CHAPTER SIX

September 15th, 2024      Life calls you to the simple way. Listen.

QUOTES

In thinking, it is important to destroy one’s opinions. They are Existence-ego desires that are way beyond its job. A good way to challenge one’s thinking is to listen to those who have walked this path before us. Here are some of their conclusions.

 

“There is neither creation nor destruction, neither destiny nor free will, neither path nor achievement, this is the final truth”.                                                    Ramana Maharshi.

Ramana Maharshi is perhaps the 20th century’s most well-known eastern ‘saint’. I use the word pejoratively simply to indicate his absorption of Life over existence. Given that to be the case, this statement renders Life completely neutral.

 

It is typical of the isolated seeker, the hermit monk, one who eschews all existence relationships. Such, almost total separation from engaging in existence, dislocates the symbiotic process expressed within existence as Love and focuses it back on Life. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but it does not change or challenge Existence-compaction.

 

Here is a ‘saint’ better known to our western ears.

 

“The knowledge of God is the cause of things. For the knowledge of God is to all creatures what the knowledge of the artificer is to things made by his art”.                                          Thomas Aquinas

                                                                                This is how The Green Jade Book might put it.

Knowing that Life is the cause of all existence, is to know as the carpenter knows his craft.

That is to say that such knowing is embedded within and if turned to steers one’s actions throughout existence. Through intention we direct our attention to understanding the knowing already exiting beyond the ego.

 

 

“At the center of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world”.                                      Simone Weil.

Simone Weil straddles the gulf between religion and reason, and in so doing articulates the truth that attention to Existence can never relieve the dissatisfaction of existences temporariness. The desire for the absolute of joy is inherent in the symbiotic relationship between Life and existence.   The ‘longing’ is for the permanence of Life.

 

 

Each time this identity announces itself, something cries: Look out for the trap, you’re caught. Take off, get free, disengage yourself.                                                              Jacques Derrida.

Here, Derrida makes a classic observation concerning being trapped by the over controlling absolutism of the ego creating the prison of Existence.

I shall return in future chapters to the views and conclusions of others – those who’s thinking is contrary to the observations and teachings of The Near Life Experience.

ILLUSION

Saints, sinners, and searchers of all kinds have pondered the questions raised by The Near Life Experience. The challenge in answering these questions gets tangled in the problem of illusion.

 

When those on an operating table or who have sustained a major illness or accident leave their bodies and ‘ascend’ into light, they often encounter their culture’s spiritual icon. The fact that they all have the same experience is confused by such diverse ‘interpretations’ of that Light / Life.

We 'see' what we want              or expect to see.

 

I awoke one morning with the central Christian symbol of a cross scratched on my back [see home page]. Did that make me special in God’s eyes, or was there a simpler explanation?

I recently read of a plane passenger praying to Jesus for a bad storm to subside, and it did. At the plane’s window she subsequently took a picture of the receding clouds – and there was Jesus in the developed snap, or was he?

                          Though such accounts are true, they are not TRUE.                           They are all polluted by illusions.

We humans trigger illusions in support of what we want to be ultimately True.

Under the heading ‘Truth’ in chapter two I made this point:                                                                            One cannot search for Truth. Even to use the word Truth is pointlessly inaccurate, for what it is when present has no thought-form, therefore no linguistic signifier.

It turns out that the solidity we assume of existent phenomena is not at all solid. This is particularly so around the edges: Thought forms, ideas, and the outer reaches of our five sense perceptions.

How we perceive what we see, hear, feel, taste and smell, and the thought formations they evoke, are malleable, and thereby susceptible to predetermination by cultural imposition. Our bodies too are not as fixed as we are used to assuming. [See the example of the cross on my back].   

 

EVIL

Before we move on, a word about illusion and its part in our perception and judgment of evil. Under this heading in the Green Jade Book are these words:

Existence-compression comes down to just one fault: an inability to trust Life. There is nothing outside of Existence and your ‘self’ that causes evil.

One might say that we don’t want evil, or its character the Devil, to be true. But we make him true in the same way we make God, angels and Jesus-in-the-clouds true. They are all manifestations of our intention.

Such intentions could be described as semi-conscious; necessary unconscious compliance with religious views that require an entity to counter our Godly projections.

