THE DEATH OF FOREVER
Darryl Reanney 1991
A NEW FUTURE FOR HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS
Page 256 continues
The pursuit of happiness
"Is this a mirage, a romantic's myth,
a dreamer's dream? I am certain it it not. One night, many years ago,
I went to a concert in Auckland with a friend. As we came out after one
of the most magnificent performances of a classical symphony I have ever
heard, my friend turned to me and said, 'Ah well, music is all very well
but we have to get back to the real world'. It has taken me half a lifetime
to realise what was wrong with that statement. It was the wrong way round.
Music is the most powerful alchemy we know, the magic agent of transcendence
that lifts consciousness into a more perfect state. When we lose ourselves
in music we become more real. The return to everyday mode, to
the sad, confused world of the ego-self, is a Fall, a reversion to unreality,
an expulsion from some simalcrum of eternity, back into time.
The essence of the human quest is to break free of time, to reconnect
to the eternal in all of us, in that space where the past and the future
interleave, the reality laboratory of our own minds. We are all explorers;
we are all time-travellers; we are all lost children seeking home. We
have a dim memory of home; it is a place we have been before. In the remote
future. / Page 257 / The last signpost on this journey is now in sight.
It points to what is, to me, the strangest and most revelatory part of
the quest. Of necessity, this part has to be incomplete for it can be
'known' only when we ourselves die.
In Chapter 6 I described the sequence of psychological states a dying
person goes through, in the experience of Elisabeth Kuebler- Ross. However,
I stop short of describing the actual moment of death itself. Let me now
restate a point made in Chapter 6. Our attitude to and ignorance of death
is shaped by the fact that we cannot comprehend death experientially;
we cannot remember something we have not yet gone through. However this
statement is, in a limited but important sense, not true. There exist
in the community people who have died in the scientific definition of
the term and as it were, returned to the living state by luck or medical
management. These people can tell us what the death experience is like.
Near death experiences, or NDEs, have now been documented in many hundreds
of cases. NDEs are defined by the cessation (at least to an outside observer)
of some or all the normal physiological indicators of 'life': the heartbeat
may stop, breathing may cease, and perhaps most importantly, the repetitive
blips traced out on a video monitor by 'brainwaves' on the EEC may fade
away, leaving a flat line on the screen (hence the term 'flat-liners').
This is not to say that every case of NDE occurs in a hospital; rather
that, to qualify as a genuine NDE candidate, a person must have at the
very least stopped breathing or lost any detectable pulse and that NDEs
are most credible when the cessation of vital function is monitored by
state-of-the-art technology. The period during which vital functions can
no longer be measured can be as short as a few seconds or as long as two
hours.
The remarkable thing about NDEs is that they show a consist-ency, a common
'core' of seemingly identical experience, irrespec-tive of gender, religion,
background or race. This hints at the possibility that the brain experiences
a more-or-less universal cog-nitive shift at the point of death. This
is centrally important in the context of this book. The message of
The Death of Forever is that ego ceases with physical death but that
consciousness does not. NDEs may thus offer a window into that climactic
moment my hypothesis predicts, when our human reality melts away like
a shadow, when the fabricated skein of the time-trapped ego-self unravels,
exposing the deep knowing of consciousness in its tempo-rally unfettered
four-dimensional state. / Page258 / Before I analyse NOEs in the light
of my conclusions in this book, I must address the alternative explanations
for their occur-rence. Are NDEs hallucinations? Does the brain malfunction
in a consistent way at death? Many experts think so. Some of the key elements
of an NDE experience can be artificially induced by hallucinogenic drugs
like ketamine (used in anasthesia) or 'angel dust'. This may be significant
because, once the blood supply to the brain is diminished or cut off,
the brain enters a period of anoxia or oxygen starvation. There is evidence
that this oxygen starvation reproduces some of the effects of those hallucinogenic
drugs that mimic the NDE.
Against this, an impartial observer must set the following facts. At precisely
the time one might expect impaired brain function because of the stopping
or winding-down of vital life support functions, NDEers report heightened
cognition, a strong sense of a reality that is in a deep way more real
than everyday awareness. Morever, at least one NDEer whom I have heard
deliberately took a range of hallucinogenic drugs after his NDE specifically
to compare their psychological effects with those of his NDE. His verdict
was quite emphatic: whereas the drug-induced condition brought about sensory
disorientation, the NDE was cogent, indelible and overwhelming; the effects
of the drug-induced state faded quickly whereas the memory of his NDE
remains with him to this day.
