Guest guest Posted December 21, 2009 Report Share Posted December 21, 2009 Usually, knowing involves assumed directionality. It proceeds from a center and moves out toward things in the environment. The center is assumed to be a " me. " Things are known, places, people, qualities, experiences. A huge paridigm shift occurs when knowing is understood as centerless. Knowing now does not proceed out towards (or away) from people, things, experiences. The knowing of the experiences as it is, and the experience, and the awareness of the experience are not divided - it is one knowing/being/experiencing. It is understandable how and why directional knowing gets formulated, and gets formulated across cultures and times. This has to do with memory and knowledge, which construct an assumed center. Note that time is directional in the same way that knowing is directional. This is not coincidence. It is the same movement,. It is a movement that attempts to form a unity, a coherence over time, based on survival and a self. Basic knowledge about pleasure and pain over time constructs a center, and part of cognitive development is to see that people are different, and each has a center - so that one person experiencing pain has a different center from someone experiencing pleasure at the same moment in time. Thus, the directional movement of time is associated with directionality in spatial knowing, which is associated with differentiating me-centers having various types of experiences in different locations. Understanding that there is no center to knowing, is the same thing as understanding that there is no directional time (apart from the located subjective knower), that there is no separable knower involved in human experiencing, and no space separating the knower, from what is known. Thus, understanding is radical in terms of socio-cultural norms involved in assuming centers for knowing processes that are different and involve different beings having different experiences. Understanding is the ending of any center based on personal experience or personal history, and therefore is the ending of the collective centering involved in maintaining a culture and shared sense of history and assumptions about located observers. - Dan - Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 21, 2009 Report Share Posted December 21, 2009 Nisargadatta , " dan330033 " <dan330033 wrote: > > Usually, knowing involves assumed directionality. > > It proceeds from a center and moves out toward things in the environment. > > The center is assumed to be a " me. " > > Things are known, places, people, qualities, experiences. > > A huge paridigm shift occurs when knowing is understood as centerless. > > Knowing now does not proceed out towards (or away) from people, things, experiences. > > The knowing of the experiences as it is, and the experience, and the awareness of the experience are not divided - it is one knowing/being/experiencing. > > It is understandable how and why directional knowing gets formulated, and gets formulated across cultures and times. > > This has to do with memory and knowledge, which construct an assumed center. Note that time is directional in the same way that knowing is directional. This is not coincidence. It is the same movement,. It is a movement that attempts to form a unity, a coherence over time, based on survival and a self. > > Basic knowledge about pleasure and pain over time constructs a center, and part of cognitive development is to see that people are different, and each has a center - so that one person experiencing pain has a different center from someone experiencing pleasure at the same moment in time. > > Thus, the directional movement of time is associated with directionality in spatial knowing, which is associated with differentiating me-centers having various types of experiences in different locations. > > Understanding that there is no center to knowing, is the same thing as understanding that there is no directional time (apart from the located subjective knower), that there is no separable knower involved in human experiencing, and no space separating the knower, from what is known. > > Thus, understanding is radical in terms of socio-cultural norms involved in assuming centers for knowing processes that are different and involve different beings having different experiences. > > Understanding is the ending of any center based on personal experience or personal history, and therefore is the ending of the collective centering involved in maintaining a culture and shared sense of history and assumptions about located observers. > > - Dan - yada yada yada. are you a day care center teacher? bet this stuff keeps the kids just a-groovin'. good for you AND the kids! you should have them put some neato posters on the wall.. for mommy and daddy " special visit " day. :-) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 21, 2009 Report Share Posted December 21, 2009 Em 21/12/2009 15:36, dan330033 < dan330033 > escreveu: Â Usually, knowing involves assumed directionality. It proceeds from a center and moves out toward things in the environment. The center is assumed to be a " me. " Things are known, places, people, qualities, experiences. A huge paridigm shift occurs when knowing is understood as centerless. Knowing now does not proceed out towards (or away) from people, things, experiences. The knowing of the experiences as it is, and the experience, and the awareness of the experience are not divided - it is one knowing/being/experiencing. It is understandable how and why directional knowing gets formulated, and gets formulated across cultures and times. This has to do with memory and knowledge, which construct an assumed center. Note that time is directional in the same way that knowing is directional. This is not coincidence. It is the same movement,. It is a movement that attempts to form a unity, a coherence over time, based on survival and a self. Basic knowledge about pleasure and pain over time constructs a center, and part of cognitive development is to see that people are different, and each has a center - so that one person experiencing pain has a different center from someone experiencing pleasure at the same moment in time. Thus, the directional movement of time is associated with directionality in spatial knowing, which is associated with differentiating me-centers having various types of experiences in different locations. Understanding that there is no center to knowing, is the same thing as understanding that there is no directional time (apart from the located subjective knower), that there is no separable knower involved in human experiencing, and no space separating the knower, from what is known. Thus, understanding is radical in terms of socio-cultural norms involved in assuming centers for knowing processes that are different and involve different beings having different experiences. Understanding is the ending of any center based on personal experience or personal history, and therefore is the ending of the collective centering involved in maintaining a culture and shared sense of history and assumptions about located observers. - Dan - Centered knowing is about things in time, involves the assumed knowledge of dimensionality while centerless knowing is analogous to dimensionless ever-expanding seeing. -geo- Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 21, 2009 Report Share Posted December 21, 2009 Nisargadatta , geo <inandor wrote: > > > > > > Em 21/12/2009 15:36, dan330033 < dan330033 > escreveu: > > > > > > > > > Â > > > Usually, knowing involves assumed directionality. > > > > It proceeds from a center and moves out toward things in the environment. > > > > The center is assumed to be a " me. " > > > > Things are known, places, people, qualities, experiences. > > > > A huge paridigm shift occurs when knowing is understood as centerless. > > > > Knowing now does not proceed out towards (or away) from people, things, experiences. > > > > The