Stewart: Dear James, one of my spiritual mentors died recently. I did experience a strong wave of grief that day. But at same time I know that grief is just a measure of my attachment to him. My father said Crawford had visited him in a dream to tell him that “dying was like falling into a deep sleep and waking up in the Spirit world with no pain.”
Seeing as how this falls in line with the teachings of Vedanta (according to my understanding ), and that Father has no knowledge of scripture, I can only assume that at least some part of the identity survives the transition of death for a time.
James: Hi, Stewart. Thankfully nobody remembers who Crawford/Stewart/etc. was in the last life. In each life a new non-eternal (i.e. conceptual identity) is formed because no two people are born at the same time and place. So Crawford will not experience anything once he is dead that he wasn’t experiencing when he was alive, because what you call Crawford was only ever the Self experiencing itself, which is to say you were experiencing existence – the bliss of being then as now, whether you know it or not.
The trick is to “fall asleep” to the waking world when you are in it, insofar as the Spirit is always present as the only knower of one’s thoughts. Actually, it doesn’t fall in line with Vedanta, because this world is the only spirit world.
It’s the traditional dualistic view of an afterlife. No part of one’s non-eternal identity survives the death of the body; it is just the story of the exploits, real or imagined, of a particular body-mind-sense complex, Stewart. The eternal individual (what Christ called “the son of man”), i.e. the subtle body, propelled by the remaining karma goes into a blissful state (heaven), if the preponderance of the karma is in harmony with dharma, and causes rebirth. If the preponderance of the karma is not in harmony with dharma the subtle body experiences pain (hell) and reincarnates once the bad karma exhausts. Heaven and hell are like going on vacation. Your money runs out and you have to go back to work.
Yes, the teaching is the same always but it is always new if you are actually applying it because, as you say, your understanding changes with each assimilated fact after which the ignorance standing in your account is reduced but not cleared completely. So you remove the next doubt, until you have finished the pondering phase, at which time you can confidently say, “I am limitless, non-dual, ordinary, ever-present, ever-free existence/awareness and not the Stewart person.” So Stewart dies in the waking state, which is deathlike. It is not death. At that time you experience Stewart as a object, a thought, and you know it is not real. You are surprised that you could have thought you were that “person” because you now know that you are the Eternal Person, i.e. existence/consciousness/bliss. If the bliss isn’t steady and always present in the waking state, you keep doing your practice until the last obstacle to it is removed.
There is no life and no death, just the appearance of them. They are not facts, just apparent facts. There is no evidence Crawford was born or that he is dead. There is evidence that a particular ambulatory blob of matter appeared and disappeared. That is all.
It’s good you’re going back to the beginning because you aren’t clear about duality and non-duality. The key is contained in three words in the very first sentence of this email. Tell me what they are, please.
~ Love, Ramji