It is neither possible nor desirable, in a work like this, to give a balanced
discussion of the various hypotheses advanced to 'explain' the NDE. Readers
are referred to the detailed investigations of Margot Grey, Kenneth Ring
and others, which attempt to analyse the phenomenon using accepted scientific
methodology. The only point I would make concerns the 'criticism' that,
with the virtue of hindsight, one can question whether a person who is
later restored to full cognitive function can ever be said to have been
'dead' at all. I agree with this. In my view the significance of the NDE
is that it gives us a fascinating window of insight into the actual experience
of dying. It can say nothing about possible post-mortem existence except
by inference and extension.
My attitude to NDEs has been significantly affected by a I programme I
saw on ABC television. In this programme a group of
people who had experienced near death experiences were brought together
with doctors and other experts. One aim of the programme seemed to be
to try to see whether the NDE was a mental abberation / Page 259 / induced
by the loss of vital function or whether it opened a door to a different
dimension of being. The people who described their NDE made a big impact
on me. It is one thing to read about NDEs in books, quite another to watch
real people struggle to find words for something which seems to transcend
language.
Consider the words of a scientist whom I will call John:
it's as if everything was there and everybody
was there; the sense was of absolute total fulfillment. And yet there
was no sense that I was there. That's the most extraordinary thing;
John vanished at that moment.
That comment fascinates me: my hypothesis
predicts that ego, the sense of self, evaporates at death but that consciousness
remains. John in this instance used just the words I would expect of someone
whose ego-self had dissolved but whose deep knowing, his real 'self, was
unaffected. The 'I' flickers out of existence but integrated awareness,
one in all and all in one, remains.
John expanded on this point in these words:
The sense was of immense depth... It's
like having been to a space before everything was and then coming back
and seeing all this from that space instead of seeing it, as I used to,
from inside my head.
Other NDEers speak of retaining a sense of
identity but only as a strand of the greater whole they now feel part
of:
One of the feelings I remember most about
them was the feeling of unity, of being totally a part of everything around
me and about me. There was no separateness at all.
Different NDEers use different words and
images to describe their experience but the one universal factor that
almost everyone reports is a vision of light. Not just any light, light
that goes beyond light. A radiance that is wordlessly ineffable:
I just found myself in this extremely
bright light and felt absolute peace. I feel the light and the peace were
one.
The light is brighter than anything you could possibly imagine.
There are no words to describe it.
A beautiful light- it's like being an ant inside a large diamond.
Page 260
Compare this with Whitman's words:
lighting the very light, beyond all
signs, descriptions, languages.
Another universal element in the core
experience is a sense of profound and transcendent love and oneness:
And the quite amazing thing is that I had an incredible sense of well-being
- I just felt completely born aloft by goodwill and by love... just the
most fantastic feeling of love and goodwill.
I felt exhilarated and felt I was one
with everything.
And from another ABC programme on the same
topic, this, to me, the most powerful description of all:
I came into the light and it hit me
all over. I stood in the light... While I stood in the light, for that
split second or a few minutes, whatever it was in time. I had this feeling
of just total understanding. It was just being part of that universal
spirit, part of what you can only describe as being all. Everything...
and it was the most inspiring and, I guess, the greatest single experi-
ence I've ever had in my life. It was just incredible.
This can be compared with Larry's description
of his illumina-tion in the quote from The Razor's Edge given
earlier. Although Larry is a fictional character, Somerset Maugham seems
to have modelled his description of Larry's enlightenment on historical
accounts of the moment of 'enlightenment' as documented for example by
R. M. Bucke in his classic opus, Cosmic Consciousness. The point I want
to emphasise is that Larry's description of his illumination could be
fitted into a book on NDEs without changing a word.
To me one of the most intriguing aspects of the NDE is the feeling two
people reported in which they state that their NDE was so real that
the living seemed shallow by comparison:
As if it 's not the dying that's
the problem but the living.
I felt as though I was awake for
the first time in my life.
Compare this again with Whitman's words:
I cannot be awake for nothing looks
to me as it did before or else I am awake for the first time and all before
has been a mean sleep.
