Others ~ Selected Correspondence

Life after Death

Perhaps things are really experiences. Anyway, I’m happy to put that to one side for now. What about reincarnation. There are thousands of documented cases of people remembering events not from their current lives. How do you explain this. OK, they could all be lying. Ill admit the evidence is based on peoples reports (although we’re prepared to give Richard the benefit of the doubt with regards to actual freedom), but it seems a bit rash to just write them all off as being fabrications. If you want to read some accounts, just do a Google search or read one of the many books on the subject.

No thanks, I’ve spent too many years wasting my time reading about such dead-end subjects. Yes indeed, there are thousands of documented cases of people ‘remembering events’ not from their current lives. If you are still convinced by them, I can only encourage you to read more and more both believers and sceptics, until the whole thing finally stops making sense – that’s what worked for me. Read Ian Stevenson’s stuff, Susan Blackmore, the book about reincarnation by Paul Edwards is about the best skeptic book on record with an extensive treatment of the subject. If you do thorough research on the subject, you will soon not be very confident that the evidence is much good. Besides intellectual objections, I remember reading an account of Stevenson’s travels from a journalist – where it seemed ‘reincarnation’ cases were popping up everywhere! Pretty soon, it doesn’t take a genius to get that something very ‘ordinary’ is going on – and it ain’t reincarnation! BTW, another good study of reincarnation was Ian Wilson’s ‘Mind Out of Time?’ – where he documents cases of crypto-amnesia and makes a good case regarding the motives of children (and parents) who dramatize their reincarnation ‘memories.’ One must remember the social status and rewards that come with the package.

How do you explain a Mozart being so advanced at such an early age bearing in mind that music is a skill that takes time to develop, rather than a gift?

Personally, I have never speculated about why Mozart was ‘so advanced’ at such an early age – I don’t know enough about him to come up with an educated guess – except that I do know that he is often used by reincarnationists in support of their theories. It seems to me that explaining his early talent may be difficult enough to explain without adding a theory of reincarnation into the mix. Hardly a step in the right direction, if you ask me. I have learned by experience that such speculations normally evaporate under the light of day. It is truly astonishing the measures that human beings go to in order to confabulate experiences of the supernatural – fooling others, and even themselves out of wishing it to be true. No 37 to No 61

One of the most important aspects of ‘membership in certain self-protective groupings’ is the social insistence and instinctual craving to belong to a particular group, tribe or nation. The other day I watched a made-for-TV documentary about the siege of Stalingrad by the Germans in WW II, when the Germans almost conquered the city and then got knocked back and enclosed in a surprising counterattack. Both Russian and German survivors of the siege were interviewed and they gave first-hand accounts of tremendous hardship and destitution, of fighting in freezing conditions with meagre supplies, of human beings desperately fighting other human beings in the bombed out rubble of the city. What was new to me from the previous times when I had watched similar reports was that this time I was neither taking sides for ‘my countrymen’ against the enemy nor did I form moral judgements for the poor Russians fighting against the bad Nazis. I was also neither upset nor sad about the enormous suffering inflicted by senseless fighting. I simply listened to this report of the human condition in action and followed with interest the sense that some of the men, fellow human beings, had made of the experiences they went through.

I was neither dissociated from the violence as I had tried to be in my spiritual days nor did I associate with the suffering of the people stuck in the desolation and cruelty of war as I had done so many times before. I could watch the report and know as a fact that it is possible to stop being a member of a squabbling and fighting humanity – I can escape my programmed fate, for moments at first and soon forever.

I watched a TV program recently on the Robert Scott expedition to Antarctica. Robert Scott is the British explorer who raced to the South Pole, only to find that Raoule Amundsen and his men had gotten there and planted the Norwegian flag there first. In any event, I was fascinated by this story because it illustrated what people will do in service of an ideal, and in service to their country. These men, owing to a tragic mistake and miscalculation of the weather forecast, sacrificed their lives in the most needless fashion, enduring incredible suffering before they died. When they reached the part where the men knew finally that they were going to die and in their last letters to their loved ones, I was struck by how they spoke of an afterlife and their souls continuing on after their demise. I did, however, at this point in the program feel some tears jerking inside, so I think there is something there to look into. It was a story about a hero’s journey, in much the same way that people approach going to war, but it was also a story of ruin and waste, of dreams unfulfilled, of hopes shattered. In much the same way that you did, I ‘followed with interest’ this account of a heroic endeavour that went tragic.

It really is amazing what humans will do to achieve an imagined immortality ... all the loftiest dreams of humanity as well as the most crushing degradations seem contained in the desire for immortality. Gary to Vineeto

As this investigation proceeds there comes a stage when it becomes so obvious that everyone has got it wrong, and always has got it wrong, that one begins to lose interest in, and emotional contact with, where one has come from and starts to more and more wonder and delight at the perfect peacefulness and peerless purity of this paradisiacal planet we humans live on. The habitual feelings of malice and sorrow together with their panaceas, love and compassion, eventually loose their tenacious grip in the face of a fascinated awareness of being here. As one’s awareness of this awareness becomes increasingly ‘self’-less, there is less experience of ‘me’ being aware, and more and more a bare and pure sensuous discernment of the universe happening at this very moment.

