Esoterics of Death and Life After Death

(By Sudhakar V Reddy)

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What is death and what happens after death?..........

Death is the state of non-manifestation of a soul.  What is soul?...Soul/Jeevaathma/Chidhaabhaasa/Chithchhaaya is a temporary and an illusory limitation/contraction the Non-Dual Awareness or Aathma or Brahman has freely assumed to express, experience, expand and demonstrate its magnificence in this world of seeming duality!  In other words...Brahman is the uncreated/unchanging/actionless element/entity.  Brahman=Reality=Awareness=I.  The same uncreated/unchanging/but-seemingly-active element that is seemingly enclosed in a body-mind complex is the soul/Jeevaathma.  Soul is an apparently-enclosed/reflected/vibratory Awareness that is in an apparent movement and wearing a colored and limiting goggles called mind.  The soul is also known as causal body or ignorance.  Death is a state in which a soul permanently ceases to imagine its present gross body to be itself.  In death, a soul experiences Peace/'Aananda'/Awareness directly but it does not know that it is Peace/'Aananda'/Awareness itself, like in deep sleep.  That is its ignorance which causes it to reappear, re-express again and again.  Deep sleep state and death state are both states of passive non-duality.  That is the reason deep sleep is called the cousin of death.

What is the difference between death and deep sleep state, then?  After deep sleep, a soul manifests in the same gross body whereas after the death of the gross body, it manifests in a new gross body.  The soul/causal body always "takes" (so to speak) the subtle body or mind along with it, whether in deep sleep or in death.  So the mind survives the death in the same way it survives the deep sleep.  The every-day experience of the three bodies: the causal body in deep sleep state, the subtle body or mind in waking state as well as the dream state and the gross body in waking state is undeniable.  We all go through these states, these experiences, nothing bizarre about it.  The causal body is the cause of the subtle and gross bodies (that is the reason it is called the causal body).  This apparent process of birth and death takes place eternally, as the energy/matter can neither be created nor destroyed!

Death does not exist in ultimate reality, but is merely a concoction, an invention, an imagined experience, an illusion, through which life becomes more valued by you.  Thus, "evil" is "live" spelled backward.

But here is the kicker!  Here is the truth!  You are not the soul!  You are not any one of the three bodies!  You are Awareness because Awareness is the only Presence that stays with you at all times!  Simple! 

So, in ultimate understanding, the concepts of Rebirth/Transmigration, Reincarnation and Everlasting-Hell/Heaven (...the journeys of the soul) are all false; because the soul itself is false, an illusion ('mithya', not-real, apparently/dependently real) and you are Awareness, 'Sathya,' which knows no birth and no death! (See...How is the creation of soul negated in ultimate understanding?...at the back end of this blog.)

Let us go little deeper.  Anything and everything in manifestation/nature is constantly changing.  So what is that unchanging, conscious entity which is going from birth to birth?  The only aware and unchanging element of life is Awareness/Consciousness which itself cannot be birthed.  There is "no one" home!  Then, what or who is born?...the tendencies/desires/memories!  Sanskrit word for it is 'vaasanas.'  The vaasanas/tendencies/desires/impressions/memories/samskaaras are the outcomes of actions/karma through likes and dislikes or 'raaga-dveshas.'  Desires and memories are what transmigrate, not any particular/individual person.  They are attracted by the individual who is receptive to them.  A person is just a notion or thought that associates itself with a certain bundle of desires/vaasanas.  And that’s why nobody knows who they were in their last life.  However, the inner experience is going to be similar as it was before after the desires/vaasanas get transmigrated to a "new" person.  In this karma/dharma field, everything is a continuous process of flow of energy.  Therefore, in higher understanding...Awareness/Self/Reality/Sathya is birthless and the not-Self (matter and mind, mithya) is also birthless because it is not-real.  And something that is not-real can never be born; it can only appear and disappear like in a dream, like in virtual reality.  When there is no first-birth of Self and not-Self, Sathya and mithya, there is no question of rebirth at all.  Birth and deaths should be called manifestation and non-manifestation.  Life is an impersonal play, an appearance in Awareness, made of Awareness and known by Awareness.  The elimination of rebirth is nothing but the elimination of the misconception that there is a possibility of rebirth!

Krishna (Bhagavad Geetha): "Which is non-existent (not-real) can never be (or never born but is temporarily appearing) and that which is existent (real) can never cease to be (or never born and is permanent)!"

No "one" will "take" another limited birth if he understands that he is Awareness.  The soul is Awareness in disguise of a person but until it understands that it is Awareness (but not the soul/ego/jeevaathma), it will be "reborn."  But not as the same ego/personality.  If you think that you’re the ego, you’re the ego and you get reborn.  We don’t have to worry about next lifetimes, it just means you’ll get caught up in the next desire that you have.  That’s rebirth.  What will be reborn is the desires/vaasanas and since those vaasanas are manifesting at a different time and place it will be a different person with a different body, different parentage and different circumstances and will be given a different name.  When a soul is apparently reborn, your memory is wiped out for a good reason.  You get cleared of this person but the new person has those vaasanas that were left over, that’s all.  So it’s a different person with a different name in a different time and place.  Soul (with an old mind but with a new gross body or biology) apparently identifies itself as a "new" person in new surroundings.  When one particular body-mind dies, that is the end of the story for that character.  When John's body is no more, John-ness is no more!  And this is part of the "continuity in evolution."  Subtle body/mind will carry on as a bundle of desires from one gross body to another until an understanding takes place at which time the three bodies will be negated and the soul "claims" its true nature as Awareness.  The soul realizes that it had never been any body and had never taken any birth and was never bound.  Then, at the time of physical death, all three bodies will "merge" in their respective pools of energies.

The concepts of transmigration and reincarnation are taught in early stages only to negate them at the end to realize that there is really not any individual soul that is born, dies and then gets re-born.  The doctrine of Karma and Reincarnation is true from an individual point of view but untrue from the Absolute point of view.  (Absolute means it is non-dependent ('swathanthra'), non-reducible ('shaashwatha'), non-contradictory ('nirviruddha') and, essentially, non-negatable ('aniraakarana').  These teachings are just ploys for gaining higher truth but, in themselves, are not Absolute Truth.  That's why, in view of the general belief in reincarnation, they say that upon realization you will not be subjected to birth and death.  They mean to say that Awareness will be free from the concept (or, rather, the misconception) of birth and death.  That's all.  Awareness has no birth and no death to begin with (Awareness is eternal).>>>If my tendency to goat-flesh in former birth makes me do same now, my present tendency will make me do it in next birth.  Thus the cause of previous birth becomes the effect now: the effect now is the cause of next birth tendency.  The position is thus inconsistent, as cause here is also effect.  The beginningless karma-body teaching (body causing karma and karma causing body) is, therefore, refuted because the cause-effect relationship can never be reversed.  An effect is a grossified cause; an effect can never illumine its cause, because the only way a plane of reality can be transgressed/transcended into another is by losing its identity to the higher plane (like sense-data to sensations, sensations to perceptions or thoughts/mind, thoughts/mind to knowledge (intellect/'buddhi'), knowledge to Awareness).  And also if the karma-body series is real and endless, there is no chance for liberation.  If there is an end to it with a beginning to liberation ('moksha'), that moksha will not be permanent.<<<

Even though these concepts of rebirth and reincarnation take you only to a half way stage, they are very legitimate and practical teachings that are inline with the cyclical nature of life.  The cause and effect, which is the basis of these teachings, can explain good and evil fortune (inequalities/disparities in life, why do bad things happen to good people, etc.) in human life and, thereby, maintain peace and moral values in the society.  The Law of Karma also explains why one is responsible for where he is in his life.  It stops the blame-game or throwing responsibility on the world or someone else.  Karma doctrine is irrefutable for those who believe in causality.  Karma and Reincarnation is also used as a fear tactic by spiritual teachers to make you buckle down and solve your ignorance problem right here, right now.  Many people think Law of Karma is fatalism.  On the contrary, the Law of Karma is the only remedy for the wrong philosophy of fatalism.  Fatalism is a wrong philosophy because it makes one to wash away his responsibility.

The advantages/benefits of The Law of Karma are: 1. It explains the life's disparities.  2. It helps in accepting the inexplicable suffering.  3. Strengthens faith in God/Reality.  4. Allows us to take personal responsibility.  5. It explains why a present good person suffers.  The doctrine of karma is a compromise to the belief that we are all separate for if you believe so, you need a method by which you come to exist.  It cannot be proven as many things cannot be proven.  It is logical, based on our own ideas of cause and effect.  It is to be understood and accepted subject to a better, more logical explanation coming along to replace it.  It is based on the idea of the doer.

Ultimately, however, there is no individual person/soul.  Gauthama Buddha: "Events happen, deeds are done, but there is no individual doer thereof!"

Another common concept, the concept of eternal heaven or eternal hell after a single birth is also false; because this is an impossible feat.  Something cannot have a beginning and be eternal; it is illogical!  That is a contradiction in terms (everything that has a beginning must have an end is an alternative way of describing the effect of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  In essence: The universe will reach some stage of maximum entropy and thermal equilibrium and must end at the state of maximum entropy, eventually).  If God is real and you are real, two realities cannot co-exist (one of them has to be less real in which case the less real is illusory; if both are real, then it is the same reality and there are no two entities; also reality can never see/perceive reality; duality is an illusion).  There is no corridor connecting mortality to immortality (finite can never become infinite).  Besides, as God is All-Knowing or the Ultimate-Subject, it cannot itself be seen or known in a subject-object relationship.  The journey from mortality to immortality is not a physical journey because the immortal is all-pervading and is the essence of everything and is, therefore, available here-and-now.  There is no distance gap or time gap; the distance is only of ignorance.  Since there is nothing other than God, it cannot "get" material to create this solid world.  God being Infinity cannot "become" finite either.  If God became the world in a milk-and-cheese-type creation (irreversible), we cannot know it as it is, because it no longer exists.  But God "created" the world in an ingenious and elegant dream-type creation so we can wake up to God (aren't we the children of God?).  World as an appearance/dream-like or belonging to a lower order reality is the only way we can explain the presence of a Non-Dual, Changeless, Action-less Reality which is, itself, not a cause of this world!

We know this because the whole creation can be destroyed without disturbing anything except ignorance/illusion/dream.  Twilight's rope-snake can be destroyed with the understanding that it is a superimposition of rope.  Therefore, it is a silly idea that you have to die to go to some heavenly place where God sits - to know and experience God there.  How can a located God be eternal (location/space is a product, has been "created," and, so, cannot be eternal because any created product has a manufactured date as well as an expiry date)?  When you "get" to heaven out of your good deeds, it will only be finite because the result of any finite deed is finite.  Heaven/Absolute cannot be gained with any effort (effort implies loss of something to gain something else).  But Absolute must include all.  (Another fallacy/irrationality of a single birth: Without rebirth—without the ability to return to a physical form—the soul would have to accomplish everything it seeks to accomplish within one lifetime, which is one trillion times shorter than the blink of an eye on the cosmic clock!)  When you go to heaven, you must be conscious to validate it.  Well, the same Consciousness is available to you right now.  Why wait to realize it?

Suppose the soul and God get separated at "Creation" and then the soul/ego joins God at some time.  This can happen again and again.  If the soul can come away from God once, then even after joining God, the soul can come away again (just like it did before).  If finite becomes infinite at a particular time, it can become finite at a later time.  In time everything can happen cyclically.  Thus the separation-union of the soul and God will go on happening and there will be no permanent liberation.  Further this would imply that God itself would be subject to time, mortality, etc.

Reality has no birth.  World/body/mind is an appearance and, hence, has no birth either.  If you say you have birth and death, it means you have neither.  Because you are in both.  As such, you can only be something distinct and separate from birth and death, and so necessarily beyond both.  Life, as such, knows no death.  Nobody has ever experienced his own death, nor can anybody think of his own death.  In order to say that you did not exist, you have to be there to observe your no-existence which is ridiculous.  Thus from life’s own standpoint, death is a misnomer.  You are Awareness which is unborn and, therefore, can never die.

If ice, water and steam are three states, then H2O is Awareness.  H2O always knows it as H2O, it does not know three distinct/different states.  Those are just names and forms that mind superimposes on H2O.  In a similar manner mind superimposes the three states of waking, dream and deep sleep ('samsaara', the wheel of karma) on the ever-present Awareness and thereby superimposes birth and death on the unborn.  The elimination of the misconception that there is a possibility of rebirth is liberation.  Freedom from rebirth is freedom from the misconception that I have rebirth.  Your journey needs to be from ignorance to knowledge; not from one world to another world, not from one body to another body.

The more you are dis-identified with yourself as the gross/subtle/causal bodies and identified with yourself as Pure Awareness, the easier it becomes to understand the riddle of death.  One part of your body (say a finger) cannot understand another part (say a second finger) because both are in the same level of relative reality and illusion begets illusion.  You do not know the reality of dream state until you wake up from the night-dream.  Similarly you do not know the reality of the waking state until you wake up from the waking-dream!  Moving from a lower plane of reality to a higher plane (or realizing the higher plane) is the solution.  There are hundreds of after-death theories in the religious world which are all based on duality.  Remember that one metaphysical theory is as good as another and they are all speculative.  Stay with the fundamentals.  Don't invest your time in the dualistic worlds, bodies, karma-and-reincarnation, rebirth, body travels, hell, heaven, powers/'siddhis' etc.  Go for the gold.  Go for Non-Duality!  Your journey must not be for travel in time and space, but in the negation of time and space.  Your journey must be from ignorance to knowledge!

Take your stand in and as the Non-Dual Awareness (or Consciousness; Awareness and Consciousness are used synonymously) because you are that Non-Dual Awareness!  Awareness is never born, so it never dies.  All there is, is the Eternal Awareness (because everything is reduced to Awareness and Awareness is not further reducible)! 

But until then...let us ponder over some concepts of Life After Death.  The most common are:  (i) One birth with soul either ending in eternal heaven or eternal hell, (ii) Reincarnation of soul with individual karma, (iii) Rebirth of soul through evolution, and (iv) Play of Consciousness with no individual souls - 'Leela'.  The first three concepts are based on dualistic approach while the last one is based on an Embodied-Enlightenment approach.  These concepts are listed in order of a lower reality/understanding to a higher reality/understanding.  The focus here has been on concept (iii).  Karma and Leela, (ii) and (iv), are discussed briefly at the back end.  Concept (i) is immature.

Dualistic concepts are acceptable until your mind becomes mature/pure by karma yoga (selfless service) and distractionless/focused by raja yoga (meditation).  The dualistic concepts have to be, eventually, dropped to embrace the Non-Dualistic concept.  Since a child cannot understand the implications of eating a candy, don't we tell her not to go into the pantry alone to get a candy because there is a ghost in the room?

Here is the story of the soul from the dualistic perspective of rebirth through evolution!....

We (Consciousness) are three-aspect beings.  We (apparently) have a gross body, a subtle body and a causal body/ignorance.  (matter=gross body; mind=energy=subtle+causal body).  Each body is made of increasingly finer grades of energy, increasingly of higher control and increasingly of higher expanse.  Each body vibrates at different speed and they interact and overlap with each other through the seven energy centers in our spine called chakras.  Gross body (consisting of one solid layer of matter) is dependent on food; subtle body (consisting of three opaque layers of energy) is dependent on energy (will or thought) and causal body (consisting of one transparent layer of the subtlest energy) is dependent on ignorance or bliss.  The physiological systems, the emotions, the intellect and the self image (ego) are part of the subtle body.

<<<Body is gross matter.  Mind is subtle matter or energy.  Mind/energy is in every cell of your body, concentrated in the brain.  Soul/Intelligence/Individual-Consciousness is everywhere in your body including the empty space (your body is more than 99% empty space).  It is the soul that holds you, your body and mind, together.  Even though the Intelligence is everywhere in the manifestation (there is only "One Soul"), individual soul seems separate like the air in a dining room versus the air in a living room.  Air is just one.  Soul is like an aura around you.  The soul is that which holds you together - just as the Soul of Reality is that which contains the cosmos and holds it together.  Energy concentrated is matter.  Energy dissipated/thin is mind.  Energy-Pure is the Soul, "One Soul" that is apparently individuated.  Experience of love is made at the soul level.  The soul is part of you that is connected to everything else.  The body is the part of you that is separate.  The mind is the bridge between the two.  If your soul could be described by a feeling, it would be freedom and love.  Love expressed Freely is what Pure-Consciousness is!  Pure-Consciousness needs matter and mind/energy to express itself.  Matter and mind/energy is lifeless without Consciousness because they (or nothing) cannot become matter/energy all by themselves.  Nothing "matters" in and of itself.  As Jesus Christ said, "Without the Father (Consciousness), I am nothing!"

The three aspects of Self - body, mind and soul - are in no wise unequal to each other.  Each has a function, but no function is greater than another, nor does any function actually preceed another.  All are interrelated in an exactly equal way.  Conceive - create - experience.  What you conceive you create, what you create you experience, what you experience you conceive.  At any point in this process, soul never overrides the body or the mind.  That is why it is said, if you can cause body to experience something (take abundance, for example), you will soon have the feeling of it in your soul, which will conceive of itself in a new way (namely, abundant), thus presenting your mind with a new thought about that.  From the new thought springs more experience, and the body begins living a new reality as a permanent state of being.  Your body, mind and soul are one, working in unison for the soul to evolve, for the soul to know "Who It Really Is" in its own experience!>>>

The seeds/impressions or the unspent energies of one's past experience as a doer ('vaasanas') are part of the subtle body (which holds ignorance and knowledge).  Since subtle and gross bodies go dormant in the causal body, causal body contains the potential for subtle and gross bodies and becomes the cause/creator of those bodies.  The gross body can be seen and the subtle body can be experienced ("I am sad").  The causal body is formless (hence everywhere) and can’t be seen or experienced directly; it can only be inferred ("I had sound sleep").  Causal body is infinite as ignorance has no objective qualities.  We did not create our gross and subtle bodies.  Self is Non-Dual (Infinite) and Unchanging and, thus, cannot be the cause of any finite body.  It is, therefore, inferred that the causal body is the cause for the gross and the subtle bodies.  Causal body supplies power/life/praana to the subtle and gross bodies.  And who creates the causal body?  It is called Maya, the Unmanifest, the Nature, the Universal Causal Body, the Universal Mind, the Universal Ignorance which is causeless and beginningless and cannot be explained.  Ignorance/Maya cannot be explained (illusion begets illusion) but can be eliminated through understanding!

