"Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to 'die before you die' — and find that there is no death." - Eckhart Tolle
Apart from dreamless sleep (...) there is one other involuntary portal. It opens up briefly at the time of physical death. Even if you have missed all the other opportunities for spiritual realization during your lifetime, one last portal will open up for you immediately after the body has died.
There are countless accounts by people who had a visual impression of this portal as radiant light and then returned from what is commonly known as a near-death experience. Many of them also spoke of a sense of blissful serenity and deep peace. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it is described as "the luminous splendor of the colorless light of Emptiness," which it says is "your own true self." This portal opens up only very briefly, and unless you have already encountered the dimension of the Unmanifested in your lifetime, you will likely miss it. Most people carry too much residual resistance, too much fear, too much attachment to sensory experience, too much identification with the manifested world. So they see the portal, turn away in fear, and then lose consciousness. Most of what happens after that is involuntary and automatic. Eventually, there will be another round of birth and death. Their presence wasn't strong enough yet for conscious immortality.
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle
The Hope of Understanding an Unknown Realm.
Sometimes, people who have ceased living, if only temporarily, see things others don't see. When they come back and share their experiences, we listen in hopes of understanding an unknown realm. Their accounts have the power to change our lives and make us think about the world differently. Imagine if what you're living here on this Earth is really being lived on a flat black and white painting on a wall and death is separation. So when we die our spirit separates from our physical body. You die and you're ripped off that flat black and white two-dimensional painting and you're brought out into a three-dimensional room of color all around you. You're experiencing things you've never experienced before. Near-death experiences (NDEs), those enigmatic phenomena teetering on the brink of life and death, defy facile explication. They're glimpses into the liminal, the threshold between corporeal existence and whatever lies beyond, shrouded in the nebulous realms of the mind's terrain.
To apprehend the essence of NDEs is to embark on a journey into the fissures of perception and cognition. In these moments, individuals often report a cascade of surreal sensations. Traversing darkened tunnels suffused with ethereal light, encountering departed loved ones or celestial entities, and undergoing panoramic life reviews that unravel the skein of existence. These encounters, while deeply subjective, bear the hallmarks of transcendence, inviting conjecture about the nature of reality and the contours of the afterlife. Yet, amidst many mystical encounters, distinctions emerge, notably between astral projection and out-of-body experiences (OOBEs). While both phenomena beckon the psyche beyond the confines of the corporeal vessel, they diverge in their conceptual underpinnings.
Astral Projection.
Astral projection, rooted in esoteric traditions and theosophical discourse, posits the separation of the astral body from its terrestrial moorings. Advocates of this belief assert that consciousness can traverse astral planes, unfettered by the constraints of time and space, engendering communion with ethereal dimensions and celestial realms. In this state, the voyager is purportedly endowed with agency, navigating the astral cosmos with deliberate intent. On the other hand, OOBEs, a staple of psychical research and parapsychological inquiry, entail the dissociation of consciousness from the body, often precipitated by trauma, illness, or altered states of consciousness. During such episodes, individuals report observing their physical form from an external vantage point, imbuing their surroundings with an eerie surrealism. Unlike astral projection, OOBEs are frequently characterized by a sense of involuntary detachment, evoking a profound disjunction between the self and its corporeal avatar. In parsing the nuances between these phenomena, one encounters a labyrinth of conjecture and ambiguity, where the boundaries between subjective experience and objective reality blur. To traverse the hinterlands of consciousness is to confront the ineffable, where certainties dissolve, and enigma reigns supreme.
Out of Body Experiences:
The conversation surrounding out-of-body experiences is a realm where the vastness of information intersects with the subjectivity of human perception. Within the corpus of knowledge, a statistic surfaces: one out of ten individuals purports to have traversed the nebulous threshold of the out-of-body realm, an occurrence shrouded in mystery and introspection. These experiences, ranging from the involuntary near-death encounter precipitated by trauma to the deliberate pursuit of astral projection, evoke an insight on the essence of existence and the quest for transcendence.
Echoes from antiquity resonate in the annals of religious texts, where figures like the apostle Paul illuminate the narrative with accounts suggestive of out-of-body encounters. Paul's enigmatic discourse in 2 Corinthians 12:1 4 evokes the ethereal, recounting a journey to the "third heaven," veiled in ambiguity as to its corporeal or incorporeal nature. Yet, amid this theological exposition, Paul's caveat lingers: these experiences, while sensational, offer no tangible gain, merely serving as ephemeral spectacles in the tapestry of faith. In the lexicon of Christian theology, the out-of-body experience assumes the guise of a transient phenomenon, akin to a dream, an enigmatic interlude devoid of substantive truth. The sanctity of divine revelation, enshrined in the Word of God, stands as the sole beacon of immutable truth amidst the tumultuous seas of human subjectivity.
Brushing with Death and Life After Life;
The Greeks knew of at least two ways of "brushing with death": near-death experiences and mystery initiations (Eleusinian, Dionysiac, Orphic, Isiac, and Mithraic mysteries, some cases of male initiations). Mystery initiations as a way to overcome fear of death could be patterned to some extent by near-death experiences. Given the popularity of mystery cults, multifaceted cave experiences of numerous initiates were perhaps one of the most profound noetic sensations known to common people of the Classical world. In ancient Greece, a common method of searching for divine wisdom was to descend into caves or underground chambers. Entering caves persistently appears as a major requirement for prophecy-giving, both in established cults and in the activities of individual seers. It is within the shadowed recesses of caves or the shroud of dim chambers that mystery initiations find their stage. The nuanced delineation between astral projection and the broader spectrum of out-of-body experiences mirrors the multifaceted nature of the spiritual journey itself. Astral projection, with its deliberate and conscious intent, embodies a quest for transcendence and communion with divine realms, a pursuit steeped in the mysteries of the cosmos.
So to the quote by Eckhart Tolle about "Death as a stripping away of all that is not you.” And that “The secret of life is to 'die before you die' — and find that there is no death." Calls on us to look at the Near Death Experiences and Out Of Body Experiences as profound transformative spiritual events that offer a deep insight into our existence. In theory and in hope it allows us to understand that liminal space where our connections to our loved ones exist eternally no matter whether they have died or not, and to trust that there is Life after Life, in some profound and ancient mysterious way.
- After Death (2023) documentary film written and directed by Stephen Gray and Chris Radtke
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