Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Eso’s Chronicles 344 / 3
6th Book of a Series
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

HOW DEATH WORKS!

Death is the Mind moving about disembodied. It has no arms or legs, but is like the parachute of a dandelion being blown by the winds of another dimension.

One way to illustrate this is to imagine that you have dropped on your bed with your face in the pillow. You are tired and exhausted. You had been doing strenuous work or have drunk one too many bottles of beer.. As we say in common speech, you ‘conk out’.

Maybe an hour later, you wake up. You are still in the same position in the bed as when you fell in it. But something is wrong. Though you are awake, you feel extremely weak, so weak that you cannot manage to raise your head from the pillow, nor move your arm. You feel that you are under some kind of spell. Therefore, you simply lie there and hope that the spell will pass and you will eventually have the strength to to get out of bed.

You fall asleep again and have a dream. You dream that you are a child. You are in your old family bedroom. The room is dark; it is nighttime. Your bed is located on the northwestern corner of the western wall of the room; your sister sleeps in the bed that is against the southern wall of the room; your mother and young brother sleep in beds against the eastern wall. Your father has no bed, because the “good” of the Earth shot him many years ago for their ‘better’ reasons. Your desk with the computer is by the window on the northeast side. True, when you were a child, there were no computers. In other words, the dream has updated the scene.

You don’t know how long you have slept, when, suddenly, you wake with an answer to something you have not been able to find an answer to before. It really is no answer, but a thought: that if you write a book on “What Is Death?” people—who have never read anything that you have said or written before—will be interested to open the book and take a look at what you have to say. You awaken with a sense of relief for having superior knowledge.

Of course, you have no idea “what death is”, but since the question arose in a dream, you are pretty sure you will be able to write the answer. Perhaps sleep and death are the same. You sense that this is similar to the occasion when you dreamt that your self-portrait was drawn for you by an unknown hand as a labyrinth. After you awakened, you grabbed a note pad, and were able to draw the ‘self portrait’ line for line as the dream had presented it to you. It was good enough to frame.

Even though you can think, you cannot act on what your thoughts tell you: you are still unable to move from your position. You are frozen in place. It is as if you are paralyzed. You do what you can to concentrate your thoughts to twist your head and turn your body so that you are able to lie on your back. You have experienced this kind of paralysis before. Psychologists call it narcolepsy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcolepsy . You may call it narcolepsy in reverse: your mind has awakened, but body and mind have not been reconnected.

Similar situations sometimes visit many of us in the middle of a dream, when the dream brings us to a cross road, but then it does not give us any hint whether to turn right or left. While we try to figure out the direction on our own, we awaken with a sense of frustration. We decide to escape the frustration, but putting our head deeper into the pillow and going to sleep again.

The problem with the psychoanalytic answer is that psychoanalysts are consensual thinkers trying to make a living off what they have been taught at the university. As far as the university is concerned, the mind is subject entirely to the brain mass. They think of the Mind as a material clump, putty like material that acts as a digital machine.  Once the body dies and the brain rots, there no longer exists a Mind.

But students of the Mind, such as the Yogi or Tibetan monks, who have meditated and observed the consequences of the practice for many more centuries than psychoanalysts, tell differently. The Chinese government is working hard at eliminating such artisans of the Mind as remain. Yet to the remainder the Mind is like a cloud at dawn, sunset, or noon. An old folk belief tells how at noon, when the sun is at zenith, there opens a door—either a black or a transparent hole. If you are alert, you may then enter into another world, and see many of the dead working at figuring out subatomic physics that holds the physical world together. Maybe they provide the wind-like motion that moves the dandelion puff about. Vincent van Gogh knew what we are talking about, when he painted landscapes that were a mirage one can walk either through or into http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/upload/img/gogh-farms-auvers-L711-fm.jpg .

As the Irish poet Yeats after sailing to Byzandium described it: “[I am] fastened to a body, I know not what it is….”, yet I move about. And there is no man-made apparatus that can catch me in the act, though Grecian goldsmiths have and may yet again.

No comments:

Post a Comment