuse our positions but were trying to listing and work things out.

 

The more we come back and work things out, the more we're creating harmony, and thus refining and dissolving all the patterns and attachments that hold us to whatever particular realms we've bound us to through past incarnations. In time we will be ready to truly dissolve, and thus we can use internal alchemy at the higher degrees without life telling us "no, you aren't ready for this yet", and we are naturally able to reach very deep levels of refinement, to the point where we pass through the gate of life itself, and then we spend... they say 7 days working through the great pass as all our lifetimes flash before our eyes. Maybe part of that challenge is to dissolve all those lifetimes then, or maybe that comes later. But after we have all these spirit clones from our past lives, and so we spend 9 years shattering the emptiness to dissolve all these remnants of our existence on this planet. And then we can move on in a truly free fashion.

 

But how can I speak of any of this? Hah! I don't know anything. There is only what I feel true from my perspective. How can I speak or even imagine upon things which are beyond my existence?

 

I admit something may exist beyond the physical realm, but it is shameful of me to speculate. We're here now. Despite all the confusion that abounds regarding what comes later, we should really try to remember to be here now.

[Protector]

Does that mean herbivores and vegetarians will devolve into tree's without brains? I don't think meat has anything to do with the formation of a brain. The brain is the computer necessary for our complex thinking and making "sense" of the world. Those things without a physical brain resembling ours, still have intelligence in a different form. Plants can learn too.

 

Nice ideas for the most part.. but I wouldn't bet on them being true.

 

Life isn't random, only the details of the journey are. These bodies/machines may die but they will provide the ingredients necessary for future projects of the spirit, a force (spirit) which can never be destroyed.

 

If you still don't believe in spirit in some form - what are you doing here? (Serious question)

 

The need for brain comes from our need for movement. When we want to eat meat, we need to catch it. The need for meat(should be a video game) makes us smarter and more social. There are herbivores who are also social but most of them don't compare to a wolf, for example. Dogs are dumbed down wolves but from human interaction they become smarter. Dogs developed different sounding barks and sounds that give them an ability to better communicate with us. We can tell when a dog is trying to tell its hungry, for example.

 

 

The thing that makes us leaps ahead of other creatures on Earth is our ability to walk on two legs. We developed an enormous brain from running and even used it to hunt. Here's another video, I won't spoil it.

 

 

And that is why the horse stance is the most important technique ever.

A thread about death and I spun it into horse stance, STILL GOT IT!

[skydog]

Psigh

Edited July 2, 2014 by skydog