Page 261
In the context of this book, one has to note
especially the odd time-sense perception that often accompanies
an NDE. As an
American NDEer reports of her 'life-review', the replay of one's life
history that seems to be an integral part of an NDE:
I can't exactly describe it to you, but it was just all there. It was
just there all at once. I mean, not one thing at a time, blinking off
and on, but it was everything, everything at one time.
Compare this with Goethe's words 'one moment holds eternity'.
Likewise, I am impressed by the strongly non-verbal nature of
the NDE experience. Not only do NDEers find that existing lan-guage is
completely inadequate to describe what they went through, but communication
with the 'light' (which seems to invite them to review their lives) takes
place, wordlessly, in a kind of instant telepathy. As Patrick Gallagher,
who had a nearly fatal car accident in 1976, reports:
I seemed to possess a knowledge as radiant,
transfiguring and ideal as the luminous light...I knew that all one had
to do was approach an interesting person and quite easily and almost immediately
understand his essence. To do so completely re-quired only a brief glance...
without any speech...the result was a consummate exchange of knowledge.
Words cannot provide a hint of such a universal knowledge.
Confronting the deep similarities between NDEs and mystical experience
('cosmic consciousness') at least one commentator, Kenneth Ring, has drawn
a striking conclusion:
What occurs during an NDE has nothing
inherently to do with death or the transition into death...the NDE...should
be re- garded as one of a family of related, mystical experiences that
have always been with us, rather than the recent discovery of modern researchers
who have come to investigate the phenom-enon of dying.
In this context it is interesting to note
that the myth of the Fall, which I have used repeatedly throughout the
course of this book, is not a specifically Christian phenomenon. Every
human culture has its myth of a golden age, paradise, a time of
innocence that man has 'lost' through some 'wrong-doing'. Anthropologist
Richard Heinberg suggests that this golden age, this lost paradise,
can be equated with /
PARADISE
PARADE EYES EYES PARADE
PARADE I EYES EYES I PARADE
PARADE I = 9 EYES = 9 9 = EYES 9 = I
PARADE
Page 262 / the 'Dreaming' consciousness of
'primitive' cultures before the advent of symbolic written language:
perhaps our most useful new clue to this lost state of being is contained
in the modern study of altered states of consciousness and in particular,
the near-death experience. The essence of Paradise is...equivalent
to what various traditions have termed, nirvana, ecstasy, union and
cosmic consciousness. It is the condition of the absence of the separate
human ego with all its defenses, aggressions and categories of judgement."
THE GARDEN OF EDEN
THE GARDEN OF NEED
"The concept that Eden really existed, as a paradisic state
of mind, is appealing but it can lead too easily to the facile New Age
belief that the purpose of life is to 'go home to Eden', to go
back to the Golden Age, by returning to prehistory. This is woolly-minded
romanticism. Evolution never runs back along its own tracks. As Ken Wilber
stresses, the Edenic mentality felt itself to be 'one' with nature because
it had not yet separated from nature; it was precon-scious (infantile)
not superconscious (spiritual). So the 'goal' of personal growth and development
is (in terms of the metaphor) not to go back to prehuman 'Eden'
but forward to posthuman 'God', to integrate non-linear consciousness
in its full depth with the self-consistent elegance of linear mathematical
definition, perfecting both the intuitive holism of right-brain knowing
and the mathemati-cal logic of left-brain science, uniting and thus completing
both mind modalities, finally, in the one mutually supportive, comple-mentary,
splendid synthesis.
This sense of return brings me to my final point. Carl Sagan has advanced
an interesting explanation for the NDE. Noting the fre- quency with which
NDEers report going through a 'tunnel' towards a source of radiant 'light',
Sagan suggests that what NDEers are
doing is, in fact, reliving the birth process - running their lives back
to their beginning. Elements of the 'core' NDE may be consistent with
this suggestion -the 'life review' for example- but if Sagan is right,
it is difficult to see why the sense of love and unity reported by NDEers
is always linked to the light. One would suppose it would be more logically
linked to the unitive darkness of the womb which the backward-running
mind records as its first memory, prior to the traumatic separation of
birth.
