h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This body will die.
When that time comes I intend
To be somewhere else.

hi Chai,

That is very reminiscent of Woody Allen who once said - 'I'm not afraid of dying, I just don't want to be there when it happens.'

az

If Wittgenstein is to be credited, we need fear no unease:

"Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through." ~TLP 6.4311

He continues:

"If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present." -- which may be relevant to the time-travelling own-tail-chasers in Grimley Moer?

The challenge is actually to live in the moment. How many of us actually do? We're more often in the past - memories, regrets, nostalgia, or in the future - plans, what we would like to say, do, where we would like to be, which is often fantasy. Being in the moment - that's the challenge!

The real challenge is to "know" in the deepest sense who "you" are. Knowing this, there is only eternal being, eternal presence.
In answer to this classic question "who am I," I've posted a poem that occurred in a moment of clarity a couple of years ago.

The quest for knowledge of the self, or who am I is one that my partner and I meditate regularly about. I heard on a tape the other day, that when we die and are called to account for ourselves (assuming that's what will happen, and I don't necessarily), we won't be asked why we didn't become an Einstein or a Mother Teresa, we'll just be asked 'Why didn't you become you?'

To which the answer might be "Ah well, you know, that's just me."

Hi Chai,

Very poignant. However death is not an ending, any more than the close of a chapter indicates the end of the whole book. It is a gate into a new life and so the cycle continues .

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\.

Death *is* an event of life? Death *is* lived through?

"The temporal immortality of the human soul, its eternal survival after death, is not only in no way guaranteed, but this assumption in the first place will not do for us what we always tried to make it do. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive for ever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies *outside* space and time."

~Wittgenstein, TLP 6.4312

Good old Wittgenstein. At the risk of making you tear your hair out in frustration, oh wise and recumbent one, I really should read more LW, shouldn't I?

Outside space and time is precisely the point. That which "is" lies outside the realm of space-time duality, while manifesting as the diversity within space-time. We can only "live" and "know" within the parameters of manifest duality, and we can only "die" within these parameters. That which "is", that "being", is our only true identity, the rest is part of the ongoing parade. When "being" is truly experienced, there is a recognition in awareness that everything within the parameters of time and space are constructs within consciousness. In other words, time and space themselves are mechanisms by which "we" construct our reality. This applies to everything that arises within awareness, from the very first impulse of "I", on up through the full range of sensation, emotion, memory, feeling, thought and perception. So that at the core of this "I" there is paradoxically, impersonal, timeless, spaceless "being."

Attempts to describe this recognition are usually expressed in terms such as emptiness, vastness, fullness, unboundedness, infinite etc.

The personal "I" is a "bound" feature of the space-time duality, while the "unbounded" timelessness, the "eternal", is impersonal. Persona, after all, means "mask," and the personal "self" is but a mask of completely conditioned features through which the unbounded, impersonal manifests as consciousness.

The enigma of present life, if truly examined in depth, is as deeply mysterious as any supposed "afterlife" might be. The thing is to wake up now from the space-time dreaming and recognise that which actually "is", beyond life and death.

Further thoughts on this subject, thanks to Recumbentman and Wittgenstein.

The problem with so much of this type of discussion is the limitation of the meanings of words, and the contradictory ways that we use them. So people frequently use terms such as "I have a soul..." which is presumably thought to be destined for an afterlife of some kind.

But the sentence begs the question of who or what, exactly, this "I" is. If that which carries the impulse "I" is the most personal and intimate sense of self we can experience, what is the "soul," that this "I" has? And how does "I" possess it? Is not the "soul" the "I"?

It makes more sense to say "I am a soul." But then when awareness is brought to the very source of thought, when awareness examines awareness, when consciousness examines consciousness, a strange transformation happens. There is a kind of falling out of individual "self-ness," into the impersonal, but unbounded expanse of being, and it is from this level that the recognition dawns that while there is no soul, there is no death. Bodies come and go, but the continuum of awareness flows in and out of them, like water through sponges.

Refication. Calling things things. Pinker describes the mind as "the workings of the brain", you could call the soul the workings of the moral being, but 'workings' are hardly to be treated as things that can be 'had'.

'Who am I?' is the major theme of the Vedic teachings.

Indeed it is, Zarquon, and there is ( as I'm sure you know )an entire branch of Vedic philosophy dedicated entirely to investigating the question. The technical term for this is "atma vicchara," or "self enquiry," associated particularly with the Advaita Vedanta ( undivided Vedanta, undivided in the sense of maintaining that ultimately reality is perceived in terms of unity, not duality.)