Maya is the infinite, undifferentiated mass of all causal bodies in the cosmos.  Maya is Consciousness-in-movement which is a modulation of Consciousness-at-rest.  Consciousness-at-rest (non-being state of potential energy, com-pressed state) is apparently forced to become Consciousness-in-movement (being state, ex-pressed state) to express and expand itself (if it didn't, it would be a dead energy).  Since the causal body is formless, it stays as it ever is; it is only the subtle body that moves into the womb by the power/presence of the causal body.  Gross body (physical body) deals with perceptions and sensations, subtle body (astral body/mental body) deals with thoughts, feelings, images and ideas and causal body (seed body, spiritual body, soul body) deals with impressions and desires in unmanifest form (doer's unspent energies, knowledge).  These are the three channels of experience: perceiving, knowing and feeling.

We experience these three bodies (gross, subtle and causal) through our three states of waking, dream and deep sleep.  Don't dream and waking states both emerge from the deep sleep state?  Remember, waking can never emerge from dream; you always have to go through the deep sleep state even if for a split second.  Because the so-called gap in between these two separate thoughts of a dream ego and a waking ego is deep sleep.  (An example: Causal body/ignorance causes us to mistake a rope as a snake.  It creates fear/emotion in the subtle body which then makes the gross body to run.)  Causal body is the subtlest layer of the mind (fourth layer of the mind); it is mind in a potential form.

Let us be clear about the word 'soul.'  Different traditions use this word differently.  It is rather vague; it has no clear cut definition.  Awareness seemingly enclosed/confined which develops Self-Awareness and is identified by the causal body is called the soul.  Awareness itself that is seemingly in manifestation which forms a reflected image in a body-mind-complex ('chidhaabhasa', ego, 'ahamkaara') is sometimes called the soul.  Soul is Awareness under the spell of 'Maya.'  The subtle body is also called the soul in some traditions.  So it depends.  The soul is also a waker or a dreamer or a sleeper depending upon what body/layer/covering it identifies with.  The soul resides in third eye chakra during waking state, throat chakra during dreaming and heart chakra during deep sleep.  The center of Consciousness/Being is at the top of the head and the center of energy/existence/nature is at the navel.  Soul is the Non-Dual Consciousness that seemingly experiences the dual world to appreciate the Non-Duality by accumulating and exhausting fears and desires (vaasanas).  If vaasanas - which are just inert Consciousness vibrating in a certain way - are the clay, then the pot is the soul.  Soul is Ignorance or Illusion, because Non-Dual can never "become" dual.

Consciousness+Ignorance (Individual Bundle of Vaasanas)=Soul.
Consciousness+Maya (Collective Vaasanas of All)=Creator/Eeshwara.

Soul is a temporary and illusory limitation/contraction the Non-Dual Awareness has freely assumed to express, experience, expand and demonstrate its magnificence in this world of seeming duality!

Dream means ignorance (non-apprehension) plus error (mis-apprehension, self-misconception, duality).  Even a waker is a dreamer as long as he has ignorance plus error (cause and effect).  Sleep means ignorance of Self (cause).  As long as these two are present, the wheel of karma ('samsaara') will never end.  When one of them, the error, is absent, we get a temporary respite from saṃsaara in deep sleep - 'laya' (or death - 'maha laya' or dissolution - 'pralaya' or great dissolution - 'maha pralaya' of the world).  But saṃsaara continues afterwards because ignorance is hiding in a potential form.  (Despite realizing that the night-dream is an illusion, don't we think that it is real as soon as we get back into it?  This error will come back again and again because the ignorance has not been removed.)  When both ignorance and error are eliminated, one "attains" Self, which is nothing but claiming one’s own glory as the Non-Dual Infinite Being.  Self claims Self!

Death process consists of separation of the subtle body from the gross body.  Then it is the separation of the subtle body from the causal body.  Remember that the causal body is bodiless/formless (like in deep sleep).  Causal body is the subtle body in its potential/infinite form.  Finally it is the causal body (soul, ignorance) that "merges" into God/Self.  Of course then you emerge (or re-emerge) to express and experience what you have known being the Self.  Your grandest desire, always, would be to experience your knowing as a discrete physical reality.  Is this not our experience on a day-to-day basis?  Well, the same thing happens on a bigger scale after our gross body dies.  And another bigger cycle repeats when the world dies.  Remember: As below, so above!

The subtle body is the instrument of perception and conception. The points on the physical body where sense perception seems to occur are not the actual sense organs.  Perception is only possible when the mind is behind the sense organs, as we know.  It is the subtle body (powered by the soul/causal body) that transmigrates, that takes rebirth.  Subtle body is the seeming experiencer.  Objective experience is not possible for the causal body without the help of subtle and gross bodies.  Soul conceives/knows/desires, mind facilitates experience and the body facilitates feeling.  Consciousness, thus, reflects in the subtle body for the purpose of experiencing.  This consciousness is borrowed like the moon borrowing its light from the sun.

Being, knowing and experiencing is a circular and an endless process (called evolution).  We cannot 'experience' something that is 'unknown' to us and also we cannot 'know' of something that is 'not', and so, first we must 'be' it.  Thus the Process: Being-Knowing-Experiencing/Being-Knowing-Experiencing/Being-Knowing-Experiencing...continuously through all eternity.  God is eternally BEING what God IS....KNOWING what It is BEING....and EXPERIENCING what It is KNOWING!

>>> Table of Contents >>>

PART I - Death and Life After Death

What is death and what happens after death?
What are the stages in death process (the story of the soul)?
Why do enlightened people come back to the Endless Wheel of Life again and again                          instead of staying in God/Oneness/Brahman forever?
What is suicide and is it an appropriate action under miserable conditions?
Why is the last thought at the time of death important?
Why do we fear death and what is the remedy?
If the mind travels with the soul between lifetimes, why can't we remember our previous                     data?
Is it beneficial for a man to remember his past lives/memories?
Why is it better to cremate a dead body?
How many kinds of birth are there in the physical universe?
How come many religions say that Rebirth is a false doctrine?
What is heaven and hell?
What is the Theory of Karma and Reincarnation?
How is the creation of soul negated in ultimate understanding?

PART II - Why Are We Here?

Why Are We Here in the Physical Universe?



And what happens after death?...Death continues as life in a different way!

Understand that death is not an end, but a beginning; not a horror, but a joy.  It is not a closing down, but an opening up.  The reason you do not stop creating when you die is that you don’t ever die.  You cannot.  For you are life itself.  And life cannot not be life.  That is what life does.  It cannot not do this, or it would not be.  Therefore you cannot die.  Life cannot play dead!  In the process of Self expression, life quite literally ‘expresses’ itself.  That is, it pushes itself out FROM itself, giving birth to itself as an aspect OF itself, that it might Know Itself in Its Own Experience.

Krishna, Bhagavad Geetha, 9.8: "Curving back upon my own nature, I create again and again!"

                             

Energy of which your body and mind are composed will never ceases to exist.  A good analogy that might help to understand the conservation of energy/matter is the ‘gold and ornaments’ teaching.  You have a gold ring.  How much of the ring is a ring and, how much is gold?  There is no ring apart from the gold.  If you melt the gold the ring disappears but the gold does not disappear.  So the ring is totally dependent on the gold but the gold is completely free of the ring.  The gold is so free that it can ‘become’ a necklace, ring, a tooth or anything, without sacrificing anything.  Body and mind can and do change shape/form throughout eternity.  What goes with you is what serves the soul: the impressions of the past experience and the remaining unspent energies.

Soul (upon reunification with God) selects a womb in complete freedom to take another birth on its return journey.  It may reconstruct itself in the present expression and dimension, returning you to this life to live over again in a new way (NDE), or it may reconstruct itself in another expression and dimension, to live a 'different' life as a different person, becoming what you call 're-birthed'.  However, throughout all of this the soul's true identity (as Consciousness) has not been, and never will be, changed.  Only the essential energy of the body and the mind has been reassembled, in a new version of life expression.

You regain your consciousness of the limited identity that you held in your last lifetime, true, but you do not move back into that identity.  You realize, upon death, that the previous life was a dream play and you have played your part.  You experience your self as much larger than that, much more unlimited.

The purpose of the soul taking different births in different lives is to provide the soul with endless differing expressions through which it can experience cyclical reunification with God (but not to get either punished or rewarded as an entity).

What are the stages in death process (the story of the soul)?..........

Death is the biggest mystery of life.  Unlocking that mystery unlocks everything.  Then we can know how to be Home with God without dying.  So here is the story!...  By the way, this story is inline with our experience.  As below, so above.  Grasping of this Principle of Correspondence gives one of the means of solving many a dark paradox and hidden secrets of nature.  This principle is of universal application and manifestation on the various planes - planes of physical, astral and spiritual universes - it is an universal law.

We discard gross body with every perception, discard subtle body with every thought and from the causal body we manifest the subtle and gross bodies again and again (nano level).  We do this on a bigger timescale every day with waking/dream/deep sleep cycle (micro level).  We repeat this on a birth/death cycle of an incarnation (going through physical, astral and causal worlds - macro level).  We also do this on a manifestation/dissolution cycle of the universe (cosmic level).  It is important to remember that our identification through all these seeming life cycles is Consciousness.  All there is, is Consciousness!

God lives in the Spiritual Realm where everything is God and everything exists in an Absolute way.  In the Absolute world there is no experience as we know, only Knowing.  God's (only) Intention (in-tension) is to Know and Express Itself in its Own Experience.  In order to Experience, God needs Not-God.  Remember, in the absence of that which is not, that which IS, is not.  But, something not being one with God (or Everything) is impossible; something not being one with Knowledge/Knowing is impossible.

What is not impossible, however, is the illusion (or Maya) of not being One with God; or the illusion of ignorance.  So...God split Itself into millions of individuations (or 'souls') and created the Relative Realms of illusion (Physical and Astral Worlds) so that It could (as and through souls) Experience and Demonstrate Itself in Its grandeur where something (seemingly) other than God exists.  Splitting up was the only way God could create a reference point within itself to begin the process.

The (seeming) process of soul evolution cannot fulfill itself in the Realm of the Spiritual.  In the Realm of the Spiritual you can notice everything that you have and are - and indeed, you do.  You notice everything.  Spiritual World exists in an Absolute way.  In the world of the Absolute, of time-no time, all things are everything.  There is no male and female, there is no before and after, there is no fast and slow, here and there, up and down, left and right—and no right and wrong.  Because everything that ever was, is now, and ever will be is, in a manner of speaking, right there in front of you.  It is like looking at the back-end programming on that CD chess game and seeing all the moves.

Yet seeing all the moves is not the same as making all the moves.  In order to make the moves you have to play the game.  That is the reason for the Physical and Astral Worlds.  Remember: When you play the game, you have to forget Who You Really Are so that you could experience Who You Really Are!  Don't we all do that in our dreams?

Individuated Aspects of God or souls being less than the whole, they lack the Complete Awareness of God.  God created the process of illusory world, birth and death for souls to go through the eternal journey from the Spiritual Realm to the Physical and Astral Realms and then from the Physical and Astral Realms back to the Spiritual Realm until the souls realize the magnificence of God and that there is, ultimately, only One Soul.  This is evolution.  Manifestation is God's way to 'involve' Itself in matter/mind and then eventually 'evolve' back out of matter/mind.

God, as these individuations (souls), could then Know, Experience and Express Its Infinite Aspects through these three Realms for eternity using the tools of body (gross body) and mind (subtle body).  The soul conceives/knows/desires, the mind facilitates experience and the body facilitates feeling.  Eternity, because anything short of eternity is called limit and limit will not do as God is Limitless. The following are the stages of this eternal journey of the soul.  And there are six (6) such stages!

1. In stage one, at the moment of your death, you will instantly experience that life has gone on.  Stage one will be the same for everyone.  The whole essential energy of you will shrink before death occurs.  Before one embarks on a new journey, the essential energy which is otherwise dispersed all over the body will return to a point.  Soul gathers itself with the subtle body and becomes a seed in order to enter the seed present in some other body later on.  All journeys begin with the seed/soul and end with the seed.  Remember, that which is the beginning is also the end.  The journey's cycle ends where it started.  We begin from a seed, we end up again as a seed.  The present life experiences, in the form of impressions (vaasanas), forms a new/resultant layer around the subtle body.  These vaasanas are also stored as impressions/records in the universal causal body which are known as 'akaashic records.'  Causal plane is also known as Maya or Chittha.  You can access these akaashic (cloud) records at anytime through awareness of your soul.

Subtle body is similar to the gross body but is energy at a higher state of vibration than the gross body.  It acts as a covering to the most subtle causal body inside it.  Subtle body is connected to the gross body through the seven chakras (energy centers).  The chakra center around which one's life has revolved is the center from where the soul will depart.  Techniques were discovered in the past that by looking at a dead body one could say through which chakra, through which door consciousness left the body.  The soul will use the same door for entering another body which it used for exiting the dying body.  The soul will enter the new cell in a mother's womb through the same door from which it came out at the previous death -- that's the only door it knows.

The existence of subtle body is evident as it is responsible for the physical activity during sleep, swoon and death.  The subtle body is the instrument of perception and conception.  The points on the physical body where sense perception seem to occur are not the actual sense organs.  Perception is only possible when the mind is behind the sense organs.

At this stage, upon soul plus subtle body's departure from the gross body, there could be a brief period of disorientation as you come to realize that you are not with your body, but, instead, are now separate from it.  That's the reason you can see your dead body from a distance.  Soon you will come to understand that while you have ‘died,’ you have not ended your life.  It is in this moment that you will realize and experience fully, perhaps for the first time, that you are not your gross body; that a body is something you can have, but not something you are.

Souls released from the body quickly remember to monitor and control their thoughts very carefully, for whatever they think of, that is what they create and experience.  It is the same for souls still residing with a gross body, except the results are usually not as immediate.  And it is the 'time' lapse between thought and creation—which can be days, weeks, months, or even years - which creates the illusion that things are happening to you, not because of you.  This is an illusion, causing you to forget that you are at cause in the matter.  This forgetting is 'built into the system.'  It is part of the process.  For you cannot create Who You Are until you forget Who You Are.  So the illusion causing forgetfulness is an effect created on purpose.

The phenomenon of 'time' is really a function of perspective.  Why does time exist while we are in the gross body?  You have caused it to exist by moving into, by assuming, your present perspective.  You use this perspective as a tool with which you can explore and examine your experiences much more fully, by separating them into individual pieces, rather than a single occurrence.  Life is a single occurrence, an event in the cosmos that is happening right now.  All of it is happening.  Everywhere.  There is no 'time' but now.  There is no 'place' but here.  Here and now is All There Is.

Yet you chose to experience the magnificence of here and now in its every detail, and to experience your Divine Self as the here and now Creator of that reality.  There are only two ways—two fields of experience—in which you could do that.  Time and space.  Space-time, as we know it, does not exist beyond Physical Realm.  When mind looks at the world through its own limitations of thought and perception, it sees eternity as time and then imagines causality, duration, choice, etc.  and it sees infinity as space and then superimposes three dimensions on to the Reality.

Subtle body in Astral Realm transcends the illusion of space, but not the illusion of time/thought.  So the subtle world experiences are filtered through thought only whereas the gross world experiences are filtered through thought ('sookshaakaasha') and perception ('sthoolaakaasha').

Consider the Parable of the Rock. Once there was a Rock, filled with countless atoms, protons, neutrons, and subatomic particles of matter. These particles were racing around continually, in a pattern, each particle going from 'here' to 'there,' and taking 'time' to do so, yet going so fast that the Rock itself seemed to move not at all. It just was. There it lay, drinking in the sun, soaking up the rain, and moving not at all. “What is this, inside of me, that is moving?” the Rock asked. “It is You,” said a Voice from afar. “Me?” replied the Rock. “Why, that is impossible. I am not moving at all. Anyone can see that.” “Yes, from a distance,” the Voice agreed. “From way over here you do look as if you are solid, still, not moving.  But when I come closer—when I look very closely at what is actually happening—I see that everything that comprises What You Are is moving.  It is moving at incredible speed through time and space in a particular pattern which creates You as the thing called ‘Rock.’  And so, you are like magic!  You are moving and not moving at the same time.”

“But,” asked the Rock, “which, then, is the illusion?  The oneness, the stillness, of the Rock, or the separateness and the movement of its parts?”  To which the Voice replied, “Which, then, is the illusion?  The oneness, the stillness, of God?  Or the separateness and movement of its parts?”

Life is a series of minute, incredibly rapid movements.  These movements do not affect at all

the immobility and the beingness of Everything That Is.  Yet, just as with the atoms of the

Rock, it is the movement which is creating the stillness, right before your eyes.  From this distance, there is no separateness.  There cannot be, for All That Is is All There Is, and there is nothing else.  God is the Unmoved-Mover.  More precisely, God is the Unmoving-Moving.  From the limited perspective with which you view All That Is, you see yourself as separate and apart, not one unmovable being, but many, many beings, constantly in motion.

There is activity from the point of view of a dreamed ego, but the dreamer is sleeping restfully untouched by any activity.  From the standpoint of the dreamer, there is no movement because the mind is everywhere in the dream!

As you look at this Rock, you do not see this process of incredible movements within the Rock.  Even if you are conceptually aware of it, to you it is all happening 'Now.'  The Rock isn’t 'doing' anything; it is a Rock, right Here—right Now.  Rock is simply 'being' a Rock.  Yet if you were consciousness of one of the sub-molecular particles inside that Rock, you would experience yourself moving at insane speed, first 'here,' then 'there.'  And if some voice outside the Rock said to you, “It is all happening at once,” would call it a liar or a charlatan.  Still, from the perspective of a distance from the Rock, the idea that any part of the Rock is separate from any other part, and, further, is moving around at insane speed, would appear to be the lie.  From that distance could be seen what could not be seen up close—that all is One, and that all the movement hasn’t moved anything!

It is the movement of the atoms of the rock which is creating the stillness, beingness.  The movement is what makes the rock what it is.  Change and Change-less aspects are one and the same.  God is everywhere at once!

From this Parable it is obvious that both observations are accurate.  Both realities are 'real' in their own way.  And when you 'die,' you don’t die at all, but simply shift into consciousness of the macrocosm—where there is no time or space, now and then, before and after (as we think).

In other words, after death your perspective expands and a feeling of incredible freedom and lightness overtakes the soul.  Your subtle body is light and there is no gravity.  The speed with which we can move in the subtle world is very fast.  If the person had children, and should think of those children, immediately the soul (in its subtle body) is in the presence of those children, wherever they are.  You transcend the illusion of space in the Astral/Subtle world, but not the time/thought.

We experience our subtle body in our dreams every night.  Our experience in stage one will be similar to our dream state.  Thus the soul learns that not only can it be wherever it wants with the speed of its thought—it can be in two places at once.  Or three places.  Or five.  It will be a shocking surprise at first, and then a very pleasant one, as you begin to remember that you are at cause in the creation of your experience, not at the effect of it.

Upon this realization, you will move into stage two of your death.  And this is where individual paths diverge.