knowing of the experiences as it is, and the experience, and the awareness of the experience are not divided - it is one knowing/being/experiencing. > > > > It is understandable how and why directional knowing gets formulated, and gets formulated across cultures and times. > > > > This has to do with memory and knowledge, which construct an assumed center. Note that time is directional in the same way that knowing is directional. This is not coincidence. It is the same movement,. It is a movement that attempts to form a unity, a coherence over time, based on survival and a self. > > > > Basic knowledge about pleasure and pain over time constructs a center, and part of cognitive development is to see that people are different, and each has a center - so that one person experiencing pain has a different center from someone experiencing pleasure at the same moment in time. > > > > Thus, the directional movement of time is associated with directionality in spatial knowing, which is associated with differentiating me-centers having various types of experiences in different locations. > > > > Understanding that there is no center to knowing, is the same thing as understanding that there is no directional time (apart from the located subjective knower), that there is no separable knower involved in human experiencing, and no space separating the knower, from what is known. > > > > Thus, understanding is radical in terms of socio-cultural norms involved in assuming centers for knowing processes that are different and involve different beings having different experiences. > > > > Understanding is the ending of any center based on personal experience or personal history, and therefore is the ending of the collective centering involved in maintaining a culture and shared sense of history and assumptions about located observers. > > > > - Dan - > > Centered knowing is about things in time, involves the assumed knowledge of dimensionality while centerless knowing is analogous to dimensionless ever-expanding seeing. > -geo- what is time? i forgot. ..b b.b. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 21, 2009 Report Share Posted December 21, 2009 Nisargadatta , " dan330033 " <dan330033 wrote: > > Understanding is the ending of any center based on personal experience or personal history, and therefore is the ending of the collective centering involved in maintaining a culture and shared sense of history and assumptions about located observers. > > - Dan - > Indeed. It is 'outside the human condition', in the sense that the human condition was never 'out there' in others, but was always 'here'. Thus, there is no 'human condition' involving many, having to do with 'others out there'. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 21, 2009 Report Share Posted December 21, 2009 Nisargadatta , geo <inandor wrote: > Centered knowing is about things in time, involves the assumed knowledge of dimensionality while centerless knowing is analogous to dimensionless ever-expanding seeing. > -geo- Expanding? There is nothing to expand into. The barrier to understanding, to the centerless knowing that is so this instant, is fear. Fear of death, loss, incapacity, fear of not having anything, fear of having no place of refuge - no security, no existence. The barrier is only the attempt to maintain a location for your knowing. The attempt to have " me. " The " me " that would know anything at all about centerless knowing. There is nothing to know about it. One faces one's fear fully, and understands, this is all I am, this fear. There is no " me " other than this fear-contraction. And this fear-contraction has no understanding at all of centerless knowing - and never will. - Dan - Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 21, 2009 Report Share Posted December 21, 2009 Nisargadatta , " Tim G. " <fewtch wrote: > > Nisargadatta , " dan330033 " <dan330033@> wrote: > > > > > Understanding is the ending of any center based on personal experience or personal history, and therefore is the ending of the collective centering involved in maintaining a culture and shared sense of history and assumptions about located observers. > > > > - Dan - > > > > Indeed. > > It is 'outside the human condition', in the sense that the human condition was never 'out there' in others, but was always 'here'. > > Thus, there is no 'human condition' involving many, having to do with 'others out there'. if it's all inside you.. why not keep it to yourself? why try and parade such tripe before imaginary others? this is unfitting for a god of your own making like yourself. it's almost inhuman to act so human like..conditionally speaking. oh lordy you two boys like to play around. it's all part of the internal 'god condition' methinks then. but that's just from the 'human condition' standpoint. oh man! this shit is great! you dudes belong on the tonight show with Conan O'Brien.. billed as: Brere Bunnies in conversation. LOL! ..b b.b. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 21, 2009 Report Share Posted December 21, 2009 Nisargadatta , " dan330033 " <dan330033 wrote: > > > > Nisargadatta , geo <inandor@> wrote: > > > Centered knowing is about things in time, involves the assumed knowledge of dimensionality while centerless knowing is analogous to dimensionless ever-expanding seeing. > > -geo- > > Expanding? > > There is nothing to expand into. > > The barrier to understanding, to the centerless knowing that is so this instant, is fear. > > Fear of death, loss, incapacity, fear of not having anything, fear of having no place of refuge - no security, no existence. > > The barrier is only the attempt to maintain a location for your knowing. > > The attempt to have " me. " > > The " me " that would know anything at all about centerless knowing. > > There is nothing to know about it. > > One faces one's fear fully, and understands, this is all I am, this fear. > > There is no " me " other than this fear-contraction. > > And this fear-contraction has no understanding at all of centerless knowing - and never will. > > - Dan - :-) two bright lads.. talking with each other about how each other is not there. fear-free in the " centerlessness " of bullshit " flowingness " . and thus and therefore we have not " Sleepless in Seattle " ... but rather..and more in tune with " Truthfullnessing " .(LOL!) Me-less in Nowhere. but brain dead nonetheless. :-) ..b b.b. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 21, 2009 Report Share Posted December 21, 2009 Em 21/12/2009 16:38, dan330033 < dan330033 > escreveu: Â Nisargadatta , geo <inandor wrote: > Centered knowing is about things in time, involves the assumed knowledge of dimensionality while centerless knowing is analogous to dimensionless ever-expanding seeing. > -geo- Expanding? There is nothing to expand into. The barrier to understanding, to the centerless knowing that is so this instant, is fear. Fear of death, loss, incapacity, fear of not having anything, fear of having no place of refuge - no security, no existence. The barrier is only the attempt to maintain a location for your knowing. The attempt to have " me. " The " me " that would know anything at all about centerless knowing. There is nothing to know about it. One faces one's fear fully, and understands, this is all I am, this fear. There is no " me " other than this fear-contraction. And this fear-contraction has no understanding at all of centerless knowing - and never will. - Dan - Yes....analogous. I suppose this expression crossed my mind because of the apparent ever-receeding-ness of awareness when one tries to contemplate/understand (in vain - instead of being it) its nature. -geo- Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 22, 2009 Report Share Posted December 22, 2009 Nisargadatta , " Tim G. " <fewtch wrote: > > Nisargadatta , " dan330033 " <dan330033@> wrote: > > > > > Understanding is the ending of any center based on personal experience or personal