On Apr 8, 2006, at 1:50 PM, jim_flanegin wrote: > What is the difference between so called life and so called death? > > We don't go away- our essential nature, our consciousness remains, > so what difference is it if the consciousness is in the living room > or the dining room or the bedroom? Is it fair or accurate to say we > have *died* when we move from room to room? If I go from the living > room to the dining room and someone says 'where's Jim?', do we > say, 'oh he went into the dining room; he's dead'...? > > It is like that old phrase about enlightenment, you know, the one > about chopping wood and carrying water, both before and after. Same > deal, dead or alive --no difference--. > > Death is just the word to mean the physical body dies. Has little to > do with the real Us on our eternal journey. No worries, mate.
When I was doing my bardo retreat, we were supposed to sit with the vajra master as a group after each level of the practice and discuss experiences and get all questions answered. These were all advanced meditators with a lot of experience under their belts. And for some of them, when they consciously "died" it was quite overwhelming and not easy by any means. In several of the people all of the lokas arose at once--that means the lower dimensions as well as the "higher" and they would enter into them. The problem arises when people get *stuck* there. And it does happen to even the most advanced practitioners--sometimes hours, days, months or years. It's not only an extremely stable condition once you leave the body, but these are your own patterns, so they're very easy to be seduced by. If we hadn't received instructions on how to handle certain situations, I wonder if some would ever come back. Most people when they experience the dawning of the Clear Light, their awareness will simply faint. A week later they figure out they're dead when they start spontaneously mentally "travelling". Some people won't even get this and swoon again. "Through the bardo retreat, one is approaching an experience of space that is utterly beyond any interference or involvement by the human person, completely unorganized and undomesticated in any sense. It is totally naked, free-form, and unconditioned. It is naked because it contains not even the most subtle dualistic filter of subject and object. It is free-form because there are no concepts or categories to provide shape or interpretation. And it is unconditioned because it stands alone, not based on causes and conditions or leading to results, simply "as it is," without any reference to past or future. It is outside of time. This description suggests the danger to the meditator. Out of the anxiety of the "free-fall" of the retreat, one may seek ground in what arises, becoming fascinated by the colored figures, the mental imagery, and the visions that one sees, and begin to fixate, magnify, and indulge in them. According to Tibetan tradition, this kind of fascination can lead to the withdrawal from reality mentioned above. In this case, one mentally creates a world of one's own and physically enters into a state of suspended animation in which one remains for years, decades, or even centuries." from "Secret of the Vajra World" Tenzin Wangyal, who carried out a bardo retreat in the Bon context, provides the following illuminating comments: I had heard stories and jokes about the problems people encountered while doing dark retreat, in which practitioners had visions they were sure were real. . . . In everyday life, external appearances deflect us from our thoughts, but in the dark retreat, there are no diversions of this kind, so that it becomes much easier to be disturbed, even to the point of madness, by our own mind-created visions. In the dark retreat, there is a situation of "sensory deprivation," so that when thoughts or visions arise in the absence of external reality testing devices, we take them to be true and follow them, basing entire other chains of thoughts on them. In this case it is very easy to become `submerged' in our own mind-created fantasies, entirely convinced of their "reality." Until we try it and experience it, you never know. You've never seen everything. :-) To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