2. Your second stage will then be the experience of whatever you believe happens after death.  Belief creates your experience in stage two.  If you believe in Reincarnation, for instance, you may experience moments from previous lives which you have no previous conscious memory.  If you believe that you will be enfolded in the embracing arms of an unconditionally loving God, that will be your experience.  If you believe in a Day of Judgment or a Time of Reckoning followed by paradise or damnation for all eternity, you will.

From the standpoint of physical life, astral life lasts longer.  Average life in the Astral Realm is more than 500 years.  The main reason for the stay of the soul is to shed its attachments.  The strength of its attachments will determine how long it takes to shed them.  Subtle/Astral bodies are made up of lifetrons (light particles) similar to our night-dream bodies.  Illusion of space drops away and things happen just like in our night-dream ('sookshmaakaasha').  Night-dream experience does not happen in a physical space; happens in time (mind) only.

Even though the astral world is free from unwilling death or disease or old age, many of the astral beings feel slightly nervous at the thought of dropping their astral form for the subtler causal one.  Physical desires are rooted in egotism and sense pleasures.  The compulsion or temptation of sensory experience is more powerful than the desire-force connected with astral attachments or causal perceptions.  A soul with strong earth-bound desires/tendencies will seek to go back to physicality as soon as possible.  Experience in a physical environment is much more intense.  So it all depends.  During the astral journey souls meet other souls vibrating at a similar level of evolution.  You may meet some souls that you encountered in the physical world if they are on your frequency.

Astral beings have all the outer sensory organs but they employ the intuitive sense to experience sensations through any part of the body.  In most cases the astral body is an exact counterpart of the last physical form.  The face and figure of an astral person resembles those of his youth in his previous early sojourn.  The ethereal astral body may occasionally be cut or bruised but is healed at once by mere willing.

You will be watching yourself in this self-created ‘hell’ or 'heaven' as an observer but will soon know that it is not real.  You will simply observe yourself having the experience, but without emotional connection to it.  It is like lucid dreaming.  It is like watching a play, watching a movie.  From the highest perspective, all levels of life are like a play.  We just don't realize it in our lives and we think that it is real!  That is life's conceit.  In actuality, every plane seems real in its own right while everything else is cancelled.

The level of awareness in the Afterlife precludes the possibility of anyone willfully choosing what is not real.  And the soul would know and understand that the concept and the idea and the experience of ‘suffering’ or 'enjoyment' is not real in the Astral World.  The soul will come to see that such astral experiences are not meaningful to create.  In a sense, the soul ‘knows too much’ to get anything more out of such experiences.  It would be like a magician performing his own tricks over and over again--for an audience of one: himself!

So, there is no such thing as suffering in Afterlife.  And when you have learned what you feel you need to learn (that is, reminded yourself of what you had forgotten), you will ‘release’ yourself and go on to the third stage of death.

In the second stage of death, the soul comes to understand that the mind, with all of its thoughts, is not real.  That is, it is not who the soul really is.  This experience releases you from any thoughts and beliefs you may still have that identify you with the mind and its contents.  Once you drop this identity, you drop your subtle body.  Subtle body (consisting of three mind layers) disintegrates just like the gross body (consisting of one gross layer).  Hell and heaven are not any physical locations.  They are states of mind.  They are experiences.  You are always in 'now' and 'here.'  Irrespective of the experience of heaven or hell in stage two, you will draw whatever remembrances there are to draw and then move on to stage three as you will realize that there is nothing more to do.

The released/disintegrated mind of yours will not, then, rest until it takes another womb.  And this is a very invisible phenomenon, like radio waves.  They are traveling around you; you don't hear them.  Once you have the right instrument to receive them, immediately they become available.  This is how mind is attracted to a person or a womb.  It is the nature of the mind to grasp forms.  We know that certain physical tendencies can be transferred through heredity in the same family line.  In a similar manner, mental tendencies can also be transferred, sometimes in the same family line and sometimes not (mental tendencies are much more fluid, have more freedom).

So if there are any remnants from one life to another, it is somebody else's mind that you have inherited.  If the memories are transferred as one lump (which is very rare) and then one soul inherits it, that is how one remembers someone else's previous life (in what we label as Reincarnation).  Remember, when one person is dead, that is the end of his/her story.  That body can never come back to life.  And the identity of the released identified-consciousness is Consciousness which is universal.

Your experience now (after dropping the subtle body) is created not by what you believe, but by what you desire.  This is known as the soul body.  Soul body is made of feelings/desires/'vaasanaas.'  This is the beginning of your experience called ‘heaven!’

You are no longer identified with your subtle body.  However, your identification with your soul body (fourth layer of mind) is there.  Soul body is also known as the seed body or the causal body.  Causal body is the cause of subtle and gross bodies.  Causal body is infinite as ignorance has no objective qualities.  However it cannot be equated to Self because ignorance is an illusion and it can end.  It is made of the most subtlest matter or vibration.  Causal body is the Reflected/Borrowed Consciousness, not the Pure Consciousness (as the Infinite, Non-Dual, Pure Consciousness can never "become" finite).  

So you leave the subtle body in this particular dimension of Always/Everywhere.  What goes with you is what benefits the soul - the impressions, unspent energies or knowledge (samskaaras/vaasanas) it gained in the previous leg of life.  They form a new/resultant layer around your consciousness.  The summation/resultant of all these layers (through various births) is known as the subconscious/unconscious mind.  The adhesive force by which all three bodies are held together is desire.  The power of unfulfilled desires is the root of all one's slavery! No desire, no body!

Soul's perspective has now enlarged by leaps and bounds.  Soul will have a faint sense of ego at this stage.

3. In stage three you will merge with the Essence and begin to experience the Ultimate Reality at the Core of Your Being.  Words cannot be found to adequately define or accurately describe the knowing/feeling - partly because the feeling is so huge.  It might be characterized as a single, enormous, conglomerate feeling that encompasses a thousand individual feelings.  You will re-establish your identity with your true nature.

                                    

The third stage of the death process releases you from your soul (causal body), and any thoughts you may still have that identify you with your soul and its individuality.  This ‘melting’ completes the change in your identity.  You no longer identify your self in any way or at any level with the separate aspect of being that you called ‘you’ in your physical life.  Here, in the Total Immersion of Self, you come to a place where Knowing and Experiencing (Loving) are one, and where what you Know and Experience is that you are not your body, you are not your mind, and you are not even your soul.  You are something much greater.  You are the sum-total of the energies that produce all three.  You are a Singularity (more precisely, Non-Duality).

Every triune reality becomes singular.  What some have described as the Holy Trinity becomes One.  Everything integrates.  Because you are now creating with all the tools of creation (thought/buddhi, word/manas and deed/body) and at every level of consciousness (subconscious, conscious and superconscious) at once, your creations are instantaneous.  Masters create from this level in the physical world as well.  Their instant results are called ‘miracles.’  (Note: Thought is the most important tool of all as it is the only tool that can create on all three levels.  The other two tools are word and deed.)

In the second stage of death you still identify with your mind/subtle body, and so your experience is dictated by what is IN your mind. Your beliefs create your experience.  Once you drop this identity, your experience is created not by what you believe, but by what you desire (causal body).  However, in the Moment of Mergence you identify with the All - which means that you identify with nothing in particular.  Nothing at all.

In Mergence, all of your individual identities are shed, ending the separation OF you FROM you, at last.  Only God IS.

You will establish the Fullness of your True Identity.

You may remain merged with the Essence as long as you wish, but you will not wish to remain forever, for you would lose the ability to know the ecstasy of the experience.  So you will seek duality again to start to appreciate the Non-Duality!  It is always your highest desire to experience and express what you know.

The tremendous energy shift that you will experience during Total Immersion will propel you back out of the Essence, renewed and re-created as the identity you remember.  As soon as you think that you are something, or that you are NOT that, then you begin to imagine yourself as limited again.  You are back as the individual soul (causal body) of your previous identity but refreshed; enhanced with new beliefs.  You will understand that your previous incarnation was nothing but a dream.  It was like a play, nothing serious.  Why would a dream life affect the real you?  If the dream-you gets cut in a dream, the real-you is not concerned.  Life is an Impersonal Play.  Life is a 'cosmic wheel,' not a 'kaarmic wheel.'  Individual karma results when you think and judge an action or a result.  The Theory of Reincarnation and  Individual Karma is a strategy of the mind to throw the responsibility on the past.

After you’ve passed through the Moment of Mergence, and as you now experience in fullness of core of Your Being, you see all that is in the ‘Life Review’ (in a sort of 'art gallery with God'), all the experience of your life, and you can look at them objectively, as if you were flipping through a picture book, or watching a movie or studying a great work of art--which each experience is.  You study each moment until you feel that you understand it.  As you explore these paintings deeply, you experience everything that is happening in the painting.  Not just what is happening with you, but what is happening with everyone else in the painting.  These images represent each of the moments of your life, and now, by examining them, you have for the first time a complete picture of all that is going on in every moment.  This is your 'meeting with God.'  And soon you are going to decide how you wish to recreate your self anew.

Now you will be asked an extraordinary question.  "Do you want to stay or do you want to go back?"  This is called the 'Holy Inquiry.'  You will, of course, have a complete choice; complete freedom.  If the thought/feeling/reply is ‘stay,’ the soul continues on its journey to the Spiritual Realm.  If the soul asks to ‘go back,’ the soul is ‘sent back’ to the Physical Realm instantly…arriving a nanosecond before it ‘died.'  This is how we can explain Near Death Experiences (NDE).

How you experience what you came to know depends on how you leave the Center.  If you release your issues (such as fear of abandonment, guilt, etc.) and leave them at the Core, then you will feel ‘centered’ because you have not taken your ‘core issues’ with you.  If you do not release them, if you just do not want to let them go, you will take whatever core issues you have not fully released to the ‘other side,’ where you will confront them again and have a chance to deal with.

If you have ended your own life consciously (like in suicide) with the intent to escape these core issues, you will feel that you are 'not complete.'  You will not escape them, but will choose to reverse course and return to the Physical Realm (in a new life), moving through the same experiences all over again, from the very beginning.

The process of what we call ‘death’ is not complete until the soul ‘passes over’ to ‘the other side!’

4. When your ‘meeting with God’ is over and you decide to move on to the Spiritual Realm, you regain your consciousness of the limited identity that you held in your last lifetime, true, but you do not move back into that identity.  Your personality from the previous lifetime is gone forever.  Rather, you experience yourself as much larger than that, much more unlimited.

The 'other side' (Afterlife) is not a time or a place where souls exist as automatons, having no feelings or emotions.  Quite the contrary, 'the other side' is a place where feelings run high, creating a contextual field within which souls remember and come to Know once again Who They Really Are.  In the absence of fixed dimensions, experience is measured in terms of intensity.  Emotions are heightened, dreams become more vivid and the presence of angels and other etheric entities is felt directly.  It feels incredibly secure because there is unity with everything.  This is the Spiritual Realm or the Realm of Knowing.  This is stage four.  Desires create the experience in stage four even though the experience is a single occurrence.  In Spiritual Realm, you know God conceptually but cannot know it experientially (or knowing+loving simultaneously) because this Realm is Absolute (no space and no time).

We can understand the reason for the journey through the Spiritual Realm better with an analogy...Let us say that you are a stage actor in a theater (Physical World).  When you had stepped offstage after playing a role in which you had very limited abilities or skills, took off your costumes, changed your clothes, and stepped out of theater and into the world, you will feel as a fully capable and powerful being.  Now on the outside of the theater there's a marquee display with flashing travel lights and photos of yours in many of the key scenes from the show.

You see yourself in these pictures, in which you are grimacing or smiling or crying or shouting with terrible anger, but of course, you have no internal or emotional reaction to any of this.  You know it is not you - that you are standing there looking at these photos - but when you were inside, on the stage, the suffering and the pain and the joy that you displayed not only felt very real to the audience...it even felt real to you.  That's how good an actor you are!  

Still, looking at these photos now, you see how you might have played some of the scenes even better - or changed some scenes altogether.  And so you determine to do that at the next performance.  Then you are on your way.  First stop: the library (Spiritual World).  You want to know more about this character that you are playing!  After your knowing is complete, you are back in the theater the next day playing the same role but in a different way!

5. Once at the outer limit of ‘the other side’ in stage four--that is, once you have taken what you have come to Know as far as you can go in the Realm of Knowing--you turn around and head back to the Core of Your Being with all that you Know.

In Spiritual Realm, the soul begins to have awareness of itself as a Divine Being.  This becomes clear very fast, because in the Spiritual Realm everything the soul desires, it produces immediately.  There is no ‘time lapse’ between conceptualizing something and Knowing it as the Self.  Illusions of space and time, both drop away in causal plane (like in our deep sleep state).  This happens because in the Spiritual Realm the soul creates at all three Levels of Creation (subconscious, conscious and superconscious) simultaneously.  In the physical world it rarely does.

There is one undifferentiated mass of experience.  The experience is a single occurrence.  If there is no second occurrence, there is no time.  If there is no time, there is no space.  You are in Now-Here, just like a baby except with one difference.  The baby is happy but not aware that he is Knowing God, whereas a soul is joyful and aware that it is Knowing God (but still has a thin veil of ignorance that prevents it in knowing that it itself is God).  A sage is Knowing and Feeling at the same time that he is God and there is nothing other than God!

Causal desires are fulfilled by feelings only.  The nearly-free beings who are encased only in the causal body see the whole universe as realizations of the dream-ideas of God; they can materialize anything and everything in sheer thought.  Causal beings therefore consider the enjoyment of physical sensations or astral delights as gross and suffocating to the soul's fine sensibilities.  Advanced souls who find themselves covered only by the delicate veil of the causal body/sheath can bring universe into manifestation even as the Creator.  Because all creation is made of the cosmic dream-texture, the soul thinly clothed in the causal has vast realizations of power.  Many beings remain for thousands of years in the causal cosmos.  However, a soul with earth-bound desires/tendencies will seek to go back to physicality as soon as possible to experience this Knowing discreetly.  It all depends.

In Spiritual Realm (causal world), you transcend the illusions of space and time ('chitthaakaasha').  The only illusion is your individuality which is very thin.  This is called ignorance, or erroneous identification with causal body.  This ignorance causes you to take subtle and gross bodies again and again.  However, this state is very blissful (like in your deep sleep).  This is called Singular Experience, subject experiencing subject, in now-here!

You are taking your Knowledge back to the Core of Your Being ('chidhaakaasha'), to now engage in the most sacred process; the re-creation of your self anew, in your next grandest vision, at the Core Level (stage five).  In your moment of Free Choice, you decide, given all that you know, what you next wish to experience of Who You Are, through the physical expression of it.  The soul will seek to experience what it Knows of itself in it’s new idea about itself.

You are given a moment of the Biggest Free Choice you will ever make...You may go on with your life retaining the identity with which you left your last experience of physical life, or you may create a new identity (keep in mind that retrogression is not possible in evolution with your new identity because once you are conscious of your ignorance, you can never fall back into that ignorance).

The soul will seek duality again to start to appreciate the Non-Duality.  This eternal cycle itself forms the Greatest Duality called Life!  The relative worlds of opposites become the opposite of the world of God!  How marvelous!!

Having once more moved through the experience of Total Immersion--of being ‘one with God’--you are prepared to be born again.  This is called evolution.  Manifestation is God's way to 'involve' itself in matter-mind or experience and then eventually 'evolve' back out of it.

Why can't we stay with God or the Essence for ever?...Yes, you can stay! Of course, God's condition is desire-less/desire-free.  But - if you Knew and Experienced IT and NOTHING ELSE, you would ultimately lose yourself in the Mergence.  You would no longer know you were having the Mergence, because there would be no other Knowing or Experiencing with which to compare it.  You would not even know who you are.  You would lose your ability to differentiate, to individuate your Self.

If there is a part of you that Knows you are Fully Aware, that means there must be another part of you that is observing you and measuring what you Know.  Yet what part of you is that, if you are already complete and full?  This must be a part of you of which you are not yet aware.  Were one to truly be Fully Aware, one would not be aware that one is Fully Aware, because who is the One who is "Aware" - and of what is that One Aware?  In deep sleep in which you are Fully Aware, you can never split yourself into two – one part knowing the other part!

This is in fact a Divine Dilemma and God solved it with the creation of that which was not God (or thought it was not).  God gave - and gives again, in every instant - a part of itself to the Lesser Experience of not Knowing itself, so that the Rest of itself can Know itself as Who and What it Really Is!

This is why divinity never ends - It is eternal and limitless and it expands the moment Its Consciousness of itself is complete.  This is God's nature!

Therefore, it is impossible for you to be Fully Aware and, therefore, impossible for you to end Experience!  Truth is approachable but can never be approached!  Truth is achievable but can never be achieved.  Truth is not a mile stone.  That is why you move on to stage six.  The worst afterlife we can imagine is hell.  The second worst may be heaven!

6. In stage six, you (as soul/causal body) re-enter the physical world ('sthoolaakaasha') to take on a new gross body with a new subtle body.  You have a new idea and agenda for this leg of life.  You are going to play your role in a newer way.  You will obviously look for a womb and surroundings that match your vibration where your unspent energies/impressions can express themselves.  Since the soul body is infinite, it needs the finite subtle body to enter into a new (baby's) gross body.  Objective experience is not possible with causal body.  Perception and conception are the functions of the subtle body; gross body performs actions.  And the soul supplies Praana/Consciousness.  The soul needs the subtle body to gather the sense data and create the experience; it needs the gross body to feel the experience of Love/God.  Re-entry into physical life--an extremely ‘heavy', dense existence compared to what you have just embraced--produces a loss of the full identity you have established.  This is by design.  Were you to know the fullness of your identity, you could not experience it in any of it’s parts--and that is precisely what you have come to the physical world to do.

Thus the Totality of You is (apparently) split again into three aspects at birth: body (gross body), mind (subtle body) and soul (causal body).  Remember, we are three-aspect beings.  Apparently, we have a body, we have a mind and we have a soul (knowledge-ignorance).  This is our daily experience through the three states of waking, dream and deep sleep.  The soul conceives/knows/desires, the mind facilitates/creates experience, the body facilitates/experiences feeling.  And with this apparent splitting, we are forced to forget Who We Really Are so that we can Experience Who We Really Are!

Your conscious mind is also wiped clean as part of God's biggest gift: Freedom.  Baby's mind is a proof of this.  Life wants you to have the freedom to make today's choices as you wish, unburdened by the decisions of your past.  Recalling the memories of one month can drive you crazy, let alone those of past lives.  However, your new mind can still access prior data (impressions of subconscious mind) from previous lifetimes when the mind determines it is beneficial, and not a hindrance, to do so (as in a case of an emergency, etc.).