The pristine purity and perfection of the physical universe becomes more and more evident as one becomes increasingly ‘self’-less. The senses become remarkably alert and exquisitely sensitive. Each happening, even the most mundane things, are experienced for the delight that they are, without a sorrowful, resentful, anxious, or malicious ‘me’ occupying ‘my’ attention. The sheer delight of simply being alive at this moment in time seems to become more and more a steady feature of one’s present functioning. Given that there has been no final, momentous elimination of the instinctual self as far as ‘self-immolation’ occurring, there is still plenty of ‘me’ around to mess up the experience of this perfection, whether through feelings of boredom, anxiety and angst, or resentment. These ‘self’-centred, affective experiences are increasingly experienced as something potentially instructive and fascinating to look into, as their continued rigorous investigation and scrutiny is what eventually eliminates ‘me’ in my entirety. This is much more than a hope or a belief that this is going to happen. It is a certainty and an assurance built upon the simple fact that the method works to eliminate the blind instincts that every human being seems to be clinging to.

In hindsight, this stage represents a point of no return on the path to freedom as the emotional ties that bind you to humanity – the feelings of malice and sorrow together with their antidotal feelings of love and compassion – are so weakened as to be ineffectual. I once experienced these ties as long tentacles stretching way into the distance behind me – tentacles that stopped me from being free. I also realized that if these tentacles were broken then ‘I’ would be no more. And not only would ‘I’ cease to exist – but even more shocking – nobody would miss ‘me’.

Nobody would grieve ‘my’ passing, for no one really can know ‘me’ because ‘I’ am non-physical and non-substantive. They may think and feel they know ‘me’, as ‘I’ think and feel ‘I’ know other ‘me’s’, but because ‘I’ have no substance in actuality, then it would be impossible for others to even notice ‘my’ demise. If these emotional ties or tentacles were to be broken, ‘my’ final demise would be a very private and solitary experience – followed by oblivion.

What became apparent from this experience was that if these tentacles no longer existed I, this flesh and blood body, would be irrevocably alone in the world. While a feeling of fear arose, there was also an acknowledgement of the fact that I have always been alone in the world in terms of being autonomous and free. Because of my numerous pure consciousness experiences combined with a substantial period of living virtually ‘self’-less, I knew that after ‘my’ demise what I am, this flesh and blood body, would continue on doing what I have always done ... get up in the morning, have breakfast, do whatever I do in the day, and go to bed at night.

Since this experience these tentacles have become even weaker, as is evidenced by an almost total disappearance of the normal emotional ties that bind ‘me’ to the other ‘me’s’ and the lack of any emotional memories that give substance to a ‘me’ having a past or a future.

But the experience did remind me of the fact that ‘I’ have to die, as in experience death, if these bonds are to be completely broken ... and that these bonds have to be completely broken if ‘I’ am to die.

I wonder sometimes if the affective, painful emotions that I have eluded to from time to time, for instance, bouts of ‘self’-pity and sorrow, or bouts of resentment, are the death throes of the instinctual ‘self’, ‘me’ raging in all ‘my’ glory, desiring to continue, craving to live, and that ‘I’, on some level, sense my demise and make a desperate grab for attention and succourance. Since ‘I’ am entirely illusory, all these emotions and feelings that arise from the instinctual part of the brain are similarly illusory (although they are experienced as real enough), and ‘I’ only think and feel in ‘my’ bosom that this death of ‘me’ is going to be a painful passage. The awareness that the emotional ties or tentacles that you referred to that bind me to humanity are being weakened and demolished has occasionally filled me with an existential dread. I have found myself wondering if this dread, as it seems to be a by-product of the method, is in some way a sure sign that one is utilizing the method to maximal effect? Perhaps, though, the only real thing that shows that the method is working is one’s own quotient of happiness and harmlessness – is one’s stock on the rise, so to speak? Is one increasingly happy and harmless in all one’s affairs?

Since ‘I’ crave immortality, ‘I’ can only regard ‘my’ death with the utmost horror, as I cling passionately to survival at all costs. Perhaps that is why death has almost universally been regarded as a tragedy (?)

I sometimes find my mind lingering on the thought of death with something like abhorrence or dread, so there must still be an instinctual self, a core ‘self’ dreading the experience and passionately clinging to life. As I have to die, as you say in ‘experience death’, does one go then through the entire range of affective experiences related to death? Is it in other words, although not an actual physical death, a death nevertheless of that which wishes to live forever? This is the ‘main event’ (death) before one’s time is up, isn’t it?

Just a couple of questions that occurred. Gary to Peter

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