--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Xenophaneros Anartaxius" <anartaxius@> wrote: If the drop becomes the ocean, the drop is no more as a drop, it is completely recycled and uniformly distributed in the ocean, if we take the analogy a bit further. The specific individuality of the drop is gone. Try and reassemble it again. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "shanti2218411" <kc21d@> wrote: IMHO, their never is a"drop"separate from the ocean(SELF). The "drop" never has an actual existence. It is only the result of the eternal SELF's creation of apparent boundaries/forms i.e.individual beings. The SELF who is writing all the posts on this forum is the same SELF that exists after the apparent beings who wrote these posts are no longer manifest. All that happens with enlightenment is that the SELF stops identifying ITSELF with boundaries and has re-cognized ITSELF as unbounded/infinite. It seems very unlikely that this recognition would mean that the SELF would stop the creative process of manifestation which I suspect is also eternal. IOW we are much much more that the skin encapsulated ego we take are SELF to be. In Zen they say" if you die before you die then you don't die when you die""shanti2218411" <kc21d@...> then wrote in a further post:I guess what I want to say is that from my point of view in enlightenment the question of what happens to the body(subtle/gross) becomes irrelevant b/c the SELF no longer experiences itself as being bounded i.e having a body. OTOH, after enlightenment, the SELF continues to have an experience of apparent boundaries (the physical body and the world etc) while no longer identifying with them or experiencing them as fundamentally real. I think Maharishi's statement" when your mind becomes THE MIND then your body is EVERY BODY" may be related to the question of what happens to the subtle bodies after physical death in enlightenment. My guess is that SELF is never devoid of the experience of boundaries since(IMO) the ultimate nature of REALITY is both pure unbounded awareness and the apparent objects of that awareness. I also think that this is a very deep question to which I doubt there is an answer which will be intellectually satisfying.
This is because language is insufficient to describe non-verbal experience. The intellect cannot get a handle on it. Analogies such as the drop of water in the ocean give the mind something to hang onto, but because analogies have limitations and eventually break down, they do not take us all the way. We know that water flows, and can break into small pieces. So creating an analogy of a small piece of water disappearing into a much larger piece of water (an ocean) creates a picture in the mind, a thought. This analogy can become more complex with understandings from science. Water consists of molecules (H2O), and if a small conglomeration of this substance is placed in a much larger conglomeration of this substance, the molecules eventually disperse more or less evenly throughout the larger conglomeration (entropy). Because of quantum indeterminacy the past history of original configuration can never be reconstructed. The drop of water as a drop is forever dead. But this is just a picture in the mind, not what one can experience. If you have the experience, you do not need the picture unless you desire to convey the nature of the experience to someone else. Another way of describing it is as you said, the self, as opposed to Self, is a fiction, never having been. A phantom idea of what one thought one is, passes away with enlightenment. But this is really dualist language too. We have 'self' versus 'Self;' MMY would say something like point value versus unboundedness. The dichotomy of 'self' versus 'Self' is also a fiction because it manufactures a sense of at least two 'things' in the mind. If the 'self' is a fiction, then its opposite value must be a fiction since one cannot have opposition to something that has no existence. If the point value was a mistaken idea, then unboundedness experienced as an idea in relation to the point is also thus suspect. The actual experience requires neither of these ideas; they are blown away. So as you said, 'I also think that this is a very deep question to which I doubt there is an answer which will be intellectually satisfying.' But here too, we have dualistic language. We have a 'deep' question. In the various traditions we have 'there is nothing new under the sun,' and 'it is before you always, and you do not see it,' and 'if you would only get rid of your opinions, it would be revealed,' so we might say that the answer to this 'deep' question is really 'shallow,' it is right there under our noses all the time, and we blunder about trying to discover it by mounting a gigantic quest. You quoted from Zen saying 'if you die before you die then you don't die when you die.' This quote interestingly also has its analogue in the Christian Bible, where Paul says 'When you clothe the mortal with the immortal, then death, where is thy sting?' We do not live to experience death (Ludwig Wittgenstein). This statement is from a logician, and it flows directly from the definition of the words' meaning. In addition he said: If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive forever?...The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies *outside* space and time....When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The riddle does not exist. Your comment that you doubt there will be an intellectually satisfying answer to this question is right on the mark. You will never find the answer as long as you are thinking about it, for in thinking about this, you are essentially running a manufacturing process in the dream of individuality, which extends the puzzle in the dream by creating new intellectually unsolvable mysteries. For some, though, thinking about something intently for a long time until it completely subsumes them can, if luck in on their side, result in a complete collapse of the whole edifice mentally built up, and in the ensuing silence, the solution is revealed, and you have awoken from the dream.