The experience of birth and death are identical.  Both are simply energy attenuations, acting not unlike power transformers, facilitating transition from one world to the next.  The words birth and death could well be eliminated from our language and may be substituted by the word 'creation' in both cases.  Birth and death are like two sides of the same coin.  You create with death by what you bring into death from the Physical Realm and you create with birth by what you bring into birth from the Spiritual Realm.  You can never be 'nothing' before you were born.  Energy is neither created nor destroyed.

It is interesting to note that we experience this death process on a daily basis on a micro level with our three states of mind: waking, dreaming and deep sleep.  We identify ourselves with gross body in waking, subtle body in dream and causal body (no body) in deep sleep.  Life is designed to experience and enjoy only one reality at a time.  That is the reason why we forget the waking state while dreaming and think that dream is an illusion upon waking.  Of course we do not remember anything of deep sleep; we only enjoy the peace and bliss of our being, after the fact!  If we knew the realities of other planes all at once - that is the state an enlightened master is in - then the game is over.

However, we still have desires that form our identity.  Desires are dormant.  They are like seeds, unmanifested.  That is why deep sleep (causal state on a macro level) is considered the seed state or causal state from which our dream and waking states emerge.  This state of deep sleep (from the point of waking state) is also called ignorance.  This ignorance rises as subtle and gross bodies again and again!

The same process of death/birth also happens on a nano level every time our perception or thought ends!  Remember that the body and the mind are minutely different after a thought or perception rises again because of the continuous change that is taking place.  (Therefore, the ignorant man who identifies himself with body and mind is dying every moment, along with every perception or thought.  And the sage, who identifies himself with the Changeless Consciousness, alone really lives and knows no death.  In other words, annihilate/understand the ego while alive.  Die, in order to live!)

Remember that all the things that happen to a soul after death happen at the selfsame instant.  All these stages after death are experienced simultaneously and sequentially--with each new experience ‘erasing’ the old.  And so it is as if the old never happened.  You ‘are’ what you ‘are’ Right Now, and it is very much as if you never were anything else.  We can call this the Singular Experience, subject knowing/experiencing subject!  Because mind can only access experience thought by thought, because it is not possible to have more than one thought at a time.  Awareness has no such limitation (It is dimensionless), so all seven billion thoughts occur at the same time which is always 'now.'  Time is not a continuum.  It is an element of relativity that exists vertically, not horizontally.

Think of time as a spindle, representing the Eternal Moment of Now.  Imagine picture leafs of paper on the spindle, one atop the other.  These are the elements of time.  Each element separate and distinct, yet each existing simultaneously with the other.  All the paper on the spindle at once!  As much as there will ever be—as much as there ever was; All of It!  There is no Beginning to this, and there is no End.  It—the All of Everything—just IS.  It is like a book vs. reading the book.  While all the story of hundred years life is right there in your hands, you (as mind) are only reading one segment/chapter at a time.

The experience after death would be difficult to explain in human terms.  We may say that it is "sequentaneous!"  There is only one moment, the Golden Moment of Now.  Everything that has happened, is happening now, and ever will happen--is happening Right Now.  This is true of all of our lifetimes, not just the part of our experience that we call This Particular Lifetime, or the Afterlife.  The difference is, in the Afterlife we know it.  We experience it.

A simple illustration.  Let us say you walked into a huge room, may be a fancy library and you notice some things 'first.'  May be there are few nude statues in the corner.  Naturally, they catch your eye.  You move toward them to check them out.  You may then see few more things equally dramatic.  Your attention goes there at once.  Now you begin to look around, and you start to see other things, smaller things, less dramatic things.  Finally, you move toward a bookcase in the middle of the room.  Your eyes light upon a particular title on the binding of a book in the center of the middle shelf directly in front of you.  This is what you came into this room for.  The statues caught your eye, and you moved toward them, but this is what you came here for.

Describing this scene to someone else later, you might hear yourself saying, "At last, there it was!  Just what I was looking for!"  Of course, there is no "at last" about it.  You could just easily have said, "At first, there it was!"  The covered book was there all along, waiting for you to see it.  It did not show up "later."  Indeed, it did not "show up" at all.  It did not arrive at a certain "time."  It was there all along.  You did not see it, because you were not looking at it.  You did not move toward it.  Yet everything in that room was there.  It all existed simultaneously.  You saw what was there, "discovered" it, and therefore experienced it, sequentially!  Thus, the moment was truly "sequentaneous!"

Life offers countless events.  But the experiences are created within and are very limited.  Because emotions are the sponsors of our experiences and are also limited.  This is by design.  You are not supposed to encounter new (interior) experiences.  You are supposed to encounter the same experiences over and over again.  All experiences are interior.  It is events that are exterior.  But events have nothing to do with your experience.  The proof of this is the fact that two people can have distinctly different experiences of the exact same event.

After a few years of life, there are no new emotions for you to experience.  All will be the ones which you have encountered before.  Your mind remembers every one of them.  Your mind has been designed to hold in memory literally millions of experiences in order for you to notice that you are encountering conditions and events in your exterior world that are the same or nearly the same in their emotional content as you have encountered before.  The noticing of this is, in turn, intended to offer you repeated chances - millions of chances - to respond differently to conditions and events (both past and present) should you choose to, thereby recreating yourself anew in the next grandest version of Who You Are!

So when this leg of ‘work’ is done (it is intended to be a totally joyful experience, as is your experience in the Afterlife), you ‘die again,’ once more entering the Core of Your Being in order to re-establish the fullness of your identity.  You re-emerge and move through the Spiritual Realm to express who and what you are in fullness through Knowing.  You return to the Core of Your Being prior to what you call ‘birth’ to re-create your identity anew, in the next grandest version of it.  You give your self birth and live your life in the Physical Realm, that you might Know your Self in your own Experience.

Upon experiencing what all soul wants to experience in the Physical Realm, it may decide to get born into the Astral Realm and work from there.  It is important to understand that an individual soul is not moving from body to body to get either punished or rewarded (like in the concept of Reincarnation) for his/her karma.  No "one" is there.  Whose karma is it?  All there is, is Consciousness.  So the karma is universal, not individual.  The soul apparently takes rebirths to experience and demonstrate Who It Really Is.  Life is an Impersonal Functioning and soul's identity is always Consciousness.

Remember, throughout this journey soul remains physical/material.  Everything in life is physical - including your soul.  Maya is material and finite (duality); God/Awareness is spiritual and infinite (Non-Duality).  God is a Mystery for the mind; because when you think you are fully aware, it will expand!  And you will have to re-create yourself!  The essence of duality is Non-Duality.  However, they are not separate.  Non-Duality modulated itself to (seemingly) become duality to experience and demonstrate its magnificence.  Rebirth becomes an important and powerful opportunity, a tool, a mechanism for the soul on its journey towards evolution.  The soul desires to play the game again in a different way.  The moment of Absolute Awareness - that is, of Knowing, Experiencing and Feeling Completely Who You Really Are - is arrived at in steps or stages as part of this evolution.

Thus, the journey continues.  Eternally.  This journey is not an endless Search for God, it is for an endless Knowing-Experience of God!  Creation and Re-Creation of God!  It is meant to be a joyful ride!

Why do enlightened people come back to the Endless Wheel of Life again and again instead of staying in God/Oneness/Brahman forever?..........

Awareness is never born and will never die.  Awareness is desire-less.  Only desires are apparently/seemingly born.  You, as the dreamer, are only seemingly born as the dream-character inside of an illusory time and space.  Is it not?  The first thing to understand, therefore, is...Awareness, the Real You, is only seemingly born!

Once you, the Awareness, realize Oneness through experience (which is life's purpose), it is impossible to stay there.  If you are fully self-realized, your grandest desire would be to experience that as a discrete physical reality!  That desire is the seeming cause for Life/Experience to begin with.  (Open space will not be available for any function.  Space becomes useful only when it becomes enclosed or seemingly limited.  The same is true with Oneness/Awareness.)  Life is not a process of discovery, but a process of creation.  The wonder of this creative process is that it is never ending.  An ending is a limitation and God's purpose is without such a boundary.  Should there come a moment in which you experience yourself in your fullest glory, you will in that instant imagine an ever greater glory to fulfill.  The more you are, the more you can become, and the more you can become, the more you can yet be.  The identity of an enlightened being is that of Awareness.  And Awareness is never born but only seemingly born for ever and ever.  That is the nature of Awareness...to express itself in innumerable ways!  You (Awareness) are seemingly born but not as the same person, because there is no "fixed person" that is going from body to body!

Krishna (Bhagavad Geetha, 9:8): "Curving back upon my own nature, I create again and again!"

If you Knew and Experienced IT and Nothing Else, you would ultimately lose yourself
in the mergence.  You would no longer know you were having the mergence, because
there would be no other Knowing or Experiencing with which to compare it.  You would not
even know who you are.  You would lose your ability to differentiate, to individuate your
Self.  In order for you to Know the bliss of the Oneness through the Experience and the Glory of its Individuation, you must emerge from the mergence.  If not...well, that defeats the whole purpose of manifestation/experience.  Awareness would be in its rudimentary form for eternity, which does not make any sense.  An enlightened being can go nowhere; he is always in now-here where God is!

That Which Is cannot be, except in the space of That Which Is Not.  Even the total ecstasy cannot be experienced as "total ecstasy" unless something less than total ecstasy exists.  So, something less than the total ecstasy of total Oneness had to be - and continually has to be - created.  It is like this:  Since most people like sex, what if God told you that beginning tomorrow you can have sex with every single person for whom you felt attraction and love?  Of course God will make sure that the other person feels the same attraction and love for you.  You will say wow, okay!  But you can do this with one condition only: You have to stop between each sex act.  You can't just go from one to the other without interruption.  So, in order to experience ecstasy of this kind of physical union, you have to also experience not being united sexually with someone, if only for a while.

Ecstasy would not be ecstasy were there not a time when there was no ecstasy.  This is as true with spiritual ecstasy as it is with physical.  There is nothing depressing about the never-ending cycle of life, there is only joy.  Simply joy and more joy.  This is in fact a Divine Dilemma.  This is the same dilemma God has always had - and God solved with the Creation of that which was not God (or thought it was not).  God gave - and gives again, in every instant - a part of itself to the Lesser Experience of not knowing itself, so that the Rest of itself can know itself as Who and What It Really Is!

Because a sage realizes his unity with all mankind, he considers their welfare as his own.  Therefore, when that present incarnation comes to a close, a sage will again express his determination to be reborn a second time.  His happiness consists in being identified with the whole universe.  So long as there is misery in this world he, the sage, tries to remove the misery of others.  This process will go on ad infinitum, with the result that the sage is born again and die again just like all other human beings.  So, from the external viewpoint he is to share the same joys and sorrows as all unenlightened men for countless number of incarnations despite the fact that he has "achieved" Enlightenment (Moksha or Nirvaana or Kaivalya).

The definition usually given of the word 'Moksha' as meaning liberation from the cycle of transmigration pertains to the lower perspective (soul, paapa/punya, karma, reincarnation, etc.).  This doctrine is on the lower level because it is based on the reality of the ego/soul which is subjected to birth and death.  In view of the general belief in reincarnation, they say that upon realization (knowing that the ego/soul is an illusion) you (bundle of karmas/vaasanaas or desires which never binded you to begin with) will not be subjected to birth and death.  They mean to say that the Self/Awareness will be free from the concept (or, rather, the misconception) of birth and death.  That's all.  To begin with, there is no birth or death to Awareness.

The Vedanthic interpretation of the word Moksha is "liberation from ignorance/limitation."  Transcending birth and death means transcending mortality or finitude.  ((Moha (delusion or dual-vision or limitation) and kshaya (destruction), mo(h)a + ksha(ya)).  Moksha is freedom or transcendence from limitation.  Claiming the immortality of myself, the Aathma, and gracefully accepting the mortality of the Anaathma (not-Self) is Moksha.  Similarly the word Nirvaana is interpreted in Buddhist traditions as meaning release from the cycle of births and deaths.  This too is the popular interpretation, not philosophical which is precisely the same as the Vedanthic.  'Nir' means not or without or free of, and Vaana means flame.  Fire stands for passion or desire, so Nirvaana means a desire-free state.  So this idea of Nirvaana as Enlightenment means a person/state free of desires (not absence of desires).  Nirvaana simply means the understanding that all the desires are futile - the desire for Nirvaana included; desires/thoughts are a second order reality; You, Awareness, are not touched/concerned by desires.

<<<It is quite true that Buddha constantly taught that man should seek release from transmigratory existence, but we must remember, however, that what the sage knows is known only to himself in its fullness and that he gives out to the public only so much as they could grasp and no more.  The work of a master is very complex because he is working with so many people of different prejudices, different conditioning - and he has to shatter their egos and make people absolutely clean, just as they were born, knowing nothing.

Masters sometimes give contradicting responses because they are free; free to say anything!  They cannot be bound by a single answer.  Their response is spontaneous.  Depending on a situation, on a person etc., a sage's comments may differ, but they are always appropriate.  For example, one may be instructed to travel south on a freeway to go to New York.  Another may be instructed to head north on the same freeway to go to New York.  Destination is the same, but answers/paths are different.  Language is dualistic.  Absolute can never be expressed in words.  Contradictories become complementaries in the Absolute.

Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda expressed the desire to be born again and again for the salvation of the humanity.  Buddha too has told of numerous previous births wherein he descended to help mankind.  Thus, the startling fact must now emerge that all the sages in the history of mankind who had ever "attained" Truth, Moksha or Nirvaana by virtue of such attainment have identified themselves with the whole of mankind and its sufferings and have, therefore, all without a single exception willed to return to earth in constantly repeated births and deaths.

Is not God/Awareness enjoying the game of (apparent) duality (Leela) to Know Itself in Its own Experience through innumerable souls and through eternity?  A sage has realized himself to be God/Awareness, so why would there be an exception?

This they have done without any necessity or compulsion upon their part, but solely in order to serve others because of their feeling of unity with them and compassion for their sufferings.  This does not mean that all the sages of history are at the present moment living on this earth, because they need not necessarily be reborn immediately after each death.  They may need a period of rest and recuperation after each incarnation and therefore some may be on earth, and others not, but the latter will surely be reborn later!>>>

In conclusion...know your true nature as the unborn, eternal love and live accordingly!

What is suicide and is it an appropriate action under miserable conditions?..........

Suicide is to kill yourself with a conscious intention for the purpose of escaping life to go into a void, rather than completing your life.

You find it impossible to get what you want with this body.  So you hope to get it elsewhere.  You consider this body to be an obstacle to the attainment of that which you desire.  So you try to remove that obstacle (your body) hoping thereby to achieve your desire.  But remember there is no void anywhere in the universe.  There is no place where nothing is.  Everywhere you go, the place is filled with something.  What you die with, you will continue to live with.  Death is life simply continuing in a different way!  After suicide, you will just place yourself right back into physical life, and into the situation you were seeking to escape...except now you will be back at the beginning again.  You did not create your body and you have no right to end it to escape misery.

A person who is not too much attached to life cannot commit suicide.  So it happens that the person who commits suicide is really the one who is very, very deeply attached to life.  Because he is so much attached to life, whenever he is frustrated he cannot do anything but commit suicide.  That deep attachment, deep desire will bring him back to life and start all over again in the same line going through the same experiences.  However if you identify yourself with the source of creation, you and the source become the same.  If you come to that point, you may throw away your body at anytime consciously.  Not by damaging the body, but peacefully.  Then there is no harm in it.

Why is the last thought at the time of death important?..........

The law of existence is that whatever essential desire is at the moment of your death, that becomes the seed of your next life.  The thought that you fall into sleep with is the thought that you wake up with.  The same is true about death, because death is a little longer life, a little deeper sleep, but the law is the same.  Whatever is the last desire hovering on your mind and being while you are dying will (most likely) be the first when you wake up in another life.  This will usually create the passage and the form of your birth.  This is not a must, but most probable.  It all depends on you, Consciousness.

Death is a doorway, but it is a magic doorway, because the energy with which you walk through that doorway determines what's on the other side.  And remember.  The last thought or desire at the moment of your death is almost always the resultant of all of your thoughts and desires that you have engaged in all of your life span!

Why do we fear death and what is the remedy?..........

We fear death because we have invested our identity in something that comes and goes (the ego); something that is a collection of ideas, information, sensations, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, etc.  This identity is so exclusive that we no longer distinguish the difference between the separate-self (ego) and the Real Self.  This is one of the essential forms of the separate-self - that I am going to disappear.  The other essential form is that I lack something.  Fear and desire are the two activities of the separate-self.  They come as a result of ignoring our true nature.

By ignoring the eternal nature of our self, we think we are the body that is limited in time and we will disappear in due course.  This creates fear.  By ignoring the infinite nature of our self, we think we are limited in space and we lack happiness.  This creates desire.

The remedy for this situation is to know yourself as you truly are, to go to the experience of being aware of being aware.

We have even structured our lives out of our fear of death.  The fear of death has created society, the nation, family and friends.  The fear of death has caused us to chase money and has made us ambitious of higher positions.  And the biggest surprise is that our Gods and our temples have also been raised out of the fear of death.  Afraid of death, there are people who pray on their knees.  Afraid of death, there are people who pray to God with folded hands raised towards the sky.  And nothing is more false than death.  That is why whatever system of life we have created, believing death to be true, has become false.

Look!  Everything we know about ourselves disappears every night when we go to sleep.  Yet we do not fear going to sleep.  Not only do we not fear it but actually we look forward to it.  Why?  Because it is such a relief when the ego disappears.  It is such a burden to carry that around all day long.  It is our repeated experience that when we go to sleep we don't cease to be and all that we experience is the peace.  Death is nothing different than sleep.  There is no need to fear death.

Socrates on death: "If I survive death there can be no fear about it.  If I don't survive, then there is nobody there to fear!"  Death is the most misunderstood phenomenon. People have thought of death as the end of life. That is the first, basic misunderstanding.

Death is not the end, but the beginning of a new life.  Yes, it is an end of something that is already dead.  It is also a crescendo of what we call life, although very few know what life is.  They live, but they live in such ignorance that they never encounter their own life.  And it is impossible for these people to know their own death, because death is the ultimate experience of this life, and the beginning experience of another.  Death is the door between two lives; one is left behind, one is waiting ahead.  There is nothing ugly about death; but man, out of his fear, has made even the word, death, ugly and unutterable.  People don’t like to talk about it.  They won’t even listen to the word death.

The fear has reasons.  The fear arises because it is always somebody else who dies.  You always see death from the outside, and death is an experience of the innermost being.  It is just like watching love from the outside.  You may watch for years, but you will not come to know anything of what love is.  You may come to know the manifestations of love, but not love itself.  We know the same about death.  Just the manifestations on the surface – the breathing has stopped, the heart has stopped, the man as he used to talk and walk is no more there: just a corpse is lying there instead of a living body.