However, Sagan's thesis does dovetail with a motif of this book, that
to know the end one must return to the beginning (see chapters / Page
263 / 5 and 7). The key cosmological conclusion of this book is that time
is closed back upon itself to form a self-consistent loop. Thus end and
beginning are, in a sense, 'linked events'. NDEs in this perspec-tive
reunite the consciousness of life's 'end' with the consciousness of life's
'beginning' but moved up one or more octaves in the scale of creation
because of the increase in knowing that comes from a life of searching.
This is, I believe, how consciousness evolves. At our present stage of
evolution we may be limited in what we can 'see', even after death. But
the collapse of the linear time fallacy must bring us closer to the climactic
mystery of completed consciousness, which in the mythology of our past
cultures we have called 'God'.
Several times during the ABC programme I referred to earlier, the camera
kept panning back to one man, in the front row. As others described their
NDE, he obviously relived part of his. On his face was an arresting expression,
a look hard to put into words; a look that, in less cynical times, might
have been called 'holy'.
That look haunts me.
Finally, how does the message of this book help us live our lives? I believe
that what is missing in our lives is a sense of the sacred. By this, I
do not mean a return to religion in any formal sense. Religions like Christianity
and Islam are, in my view, profaners of the sacred, denying in practice
the very truths they profess in principle. The American historian, Lewis
Mumford, summed up the failure of organised Christanity when he said:
Karl Marx once said of himself that he
was not a Marxist; and of Jesus one may say without irreverence, that
he was not a Christian. For little men, who guardedJesus' memory, took
him, drained off the precious life blood of his spirit, mummified his
body, and wrapped what was left in many foreign wrappings; over these
remains they proceeded to errect a gigantic tomb. That tomb was the Christian
Church.
To see how this came about, remember that
the structure of our minds, with their emphasis on negative feedback,
predisposes us to resist change. Organised religion, with its bureaucratic
insistence on the 'right way' and 'eternal truths', denies change. Its
very exclu- siveness shows how tightly its dogmas are identified with
its own sense of collective ego. The eagerness it displays to win converts,
to bring their otherness into its own self-image, betrays its deep-rooted
/ Page 264 / insecurity-that insecurity is the inevitable companion of
ego. Christianity and Islam have been the chief examples of this unstable
super ego and the consequences of their insistence that their way is the
only way are only too evident, even today, on the streets of Belfast or
Beirut.
The metaphor I have always used when I am confronted with the paradox
of a thousand faiths, each claiming to have found 'the way', each claiming
for themselves a monopoly on truth, an exclusive right to salvation, is
the parable of the searchers on the mountain. At the bottom of the mountain
they look up, dimly sensing the high place that the intuition of their
prophets see as 'God'. Each searcher starts from the baseline of the mountain
where, handicapped by ignorance and trapped by ego, he cannot see round
the comer where his nearest fellow-traveller is. So, each searcher thinks,
and be- lieves, that the path he has found, his way up, is the only way
and that the vision he glimpses is a special privilege granted to him
alone. As the searchers climb higher, i.e. evolve towards higher states
of consciousness, their various paths start to converge and they see that
round the edge of the hill are other roads, with other seekers. At the
summit, the high place (pure consciousness), all paths unite. The sense
of separateness that divided searcher from searcher and road from road
is no more. They finally understand that all the seemingly different roads
led to the same place in the end, the common meeting point that novelist
Umberto Eco describes, where each can say:
I shall sink into the divine shadow,
in a dumb silence and an ineffable union, and in this sinking all equality
and all inequality shall be lost, and in that abyss my spirit will lose
itself; and will not know the equal or the unequal, or anything else;
and all differences will be forgotten. I shall be in the simple foundation,
in the silent desert where diversity is never seen, in the privacy where
no one finds himself in his proper place. I shall fall into the silent
and uninhabited divinity where there is no work and there is no image.
When I began this book, I
spoke of a 'gap at the centre' in Western civilisation due to the breakdown
of the old faiths. The clear implication was that this gap needs to be
filled. But with what? I repeat, I believe it can only
be filled by a renewed sense of the sacred. By this, I do not
mean a new set of beliefs, which will inevitably harden into dogma.
I mean an experiential sense of trust and caring, / Page
265 / a renewed feeling for beauty in whatever form it may be found. To
give this experiential message some 'shape' it will, I think,
be necessary to develop a new story for our time, based on science.