history, and therefore is the ending of the collective centering involved in maintaining a culture and shared sense of history and assumptions about located observers. > > > > - Dan - > > > > Indeed. > > It is 'outside the human condition', in the sense that the human condition was never 'out there' in others, but was always 'here'. > > Thus, there is no 'human condition' involving many, having to do with 'others out there'. True. So with no inside from which to know what is outside, the condition of having relationships and personal experiences dissolves into the conditionless being. -- Dan -- Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 22, 2009 Report Share Posted December 22, 2009 Nisargadatta , geo <inandor wrote: > Yes....analogous. I suppose this expression crossed my mind because of the apparent ever-receeding-ness of awareness when one tries to contemplate/understand (in vain - instead of being it) its nature. > -geo- This is the moment of one's own death. The moment of understanding. The point at which death cannot be deferred. Cannot be located at some other point of time. People prattle on about the eternal. But the eternal is only what remains, when everything that can die, dies. And anything born, anything with a beginning, ends. Anything with continuity over time, ends. - Dan - Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 22, 2009 Report Share Posted December 22, 2009 Nisargadatta , geo <inandor wrote: > > > > > > Em 21/12/2009 16:38, dan330033 < dan330033 > escreveu: > > > > > > > > > Â > > > > > > > Nisargadatta , geo <inandor@> wrote: > > > > > Centered knowing is about things in time, involves the assumed knowledge of dimensionality while centerless knowing is analogous to dimensionless ever-expanding seeing. > > > -geo- > > > > Expanding? > > > > There is nothing to expand into. > > > > The barrier to understanding, to the centerless knowing that is so this instant, is fear. > > > > Fear of death, loss, incapacity, fear of not having anything, fear of having no place of refuge - no security, no existence. > > > > The barrier is only the attempt to maintain a location for your knowing. > > > > The attempt to have " me. " > > > > The " me " that would know anything at all about centerless knowing. > > > > There is nothing to know about it. > > > > One faces one's fear fully, and understands, this is all I am, this fear. > > > > There is no " me " other than this fear-contraction. > > > > And this fear-contraction has no understanding at all of centerless knowing - and never will. > > > > - Dan - > > Yes....analogous. I suppose this expression crossed my mind because of the apparent ever-receeding-ness of awareness when one tries to contemplate/understand (in vain - instead of being it) its nature. > -geo- you're obviously trying to hard. you can't get to the there that is here by trying. but.. brave on little soldier! understandingness in beingness is just what it isness.... apparentlyness i guessness. LOL! ..b b.b. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 22, 2009 Report Share Posted December 22, 2009 Nisargadatta , " dan330033 " <dan330033 wrote: > > > > Nisargadatta , " Tim G. " <fewtch@> wrote: > > > > Nisargadatta , " dan330033 " <dan330033@> wrote: > > > > > > > > Understanding is the ending of any center based on personal experience or personal history, and therefore is the ending of the collective centering involved in maintaining a culture and shared sense of history and assumptions about located observers. > > > > > > - Dan - > > > > > > > Indeed. > > > > It is 'outside the human condition', in the sense that the human condition was never 'out there' in others, but was always 'here'. > > > > Thus, there is no 'human condition' involving many, having to do with 'others out there'. > > True. > > So with no inside from which to know what is outside, the condition of having relationships and personal experiences dissolves into the conditionless being. > > -- Dan -- and then.. and then... OMG! when you've finally ARRIVED like dabby... you write about it. Out from the Center! ....dissolvingness. LOL! ..b b.b. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 22, 2009 Report Share Posted December 22, 2009 Nisargadatta , " dan330033 " <dan330033 wrote: > > > > Nisargadatta , geo <inandor@> wrote: > > > Yes....analogous. I suppose this expression crossed my mind because of the apparent ever-receeding-ness of awareness when one tries to contemplate/understand (in vain - instead of being it) its nature. > > -geo- > > This is the moment of one's own death. > > The moment of understanding. > > The point at which death cannot be deferred. > > Cannot be located at some other point of time. > > People prattle on about the eternal. > > But the eternal is only what remains, when everything that can die, dies. > > And anything born, anything with a beginning, ends. > > Anything with continuity over time, ends. > > - Dan - oh! the depth.. the vastness.. the unbelievable ridiculousness of it all! it seems that it never ends this endingness you speak of swami! sock it to'em dabbo! :-) ..b b.b. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 22, 2009 Report Share Posted December 22, 2009 Nisargadatta , " dan330033 " <dan330033 wrote: > > > > Nisargadatta , geo <inandor@> wrote: > > > Yes....analogous. I suppose this expression crossed my mind because of the apparent ever-receeding-ness of awareness when one tries to contemplate/understand (in vain - instead of being it) its nature. > > -geo- > > This is the moment of one's own death. > > The moment of understanding. > > The point at which death cannot be deferred. > > Cannot be located at some other point of time. > > People prattle on about the eternal. > > But the eternal is only what remains, when everything that can die, dies. > > And anything born, anything with a beginning, ends. > > Anything with continuity over time, ends. > > - Dan - > " The soul comes to the end of its long journey and, naked and alone, draws near to the divine. " -- from the movie 'fearless' Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 22, 2009 Report Share Posted December 22, 2009 Nisargadatta , " Tim G. " <fewtch wrote: > > Nisargadatta , " dan330033 " <dan330033@> wrote: > > > > > > > > Nisargadatta , geo <inandor@> wrote: > > > > > Yes....analogous. I suppose this expression crossed my mind because of the apparent ever-receeding-ness of awareness when one tries to contemplate/understand (in vain - instead of being it) its nature. > > > -geo- > > > > This is the moment of one's own death. > > > > The moment of understanding. > > > > The point at which death cannot be deferred. > > > > Cannot be located at some other point of time. > > > > People prattle on about the eternal. > > > > But the eternal is only what remains, when everything that can die, dies. > > > > And anything born, anything with a beginning, ends. > > > > Anything with continuity over time, ends. > > > > - Dan - > > > > " The soul comes to the end of its long journey and, naked and alone, draws near to the divine. " -- from the movie 'fearless' > The Greek word 'psyche' means 'soul'. Werner Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 22, 2009 Report Share Posted December 22, 2009 Nisargadatta , " Tim G. " <fewtch wrote: > > Nisargadatta , " dan330033 " <dan330033@> wrote: > > > > > > > > Nisargadatta , geo <inandor@> wrote: > > > > > Yes....analogous. I suppose this expression crossed my mind because of the apparent ever-receeding-ness of awareness when one tries to contemplate/understand (in vain - instead of being it) its nature. > > > -geo- > > > > This is the moment of one's own death. > > > > The moment of understanding. > > > > The point at which death cannot be deferred. > > > > Cannot be located at some other point of time. > > > > People prattle on about the eternal. > > > > But the eternal is only what remains, when everything that can die, dies. > > > > And anything born, anything with a beginning, ends. > > > > Anything with continuity over time, ends. > > > > - Dan - > > > > " The soul comes to the end of its long journey and, naked and alone, draws near to the divine. " -- from the movie 'fearless' what journey? what soul? what divine? what nonsense! anyway..John Wren Lewis (though also screwed up).. reviewed the movie better: Fearless -A movie masterpiece about transcendence by John Wren-Lewis ………….This knot intrinsicate / Of life at once untie!' Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra 'All changed, changed utterly; / A terrible beauty is born.' W. B. Yeats, Easter 1916 Perhaps the best evidence that Peter Weir's film Fearless was a masterpiece is that airline companies haven't got together to buy up and destroy all copies, lest the public be put off flying forever by its vivid re-enactment of a jetliner crash from a passenger's eye view. This occurs not just once in the film but three times, as the hero, Max (superbly acted by Jeff Bridges), flashbacks to the events that occurred when his flight home from Texas to San Francisco crashed somewhere in prairie-country. The wreckage we see in the film's opening shots is gruesome enough, but because Max is meant to be discovering progressively more in these flashbacks about what happened in the crash itself, each rerun shows progressively more of the howling destruction going on all around him as the plane breaks up, with no punches pulled and no detail spared. Yet far from aggravating fear of dying, the final effect is the absolute reverse. Weir has pulled of the incredible achievement of enabling viewers actually to feel for themselves how at such moments human consciousness can transcend fear, and indeed mortality itself, by moving out of time. So effective is it, I even wonder if the film wouldn't be positively reassuring as in-flight entertainment on a bumpy run -or perhaps that would be going too far! The same cautionary thought makes me hesitate to press anyone with a really weak heart to see it, though I've not heard of any casualties in cinemas yet. But readers of this publication should be more prepared than most to envision what are, after all, well-known facts about death in air disasters—so, having entered my caveat, I'll go ahead and urge you to catch Fearless on the big screen if you still can when this article comes out. If that's impossible, get a video without delay, and sit as close to the screen as you comfortably can when you watch it—because to get the full 'feeling-message' from the film's climax you need to be surrounded by the vision and sound. Then, if you've really gone along with Weir's enormously skillful lead-up in the rest of the film, and can let yourself experience the roaring, screaming disintegration with Max himself, I believe you'll find a meaning you've never dreamed of in Shakespeare's now hackneyed statement that love 'looks on tempests and is never shaken'. I'll admit unashamedly that tears were streaming down my face as I watched it, for it recaptured for me the most important experience of my life, when I myself came to the brink in 1983 and discovered, in the moment of time-stop, that human consciousness is grounded in the same fundamental energy that moves the sun and other stars and tempests too—an energy for which 'love' is the only word we have, though its common sentimental associations are hopelessly misleading. And from quizzing other viewers who have not had the experience personally, I believe Weir's artistic genius has succeeded in the almost impossible task of getting across even to 'outsiders' the fundamental feeling of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs), and why they change lives. Earlier movies on the subject, which have tried to re-enact scenes of people floating up out of their bodies and moving down tunnels to heavenly light, fall so far short of capturing the life-changing feeling that I think they deserve the Monty python send-up in The Meaning of Life. (There, the middle-class couples who have died of food-poisoning float out of their bodies into 'astral' forms, drive down the tunnel in astral versions of their family cars, and find that the light at the tunnel's end is a luxury hotel, with a Hollywood-style Grand Christmas Cabaret perpetually in progress " especially for you! " ) Moreover it's not just lack of feeling in those feeble re-enactment movies that sells the reality of NDEs short. The feeling they do convey actually does violence to what I believe to be the most significant feature of the experience, for they suggest going away from this world and this life to find the heavenly light and love in some other realm, whereas the life-changes that have impressed even hard-nosed skeptics into taking NDEs seriously, happen because " experiencers " find their eyes have been opened to light and love right here, in the world to which they return on resuscitation. The genius of Weir's film is that he starts from this fact and makes it the main focus of his story; he builds up to the time-stopping climax as the explanation of the extraordinary way Max has been changed by what seems, at the beginning, like nothing more than the shock of relief at having survived. From interviews with Weir in the Australian media, I gather he hasn't himself had an NDE, and I know nothing about the author of the novel on which the screenplay was based, but between them the folk responsible for Fearless have managed to capture the feelings of a Near-Death Experience in an extraordinary way. For starters, it's still not at all widely realised that all the classic experiences which make the headlines when people are resuscitated from the brink of clinical death - disappearance of fear and pain, feelings of blissful peace, slowing-down or total stoppage of time, even the famous tunnel and encounter with celestial beings and heavenly light -can also occur to people who, like Max, narrowly avoid death without being sick or damaged in any way. In fact one of the very first serious studies in this whole area was made by a Swiss alpine climber named Albert Heim back in the 1890s, who fell off a cliff to what seemed like certain death, only to land on soft snow with very minor injuries. As he went down, time seemed to become infinitely extended, fear vanished, and he experienced wonderful colors and music, plus a panoramic review of his life right from childhood, with a sense that even his nastiest acts were now somehow accepted without being in any way whitewashed. He was moved to write a scientific paper about it when he found many other mountaineers had similar experiences, but this received little if any attention outside Switzerland, and wasn't translated into English until Professor Russell Noyes of the University of Iowa did so in the 1970s, after Raymond Moody had begun to draw attention to NDEs experienced in clinical situations. Even then very little attention was paid to this kind of Near-Death Experience, because journalists -and for that matter most professional researchers -were concerned mainly with finding possible evidence of a soul that could survive the body' s death, which meant concentrating attention on people who might actually have been dead for a short time, as in the movie Flatliners. Australian sociologist Allan Kellahear, now Professor of palliative care at La Trobe University, played a major role in drawing attention to the similarity between clinical NDEs and the experiences of people in crisis -situations like shipwrecks and air disasters. In Fearless, however, this is one of the major plot lines. The movie's climax is the revelation that Max' s strange post-crash behavior -an apparently total loss of fear, disappearance of a long-standing allergy, an aversion to lying even for `good causes' , estrangement from his wife and son while feeling great love for another crash survivor who is deranged at the loss of her baby -are due to his having experienced in the crash the same 'moment of death' that recurs weeks later when he comes