These are only outer symptoms.  Death is the apparent transfer of the mind-stuff from one body to another body, or in case when a man is fully awakened, from one body to the body of the whole universe.  It is a great journey, but you cannot know it from the outside.  From outside, only symptoms are available; and those symptoms have made people afraid.  Those who have known death from inside (like in meditation) lose all fear of death.  Death exists only in ignorance.  Life is eternal.  Once you have it, you have it forever.  Life knows no death.

Once you know what life is, death disappears.  If you are still afraid of death, know well you have not known life yet!

If the mind travels with the soul between lifetimes, why can't we remember our previous data?..........

The mind of all human beings is reset to zero at the moment of birth.  All previous data is deleted.  And so while on your first day of birth, your soul held Consciousness of All and your mind held nothing at all.  This is not by accident.  Life is designed to give the Totality of You a fresh start with every incarnation.  In this way you can re-create yourself anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision your soul ever held about Who You Are.

Also, your mind can't be burdened with enormous amount of data which will make you go mad.  Your mind can't even remember more than 90% of this lifetime's data.  It simply cannot handle it.  Recalling the memories of one month can drive you crazy, let alone those of past lives.

The slate is, therefore, wiped clean as part of God's biggest gift: Freedom.

Life wants you to have the freedom to make today's choices as you wish, unburdened by the decisions of your past, unlimited thanks to the promise of your future, unfettered by the conditions of your humanity, and unleashed thanks to the glory of your divinity.  Rising above any old thought that your mind may have harbored about your inadequacies of failures, your refreshed mind opens at each birth to Consciousness that your soul has always held: that you are magnificent.

Does this mean that we are born every time with a new mind?  The answer is no.  For your mind is indeed like a computer - only much, much better.  On a computer you cannot permanently erase any data.  You can send data to 'trash' - that is, you can 'delete' it - but the word 'delete' is a false promise.  You have simply sent data to a separate location on your hard drive.  This is a location that your operating system is programmed not to scan every time you give it a command, so the system runs faster.  For this reason it's a good idea to send unneeded data to the 'trash bin'... but it's also a good idea to know that it resides there forever.

In short, you cannot permanently 'shred' the data of the mind.  This means that while, yes, you begin each new physical life with a 'clean slate,' giving you the freedom to make here-and-now choices unencumbered by your choices in the past, your mind can still access prior data from previous lifetimes when the mind determines it is beneficial, and not a hindrance, to do so.  Anything that stops growth is considered a hindrance.  Anything that serves the continuation of life is not.  The place of the location of this data is called 'aakaashic records' or causal plane.  All memories in the form of impressions ('vaasanaas') of yours and of all beings are stored in this 'cloud' for ever.

Hence, we've all heard stories of the person who suddenly "knew" how to swim because a child desperately thrashing about in the lake needed saving, or who suddenly "understood," with zero present-life training in advanced psychology, the exact right thing to say to talk to a man out of jumping off a bridge.

The closer you are to birth, the closer you are to the truth of your being.  With your memory cleared of all your previous life experiences in the body, you can be a new mind about things.  And so it is that you have been wisely advised: "Be ye as little children!"

Is it beneficial for a man to remember his past lives/memories?..........

Yes or no.  It depends.  Man can, of course, know about his past lives, because once
something is imprinted in the form of a memory on our minds, it is never destroyed. It always remains in our deep unconscious levels.  Whatsoever we have known, we can never forget.

However, it is not without reason that nature has arranged for us to forget our past lives/memories.  Recalling the memories of one month can drive you crazy, let alone those of past lives. Not everyone can handle this situation, only courageous minds can handle that much data. Life wants you to have the freedom to make today's choices as you wish, unburdened by the decisions of your past.

So anyone can enter his past life.  But were a man to enter this storehouse unwittingly, without understanding, he would instantly go mad -- so overwhelming are the memories.  There are ways of doing it; there is a methodology for it.  The greatest contribution to mankind made by Mahavira and Buddha is not the doctrine of nonviolence, their greatest contribution is the doctrine of remembering past lives.  They were the first on earth to make it clear to seekers that until they had entered their past lives, they would not be able to know what the soul is.  And they helped every seeker to go back into his previous life.

Should a man gather enough courage to recall the memories of his past life, he will become a different man altogether -- because he will come to see he is repeating things he has already done thousands of times before.  He will see his foolishness.  He will come to see how many times he has amassed wealth, how many mansions he has built, how many times he has run after prestige, honor, status, etc.  He will realize the innumerable times he has done all this, and that once again he is doing the same thing.  And each time, in the final analysis, the journey has proven unsuccessful.  And the journey will be unsuccessful this time as well.

With the revival of this memory, his chase after wealth will instantly end, his attachment to position will disappear.  The man will come to know how many women he has had relations with in the course of thousands of years, and the woman will come to know how many men she has had relations with -- and that no man was ever satisfied by a woman, nor was any woman ever satisfied by a man.  And yet, a man still wonders whether he should enjoy this or that woman and a woman still wonders whether she should enjoy this or that man.  This has happened millions of times.

If all this is recalled even once, a person will never repeat it again -- because having repeated an act so many times, its worthlessness becomes self-evident; the whole thing becomes meaningless.  Both Buddha and Mahavira conducted intensive experiments in jathi-smarana, in recalling the memories of past lives.  The seeker who passed through these memories even once, was transformed.  He became a different man.

Why is it better to cremate a dead body?..........

Ordinarily when a person dies, it is only his physical body dies, his soul (soul body, seed body or causal body) and his mind (subtle body or astral body) do not die with the body.  Ordinarily the mind of the dying person goes with him as subtle body, and for a little while after death he retains all his memory of his previous life.  It is like what happens with our dreams.  After you wake up from sleep you remember your dreams for a little while.  Slowly the memory of dreams begins to fade and by noontime it fades away completely.  And by the evening you cannot say even a word about them.  In the same way a man’s bodiless soul remembers its previous life, its friends and relatives for a little while after his death.  And this memory is rather painful, because he cannot relate with them any more.

It is for this reason that we do a few things.  Soon after someone close to us meets his death, so that he is relieved of the memories of his past associations and attachments.  Now it is not good to carry them, because they are very painful.  Some cultures cremate the dead bodies of their relatives soon after their death; they try not to delay if it is avoidable.  And it is significant.  Cremation destroys all identity and attachment of the dead with their bodies, because they remember their past only through the medium of their dead bodies.  The dead body serves as a bridge between the released soul and his past life.  So cremation is in the best interest of the departed souls.

Soon after cremation or burial of a dead body the soul is gradually freed from its past memories and associations.  It is like we gradually forget our dreams.  It is on the reckoning of time taken by different kinds of souls that we have different death rites for our dead.  Some people, particularly children take only three days to forget their past associations.  Most others take thirteen days; so some communities in the East have thirteen-day long death rites.  There are a few souls — souls with very powerful memories — who take a year’s time for this purpose.  Because of them, some of our death rites are spread over a full year.  Three to thirteen days are the general rule, and very few souls survive without bodies for a full year (usually known as ghosts); most of them are reborn with new bodies within a short time.

A person who dies with awareness, who remains fully conscious and aware at the time of his death, does not die really; he knows he is deathless.  He is not dying, he is leaving his old body like we discard old clothes.  And a person who attains to such a state of deep awareness is rare; he is free of all attachments and psychological memories.  He has neither friends nor foes; he is free of all cravings and desires.  He is a class by himself; dying with awareness he will be born with awareness, unencumbered by his past.

Just as one remembers his past for a while after death, so he does after his new birth too.  A newborn child carries with him for a brief time the memories (in the form of impressions) of his previous life as a spirit.  But by and by this memory fades away and by the time he learns speaking it is completely lost.  It is rare that a child remembers his past life even after he is articulate and able to communicate with others.  He is called a freak of nature.  He must have been a man of rare memory in his past existence.

Dead bodies of a child and a sage are generally not cremated, they are buried.  Why?...The child has not yet become impure (has not established firmly in his gross body; he is operating mainly with his subtle and causal bodies).  A child right after his birth is sleeping most of the time; he is in his causal body (deep-sleep-state).  And even when he is awake, he will mostly be in his subtle (dream-state) body.  That is the reason why children's eyes look so dreamy and innocent.  The whole reason for this is that they are in the dream-state with open eyes.  His world is still very colorful because it is a world of dreams.  There are butterflies flying all around for him and flowers blossoming everywhere for him - because so far he has not experienced the reality of life (through gross body).

The sage has become pure by burning his three bodies on his own (what more purification than that is needed?).

How many kinds of birth are there in the physical universe?..........

The five gross elements of creation (space, air, fire, water and earth; 'pra-pancha') produce five kinds of gross bodies.  The first one is of miraculous or spontaneous or supernatural birth using just light and/or sound of space...Lord Ganesha was born by breathing life into a doll made by turmeric paste by his mom Paarvathi; Seetha was born out of earth; Draupadhi was born out of fire, Kaurava brothers were born in pots by In-vitro fertilization, Karna was born to Kunthi at once by the grace of Sun, etc.  The next four gross bodies are those that are born of womb (air/breath/'praana') - belonging to humans and various animals; those that are born of eggs (heat) - belonging to birds and reptiles; those that are born of moisture (water) - belonging to lice and mosquitoes; and those that are born of earth - belonging to trees, plants and creepers.

How come many religions say that Rebirth is a false doctrine?..........

Organized religions denounced the doctrine of Rebirth or Reincarnation as heretical to gain and control their church membership.

How?...Humans have many fear-based religions whose teachings surround a doctrine of a God who is to be worshipped and feared.  It was through fear that your entire earth society reformed itself from the matriarchy into the patriarchy.  It was through fear that the early priests got people to “mend their wicked ways” and “heed the word of the Lord.”  It was through fear that churches/temples gained, and controlled, their membership.  People couldn’t trust themselves to be good, to act appropriately, on their own, for their own built-in reasons.  So they had to create a religion that taught the doctrine of an angry, retributive God in order to keep themselves in line.

Now the idea of Reincarnation threw a monkey wrench into all of that.  The church/temple was proclaiming that you’d better be nice, or else—and along came the Reincarnationists, saying: “You’ll have another chance after this, and another chance after that.  And still more chances. So don’t worry.  Do the best you can. Don’t become so paralyzed with fear that you can’t budge.  Promise yourself to do better, and get on with it.”  Naturally, the early church couldn’t hear of such a thing.  So it did two things. First, it denounced the doctrine of Reincarnation as heretical. Then it created the sacrament of confession.  Confession could do for the churchgoer what Reincarnation promised. That is, give him another chance.

However, this absolution could not come directly from God.  It had to flow through the church, whose priests pronounced “penances” which had to be performed.  These
were usually prayers which were required of the sinner.  So now you had two reasons to keep up your membership.

But now there was another problem.  People figured out that this must mean they could do
anything, as long as they confessed it.  The church was in a quandary.  Fear had left the hearts of the people.  Church attendance and membership dropped.  People came to
'confess' once a year, said their penances, were absolved of their sins, and went on with
their lives.  There was no question about it. A way had to be found to strike fear into the heart again.  So purgatory was invented.

This was described as a place something like hell, but not eternal.  This new doctrine declared that God would make you suffer for your sins even if you confessed them.  Under the doctrine, a certain amount of suffering was decreed by God for each non perfect soul, based on the number and type of sins committed.  There were 'mortal' sins and 'venial' sins.  Mortal sins would send you right to hell if not confessed before death.  Once more, church attendance shot up.  Collections were up, too, and especially
contributions-for the doctrine of purgatory also included a way one could buy one’s way out of the suffering.

According to the church’s teaching, one could receive a special indulgence—but again, not
directly from God—only from an official of the church/temple.  These special indulgences freed one from the suffering in purgatory which they had 'earned' with their sins—or at least part of it.  For a really huge sum, one could obtain a plenary indulgence.  This meant no time in purgatory at all.  It was a nonstop ticket straight to heaven!

No wonder the church/temple declared Reincarnation (rebirth) to be an untruth.

Without rebirth—without the ability to return to a physical form—the soul would have to accomplish everything it seeks to accomplish within (just) one lifetime!  This does not make any sense.  God created us to experience Who It Is through us, lifetime after lifetime, and through the millions of other creatures of Consciousness It has placed in the universe.

What is heaven and hell?..........

Heaven is Awareness of Knowing and Feeling of Who You Really Are.  Hell is the experience of forgetting Who You Really Are.

Actual hell does not exist.  However, you can create the illusion of hell, and you "sure as hell" will experience it.  The concept of a physical place of hell brings out the worst and makes a mockery of God.  Heaven and hell as places do not exist.  They are states of mind.  Heaven and hell are nothing but projections of greed and fear.  The concept of heaven means that that there is a better place than earth so you can ignore earth and go to heaven.  You live here for just one mediocre lifetime (which is at least one trillion times shorter than the blink of an eye on the cosmic clock) and then go to heaven and live there as you wish for eternity.  What a tragedy?

Eternal heaven or eternal damnation are impossible.  Something cannot have a beginning and be eternal!  That is a contradiction in terms.  There is no corridor connecting mortality to immortality.  In many religions, liberation is presented in dualistic terms in which God-devotee duality is maintained, i.e., liberation is a condition in which the devotee lives with God happily for a long time.  This is designed not to frighten an individual in his early stages of seeking because the reality is there is only one "I," 'Advaitham'.

You are on a journey to nowhere.  Heaven—as you call it—is nowhere.  Let’s just put some space between the w and the h in that word and you’ll see that heaven is now. . .here!  The point of life is not to get anywhere—it is to notice that you are, and have always been,
already there.  You are, always and forever, in the moment of pure creation.  The point of life
is therefore to create—Who and What You Are, and then to Experience That!

What is the Theory of Karma and Reincarnation?.........

The Karma/Reincarnation theory is based on human experience, not ultimate truth.  So it is only valid for dualism (when one feels that he is a separate-self with independent existence and/or free will and happiness/peace is in objects).  Law of Karma is psychological and applies to the subtle body and/or the subtle universe.

Swami Vivekananda: "Good, good; bad, bad; (upon wearing a finite body) none escapes the Law of Karma!"...Whosoever wears the form (with an implied freewill), wears the chain of karma too.  One must know how to work the machine (mind) so that the machine (mind) can set you free!

We have four categories/classifications of truth: 1. true ('sath'; eternally unchanging, absolute, independent existence, has no beginning and no end), 2. untrue ('asath'; a square circle; a barren women's baby, 'thuchha', non-appearing no-existence); sometimes 'asath' is also used as not-true, 3. both true and untrue (true from one point of view but untrue from a different point of view; 'sath-asath'; ex: the doctrine of karma and reincarnation), and 4. neither true nor untrue ('mithya'; world as an appearance is mithya; not-real; a mystery; apparently-real, appearing non-existence, has no beginning but an end).  As we all know...Science deals with the objective knowledge and/or the physical world or the observed world; religion deals with the ethical, moral, psychological and/or the subtle world or the non-observed world; spirituality deals with the knowledge of the Spirit or Consciousness or Awareness and/or the deeper nature of the observer himself.  The doctrine of Karma and Reincarnation is in the realm of the metaphysical/subtle which is true from an individual point of view but untrue from the absolute point of view.  However, Brahman is neither sath nor asath; it is the one that illumines the both; it is Yourself!

The literal meaning of karma is action.  In regards to Karma and Reincarnation ('karma' and 'punarjanma'), however, karma means both: action as well as the result/fruit of action. Results coming from a personally volitional acts, willful acts, acts filled with certain feeling or attachment called raaga-dveshas.  These results or reactions are also called likes and dislikes or 'raaga-dveshas' which will be stored as impressions or 'vaasanaas' or 'karmas' or 'desires' in your unconscious mind.  The nature of karma is not in the actions that you perform, but in the volition, the intention, the kind of mind that you carry which makes your karma or the bundle of vaasanaas.  Karma is not about what you are doing, it is just the way you feel about whatever you are doing whether it is prompted by a personal desire or not.  Thinking using free will creates karma.  Remember that apart from physical actions, words and thinking also create karma or vaasanas because, thought, word and action are the three tools ('saadhanas') of creation in life.  Since animals do not have Self-Awareness, they cannot create any karma, they can only spend.  And, for a person who is thinking in terms of transcending life and death, right karma is as useless as the wrong one because each and any action produces an equal reaction.  All karma is a burden for him and he wants to drop them all.  A doing with a doer (me-ness and/or mine-ness), in which one thinks himself as a doer (me-ness and/or mine-ness), is action, karma.

The concept of karma — that is, the idea that each action that an individual does with volition by mind, speech or body must bear fruit or yield a moral consequence that will sooner or later be experienced by that individual as either a pleasant or unpleasant experience — is very ancient, dating back to the older portions of the Vedas, which are the earliest records of philosophical and religious thought in India.  Almost every system of Indian philosophy and every religion of Indian origin accept this concept in one form or another, though they each have their own theories about it — both about what constitutes a moral or an immoral action, and about how such actions yield their appropriate fruit.  The Law of Karma is based on the very nature of life: As you sow, so shall you reap!

Within the sphere of manifest creation, communication is instantaneous.  Whatever we do is known immediately throughout the whole creation, because it is such a tight structure, a hologram, with all parts interrelated.  As they say, when a blade of grass moves, the sun shakes!  This is the basis for the Law of Karma or the principle that to every action there is a corresponding reaction.  The whole manifest creation is affected by and reacts to our feelings, thoughts, words and actions.  The Theory of Karma is based on mind/psychology; it is created with our mind and also worked out with our mind.

Buddhism and Jainism have or had no place for the concept of Creator, and hence see no need to postulate a Creator who ordains the fruits of karma, so they maintain that karma somehow bear fruit automatically.  Without any concept of Creator or Eeshwara, however, it does not seem easy to explain how karma can bear fruit according to any moral principles.  Unless there is a conscious regulating power that decides which action is to bear what type of fruit, how can a moral action automatically result in a pleasant experience for the person who did it, and how can an immoral action automatically result in an unpleasant experience for that person?

If karma itself were conscious, it could perhaps determine its own fruit, but a karma is just an action that an individual does by mind, speech or body, so how could it be conscious?  Since karma is not conscious, how can it determine its own fruit?  Though an individual who does any karma is conscious, he or she cannot be the one who determines the fruit of that action, because if they could, a person who does an immoral action would not choose to experience an unpleasant fruit as a result of it.

Therefore, since the fruit of any karma cannot be determined either by the individual who did it or by the karma itself, there must be some independent power that is conscious and therefore able to determine its fruit.  Unless such a power is postulated, it would be very hard to substantiate any karma theory.  That is, what fruit each karma should yield, and when and how that fruit should be experienced is determined only by Creator/Eeshwara/Bhagavaan, because he alone can know the moral worth of each action and what fruit would be appropriate to it.