I say 'story' because science in its present form gives no human dimen-sion
to the truths it creates and illuminates. We need a parable, not a textbook,
a poem of reality so rich and beautiful that its meaning will transcend
the words it uses.
An example may help. The timescale of evolution is framed in numbers so
vast that they literally lie beyond comprehension. Who can really get
a feel for a number like 10000 000 000 years ago? However, all of us can
sense the meaning of deep time from a story I read when I
was a boy, in Arthur Mee's Childrens' Encyclopedia:
Faraway, in the West of the world there is a mighty granite rock,
a mile high, a mile wide and a mile deep. Once every hundred
years a little bird comes to the rock and sharpens its beak on the
granite. And when the bird has worn the rock away, that will be
one day in eternity.
The restoration of this sense of the sacred
is the most important task of this generation. People may say, 'No, it
is more important to
develop strategies to combat the greenhouse effect (for example)' .
That is only superficially true. The greenhouse effect, a result of planetary
pollution, is a direct consequence not so much of a rapacious commercial
culture as of the attitudes and assumptions that make that culture possible.
We see now whence those attitudes come. They are the direct consequences
of the me-first competitive- ness of the ego-self. The only way, I repeat,
the only way to reverse this planetary degradation is to break down the
barriers that wall us off from each other and the world, to recognise
that aphorisms like 'the brotherhood of man' are not romantic, pie-in-the-sky
day- dreams but practical patents for survival.
To achieve this, I believe we need to reintroduce a cycle of rituals into
life-not grandiose, self-important charades but participatory ceremonies
that have their roots in human needs, rituals that give meaning to our
lives, by connecting us to both the elemental simplicity we once were
and to the sublime glory we shall be. When a group of people gather to
share a meal, they could, for a minute, link hands. Small though this
gesture is, it is rich in significance. We all need that human contact
because we all need to belong to something bigger than ourselves: something
that remembers our Page 266 / past and affirms our future. We should create
new rites of passage to celebrate the phases of the human life cycle,
rituals for birth, for the transit into adolescence, and above all, for
dying.
Of these, the need for a ritual of dying is the most urgent. I know of
no greater testament to the failure of our civilisation than the fact
that so many people die alone, abandoned like discards on society's junk
heap. Dying must again be united with a sense of the sacred, for it is
here, if anywhere, that the psyche outgrows its human limitation.
The most important message of this book is that consciousness cannot be
extinguished by death, for consciousness transcends time. We should
learn to approach death with gratitude, seeing it for what it is, the
final elimination of ego, the end of the fallacies of time and self.
In the end it can all be said so simply.
Time and self are outgrown husks which consciousness will one day
discard, just as a butterfly abandons its chrysalis to fly towards the
sun."
THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD
LIBERATION THROUGH UNDERSTANDING IN THE BETWEEN
Translated by Robert Thurman 1994
TIBET: A SPIRITUAL CIVILIZATION
Page 10
"During the three centuries of Tibet's
modern period, the national pri-ority was on monastic education, literary
and philosophical creativity, the practice of meditation, the development
of ritual and festival arts, and so forth. Spiritual adepts were accepted
as the highest level of Ti-betan society, considered to have become perfected
Buddhas through their practice of the Tantras (spiritual technologies)
of Unexcelled Yoga (self-cultivation). They were inner-world adventurers
of the highest dar-ing, the Tibetan equivalent of our astronauts-I think
it is worth coin-ing the term "psychonaut" to describe them.
They personally voyaged to the furthest frontiers of that universe which
their society deemed vital to explore: the inner frontiers of consciousness
itself, in all its transfor-mations in life and beyond death.
In Western culture, the last frontiers of our material conquest of the
universe are in outer space. Our astronauts are our ultimate heroes and
heroines. Tibetans, however, are more concerned about the spiritual conquest
of the inner universe, whose frontiers are in the realms of death, the
between, and contemplative ecstasies. So, the Tibetan lamas who can consciously
pass through the dissolution process, whose minds can detach from the
gross physical body and use a magic body to travel to other universes,
these "psychonauts" are the Tibetans' ultimate he-roes and heroines.