In the first chapter I made a statement that is fundamental to The Near Life Experience:

We make an Intention to prioritize Life over Existence.

The reason this is so important is because, not only are our projections based upon illusion, but we ourselves are primarily illusion. We are a tenuous existence within Life. Our consciousness is Life’s consciousness - by the process of symbiosis we are Life temporarily made flesh.

We can choose to live according to Life’s pulsation or grasp to existence as though we own it. It is the action of such ownership that produces self-compaction, which at its darkest fulfils our projection of evil.

TRANSITION

If we are to avoid near extinction, we must free ourselves from Existence-compaction on a societal level. That can only occur if we have the determination to make alterations to our own Existence pattern.

 

Being in transition means we have let go of the greed for some form of instant change; enlightenment, awakening, realization, non-dual perception (the list is endless – and mostly meaningless).

 

The term transition means to move gradually from one state to another. It requires our determination and attention – the two constituent parts of intention.

Intention is centered in the heart of ones being, it reveals the primary direction of our existence movement, whether that be outwards to Life or to turning the treadmill of Existence.

The graduality of transition alleviates the anxiety (or fear) of change which the ego holds on to.

It requires patience, something we in current society find challenging

 

In an attempt to change some people go on retreats and practice meditation, the core of which is to sit and do nothing but breathe. Those same folk, when they get home hardly ever ‘do nothing but breathe’. Why? Because the very act of being on retreat is ‘doing’ something, it is existence engagement, and thus feels satisfying to our ego.

 

 

 

Monastic life, entered upon to free oneself from the constant round of samsara - Existence, is actually filled with fascinating elements of ‘doing’ and ‘acquiring’- a whole new persona, making it very possible to have an Existence as a career monk or nun.

 

These are all genuine attempts at change, sincerely undertaken. Something I tried, as you can see from this photo of my own efforts.

 

 

Taken of a painting titled 'Transition'. 

The problem with these methods of trying to change is that they are calculated and particularized, consequently they fit the desires of existence ego, and that makes them vulnerable to Existence compaction: Just in a collection pattern of a different form. In other words, they hold the danger of looking for existence fulfillment, not Life.

To transition beyond existence, our intention has to be on Life. It is an ongoing permanent act of trusting in our conscious knowing, that gradually raises Life out of existence until there is only Life. The transitioning of Life over existence has to be entirely intentional moment by moment. 

 

EXISTENCE / existence

Placing our intention on Life does not mean we abandon the existence we are an integral part of. It may be said that the meaning of existence, [the answer to ‘why are we here’], is to be Life’s expression. That clearly means a joyous creative pattern of being.

 

Watching children on the beach building a sandcastle, old enough to know about the tide coming in and washing it away. Their actions find meaning, not out of the accumulation of a castle, but in the enjoyment, the sand, sea, the air, and the creativity used to build it.

Of itself the sand castle has no meaning, yet in the exercising of creativity embedded within us by Life we employ existence to express that Life.

The satisfaction within existence is never found in accumulation, it is in doing. Unfortunately, we have turned most of our doing to the service of accumulating, and short-changed joy for the arrogance of owning Existence.

Our existence is a gift. The opportunity to express joy, love, and light.

The human mind and body give us the greatest facility for exploring Life through our actions.

But we have turned our attention upon ourselves, building Existence as though it were permanent. In doing so we have robbed ourselves of the grand potential of bringing Life fully into existence and lifting existence possibilities way beyond the intrinsic heaviness of corporality.

We are stifling transcendent potential. (f)

“Once we let go of the notion that the human somehow ends at the skull and skin, that consciousness is the same thing as cognition, that mind is nothing more than brain, then everything changes”.                                                                                                                                                                                         Jacques Derrida

May you be well, may your days and nights be filled with Life.

Comments and questions - sucinno@hotmail.com   Subject: Nearlife.

 

FOOTNOTE (f)

We are stifling transcendent potential. (f)

The occasional strange things that happen for which we have no rational explanation, are the tip of the proverbial iceberg. They reveal the potential that every human could by intention develop over and above the dense corporality of our animal state. Our consciousness is our connection. 

When I am further along with the chapters, I will make reference to recent research and outline the evidence for those possibilities and why we should pursue them.