One important point.  When we do a karma, it may or it may not not yield its fruit immediately, because whatever we experience in our present life is predestined, being what God has selected from the large collection of fruits of our past karma for us to experience in this lifetime.  Immediate fruit gotten by our fresh action is called 'dhrishta phala' and the unseen fruit stored for a future life is called 'adhrishta phala.'  Hence the unseen fruit of whatever fresh karma we do in any lifetime will not be experienced by us during that lifetime, but will be stored in order to be experienced in an apparent future lives.

To get into the details...Let us define destiny, free will and the four types of karmas.  What you come across is your destiny (fate or 'vidhi'), and the way you respond is your free will ('swetcha-sankalpa' or simply 'sankalpa' or 'purushaartha').  What you cannot control is destiny, and what you can control is free will.  Whatever fresh karma we do by our own volition or free will is called 'varthamaana karma' or 'kriyaamaana karma,' (=present karma, conscious karma, fresh karma; present karma can be classified as 'nithya' or day-to-day and necessary, 'kaamya' or personal desires, 'naimitthika' or ritualistic, and 'nishiddha' or avoiding/harmful). Some of the results are experienced in this life and some may have to be experienced in a future life.  The future/postponed karma is called 'aagaamya karma.'  The store of all the accumulated fruits of our past karma that we are yet to experience is called 'samchitha karma,' (=sam-chittha karma=total karma=unconscious karma) and the fruits of our past karma that we are destined to experience in any particular life is called 'praarabdha karma' (also called destiny or 'vidhi'=karma that has begun and fixed, born with, subconscious karma, ripened karma, fate).  To summarize, the four karmas are: 1. Fixed/Destiny. 2. Fresh/Free Will. 3. Future. 4. Total.  Praarabdha karma (out of all the four karmas) is the only one that is fixed and has to be spent in this present life, no matter what (as it is bound by the law of cause and effect).  Aagaamya karma (future karma generated by using your free will in the present life) is not fixed and is the most important of all karmas.  This is an important point.

Generally the amount of kriyaamaana and aagaamya that we do in each life is much greater than the amount of praraabdha that we experience, because we desire and make effort by mind, speech and body to experience much more than we can experience in a single life, and we also desire and make effort to avoid experiencing all the unpleasant things that we are destined to experience, so the quantity of the fruits of all our kriyaamaana (some of which are spent in this life) and aagaamya that are stored in our samchitha for future is steadily increasing.  Hence for each of our lives (which are just dreams that occur in our long sleep of self-ignorance) Creator or Eeshwara has to select just a small portion from the vast store of fruits that have accumulated in our samchitha.  This is done to help an individual advance spiritually, closer and closer towards God.

Since the fruit of any aagaamya that we do now will not be experienced by us during this lifetime, we cannot by any effort made now by our own free will change anything that we are destined to experience in our current life because it is fixed; it is like a released arrow with a certain momentum.  Accordingly, what is never to happen will not happen whatever effort one makes - what is to happen will not stop whatever obstruction one does.  Firstly, we are not free to change whatever we are destined to experience, and secondly that we are nevertheless free to try to change it or block it.

Since our destiny or fate (praarabdha) will impel us to make whatever effort is required for us to experience what we are destined to experience, the actions of our mind, speech or body are driven by two forces, destiny and free will, which may work at any moment either in harmony or in conflict with each other.  Some of our actions may be impelled only by our destiny, others may be impelled only by our free will, while yet others may be simultaneously impelled by both.  That is, since we genuinely desire some of the things that we are destined to experience, both our destiny and our free will will impel us to make whatever efforts are required to experience such things, in which case they will be working in harmony.  However, it is not possible for us to determine to what extent each of our actions is impelled by either destiny or free will.

Since it is certain that we cannot change what we are destined to experience, no matter how much effort we may make to do so, we should understand that it is futile to make any effort by our own volition either to experience or not to experience anything other than ourselves.  That is, destiny determines only what is experienced by us when our mind is turned outwards — towards anything other than ‘I’ — but it cannot prevent us from turning inwards to experience ‘I’ alone, because attending to and thereby experiencing only ‘I’ is not an action or karma (doer is doing to get a result; this is called a 'triputi' or three factors) but a state of just being, and hence it is not bound or restricted by karma in any way whatsoever ('I' is trying for 'I' to get 'I' so there is no 'triputi').

Therefore the only wise use we can make of our free will is to try to experience nothing other than ‘I’ by attending to ourselves alone, thereby remaining indifferent to whatever we may or may not be destined to experience outwardly.  Calmly and silently attending, thus, to ‘I’ alone is the best choice.

Since the subsidence of our personal ego entails the subsidence of our individual will, only when our personal ego has subsided completely will our will be surrendered entirely to God (which is the state that devotees aspire for when they pray "Thy will be done: not my will, but only thine"), and if our personal ego is not yet completely subsided, our will is surrendered only to the extent that our personal ego is subsided.  Hence, only to the extent that we are subsided and behave accordingly is there goodness.  And only to the extent that we are subsided are we just silently being.

Thus our praarabdha will impel us to do whatever actions of mind, speech or body are required to experience whatever we are destined to experience, so we cannot avoid doing such actions, but we should try to avoid doing any other action (that is, any action impelled by our free will), and the only way to avoid doing any such action is just to remain silent by attending only to ‘I.’  So long as we are attending to anything other than ‘I,’ our ego is active and will therefore inevitably be driven by its free will to do varthamaana and aagaamya, whereas when we attend only to ‘I’ (and/or the activities of the Totality) the activity of our personal ego will subside, leaving us in our natural state of just silently being.

Since destiny determines what this ego is to experience in this lifetime, we can escape its destiny only by escaping the ego itself.  The limited free will of the ego is a reflection of the infinite freedom of our real self, which is infinitely free because nothing other than it actually exists, and hence there is nothing that could limit its freedom.  However though we (as we really are) are infinitely free, we only use our infinite freedom just to be as we really are, because we are also infinitely wise, so we would never use our freedom to be anything else.

Therefore the only effective and reliable means to remain without doing any varthamaana and aagaamya is to attend only to 'I,' and/or Totality's actions.   So, be aware!  Awareness burns up the unconscious vaasanaas like the light burns up darkness.  Karma gives three results: sinful (negative energy, 'paapa karma'), meritorious (positive energy, 'punya karma') and Godly (liberation, 'moksha karma').  Moksha karma is obtained when one attends to 'I' alone which will basically nullify raaga-dveshas and purifies the mind (you will not accumulate any varthamaana and aagaamya karma by praying to God or performing pujas in the absence of ego; you will not also accumulate any varthamaana and aagaamya karma in meditation but then you will also reduce your karmas or raaga-dveshas in meditation because your are attending to yourself or being yourself while your mind or 'manas' is active).  And then, upon mind's purification, Moksha can easily be realized through Self-Inquiry, Gnyaana Yoga or Aathma Vichaara by knowing yourself as you truly are: Existence-Consciousness-Infinity/Aananda/Completeness!

Remember...Just as we cannot logically prove that God exists as a separate entity, we cannot logically prove that the Theory of Karma is true, so if we are willing to believe it we can do so only on the basis of faith.  In the karma theory Creator has an essential role to play, because karma is insentient (devoid of any consciousness or awareness), so it cannot determine which ‘fruit’ or moral consequence each karma should produce, nor can it determine when each such consequence should be experienced.  Therefore the karma theory would be true only if it were true that we are this ego and that Creator or Eeshwara is therefore something other than ourselves.

The doctrine of karma has shifted the burden of mankind's sufferings on to his own shoulders, whereas most religions talk of God being All-Merciful despite the pain and sorrow everywhere.  Everything depends upon yourselves, not upon prayers to God.  Prayer is useful only to purify the mind to certain extent and not to accumulate any future karmas.  The kaarmic law is more effective deterrent against evil than religion, for it says "whether God exists or not you will suffer for your evil deeds.”  Whether happiness or suffering, whether heaven or hell, the total responsibility is on yourself.  If you blame someone else for your shortcomings, you will not change as long as the other won't change.  But if you take the full responsibility, the doors of freedom will open; you can change by changing yourself!  That is the Law of Karma!  Taking the credit for yourself for good results and blaming others or God for suffering is a misunderstanding of the Law of Karma.  We are here in the physical world to seek happiness/peace.  So, do not seek happiness/peace through others, let others seek happiness/peace through you!

The idea that if you do wrong God will punish you, is anthropomorphic.  Just as one man punishes another for ill-doings so we transfer the same characteristic to our notion of God.  Religion transplants ordinary human qualities to supernatural beings whereas Karma removes all need of this anthropomorphism.

The karma theory is basically based on human experience, not ultimate truth.  If you cook food, you find it eatable.  If you lay under a motor car, you get crushed.  This cause and effect theory is based on what we see around us.  Karma is the most scientific way of explaining the good and evil fortune in human life.  Karma theory is beneficial in the sense that it helps explain the inequalities in life and also motivates us to give up all our cares and concerns by clinging vigilantly and tenaciously to self-attentiveness.

So long as we believe in cause and effect, the doctrine of Karma and Reincarnation are of inestimable value and high importance.   It is a very useful concept to maintain the moral values and peace in the society.  The Law of Karma also explains why one is responsible for where he is in his life.  It stops the blame-game or throwing responsibility on the world or someone else.  This law helps bring out the best in an individual.  The Law of Karma is simply a theory which explains something true inside your being.  Nobody can avoid it.  Nobody should try to cheat on karma because that is not possible.  Once you know and understand the inevitability of it, you will be a totally different person.

A higher truth of this theory is that body/mind organisms are created as effects of previous actions/causes as part of evolution/Impersonal Functioning, and a soul (consciousness in a body) is free to choose a womb to experience a predetermined life for its spiritual progress - there is Rebirth but not Reincarnation.  This precludes an individual moving from one birth to another birth spending "his" samchitha karma either to enjoy or to suffer the fruits of "his" actions.  Even a higher truth is that there is no separate-self with independent existence and that the life is a spontaneous happening, an Impersonal Play of Consciousness.

In ultimate understanding, however, Karma/Reincarnation is an illusory concept for an illusory separate-self!  These concepts of transmigration and reincarnation are taught in early stages only to negate them at the end to realize that there is really not any individual soul that is born, dies and then gets re-born (migrating from birth to birth).  The teachings are just ploys for gaining higher truth but, in itself, is not Absolute Truth.  That's why, in view of the general belief in reincarnation, they say that upon realization you will not be subjected to birth and death.  They mean to say that Awareness/Consciousness will be free from the concept (or, rather, the misconception) of birth and death.  That's all.  Awareness has no birth and death to begin with!  And you are That!

Therefore, in conclusion, (for an enlightened living) in each moment do exactly what you think or feel to do, understanding that what you end up doing is what is destined to happen!  Feeling of free will is a gift; belief in free will is suffering.  Feeling/acting as if you have free will but knowing that it is illusory and with the understanding that it's all Totality's will is liberation!  You, as Consciousness/Awareness, are the knower-witness of this drama (Maya's drama), so enjoy the drama!  You are above and beyond Maya and/or Creator/Eeshwara!

How is the creation of ego/soul negated in ultimate understanding?..........

Brahman is often compared to space, because Consciousness Principle is very similar to space.  What are the similarities?  Both are intangible and invisible.  You understand space but you don’t see it because it does not have any color or form.  Both are formless, all-pervading, indivisible, accommodate everything, and uncontaminated.  Space is indivisible.  Consider an open space.  A potter creates many pots from the clay of the earth.  Once the pots are created, the all over open space is available in the pot also.  Now we have space within and without.  Therefore we use the expression outside space and inside space, unenclosed space and enclosed space.

Even though we use two phrases open space and enclosed space, really speaking space has not been divided, it is only seemingly divided.  This is the first seeming division.  Once you introduce inside space, the enclosed space has become many as it were, since there are several pots.  Then we start using adjectives to indicate the seemingly different sizes of the enclosed space in the pots.  The words are many, the adjectives are many, but how many spaces are there: only one space with a seeming division.  Open space is not available for any function.  Space becomes useful only when it becomes enclosed or seemingly limited.  Open land is useless for living but a building that encloses the space gives the land utility.  The building is not the main concern but the space within is.  Transactional utility belongs to the enclosed space.  The useless space has now become useful space.  Non-Dual space has now become pluralistic space.  This plurality looks as though factual plurality.  It looks as though space has become many but all the time space continues to be Non-Dual.

If space can be seemingly divided and the seemingly divided space can become useful for transaction, the same thing is happening for Consciousness also.  Consciousness by itself is not available for any transaction.  Just as many pots are produced, many bodies are produced out of Maya.  When many bodies and minds are created, the all-pervading One Consciousness is available within the body also.  Now there are two Consciousnesses as it were.  One is external Consciousness, which is not available for any transaction and the other is an internal Consciousness, identified Consciousness, enclosed Consciousness obtaining within the body-mind complex.  The enclosed Consciousness is available for all the transactions.

The first and foremost transaction that happens when Consciousness is seemingly enclosed within the body-mind is “I am."  This first Consciousness, without any subjectivity, is called Self-Awareness.   The open Consciousness without body-mind complex does not have Self-Awareness, but the very same Consciousness enclosed in the body-mind develops Self-Awareness, “I am."  This seemingly-enclosed Consciousness with Self-Awareness is called individual-soul or simply soul or Jeevaathma.  This Self-Awareness, “I AM,” does not refer to the body, mind or thoughts but it refers/points to the Original Consciousness.  The unenclosed all-pervading Consciousness is called super-soul or Paramaathma.  External Consciousness is Paramaathma (super-soul) and internal Consciousness is Jeevaathma (individual-soul).  Ego (ahamkaara) is the I-sense with a personal beliefs and identifications attached while the soul is the I-sense with an impersonal sense of presence.

Is there a division between them?  Is there a division between pot-space and total space?  Don’t say that division is there.  Don’t say that division is not there.  The answer should be that there is a seeming division between total space and pot-space.  Similarly, Jeevaathma and Paramathma are seemingly divided but really speaking there is no division at all.  When the pot is born, the pot-space is enclosed within the pot, which is called pot-space.  Can it be said that the potter created pot-space?  The potter creates only the pot but does not create a pot-space.  Total space has not undergone a change to produce a pot-space.  Total space has not been divided to produce pot-space.  Pot-space has not been produced at anytime.  Pot-space is not born.

When the pot is created, the enclosed pot-space seems to be created.  Before the creation of the pot, the enclosed space was not available.  After the creation of the pot, the enclosed space is available.  Therefore we tend to say that the enclosed space is created but the potter does not create it all.  Similarly when the body-mind complex is born, the total Consciousness is available in the body-mind complex, which is named Jeevaathma.  Jeevaathma is not born.  Then what is born?  The name(concept) 'pot-space' is born!  We have introduced the name ‘pot-space’ for the sake of transaction.  Jeevaathma/soul is never born in all the three periods of time and only the name 'Jeevaathma' is born which is used for the sake of transaction.  Only the name 'jeevaathma/soul' is born.  Soul is, thus, an illusion or more precisely 'mithya,' seemingly formed when a body-mind is available for transactional purposes (just like the 'pot-space').  It is not what it seems to be!

Since the individual soul is an illusion, here is the view of life after death from an enlightened perspective...People say they have had many lives, before the present one.  But the truth is that you (as ego) die with every perception, thought or feeling.  So you live many lives even in a short period of time.  This is not noticed or perceived by the ordinary man.  Because qualitatively, there is not any difference between the (so-called) gap between mentations, deep sleep and physical death.  'You’, as a separate-self, are dying every moment, getting out of the body every moment.  Your three bodies are changing form every moment!  So who is reincarnating?  Who and where is the individual soul?  The three bodies are inert.

Lakshmana Sarma: "One assumes that the body is real.  As a seer of a cinema-show seeing a new picture every moment, thinks them all to be one, so the ignorant man seeing a new body every moment, thinks that all of them are one and the same."

The only conscious and unchanging element is Consciousness.  If a wave/whirlpool thinks that it has reincarnated as a bigger wave/whirlpool, so be it.  Water is not concerned!  Manifestation is an Impersonal Functioning of the Totality (Maya).  Karma (cause and effect) works/applies from a universal standpoint, not from an individual standpoint.  Reward and punishment are part of the cosmic story because there are no individuals.  Life is a play of Consciousness, play of light and sound.  You, as Self, are the witness.  Hindus have called this impersonal play, 'Leela.'  Because Consciousness is all there is!

Body/world is an image in the finite mind.  Finite mind is a localization/precipitation/whirlpool of Infinite Consciousness.  When the body dies, its localization/whirlpool disperses or disappears.  However as the whirlpool disperses, its contents are still in Consciousness (water still remains).  And there is no reason why another whirlpool should not form that would contain the elements/residues of the previously dispersed whirlpool as part of the flow of the river/water.  This could explain successive precipitations of finite minds.  When all or most of the residues of one particular precipitation becomes another precipitation, that is when someone recollects previous lump of someone else's memories as a single past life in what is commonly known as Reincarnation.

It is not that a new body is created to embody the previous soul so that it can enjoy or suffer one's karma earned.  Being not an independent/autonomous entity, he merely carries out his destined function.  This latter function paves the way for the destined function of another supposed individual in the future in this dream play.  That means there would be necessarily a continuity between the form that dies and the new form that is born because evolution must go on and nature does not start from scratch.  The emphasis here is "continuity in evolution" and not continuity in the transmigration of a particular soul.  When one particular body-mind dies, that is the end of the story for that character.  When John's body is no more, John-ness is no more.

Therefore, in ultimate understanding, the concepts of Rebirth (Transmigration) and Reincarnation are false; soul is an illusion (not real)!

Buddha: "Events happen, deeds are done, but there is no individual doer thereof!"

Another common concept, the concept of eternal heaven or eternal hell after one birth is also false; because this is an impossible feat.  Something cannot have a beginning and be eternal; it is illogical!  That is a contradiction in terms.  There is no corridor connecting mortality to immortality.  Without rebirth—without the ability to return to a physical form—the soul would have to accomplish everything it seeks to accomplish within one lifetime, which is one trillion times shorter than the blink of an eye on the cosmic clock!  If God became the world in a milk-and-cheese-type creation (irreversible), we cannot know it as it is, because it no longer exists.  But God created the world in an ingenious and elegant dream-type creation so we can wake up to God (aren't we the children of God?).  World as an appearance/dream-like or belonging to a lower order reality is the only way we can explain the presence of a Non-Dual, Changeless, Action-less Reality which is, Itself, not a cause of this world!  We know this because the whole creation can be destroyed without disturbing anything except ignorance.  Therefore, it is a silly idea that you have to die to go to some heavenly place where God sits to know and experience God.