If you can bear with me for a bit, this is a fundamental aspect of psychological philosophy, what we might call pragmatic philosophy, characteristic of both the Vedic tradition, and its major offshoot, Buddhism. ( Skim through any of this which is already known to you, but for the benefit of anyone who wants to know a bit more about this area, here's more...)

Tibetan Buddhism, particularly the Yellow-hat Gelugpa sect, devote huge amounts of time and study to abstract dialectic, but the other sects tend to tie in their philosophical approach with the practice of awareness-altering meditation, in pursuit of realisation. Similarly, advaita vedanta is associated with meditation and yoga techniques aimed at achieving an "awakening", a life-transforming realisation of truth, beyond mere abstract discussion.

The main distinction between the Buddhist and Vedic attitudes is on precisely the question of "atma," or self. Veda maintains the existence of a cosmic atma, or Atman, which is the all-embracing, impersonal self, or sense of "I AM-ness" underlying all manifest reality. This Atman is described in terms of "Sat Chit Ananda," or Being, Consciousness and Bliss. ( It's important to understand that bliss in this context is not a physical experience of ecstatic states, but the nature of consciousness itself in its very essence.)

The Upanishads ( subtexts to the Vedas ) describe the unity in terms such as fullness. eg:
Purnam adah, purnam idam,
purnat purnam udachyate
purnasya purnam adayah
purnam evaavashishyate.

This is fullness, that is fullness
from the ocean of fullness arise waves of fullness
yet that fullness is never lost.

NB "Purna", depending on the translation, is sometimes expressed as "perfection," or "wholeness."

By contrast, the Buddhists deny the existence of an Atman, and describe the atman-less absolute as emptiness "shunyata." Emptiness devoid even of the character of emptiness. "Emptiness is form, form is emptiness...etc." But in time they retreated a little from the most extreme expressions of emptiness, and allow for a "beingness," as an aspect of the emptiness, to explain apparent existence.

In describing the ultimate Self, the Upanishads ( eg Mandukya ) say:

"The pure Self alone
is the Lord of all,
the seer of all,
the source and goal of all.
It is not outer awareness
It is not inner awareness
Nor is it suspension of awareness.
It is not knowing
It is not unknowing
Nor is it knowingness itself.
It can neither be seen nor understood,
It cannot be given boundaries.
It is ineffable and beyond thought.
It is indefinable
It is known only through becoming it.
It is the end of all activity,
silent and unchanging,
the supreme good,
one without a second.
It is the real Self.
It, above all, should be known.
Whoever awakens to That becomes the Self."

Which is not so very different from the Buddhist view, except in how the nature of the transformation is characterised. The old problem ( as Wittgenstein might have said ) of refusing to pass over in silence that whereof we cannot speak. So much depends on the cultural context within which realisation occurs, from which the "theology" derives.

Nonetheless, the history of both Vedanta and Buddhism is littered with people who have experienced the "awakening," and who tend to speak in these paradoxical terms about it. There is a very active stream of Neo-Advaitins who have emerged in Europe and America in the wake of Shree Ramana Maharshi's influence. You may have heard of the likes of Gangaji, Tony Parsons ( not the novelist ) and others. One of the most fascinating is a French man, Stephen Jourdain ( author of Radical Awakening...well worth reading ) who had a spontaneous awakening, rather like Ramana, at the age of 16. He's now in his sixties, and is a total iconoclast, with no time at all for new age spirituality, gurus, ashrams, and all that.

While many neo-Advaitins say there is nothing you can do to become awakened, there are some, such as Stephen Jourdain, who reckon that you can, through self-enquiry, pursue the question of "who am I," to the threshold of awareness, and break through. It is particularly powerful if the mind is focussed, not so much on the thought "who" am I?, but on trying to locate the "where" of the sense of "I." That really takes "you" places. Where does the sense of "I" arise? What is it that knows this "I"? and so on.

The irony is that the awakening is usually described in terms of the non-existence of any personal "I".

But that's enough for now. Apologies if this is all too much, and too long. But it's hard to do justice to the subject in less space.

Hi Chai!

Yes, I *was* thinking of Advaita Vedanta. My friend Merlin is an adherent and we regularly discuss self enquiry. He has a guru he sees regularly and particularly admires Ramana Maharshi.

We have both recently been looking at Nichiren Daishonin Buddhism, which appears to be very close to Advaita.