close to clinical death through the return of his allergy. The moral ambiguity of Max' s post-crash behavior, which is the film's main plot line, brings out another feature of NDEs that doesn't get much discussed. Here again, researchers in the 1970s and early 1980s had an agenda that led them to bypass important facts. They were anxious to establish that NDEs were not just hallucinations produced by disturbed brains, so they were at pains to demonstrate, by means of interviews and psychological tests, that experiencers showed no signs of mental sickness, but were actually living healthier, more creative lives than before. The impression created was one of ' all sweetness and light' , until in 1988 housewife researcher Phyllis Atwater of Idaho blew the whistle in her book Coming Back to Life, by showing that healthier and more creative living often involved upsetting conventional domestic and social apple-carts. Yes, " experiencers " do indeed come back with new spiritual drive and urge towards a better world, but that often means preferring poverty to dull jobs that would keep families in the style to which they' re accustomed, helping strangers rather than going to neighborhood cocktail parties, and looking at scenery for hours instead of taking Junior to Little League. Fearless explores this issue with enormous sensitivity, showing how Max' s changed behavior -sometimes generous beyond all expectation, but sometimes apparently foolhardy or even cruel—springs from his inability to countenance the compromises with fearful self-protection that are involved in even the `happiest' marriages and the most `regular guy' lifestyles. In that timeless moment of the crash, he has experienced the wonder of infinite Aliveness which gets continually blocked out in so-called normal life by fearful evasion of any facts we' ve been taught to find unpleasant. As a consequence, he rescues several other passengers from the wreck in a way which they and observers consider heroic, though to him it really is, as he insists, nothing special. Yet the same ' fearlessness' later leads him to take risks that could harm people, both physical risks like crashing a car to jerk one of his fellow survivors out of irrational guilt about the fact that her baby was killed and she lived, and social risks like challenging the routine evasions practiced by insurance agents getting the best pay-out for crash victims. For Weir, however, the exploration of these moral ambiguities is more than just a human drama; what makes the film a work of genius rather than just a fine movie is the way he uses the story of Max' s perplexing behavior to introduce viewers gradually, step by step, to the experience of timelessness at the climax. First, he joins some of those earlier makers of NDE re-enactments in employing slow motion photography, just to get us used to the idea of time-sense being changed. In Max' s first and second flashbacks to the crash, we see how his rescue of other passengers was indeed no heroic defiance of fear but something he can do quite naturally because time has slowed down for him, enabling him to see how to avoid falling debris, etc. For me, this echoes a story of my Queensland friend Jack, who performed a similar rescue of a mate from a blazing tank in World War 2, and is equally anxious to repudiate any idea that he was heroic. Such experiences are by no means uncommon, even outside NDE literature. However, there' s an added twist in Weir' s presentation of the rescue scene which I wonder if I may perhaps be the only viewer to appreciate. As the plane breaks up all around, Max picks up a baby and then calls out, to the passengers who are still relatively unhurt, " Follow me towards the light! " This apparently straightforward directive about how they can get safely out of the wreckage takes on highly symbolic significance when, in the final climactic flashback to the scene, the long body of the plane through which Max leads them becomes identified with the tunnel of his allergy-NDE. Since he clearly wasn't asking the others to follow him to the light of heaven beyond the grave, but taking them back to life on earth, Weir seems to be anticipating my own hypothesis (which I' ve never seen advanced by anyone else, and haven't yet published outside Australia) that the tunnel-to-the light-phenomenon in NDEs is a discovery of 'heavenliness' as the true nature of this world when it' s perceived without the veil of fear. And since it is timeless heavenliness, the question of whether it continues after physical death is entirely secondary. Weir keeps giving hints of Max' s ' heavenly' experience of the world all through the film -for example, in the way he finds the buildings of San Francisco fascinating when others don' t even notice them, and is truly at a loss to understand how his fellow-survivor (the girl whose baby was killed) fails to see what he sees. Another example is his description of being free from society' s entanglements because death brings freedom and he feels he's already dead. Some notable statements to this effect have been made by real-life Near-Death " Experiencers " : One that comes most immediately to mind is the great pioneer of humanistic and trans-personal psychology, Abraham Maslow, who described the blissful calm he experienced, in the two years he lived on after his near-fatal heart attack in 1968, as ' my posthumous life'. But here again, Weir introduces a twist which resonates with my own experience in a way I' ve not seen mentioned anywhere else in NDE literature. Max tells the girl survivor as they walk through the San Francisco streets that they' re invisible to the crowds, ' because we're ghosts' . I dreamed exactly that on Good Friday of 1984, not long after I' d arrived in Sydney in the wake of the NDE; in the dream most people couldn't see me because I was a ghost. It was such a remarkable dream that I published a paper about it in an American psychological journal, but I can' t imagine it was read by anyone involved in making Farless. The most interesting thing of all for me about the film as a whole, however, is the way it explores what I have come to see as the $64,000 question -why is it that something like a close brush with death is normally needed for the heavenliness of the world to be experienced? (And even that only works in a minority of cases!) The film' s answer, if I understand it right, seems to be that the natural biological fear-response seems to have gotten out of hand in the human species, to the point where it governs the whole organization of social life down to the minutest detail, blocking out aliveness in the process. For a fortunate minority, coming close to death unravels the knot, but then we have the problem of finding out how to organize practical affairs with fear as life' s servant rather than its master, a problem about which even the world' s greatest mystics and religious teachers have left us only very partial blueprints. NDEs are often spoken of as rebirths; mine felt more like a resurrection, because I was `reconstructed' with all my past experience, but with the fear-response now operating ' to one side' , as it were, so that for most of the time I can heed it rationally but not be run by it. For Max, however, the process seems to have been incomplete, in that he doesn't seem able to handle fear at all without it taking over and removing his pearl of great price, which of course he won' t allow. I find in his story a quite uncanny parallel, in modern secular Western terms, to what happened in real-life history at the beginning of the last century to the South Indian sage Ramana Maharshi who is widely acknowledged as probably the most truly ' enlightened' mystic of recent centuries. Though not at all given to religious life, he came to recognize in his late teens that fear was in some fundamental way keeping him from really living, so he put himself through what might be described as an artificial NDE, by lying on the floor and