Consciousness identifies Itself with a body/mind organism and the identification continues for several births and when the mind turns inwards the process of dis-identification starts which also goes through several births, several lives.  But these lives are different lives, different body/mind organisms.  They do not refer to the evolution of any single entity.  Ultimately, there is no such thing as a singe, individual entity that is responsible for actions.  There are no souls but one Super Soul/Consciousness.  Rebirth process goes on through different objects and the process to go on, new body/mind organisms are created to manifest any unspent energies or impressions of a past life.  These impressions are stored on a cosmic disk called the causal plane or Maya.  If John dies, that is the end of John's story.  It is not that any entity takes on new forms in order to evolve; it simply is 'Works of God' or a 'Play of Consciousness,' 'Leela.'

One episode from Christ's life: And as he was passing by, he saw a man blind from birth.  And his disciple asked him, "Rabbi, who has sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind?"  Jesus answered, "Neither has this man sinned, nor his parents, but the Works of God were to be made manifest in him."

Krishna (Bhagavad Geetha): "The Omnipresent Consciousness does not involve itself in the sinful or virtuous deeds of anyone.  The living entities are deluded because their inner knowledge is covered by ignorance!"

With this understanding you will realize (i.e., make it real) that you are beyond birth and death.  Your true identity is Consciousness (Self or Aathma), not a separate-self/soul.  The more you are dis-identified with yourself as the gross/subtle/causal bodies and identified with yourself as Pure Consciousness, the easier it becomes to understand the riddle of death.  You do not know the reality of dream state until you wake up from the night-dream.  Similarly you do not know the reality of the waking state until you wake up from the waking-dream!

All your questions about birth and death will dissolve upon that realization!

Man is afraid of death.  Who says this?  Is it life?  Or is it death?  Certainly death cannot say this.  Because it is lifeless.  Then will life say so?  No.  Because life can never be out of life, life is neither created nor destroyed.  And so it can never comprehend death.  Then can it be the dead inert matter (body) that says so?  No.  Because it is already dead, and it cannot speak.  There is none else present to say so.  Therefore either it has never been said, or it can never be seriously said, by anyone.

Socrates on death: "If I survive death there can be no fear about it.  If I don't survive, then there is nobody there to fear!"

If you say you have birth and death, it means you have neither.  Because you are in both.  As such, you can only be something distinct and separate from birth and death, and so necessarily beyond both.  Life, as such, knows no death.  Nobody has ever experienced his own death, nor can anybody think of his own death.  In order to say that you did not exist, you have to be there to observe your no-existence.  You are Consciousness which is unborn and can never die.  The “I” that dies is never aware and the “I” that is aware never dies because it was never born.  Therefore from life’s own standpoint death is a misnomer.  Nobody has ever experienced his own death, nor can anybody think of his own death.

Hence death is not.  Death is a myth.

Remember that one metaphysical theory is as good as another and they are all speculative.  Stay with fundamentals.  If you think the ego/soul is real, it will be born and it will die and it will evolve.  It will be born again and again and then will die again and again according to the Law of Karma.  But the fact is that ego/soul is not real; it does not exist as an independent entity.  Therefore the answer is not in the mind but through non-mind!  The "mind" beyond mind is nothing but the ever-present Consciousness which is never born and can never die.  These three bodies are merely appearances, ideas.  All there is, is Consciousness.  Take your stand in and as Consciousness because you are Consciousness!  You are the eternal and unchanging Aathma!

Death, therefore, exists only in ignorance!  Wake up from this illusion of ignorance!

<<< However...So long as we believe in cause and effect on a relative level, the doctrine of Karma and Reincarnation are of inestimable value and high importance.  It is a very useful concept to explain the inequalities of life and to maintain the moral values and peace in the society.  The doctrine of Karma has shifted the responsibility on to one's own shoulders and one's misery to his past.  Though from the highest standpoint the world may be mithya (non-substantial), but from the standpoint of a separate-self, the waking state and the world should be understood as real and that the world is important.  Therefore during transaction, the world importance should be recognized and adherence to Dharma and Karma should be followed.  The Law of Karma is valid in this plane. >>>

PART II - Why Are We Here?

Why are we here in the Physical Universe?..........

"Why are we here in the Physical Universe?" can only be answered in a relative sense as Life is a Mystery.  Before we explore the question, following are the reasons why there could not be a 'true' answer.

- (From the aspect of Being or Sath or Existence) Nothing can rise higher than its source.  The higher can see and understand the lower and the lower cannot see the higher and understand it.  This is one of the basic laws of Life.  It is like mind can see an eye and eye can see an object; but an object cannot see an eye and eye cannot see the mind.  So, Awareness can understand the mechanism of the mind but the mind cannot understand the nature of Awareness.  Because Awareness is prior to mind and apparently produces it.  Awareness is the source of mind.  If Awareness was produced by mind, then it would have to have a beginning.  But Awareness having a beginning (or even an ending) is never our experience and can never be our experience.

Mind is, thus, a subset of Awareness (a derivative or limitation of Awareness), not the other way round.  Mind cannot understand that from which it was born, being only a part of the whole.  It cannot conceive anything bigger than itself.  How can a cell within your body know the body?  Mind is within Awareness.  The principle of logic demands that the cause must be at least as rich as the effect.  It is like this: A three-dimensional cube cannot be accommodated into a two-dimensional plane.  A two-dimensional plane cannot be accommodated into a one-dimensional point.  Mind is one dimensional.  Its dimension is time.  Awareness has no attributes; it is dimensionless.  How can mind be accommodated into Awareness? 

- (From the aspect of Knowing or Chith or Consciousness) Mind is an ever-changing flow.  It is not possible to know the one that never changes, i.e., God, through the mind.  Anything known through a changing medium will also be seen as changing, because the medium used for knowing is being imposed on all that is to be known.  It is as if you were wearing sunglasses whose color went on changing. 

- (From the aspect of Loving or Aananda, or Infinity) Mind is in duality and the cause and effect relationship does not apply to the Absolute...God is Eternal and Infinite.  Mind's capacity is limited as it has attributes.  Mind cannot conceive eternal, infinite things.  When mind looks at the world through its own limitations of thought and perception, it sees Eternity as time and then imagines causality, duration, choice, etc.  and it sees Infinity as space and then superimposes three dimensions on to the Reality.  Human reason cannot grasp God because it is crippled by the law of non-contradiction.  God is not a person, but a presence.  God is Life.  God is Love.

If we were to ask God why this Universe had been created, God would say that there is no desire, no Universe and no 'you' and there is nothing other than God.

Why?...Because how could an infinite being knows something that is finite?  If it knew, the finiteness would displace the infiniteness of God and God would no longer be God.  H2O, the essence of water, knows itself only as H2O irrespective of its forms - whether it is ice, water or steam.  So, the world exists for mind (ego) only. 

Therefore, mind has no direct access to Awareness.  Mind converts everything into its own media.  Mind sees Eternity as time, Infinity as space and God as matter.  Mind can only access experience thought by thought, because it is not possible to have more than one thought at a time.  Consciousness has no such limitation (It is dimensionless), so all seven billion thoughts occur at the same time which is always 'now.'  Any question which has the slightest reference to the Absolute cannot be answered in the relative and the question does not arise in the Absolute.  Only a non-mind can realize the Absolute.  And in that moment, 'why' question will be dissolved.  Not that you will get an answer, but the question itself will disappear.

Thus, Life is a Mystery.  However, you ARE that Mystery.  Life is too close to you to be known or penetrated.  It is the object-less experience of the Knowing of you own Being.  You can ask what is Life but you cannot ask why is Life.  'Why' belongs to duality only.  Therefore, this question cannot 'truly' be answerable.

The mind is possessed by the devil of causality/duality; therefore you have trouble and difficulties.  Questions always arise to the one who imagines himself to be a separate-self.  See that causation rises and falls with the ego.  Give up causality, and you shall have the One, the Non-Causality!

One simple answer may be: Investigate the 'I' to whom this question is arising!  Investigate what is that which is aware of my experience!

<<<In the highest understanding, Reality never "becomes" manifestation which is finite and dual.  Reality only knows itself, there are no two things there.  Reality does not generate experience because it lacks nothing.  However...from the point of view of an inquisitive mind (since we cannot deny the experiencing), Reality did.  It did it for Experience, we might say!  It wanted to know itself, know its magnificence in its Own Experience!  That is Reality's desire!  Desire is Reality's nature as Consciousness-At-Rest (Shiva, Purusha, Father, Emptiness) has to become Consciousness-In-Movement (Shakthi, Nature, Mother, Form) at some point.  Potential energy was forced to become kinetic (from the point of view of an ego); if it didn't it would be dead energy.  It is the nature of Consciousness to celebrate itself through Manifestation.  And it freely assumes the seeming limitation called 'mind' to become and observe/witness the world in finer detail (If Consciousness did not have the power to appear as something other than what it is, then it would not be Limitless; so why not?).  Manifestation/experience/expression is an act love!  You cannot ask a mother "why" she had her baby. You cannot ask "why manifestation" to the Absolute because cause-and-effect, time and space are created with/within manifestation. If you are in a dream, asking the cause of a running tiger, where did it come from, etc.,does not satisfy the mind for too long. You simply have to wake up to realize that there is no real tiger!>>>

However...As a compassionate concession to the mind that repeatedly asks why God has created this Physical Universe...different teachings are available that give different answers in mind's own terms to its own satisfaction.  The following is one such teaching (a STORY?) for "Why are we here?"

First of all, Life as a whole is purposeless.  Life is goal-less; that is why it is eternal.  Goal implies a limit.  If there is a goal then life cannot be eternal, because when the goal is achieved life is dead.  But we know that life can never be dead.  Energy is neither created nor destroyed.  Purpose means an impediment.  A flower blooms joyfully whether there is a passer-by or not.  It can only bloom fully if it blooms without any purpose.

Purposeless Life is God's greatest gift to us.  If God had given Life a purpose, Life would have no choice but to obey.  Then the point of everybody's Life would have had to have been the same!  Life would be monotonous and boring.  So God, in infinite wisdom, imbued Life with no purpose whatsoever, in order that each and every one of us might imbue it with a purpose of our own, thus to define and create, experience and demonstrate, announce and declare Who We Really Are.

We are three-aspect beings.  We have (apparently) a body (gross body), we have a mind (subtle body/astral body/mental body) and we have a soul (causal body/ignorance/seed body/kaarmic body).  We are a combination of these three aspects (satthva, rajas, thamas).  This is our daily experience through the three states of waking, dream and deep sleep. The soul conceives/knows/desires, the mind facilitates/creates experience, the body facilitates/experiences feeling.  Experience is arrived at three different portals of perceiving, thinking and feeling.  (gross body: functions with perceiving and sensing, operates in time and space, expresses with actions, experiences pleasure and pain, composed of sensations and emotions; subtle body: functions with thinking and creating, expresses with words, operates in time and transcended-space (here), experiences happiness and misery, composed of thoughts and images; soul body: functions with knowing and desiring, expresses with feelings, operates in now-and-here, experiences joy/peace and ignorance, composed of likes and dislikes).  We have four Realms, Realm of the Physical, Realm of the Astral (these two are also called the Realms of the Relative or the Realms of Experiencing), Realm of the Spiritual (which is also called the Realm of the Absolute or the Realm of the Knowing) and the Realm of Being (which is the Realm at the cross-point from which the other three realms apparently emerge).

In the beginning and in the Realm of Being where God resides, things are Absolutely what they are.  All things exist in their Absolute stage.  There is no Time or Space.  Everything that ever was, is now, and ever will be, exists now.  There is only WhatIsRightHereRightNow...Eternality.  We may call this Heaven.

And God chooses to know Itself in Its Own Experience.  Why?...This is the Divine Impulse or the Desire or the Intention, and it exists in us, and in everything.  If God is like energy, energy can be either potential or kinetic.  It is one and the same; Energy-at-Rest or Energy-in-Movement.  It is the nature of energy to get activated at some point; otherwise it would be dead energy.  Energy-at-Rest or the Unmanifest Energy was "forced" to manifest itself to become the Universe.  This is called the (eternal) breathing in and breathing out of the Absolute.  Everywhere, wherever Life is to be found, the incoming and the outgoing process will be there.  Life cannot exist without this polarity.

The nature of something is what makes it what it is.  For example, the nature of fire is heat. If you take away the essential nature of something it ceases to be what it is.  It is the nature of Life to oscillate between two states of rest.  That is what it is, not what it does.  

Beingness is the (God's) highest state of existence.  God seeks to realize Its highest state or idea through action.  The urge to do this is called Impulse or Desire.  It is this Consciousness-in-Movement.  Desire is God; God is not separate from Desire.  Since God is Everything, seen and unseen, there is nothing which IS that God could want.  There is nothing that God could desire except more of Itself.  That is because there is nothing else to desire.

When there is nothing in existence but You, there is nothing for You to desire - save more of You.  There is no other option.  This is God's nature...to expand and express.  This is Life's nature...to expand and express.  If It did not do this, It would not BE.  You cannot experience until you express and expression has no meaning without experience.  It is through both the Knowing and the Experiencing that Life gets to BE.  This is the reason for all of Life.

This, then, is God's desire: To Know (expand) and Experience (express) More Of Itself.

How can God Experience?...Absolute Realm is all-knowing but is not an environment made for ex-pression, it is environment made for com-pression.  In that environment, every moment is com-pressed in to one moment, now, the Only Moment There Is.  In that environment, everything is com-pressed in to one thing, the Only Thing There Is.

The Only Thing There Is is All-Knowing.  God knows his utter magnificence only conceptually, not experientially.  Yet the experience of Itself is that for which It longed, for It wanted to know what it felt like to be so magnificent.

We can know ourselves to be all love, but if we do not experience ourselves being loving, all we have is a concept about ourselves.  We have no experience of it.  It is one thing to know ourselves as something, it is another to experience ourselves as that.  For example, it is one thing to know all about sex conceptually, but it is entirely a different thing to experience it.  This knowing will not have any meaning or significance without experience.

God is free even before it manifests/appears itself in the Universe, but that freedom does not have any weight, any significance.  That freedom cannot be experienced; there is no feeling of liberation.  In order to experience freedom, first you have to lose your freedom.  It is impossible to experience peace, if one has not experienced turmoil; it is not possible to experience liberation, if one has not experienced bondage.

Thus, you cannot experience yourself as what you know yourself to be if there is nothing else.  If everything is black, and there were no other colors to distinguish it how could you know it existed?  You must, therefore, find a way to experience something other than What You Are.

So, God can only experience Itself by not being God.

Since God wished to Know Itself experientially as well as conceptually, God created a system/place in the Ultimate Reality where all that God Is could be Experienced as well as Known.  In delight, God's pinpoint of incomprehensibly compressed energy exploded into the expression of that same energy in incalculable profusion and infinite diversity.  The One Thing (which is Nothing) had burst wide open to reveal the Many Things It Is.  Physical Realm had been, thus, created!  As the elements of all raced forth, time was created, for a thing was first here, then it was there—and the period it took to get from here to there was measurable.

Not only was the Physical Realm thus created, but the Astral and Spiritual Realms as well...all realms, seen and unseen.  Part of God also exploded into an infinite number of units smaller than The Whole.  God did this by dividing Itself up into a million ka-jillion different Parts, or Aspects of Itself, with each of the Parts created in different sizes and shapes, colors and textures, speeds and sounds, and different degrees of consciousness.  God, by division, created a reference point within Itself (God could not create a reference point outside if Itself as there is nothing outside of It).  However, God still remained Infinite as Infinity minus Infinity is still Infinity.  Spiritual Realm is also known as Causal or Soul World.

Since there is nothing other than what we are, the first and the only option is for us to break ourselves down into our constituent parts, so that each part of us would be less than The Whole, without being in any way separate from The Whole, or other than The Whole.  Rather like a drop of the ocean is in no way separate from the ocean, or other than the ocean.

God imbued all of these Aspects with sufficient consciousness (as a minimum) to have self-awareness.  We may call these Aspects 'Souls.'   Soul is a temporary and illusory limitation the Non-Dual Consciousness has freely assumed in producing this apparent dual-world to express, experience and demonstrate Its magnificence!
Soul=Reflected Consciousness; Soul=Consciousness-in-Movement.  Individuated Aspects of God or 'Souls' being less than The Whole (like the reflections of the one sun in multiple ponds), they lack the Complete Awareness of God.  However, God had to imbue some of those parts with sufficient consciousness to recognize Divinity when it was looking right at It.  (Not all human beings have risen to that level of consciousness.)  God put into place a system by which Individuations of Itself could rise to such a level, and that system was called evolution.

Thus three elements suddenly existed: That which is here.  That which is there.  And that which is neither here nor there - but which must exist for here and there to exist.  It is nothing which holds everything.  It is non-space which holds the space.  It is all which holds the parts.  Thus God is All That Is and All That is Not, seen and unseen.

In creating that which is 'here' and that which is 'there,' God made it possible for God to Know Itself as It truly is, in Its own Experience.  In the moment of this great explosion from within, God created 'relativity' - the greatest gift God ever gave to Itself.  An entire reality based on (the law of) Maya (Illusion) as that is the only possible way for God to create relativity because nothing real could exist that is Not-God!  God has to create by assuming another form without surrendering Its nature as Infinite Awareness.  This spiritual event is entirely consistent, incidentally, with what we call The Big Bang Theory.

Souls, as parts of God, know Absolutely everything, but, in an Absolute way.  They cannot experience what they know, because there is nothing else.  They know Light, but they cannot experience themselves as Light, because there is nothing else but Light.  Souls are Aspects of God but are conscious of themselves to a lesser degree than God.

God, then, sent the Individual Aspects of Divinity on an eternal journey in the Spiritual Realm around a Circle called Life.  Now any Part of The Whole could look back on The Whole from which It emerged and say, "Oh, my God, how magnificent Thou art!"  This feeling of knowing and experiencing Itself simultaneously is the experience for which God yearns.  This is God's state of Being.  This is God's state of Peace, Knowing and Experiencing simultaneously Who It Really Is.

Individuated Aspect going around the Life Circle, however, only knows what is God by looking back at God.  Yet how could each of the Individuated Aspects also know/remember Itself as God?  That was the question!  This is like zillions of candles in the midst of sun knowing that the sun is magnificent, but not knowing that they themselves are the sun.  Seeing the rest of It, would it know that It WAS the rest of it, in singular part?...No, not really.

We can know ourselves and conceive of ourselves as light in the Realm of the Absolute like the candles, but if everything is light, then the concept of 'light' has no meaning.  Similarly, we can know ourselves and conceive of ourselves as big in the Realm of the Absolute, but if everything is big, then the concept of 'big' has no meaning.  We have to experience ourselves as 'big' in order for the concept to have any meaning at all.  Yet how to experience our self as 'That' in a realm where All is 'This'...?