The Dalai Lamas and the several thousand "reincar-nate"
Lamas (also called "Tulku," which means "Buddha
Emanation") are these heroes and heroines. They are believed
to have mastered the death, between, and rebirth processes, and
to choose continuously, life after life, to return to Tibet
out of compassion to lead the Tibetans in their spiritual national
life and to benefit all sentient beings.
Thus the modern Tibetan civilization was unique on the planet. Only such
a special civilization could have produced the arts and sci- ences of
dying and death transmitted in this book. I describe the unique psychological
character complex that corresponds to the modern Ti-betan society as "inner
modernity." It should be understood to contrast with the modern Western
psychological character complex, which can be described as "outer
modernity." The Western character complex is usually contrasted with
a premodern traditional" character. It is often / Page 11 / described
as a complex of traits such as individualism, openness and flexibility
of identity, restless reflectiveness, and adherence to rationality. This
modern Western character complex is connected with a peculiar perception
of all things-including psychic or mental things-as ulti-mately reducible
to quantifiable material entities. This is what gives it its "outwardness."
The modern Tibetan character complex shares the modern traits of individualism,
openness and flexibility of identity, re-flectiveness, and rationality.
But the Tibetan character is bound up with its peculiar perception, derived
from Buddhist civilization, of all things as infused with spiritual value,
as interconnected with mental states. In contrast to Western ideas, the
Tibetan view is that the mental or spir-itual cannot always be reduced
to material quanta and manipulated as such-the spiritual is itself an
active energy in nature, subtle but more powerful than the material. The
Tibetan view is that the "strong force" in
nature is spiritual, not material. This is what gives the Tibetan
char-acter its "inwardness." Thus while Western and Tibetan
personalities share the complex of modernity of consciousness, they are
diametrically opposed in outlook, one focused outward on matter
and the other in-ward on mind."
4 |
MIND |
40 |
22 |
4 |
6 |
MATTER |
77 |
23 |
5 |
10 |
|
117 |
45 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
5 |
LIGHT |
56 |
29 |
2 |
4 |
DARK |
34 |
16 |
7 |
9 |
|
90 |
45 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
8 |
POSITIVE |
115 |
43 |
7 |
8 |
NEGATIVE |
83 |
38 |
2 |
16 |
|
198 |
81 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
7 |
GODDESS |
73 |
28 |
1 |
3 |
GOD |
26 |
17 |
8 |
10 |
|
99 |
45 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
5 |
SATAN |
55 |
10 |
1 |
3 |
GOD |
26 |
17 |
8 |
8 |
|
81 |
27 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
5 |
BRAIN |
44 |
26 |
8 |
4 |
BODY |
46 |
19 |
1 |
9 |
|
90 |
45 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
8 |
MAGNETIC |
72 |
36 |
9 |
5 |
FIELD |
36 |
27 |
9 |
13 |
|
108 |
63 |
18 |
1+3 |
|
1+0+8 |
6+3 |
1+8 |
4 |
|
9 |
9 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
99 |
NAMES
OF GOD |
99 |
45 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
5 |
LUCKY |
72 |
18 |
9 |
8 |
THIRTEEN |
99 |
45 |
9 |
13 |
|
171 |
63 |
18 |
1+3 |
|
1+7+1 |
6+3 |
1+8 |
4 |
|
9 |
9 |
9 |
5 |
DALAI |
27 |
18 |
9 |
4 |
LAMA |
27 |
18 |
9 |
9 |
|
54 |
36 |
18 |
|
|
5+4 |
3+6 |
1+8 |
9 |
|
9 |
9 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
ADD TO REDUCE REDUCE TO DEDUCE
TIBET
THE IN BETWEEN
THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD
LIBERATION
THROUGH UNDERSTANDING IN THE BETWEEN
Translated by Robert Thurman 1994
Page 11
"Thus while Western and Tibetan personalities share the complex of
modernity of consciousness, they are diametrically opposed in outlook,
one focused outward on matter and the other in-ward on mind."This
difference of personality underlies the difference between the two civilizations.
While the American national purpose is ever greater material productivity,
the. Tibetan national purpose is ever greater spir-itual productivity.
