What Happens When We Die?

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Tuesday, 01 December 2009 15:28 Written by Nirmala

Another question came in my email:

If I feel oneness with the great Essence, will I still have the sense of oneness after my death?    Do Buddha, Ramana or Jesus still feel the Oneness as they would have felt it individually when they were alive?

And here is my response:

This a good question, although ultimately no one can really answer it until they actually die. There are some mysteries that are meant to be mysteries. It can even be very rich and exciting to not know something. And when it comes to something like death, what we do not know will always be more than what we do know.

Based on all of my experience so far in living, my guess is that there is no formula for what happens when we die. So just as everyone's experience of life is unique, so it seems likely that everyone's experience of death would also be unique. So some people might just dissolve back into the Oneness without any trace of individuality remaining. Others might have a very expanded sense of their true nature with still just a little bit of a sense of identity as someone who is experiencing the vastness of Being. And of course others will still have a strong sense of individual existence which might suggest that they would choose to reincarnate again to satisfy their remaining karma or individual desires and conditioning.

Some good news is that we all eventually get to find out what happens when we die. And even better is the mystery of what is going to happen next. Will I live or die today? Will I fall in love today? Will I be happy or sad today? There are endless small mysteries to be discovered everyday, and even sometimes big mysteries that appear in our daily life. Your question is a good one because it shows curiosity. Since life and death are so unpredictable, your curiosity can serve you much better than any answer to your questions. It can be very surprising to discover that questions are almost always more satisfying than answers.

 

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Experience versus Knowing

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Monday, 30 November 2009 17:09 Written by Nirmala

Someone used the contact form on here to send me the following question:

I can't begin to thank you for your free ebooks and writings.  Your message just sings so beautifully to me.  It answers the questions in the perfect order even before I can ask the questions.  Last week while reading your latest ebook, it was seen with incredible ease that the thoughts in my head were not who I am and now, I know as fact that only presence exists.  I can't even go to my mind without something coming up and keeping me in the moment.  Thoughts still arise, but very few "I" thoughts, and those dissipate in a split second.  I do have a question regarding "who I am".  I have of course investigated this and read about this.  I know as fact now that I am not my thoughts or body.  I know "intellectually" that I am Presence Awareness.  I say intellectually because I don't yet sense it as fact.  I wonder if part of me still sees it (Awareness) as an object of some sort?  I have felt/experinced glimpses of it in past - a complete feeling that everything was One and connected (air, people, trees, birds, etc), but that only felt like a passing experience.

Do you have any additional pointers I could read?

And here is my response:

This is a very good question, as many people have grasped the Oneness and their true nature as Awareness intellectually, but are concerned that it is not a common or ongoing experience for them, and so the sense of knowing still seems tenuous or vague. It also seems that there is often a gap between an intellectual knowing and a more grounded, whole being kind of knowing. And the bridge between these two is very simply repeated experiences of the bigger truth. We tend to only really know something that we have experienced a lot.

Everyone has different amounts of experience that is required for that knowing to be felt in an ongoing way. A simple example is asking how many times doing something it would take for you to really know that you now know how to perform some new skill like flying an airplane. If you piloted an airplane once for 2 minutes, would you feel that you know how to fly an airplane? Hopefully not! But if you had flown solo many times, then you would probably start to have an ongoing sense that you know how to fly an airplane.

So it does boil down to having lots of experiences of Oneness and Presence. That is what finally shifts someone's inner sense of knowing. At a certain point the sense of knowing shifts from being an intellectual knowing to a deeper knowing "in your bones". In the case of the knowing of Presence or Oneness, this shift can happen from several repeated experiences of Presence or very occasionally it can happen from one very strong or long lasting experience of the Oneness of Being. And of course everyone wants to have a single big experience that does the trick, but from my many conversations with people undergoing the shift, I have observed that it more often happens gradually or in a series of experiences.

There is one more point I would share with you. The important thing is the shift to a deep sense of inner knowing of the truth. The experiences of Oneness are wonderful and are of great service to this shift, but the experiences are not really that important in and of themselves. Like every other experience, the experience of Presence comes and goes. And any effort to get or keep these experiences will cause you to suffer pretty much in the same way as efforting to get or keep any other ordinary experience...

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Is the Brain the Source of Consciousness?

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Thursday, 19 November 2009 17:00 Written by Nirmala

Someone contacted me with the following questions:

I have a question about the Self, our true identity, about Who we, you, me, all really are: Are we not simply the Brain? And if not, how can we know this? Am I not simply just this brain, is the brain not the source of consciousness and awareness?

It seems quite compelling, that the brain is just an evolved organ as is the eye commonly used as an example in explaining the evolution of complex life, that has evolved in increments over millennia from single celled life to its present blinding complexity... but is that not all that we are? A body that has this awareness through this unprecedentedly sophisticated organ, the brain? I wonder whether the interrelation between the left and right hemespheres is what creates this awareness of awareness - like two opposing mirrors, creating an infinity of reflection...

But if we are the brain, then we are mortal, we will die, and we are not this Eternal Self... Is that too not simply another comforting idea like that of God? Is that awareness of awareness experience simply the experience of being the animal, experienced from its centre of intelligence, the brain - merely an evolved state of brain activity?

And here is my response:

These are very thoughtful questions, and yet there is a limitation in them that is based on a faulty assumption that is also at the core of most scientific reasoning. And once that faulty assumption is accepted then all of the logic that proceeds from there is faulty. It is as if you leave on a trip believing you are in Kansas when you are in Montana. There is very little chance that you will arrive at your intended destination when your starting assumption is so mistaken, even if your navigation skills are very good. And as I said, your questions are very thoughtful good questions.

So what is this mistaken assumption? It is the idea that things are separate. If things are separate from one another, then your questions about the brain are the most relevant ones. And of course the brain is a truly amazing expression of this thing called awareness or consciousness. In fact it is such an amazing expression that it is natural that we have come to assume that it is somehow the source of the consciousness we can observe operating through the brain, and really through the whole body since the nervous and endocrine systems actually use the entire organism to think and perceive.

But what if this more fundamental assumption of separateness is simply mistaken? What would that mean about the body/brain organism and its amazing functioning if it is not separate from anything else around it? What if there is really just one thing here? What would be the source of the awareness we observe?

Just as scientists can no longer really think about the brain and its functioning as somehow separate from the body because the processes we call thought are actually happening in the entire body, it turns out we cannot accurately consider thought as something that happens in one body. Every movement of consciousness that we recognize as thought or awareness is happening in the entire field of awareness that our bodies and brains appear in.

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