imagining dying. He emerged from it completely aware of the heavenly aliveness in all being, but quite unable to cope with routine living along the line of time. Because he lived in Hindu culture, where such consciousness-changes are understood and catered for, he was promptly surrounded by devotees who looked after him almost like a child for seventeen years, simply for the privilege of being in his presence and hearing what few observations he chose to make about reality. Towards the end of that time he began to have anoxial fits, and after one of these he suddenly emerged fully able to cope with practical living, showing delightful ease and simplicity and astonishing efficiency -the state known in Hindu philosophy as sahaj samadhi. It was as if the resurrection-process had only gone halfway with his artificial NDE, but now had completed itself. I can' t help wondering if the film isn't saying that Max too experienced only a `half -resurrection' process because in the crash he, like Ramana, didn't actually come to the point of real death. In the film' s climax, his inability to cope with society' s fear-organized conventions does indeed cause fear to overwhelm him, eventually making his allergy return and really take him to the dying-point -and when his wife saves him by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, he comes back out of that NDE tunnel saying, " I' m alive! " in an entirely new tone of voice, and with a new look of 'solid' aliveness which I find a triumph both of acting and direction. Are we to conclude that now the resurrection process has gone to term, leaving him able to be in the world of compromise without being compromised? And if so, will he stay with his wife and child or not? I don't know, and maybe when you see the film you'll have your own views about what its ending means. Meantime, I hope I' ve said enough to make clear that it' s not to be missed on any account. John Wren-Lewis Literary Footnote The remarkable story of Abraham Maslow and his ' post-mortem life' is told in The Right to be Human by New York psychologist Ed Hoffman, one of the best biographies I' ve ever come across. Ramana Maharshi's story can be found in Sir Arthur Osborne's The Teachings of Ramana Mabarshi. A good introduction to NDE research, which incidentally is very clear about the way they often disrupt marriages, is Cherie Sutherland's Transformed by the Light, and it gives all the necessary references for you to read further. Allan Kellahear's recent book of personal reflections Eternity and Me, makes delightful reading and is published in Australia by Hill of Content Publishing in Melbourne. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ a note: if your going to insist on reading bullshit.. it just might as well be good bullshit. ..b b.b. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 22, 2009 Report Share Posted December 22, 2009 Nisargadatta , " Tim G. " <fewtch wrote: > > Nisargadatta , " dan330033 " <dan330033@> wrote: > > > > > > > > Nisargadatta , geo <inandor@> wrote: > > > > > Yes....analogous. I suppose this expression crossed my mind because of the apparent ever-receeding-ness of awareness when one tries to contemplate/understand (in vain - instead of being it) its nature. > > > -geo- > > > > This is the moment of one's own death. > > > > The moment of understanding. > > > > The point at which death cannot be deferred. > > > > Cannot be located at some other point of time. > > > > People prattle on about the eternal. > > > > But the eternal is only what remains, when everything that can die, dies. > > > > And anything born, anything with a beginning, ends. > > > > Anything with continuity over time, ends. > > > > - Dan - > > > > " The soul comes to the end of its long journey and, naked and alone, draws near to the divine. " -- from the movie 'fearless' what journey? what soul? what divine? what nonsense! anyway..John Wren Lewis (though also screwed up).. reviewed the movie better: Fearless -A movie masterpiece about transcendence by John Wren-Lewis ………….This knot intrinsicate / Of life at once untie!' Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra 'All changed, changed utterly; / A terrible beauty is born.' W. B. Yeats, Easter 1916 Perhaps the best evidence that Peter Weir's film Fearless was a masterpiece is that airline companies haven't got together to buy up and destroy all copies, lest the public be put off flying forever by its vivid re-enactment of a jetliner crash from a passenger's eye view. This occurs not just once in the film but three times, as the hero, Max (superbly acted by Jeff Bridges), flashbacks to the events that occurred when his flight home from Texas to San Francisco crashed somewhere in prairie-country. The wreckage we see in the film's opening shots is gruesome enough, but because Max is meant to be discovering progressively more in these flashbacks about what happened in the crash itself, each rerun shows progressively more of the howling destruction going on all around him as the plane breaks up, with no punches pulled and no detail spared. Yet far from aggravating fear of dying, the final effect is the absolute reverse. Weir has pulled of the incredible achievement of enabling viewers actually to feel for themselves how at such moments human consciousness can transcend fear, and indeed mortality itself, by moving out of time. So effective is it, I even wonder if the film wouldn't be positively reassuring as in-flight entertainment on a bumpy run -or perhaps that would be going too far! The same cautionary thought makes me hesitate to press anyone with a really weak heart to see it, though I've not heard of any casualties in cinemas yet. But readers of this publication should be more prepared than most to envision what are, after all, well-known facts about death in air disasters—so, having entered my caveat, I'll go ahead and urge you to catch Fearless on the big screen if you still can when this article comes out. If that's impossible, get a video without delay, and sit as close to the screen as you comfortably can when you watch it—because to get the full 'feeling-message' from the film's climax you need to be surrounded by the vision and sound. Then, if you've really gone along with Weir's enormously skillful lead-up in the rest of the film, and can let yourself experience the roaring, screaming disintegration with Max himself, I believe you'll find a meaning you've never dreamed of in Shakespeare's now hackneyed statement that love 'looks on tempests and is never shaken'. I'll admit unashamedly that tears were streaming down my face as I watched it, for it recaptured for me the most important experience of my life, when I myself came to the brink in 1983 and discovered, in the moment of time-stop, that human consciousness is grounded in the same fundamental energy that moves the sun and other stars and tempests too—an energy for which 'love' is the only word we have, though its common sentimental associations are hopelessly misleading. And from quizzing other viewers who have not had the experience personally, I believe Weir's artistic genius has succeeded in the almost impossible task of getting across even to 'outsiders' the fundamental feeling of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs), and why they change lives. Earlier movies on the subject, which have tried to re-enact scenes of people floating up out of their bodies and moving down tunnels to heavenly light, fall so far short of capturing the life-changing feeling that I think they deserve the Monty python send-up in The Meaning of Life. (There, the middle-class couples who have died of food-poisoning float out of their bodies into 'astral' forms, drive down the tunnel in astral versions of their family cars, and find that the light at the tunnel's end is a luxury hotel, with a Hollywood-style Grand Christmas Cabaret perpetually in progress " especially for you! " ) Moreover it's not just lack of feeling in those feeble