Spiritual productivity is measured by how deeply one's wisdom can be developed,
how broadly one's compassion can exert itself. Tibetan Buddhists believe
that outer reality is interconnected with inner mental development over
a beginningless and endless series of lives, so they see no limit to how
far the self and the environment can be transformed for the better. The
self can become a Buddha, a being of perfect wisdom and compassion; and
the environment can become a perfect Buddha-land, wherein no one suffers
pointlessly and all are there for the happiness of all.
The ultimate example of the inwardly directed rationality of the modern
Tibetan mind is precisely our present concern, the Tibetan exploration
of death. The outwardly directed Western mind long ago dismissed the topic
of death and future lives as archaic, of concern only to the superstitious
traditional mind. Materialistic habits of thought reduce the mind to matter
and eliminate the soul. Ruling out the pos-sibility of future lives, death
is merely a physiological condition, equated with a "flatline"
on an electroencephalograph. There is no interest at all in the states
of the person or condition of the mind after death. Scientific investigation
restricts itself to the material quanta perceivable by the physical senses,
augmented by machinery, during this one bodily / Page 12 / life. At the
same time, Westerners have set about exploring the outer world, the farthest
continents, the macro realms of the outer galaxies, and the micro realms
of the cell, the molecule, the atom, and the sub-atomic forces.
Tibetan inwardly directed reason put the material world second on its
list of priorities. Its prime concern was the world of inner expe- rience,
the waking, gross realm of causality, relativity, sensation, percept and
concept, and the subtle realm of image, light, ecstasy, trance, dream,
and finally, death and its beyond. The Tibetans considered the inner,
subtlemost, experiential realm the important point at which to assert
control of all subjective and objective cosmic events. And so they
set about exploring this inner world, using analytic insight and contempla-tive
concentration to extend their awareness into every crevice of ex- perience.
They used the manipulation of dreams and inner visions to visit lucidly
the territories of the unconscious. They used focused dis- identification
with coarse subjectivity to gain access to the subtlest level of sentience.
And they used an augmented sense of mindfulness and memory to gain access
to past life experience, including the dreamlike experiences of the between
states traversed from death to birth."
THE MUMMY
Ernest A. Wallis Budge 1893
Page 350
"The quality of the papyrus depended
entirely upon the class of plant used in its manu-facture. The colour
of the papyri that have come down to us varies greatly, from a rich brown
to a whitish-grey; the texture of some is exceedingly coarse, and of others
fine and silky. The width of papyri varies from six to seventeen inches,
and the longest papyrus known (Harris, No. I, B.M. 9999) measures
135 feet in length. The finest hiero-glyphic papyri of the Book
of the Dead are about fifteen inches in width, and when they contain a
tolerably full number of chapters, are from eighty to ninety
feet long
135 1+3+5 = 9
135 x 12 = 1260 1+2+6 = 9
LENGTH OF GRAND GALLERY = 153 FEET
1 + 5 + 3 = 9
153 feet x 12 inches = 1836
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KEEPER OF GENESIS
A QUEST FOR THE HIDDEN LEGACY OF MANKIND
Robert Bauval Graham Hancock 1996
Page 254
"...Is there in any sense an interstellar Rosetta Stone? We believe
there is a common language that all technical civilizations, no matter
how different, must have.
That common language is science and mathematics.
The laws of Nature are the same everywhere:..."
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NINE |
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KEEPER OF GENESIS
A QUEST FOR THE HIDDEN LEGACY OF MANKIND
Robert Bauval Graham Hancock 1996
Page 254
"...Is there in any sense an interstellar Rosetta Stone? We believe
there is a common language that all technical civilizations, no matter
how different, must have.
That common language is science and mathematics.
The laws of Nature are the same everywhere:..."
Page 255
" In addition, though the monuments are enabled to 'speak'
from the moment that their astronomical context is understood, we have
also to consider the amazing profusion of funerary texts that have come
down to us from all periods of Egyptian history - all apparently emanating
from the same very few common sources5 As
we have seen, these texts operate like 'software' to the monuments'
'hardware', charting the route that the Horus-King (and all other future
seekers) must follow.
We recall a remark made by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend
in Hamlet's Mill to the effect that the great strength of myths as vehicles
for specific technical information is that they are capable of transmitting
that information independently of the knowledge of individual story-tellers.6
In other words as long as a myth continues to be told true, it will
also continue to transmit any higher message that may be concealed within
its structure - even if neither the teller nor the hearer understands
that message."
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