Simple!  Create an illusion of 'This' and 'That'---where the experience of 'big' is possible because there is something that is 'small'---where the experience of 'good' is possible because there is something that is 'evil'.  (Remember, in the absence of something 'finite,' 'infinity' cannot be experienced.)

This illusion became part of the Physical and Astral Realms that have just been created....called the Realms of the Relative or the Realms of Experiencing.  Thus the 'evil' is there for a holy reason. (...Judge not and neither condemn!  Raise not your fist to the darkness, but be a light unto the darkness, and curse it not.)  Physical and Astral Realms are, thus, designed to provide the souls with a context within which they might experience outwardly what they know inwardly.

God then sent the souls from the Spiritual Realm into the Physical and Astral Realms (after making them forget Who They Really Are) to Experience Who They Really Are!

This is soul's state of Peace, Knowing and Experiencing simultaneously Who It Really Is in the Relative Realm.  But watch for the trap!  The only way a soul can seek to experience itself as God, as Peace, is to allow others to seek to experience God through itself!

Yet how could it be guaranteed that each Individuation would move into this Peace as well?  Ah, there's the twist.  And so, in order to ensure this, the Circle that is Life twisted itself to form a figure 8 reasoning that if at one point both sides of the parts could touch, then the Totality of Being God could at that cross-point be known and experienced by every one of God's Individuations!

This cross-point was simply created in order to ensure that each Individuated Aspect of Divinity would never be lost from the feeling, but would be guaranteed peace or nirvaana.  This is what you experience when you 'cross over' at the moment of your 'death' (which does not really exist) and at the moment of your rebirth (your next re-entry into the Realm of the Physical). 

So what exactly are these Physical and Astral Universes?...Everything is One in the Realm of God (or Absolute).  Something not being one with Everything is impossible.  Take space for example.  Everywhere you go there is space.  It is impossible to avoid it.  What is not impossible, however, is the Maya (or illusion) of not being One with Everything.  The Realms of the Relative (or the Physical and Astral Universes) were thus created as Maya/illusion.  Creating an entire reality based on illusion was so ingenious and spectacular in that it produced a solution to God's conundrum.  The Realms of the Relative are like an Alice-in-Wonderland, in which things are not what they seem to be, and in which things seem to be what they are not!  Suddenly, we have a point of reference by which we may know ourselves in our own experience.

Of course, there is no way for the souls to not be Who and What They Are - souls simply are that pure spirit, have been always, and always will be.  So souls did the next best thing.  Souls caused themselves to forget Who They Really Are.  Upon entering the Physical Universe, souls relinquished their remembrance of themselves.  This allows the souls to choose to be Who They Are, rather than simply wake up in the castle, so to speak.

Despite the Realms of the Relative being illusions, each Individuated Aspects of Divinity traveling on its journey through the endless cycle of Life through Physical, Astral and Spiritual Realms, may both Know and Experience Itself as Who It Really Is at any place on that cycle.  You can do this now, in any moment of your present lifetime.

That is the wonder of this process as the system that is placed in by God for Soul Evolution is perfect.  Others have done it.  Masters have done it.  Masters are called 'masters' because they have known and experienced themselves as God.  They have remembered, or re-membered, themselves as God.  They have awakened to realize themselves as God.  Don't we awaken and remember ourselves from our illusory dream when we are having a nightmare?

So then, what is the Best Way to Experience?...In the Realms of the Relative, All That Is has been broken down into its constituent parts.  Therefore, Now looks like Before, Now, and After.  Here looks like There, Here, and Everywhere In Between.  Because everything that ever was, is now, and ever will be exists now, it is impossible to create anything.  Everything that one might create has already been created.  Thus, what we call 'creation' in the Realm of the Physical or Astral is actually the act of 'perception,' i.e., noticing the existence of something for the first time.  However, our perspective enlarges in Astral Realm where space and time exist in a different way, not as we know it in the Physical Realm.  Our thoughts materialize very fast as there is no illusion of space anymore.

The fact that we did not previously notice something does not mean that it did not exist before we noticed it.  And so, we see that 'creation' is simply...Consciousness.  The Act of Creating is the Expanding of Mind/Consciousness of the Already Existent Nature of the thing we imagine ourselves to have 'created.'  It is like reading a book.  While all the story of ten years is right there in your hands, you are only reading one chapter at a time.

Thus, we find ourselves in the Realm of the Relative, so that we might experience, demonstrate and personify Who We Are by Expanding our Mind/Consciousness, after Knowing of It.  (In actuality, Consciousness cannot be expanded.  It is already complete.  It is what IS.  It is the mind that expands to uncover Consciousness.  Pure Consciousness means that the total mind has become conscious.)  Awareness is the feeling of what you have known and experienced.  And creation of this feeling of Who We Are is the best way to experience in the Physical and Astral Realms.

What is the Process of Experience?  Or, Process of Life?...We cannot 'experience' something that is 'unknown' to us and also we cannot 'know' of something that is 'not', and so, first we must 'be' it.  Thus the Process: Being-Knowing-Experiencing/Being-Knowing-Experiencing/Being-Knowing-Experiencing...continuously through all eternity.  God is eternally BEING what God IS....KNOWING what It is BEING....and EXPERIENCING what It is KNOWING!...This is the Life Process.  God is known as Sath (Being/Truth), Chith (Knowing/Consciousness), and Aananda (Experiencing/Peace)!  The locus of feeling is the heart, the locus of knowing is the head/third eye center and the locus of existence/nature/energy is the navel/gut/belly.

Your soul has embarked on its sacred journey in a single identity eternally, while your body and mind are configured in their present identity only on this particular 'leg,' your current leg, of your eternal travels.  Some people may interpret this to mean that the soul lives forever, while the body and mind die.  This is not accurate.  The body and the mind do not die, any more than the soul (causal body) dies.  Body (gross body) and mind (subtle body) simply change form.

How does the Life Process work?...Life is ruled by three basic principles: Functionality, adaptability and sustainability.  It functions, or, having atrophied to the point of near dysfunctionality, it adapts, and having adapted, it sustains itself.  All things in Life support Life, serve the process of Life Itself; it must.  Thus, Life Cycle never ends.  If it did, Life itself would cease to be.  Such a thing cannot occur, because Life will not allow it.  Life is a self-regulating system.  It will do whatever it takes to survive and function - including producing disasters and even 'dying.'  These three principles are also known as Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu in Vedic tradition; Son, Holy Spirit and Father in Christian tradition.  Life is thus never-ending and always evolving.  That is the wonder of the process.  An ending is a limitation, and God's purpose is without such a boundary.

This never-ending evolution of Life is all energy in motion.  Nothing stands still.  Nothing.  But not all of the energy in the Universe is vibrating at the same speed or frequency - or the same level of consciousness.  Energy that is totally aware of itself moves faster ways to produce difference.  Energy that is not totally aware of itself moves very slowly, producing over and over again nearly the same pattern that existed before, until that pattern alters itself over a very long period of time.  The Universe for instance, spins in such a pattern.  Our Milky Way has been spinning in the same way for billions of years, and we can count on it to spin the same way for billions of years more.  It has to do with levels of self-awareness. 

All energy is aware, but not all energy is aware that it is aware.  All of Life, down to the tiniest cell, molecule, or sub-molecular particle, contains intelligence.  This basic intelligence is built in.  It is a cellular encoding.  Because that is true, these tiny particles move in ways that make sense.  Their movement produces a specific and predictable outcome.  This outcome is called Life.  At the macro level, it is called the cosmology of the Universe.  At the micro level it is called particle physics.

Now comes an interesting twist: At a certain point in the process of evolution, Life energy becomes aware that it is aware of itself.  It is supremely impacting, because it produces 'separation phenomenon'.  This is when an element of Life first has the 'idea' that it is separate from God.  It is the first pivotal moment.  Prior to this moment, energy particles expressed themselves as an integral part of an overall system.  Their intelligence was expressed as the intelligence of the system.

In the first pivotal moment of self-discovery, an energy unit becomes conscious of itself as a part of the system, rather than as the system itself.  Its identity as part of the system soon expands into a thought that it is separate from the system.  A mind or ego is born.  A baby does not have an ego.  He sees the universe as an integral whole.  His consciousness is merged in his experience.  As he grows older, he begins to see himself separate which paves the way for his ego to develop.  Man alone, of all living beings, exists and knows that he exists.  Man alone, of all living beings, knows and knows that he knows!

This gives birth to the next emerging process of Life: Chaos.  The thought of being something 'other' than the system is what brings chaos to Life.  While a unit of energy becomes self-aware, it is losing its awareness of the larger system of which it is a part.  Its intelligence - which is really the intelligence of the system - is now experienced as its own intelligence.  This creates an illusion, illusion of disunity.  However, this is all natural; this is how Life works.  You need a developed mind to know God, to experience peace knowingly.

As the energy unit starts increasing its self-awareness, it will start affecting that of which it is aware.  Quantum physics says: "Nothing which is observed is unaffected by the observer."  Now the energy unit, or life form, begins to experience itself as an integral part of a system again.  It becomes aware that the more rapid is the vibration of its energy, the higher is its frequency, and the more impact it has on the energy around it.  This is called creation.

Everything is predictable in the energy unit we call rock.  Now along comes a human being - an energy unit or life form vibrating at a much higher frequency - having the capacity to see in rock what the rock does not and cannot see in itself.  The human does something totally unpredictable, from the rock's point of view.  The human being picks up the rock, puts it in a tumbler, and polishes it until it reveals itself to be a shining and beautiful stone.  The much slower energy system of which the rock is normally a part can also produce the same result, with the earth itself becoming the tumbler and its elements rubbing against the rock until a precious stone appears.  Yet that can take eons, whereas a human being - who knows how to move energy around consciously to produce a specific result - can produce the same outcome in a few hours.  This is called conscious creation.

And so, we see that all of Life is creative, with the more evolved elements of Life able to be consciously creative.  And, the more evolved a life form is, the more consciously it will create.  Finally, as Life forms become even more self-aware, they begin to access differing levels of consciousness, including the level of consciousness from which they, themselves, emerged.  This is known as Complete-Consciousness.

How is this Complete-Consciousness/Awareness achieved?...Awareness is the feeling of what you have known and experienced.  It is one thing to know something, it is quite another thing to experience it, and still another to feel it.  Only feeling produces Complete-Consciousness.  Knowing, alone, can produce only partial Consciousness.  Experience, alone, can produce only partial Consciousness.  You can know that you are loving, but when you experience yourself being loving, then your Consciousness is made complete through the living of that feeling.  Feeling is the language of the soul.  Awareness of the self is achieved through the Complete Feeling of yourself being Who You Really Are. 

As Consciousness is a twofold process, there are two paths by which it is reached.  A soul arrives at Complete Knowing along the path of the Spiritual World, and at Complete Experiencing along the path of the Physical World.  Both paths are needed, and that is why there are two worlds.  Put them together, and you have the perfect environment within which to create Complete Feeling, which produces Complete-Consciousness or Awareness.

However, do not seek to experience Who You Are through others in a superior way.  Allow others to seek Who They Are through you.  You cannot experience what you do not allow others to experience!

The grandest of all feelings is called love; as all feelings, ultimately, are outgrowths of love.  Love is a Complete Feeling.  This feeling of love, love for Life, produces a reversal of the separation phenomenon - the second pivotal moment: A disappearing of individual consciousness, a melting of it into the All in an experience that some Eastern mystics have called bliss/peace, or nirvaana.

Bliss/peace is the highest vibration of energy that is possible.  This is Heaven.  This is reunification with the One.  This moment of peace brings the process of Life to an end!  A sort of an end! 

This Cycle of Life is never-ending!  Why so? 

There are two main reasons.  First reason...Because once you realize Oneness, it is impossible to stay there.  Life is not a process discovery, but a process of creation.  The wonder of this creative process is that it is never ending.  An ending is a limitation and God's purpose is without such a boundary.  Should there come a moment in which you experience yourself in your fullest glory, you will in that instant imagine an ever greater glory to fulfill.  The more you are, the more you can become, and the more you can become, the more you can yet be.  There is nothing depressing about this never-ending cycle of Life, there is only joy.  Simply joy and more joy. 

Second reason...That Which Is cannot be, except in the space of That Which Is Not.  God cannot be, except in the space of Not God.  Even the total ecstasy cannot be experienced as "total ecstasy" unless something less than total ecstasy exists.  So, something less than the total ecstasy of total Oneness had to be - and continually has to be - created.

It is like this: Since most people like sex, what if God told you that beginning tomorrow you can have sex with every single person for whom you felt attraction and love?  Of course God will make sure that the other person feels the same attraction and love for you.  You will say wow, okay!  But you can do this with one condition only: You have to stop between each sex act.  You can't just go from one to the other without interruption.  So, in order to experience ecstasy of this kind of physical union, you have to also experience not being united sexually with someone, if only for a while.

Ecstasy would not be ecstasy were there not a time when there was no ecstasy.  This is as true with spiritual ecstasy as it is with physical. 

Therefore, if you knew and experienced God and nothing else, you would ultimately lose yourself in the mergence.  Because in the absence of What-You-Are-Not, What-You-Are...is Not.  You would no longer know you were having the mergence, because there would be no other knowing or experiencing with which to compare it.  You would not even know who you are.  You would lose your ability to differentiate, to individuate your self.

If there is a part of you that Knows you are Fully Aware, that means there must be another part of you that is observing you and measuring what you Know.  Yet what part of you is that, if you are already complete and full?  This must be a part of you of which you are not yet aware.  Were one to truly be Fully Aware, one would not be aware that one is Fully Aware, because who is the One who is "Aware" - and of what is that One Aware?  In deep sleep in which you are Fully Aware, you can never split yourself into two - one part knowing the other part!

This is in fact a Divine Dilemma and God solved it with the creation of that which was not God (or thought it was not).  God gave - and gives again, in every instant - a Part of Itself to the Lesser Experience of not Knowing Itself, so that the Rest of Itself can Know Itself as Who and What It Really Is!

This is why divinity never ends - It is eternal and limitless and It expands the moment Its Consciousness of Itself is complete.  This is God's nature!  God must expand for ever and ever.  It is an eternal Truth.  That is why it is so precise to define God as 'Brahman,' the ever expanding and/or limitless!

The soul will seek duality again to start to appreciate the Non-Duality.  This eternal cycle itself forms the Greatest Duality called Life!   The physical and astral worlds of opposites become the opposite of the world of God!  How marvelous!!

We, The Totality, are back into the Physical Realm splitting into three aspects or three bodies: Body (gross body), mind (subtle body) and the soul (causal body) - where mind is the balancing force.  And with the splitting, we are forced to forget Who We Are so that we can Experience Who We Are!  Complete-Consciousness is created by mind, which acts as a linkage, or balancing force, between the two extremities.

Why three aspects?...To create something the minimum number of parts required is three; less than three won't do.  We need an electrolyte between positive and negative to create electricity.  With three, creation and growth becomes possible.  Vedanthic tradition refers these three aspects or energies as thamas (inertia), rajas (movement) and sathva (balancing force).

In the phenomenon of experience (i.e., to be conscious of something), there is an 'observer', there is an 'observed' and there must also exist a linkage or a process that connects the observer to the observed which is called 'observing'.  In Life...soul is the observer, body/world is the observed and the mind is the observing medium which acts as a linkage between the two.  As an analogy - when a gold bracelet is melted and made a bangle, melting/destroying is called Shiva (thamas), new form of bangle/birthing is called Brahma (rajas) and the gold is called Vishnu (sathva) which is a non-changing common link that sustains and allows the process.

We see that a single Life offers in miniature what rebirth offers in 'maximature': Limitless opportunities to evolve!  This is the Process of Life in all its forms.  Scientists tell us that even the Universe is evolving.  Do you imagine that you are not?  It is the nature of Life to seek greater and greater expressions and experiences of Itself.

Rebirth becomes an important and powerful opportunity, a tool, a mechanism for the soul on its journey towards evolution.  The  moment of Absolute Awareness - that is, of Knowing and Experiencing and Feeling Completely Who You Really Are - is arrived at in steps or stages.  And each passage through a lifetime can be considered as one of those steps.

In Conclusion..........

There is no 'true' answer for 'why' we are here in the Physical Universe because Life is a Mystery.  Investigate the 'I' to whom this question is arising!

In God, contradictories merge into identities - a line becomes a circle and zero becomes infinity.  Answer is offered to mind as a compassionate concession for its temporary satisfaction.  Life in the Physical and Astral Realms is a tool, a device, a mechanism through which the soul apparently evolves.  The Totality of Your Being came into the Physical Realm, dividing itself into body (gross body), mind (subtle body), and soul (causal body), so that It might know, demonstrate and personify Itself in Its own experience - and thus - the divinity might be realized, in, through, and AS you.  You came into this life with nothing to learn—you have only to remember and demonstrate what you already know.

In other words, the mission of the individual soul is to grow in consciousness (not in size) expanding to duplicate Awareness of God - to realize that there is only One Soul.  The drops of water that make up the ocean do not expand to a point where they eventually become a billion huge oceans.  Rather, the drops become aware that they were never separate from the ocean at all!  They come to know that the drops are the ocean as waves are the water.  Individual soul (ego) is an illusion.

This process of soul evolution cannot fulfill itself in the Realm of the Spiritual alone.  In the Realm of the Spiritual you can notice everything that you have and are - right there in front of you.  It is like looking at the back-end programming on that CD chess game and seeing all the moves.  Yet seeing all the moves is not the same as making all the moves.  In order to make the moves, you have to play the game!  Remember: when you play the game, you have to forget Who You Are so that you could experience Who You Are!  Don't we all do that in our dreams?

The soul will seek duality again to start to appreciate the Non-Duality.  This cycle itself forms the Greatest Duality called Life!

Your Self tore apart - that created time and space - to look at the pieces of You to experience the magnificence of You in its every detail (Remember, only as a division you can experience the Whole).  You have been picking up the pieces ever since to solve the puzzle to realize that there is only one Piece!

Your soul has embarked on its sacred journey in a single identity eternally, while your body (gross body) and mind (subtle body) are configured in their present identity only on this particular 'leg', your current leg, of your eternal travels.

Thus: Life is God's Play, Play of Hide and Seek, the 'Leela', the Happening.  There is joy and more joy as there is only One of Us!  God is the only actor, individuals are just characters!  And, by the way, actor is also the act! 



- Sudhakar V Reddy

For Further Reading:

Esoterics of GOD-The Reality!  And How to Realize IT?
https://sudhakarvreddy.blogspot.com/2018/04/esoterics-of-god.html

Esoterics of the Seven Bodies of Man!
https://sudhakarvreddy.blogspot.com/2013/09/esoterics-of-seven-bodies-mysteries-of_2.html