re-enactment movies that sells the reality of NDEs short. The feeling they do convey actually does violence to what I believe to be the most significant feature of the experience, for they suggest going away from this world and this life to find the heavenly light and love in some other realm, whereas the life-changes that have impressed even hard-nosed skeptics into taking NDEs seriously, happen because " experiencers " find their eyes have been opened to light and love right here, in the world to which they return on resuscitation. The genius of Weir's film is that he starts from this fact and makes it the main focus of his story; he builds up to the time-stopping climax as the explanation of the extraordinary way Max has been changed by what seems, at the beginning, like nothing more than the shock of relief at having survived. From interviews with Weir in the Australian media, I gather he hasn't himself had an NDE, and I know nothing about the author of the novel on which the screenplay was based, but between them the folk responsible for Fearless have managed to capture the feelings of a Near-Death Experience in an extraordinary way. For starters, it's still not at all widely realised that all the classic experiences which make the headlines when people are resuscitated from the brink of clinical death - disappearance of fear and pain, feelings of blissful peace, slowing-down or total stoppage of time, even the famous tunnel and encounter with celestial beings and heavenly light -can also occur to people who, like Max, narrowly avoid death without being sick or damaged in any way. In fact one of the very first serious studies in this whole area was made by a Swiss alpine climber named Albert Heim back in the 1890s, who fell off a cliff to what seemed like certain death, only to land on soft snow with very minor injuries. As he went down, time seemed to become infinitely extended, fear vanished, and he experienced wonderful colors and music, plus a panoramic review of his life right from childhood, with a sense that even his nastiest acts were now somehow accepted without being in any way whitewashed. He was moved to write a scientific paper about it when he found many other mountaineers had similar experiences, but this received little if any attention outside Switzerland, and wasn't translated into English until Professor Russell Noyes of the University of Iowa did so in the 1970s, after Raymond Moody had begun to draw attention to NDEs experienced in clinical situations. Even then very little attention was paid to this kind of Near-Death Experience, because journalists -and for that matter most professional researchers -were concerned mainly with finding possible evidence of a soul that could survive the body' s death, which meant concentrating attention on people who might actually have been dead for a short time, as in the movie Flatliners. Australian sociologist Allan Kellahear, now Professor of palliative care at La Trobe University, played a major role in drawing attention to the similarity between clinical NDEs and the experiences of people in crisis -situations like shipwrecks and air disasters. In Fearless, however, this is one of the major plot lines. The movie's climax is the revelation that Max' s strange post-crash behavior -an apparently total loss of fear, disappearance of a long-standing allergy, an aversion to lying even for `good causes' , estrangement from his wife and son while feeling great love for another crash survivor who is deranged at the loss of her baby -are due to his having experienced in the crash the same 'moment of death' that recurs weeks later when he comes close to clinical death through the return of his allergy. The moral ambiguity of Max' s post-crash behavior, which is the film's main plot line, brings out another feature of NDEs that doesn't get much discussed. Here again, researchers in the 1970s and early 1980s had an agenda that led them to bypass important facts. They were anxious to establish that NDEs were not just hallucinations produced by disturbed brains, so they were at pains to demonstrate, by means of interviews and psychological tests, that experiencers showed no signs of mental sickness, but were actually living healthier, more creative lives than before. The impression created was one of ' all sweetness and light' , until in 1988 housewife researcher Phyllis Atwater of Idaho blew the whistle in her book Coming Back to Life, by showing that healthier and more creative living often involved upsetting conventional domestic and social apple-carts. Yes, " experiencers " do indeed come back with new spiritual drive and urge towards a better world, but that often means preferring poverty to dull jobs that would keep families in the style to which they' re accustomed, helping strangers rather than going to neighborhood cocktail parties, and looking at scenery for hours instead of taking Junior to Little League. Fearless explores this issue with enormous sensitivity, showing how Max' s changed behavior -sometimes generous beyond all expectation, but sometimes apparently foolhardy or even cruel—springs from his inability to countenance the compromises with fearful self-protection that are involved in even the `happiest' marriages and the most `regular guy' lifestyles. In that timeless moment of the crash, he has experienced the wonder of infinite Aliveness which gets continually blocked out in so-called normal life by fearful evasion of any facts we' ve been taught to find unpleasant. As a consequence, he rescues several other passengers from the wreck in a way which they and observers consider heroic, though to him it really is, as he insists, nothing special. Yet the same ' fearlessness' later leads him to take risks that could harm people, both physical risks like crashing a car to jerk one of his fellow survivors out of irrational guilt about the fact that her baby was killed and she lived, and social risks like challenging the routine evasions practiced by insurance agents getting the best pay-out for crash victims. For Weir, however, the exploration of these moral ambiguities is more than just a human drama; what makes the film a work of genius rather than just a fine movie is the way he uses the story of Max' s perplexing behavior to introduce viewers gradually, step by step, to the experience of timelessness at the climax. First, he joins some of those earlier makers of NDE re-enactments in employing slow motion photography, just to get us used to the idea of time-sense being changed. In Max' s first and second flashbacks to the crash, we see how his rescue of other passengers was indeed no heroic defiance of fear but something he can do quite naturally because time has slowed down for him, enabling him to see how to avoid falling debris, etc. For me, this echoes a story of my Queensland friend Jack, who performed a similar rescue of a mate from a blazing tank in World War 2, and is equally anxious to repudiate any idea that he was heroic. Such experiences are by no means uncommon, even outside NDE literature. However, there' s an added twist in Weir' s presentation of the rescue scene which I wonder if I may perhaps be the only viewer to appreciate. As the plane breaks up all around, Max picks up a baby and then calls out, to the passengers who are still relatively unhurt, " Follow me towards the light! " This apparently straightforward directive about how they can get safely out of the wreckage takes on highly symbolic significance when, in the final climactic flashback to the scene, the long body of the plane through which Max leads them becomes identified with the tunnel of his allergy-NDE. Since he clearly wasn't asking the others to follow him to the light of heaven beyond the grave, but taking them back to life on earth, Weir seems to be anticipating my own hypothesis (which I' ve never seen advanced by anyone else, and haven't yet published outside Australia) that the tunnel-to-the light-phenomenon in NDEs is a discovery of 'heavenliness' as the true nature of this world when it' s perceived without the veil of fear. And since it is timeless heavenliness, the question of whether it continues after physical death is entirely secondary. Weir keeps giving hints of Max' s ' heavenly' experience of the world all through the film -for example, in the way he finds the buildings of San Francisco fascinating when others don' t even notice them, and is truly at a loss to understand how his fellow-survivor (the girl whose baby was killed) fails to see what he sees. Another example is his description of being free from society' s entanglements because death brings freedom and he feels he's already dead. Some notable statements to this effect have been made by real-life Near-Death " Experiencers " : One that comes most immediately to mind is the great pioneer of humanistic and trans-personal psychology, Abraham Maslow, who described the blissful calm he experienced, in the two years he lived on after his near-fatal heart attack in 1968, as ' my posthumous life'. But here again, Weir introduces a twist which resonates with my own experience in a way I' ve not seen mentioned anywhere else in NDE literature. Max tells the girl survivor as they walk through the San Francisco streets that they' re invisible to the crowds, ' because we're ghosts' . I dreamed exactly that on Good Friday of 1984, not long after I' d arrived in Sydney in the wake of the NDE; in the dream most people couldn't see me because I was a ghost. It was such a remarkable dream that I published a paper about it in an American psychological journal, but I can' t imagine it was read by anyone involved in making Farless. The most interesting thing of all for me about the film as a whole, however, is the way it explores what I have come to see as the $64,000 question -why is it that something like a close brush with death is normally needed for the heavenliness of the world to be experienced? (And even that only works in a minority of cases!) The film' s answer, if I understand it right, seems to be that the natural biological fear-response seems to have gotten out of hand in the human species, to the point where it governs the whole organization of social life down to the minutest detail, blocking out aliveness in the process. For a fortunate minority, coming close to death unravels the knot, but then we have the problem of finding out how to organize practical affairs with fear as life' s servant rather than its master, a problem about which even the world' s greatest mystics and religious teachers have left us only very partial blueprints. NDEs are often spoken of as rebirths; mine felt more like a resurrection, because I was `reconstructed' with all my past experience, but with the fear-response now operating ' to one side' , as it were, so that for most of the time I can heed it rationally but not be run by it. For Max, however, the process seems to have been incomplete, in that he doesn't seem able to handle fear at all without it taking over and removing his pearl of great price, which of course he won' t allow. I find in his story a quite uncanny parallel, in modern secular Western terms, to what happened in real-life history at the beginning of the last century to the South Indian sage Ramana Maharshi who is widely acknowledged as probably the most truly ' enlightened' mystic of recent centuries. Though not at all given to religious life, he came to recognize in his late teens that fear was in some fundamental way keeping him from really living, so he put himself through what might be described as an artificial NDE, by lying on the floor and imagining dying. He emerged from it completely aware of the heavenly aliveness in all being, but quite unable to cope with routine living along the line of time. Because he lived in Hindu culture, where such consciousness-changes are understood and catered for, he was promptly surrounded by devotees who looked after him almost like a child for seventeen years, simply for the privilege of being in his presence and hearing what few observations he chose to make about reality. Towards the end of that time he began to have anoxial fits, and after one of these he suddenly emerged fully able to cope with practical living, showing delightful ease and simplicity and astonishing efficiency -the state known in Hindu philosophy as sahaj samadhi. It was as if the resurrection-process had only gone halfway with his artificial NDE, but now had completed itself. I can' t help wondering if the film isn't saying that Max too experienced only a `half -resurrection' process because in the crash he, like Ramana, didn't actually come to the point of real death. In the film' s climax, his inability to cope with society' s fear-organized conventions does indeed cause fear to overwhelm him, eventually making his allergy return and really take him to the dying-point -and when his wife saves him by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, he comes back out of that NDE tunnel saying, " I' m alive! " in an entirely new tone of voice, and with a new look of 'solid' aliveness which I find a triumph both of acting and direction. Are we to conclude that now the resurrection process has gone to term, leaving him able to be in the world of compromise without being compromised? And if so, will he stay with his wife and child or not? I don't know, and maybe when you see the film you'll have your own views about what its ending means. Meantime, I hope I' ve said enough to make clear that it' s not to be missed on any account. John Wren-Lewis Literary Footnote The remarkable story of Abraham Maslow and his ' post-mortem life' is told in The Right to be Human by New York psychologist Ed Hoffman, one of the best biographies I' ve ever come across. Ramana Maharshi's story can be found in Sir Arthur Osborne's The Teachings of Ramana Mabarshi. A good introduction to NDE research, which incidentally is very clear about the way they often disrupt marriages, is Cherie Sutherland's Transformed by the Light, and it gives all the necessary references for you to read further. Allan Kellahear's recent book of personal reflections Eternity and Me, makes delightful reading and is published in Australia by Hill of Content Publishing in Melbourne. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ a note: if your going to insist on reading bullshit.. it just might as well be good bullshit. ..b b.b. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 22, 2009 Report Share Posted December 22, 2009 Nisargadatta , " wwoehr " <wwoehr wrote: > > > > Nisargadatta , " Tim G. " <fewtch@> wrote: > > > > Nisargadatta , " dan330033 " <dan330033@> wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > > Nisargadatta , geo <inandor@> wrote: > > > > > > > Yes....analogous. I suppose this expression crossed my mind because of the apparent ever-receeding-ness of awareness when one tries to contemplate/understand (in vain - instead of being it) its nature. > > > > -geo- > > > > > > This is the moment of one's own death. > > > > > > The moment of understanding. > > > > > > The point at which death cannot be deferred. > > > > > > Cannot be located at some other point of time. > > > > > > People prattle on about the eternal. > > > > > > But the eternal is only what remains, when everything that can die, dies. > > > > > > And anything born, anything with a beginning, ends. > > > > > > Anything with continuity over time, ends. > > > > > > - Dan - > > > > > > > " The soul comes to the end of its long journey and, naked and alone, draws near to the divine. " -- from the movie 'fearless' > > > > > The Greek word 'psyche' means 'soul'. > > Werner the German word " werner " means " cute long hairdo on an old guy " .. or at least it appears as though it means that. :-) ..b b.b. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 22, 2009 Report Share Posted December 22, 2009 " I have a capacity in my soul for taking in God entirely. I am as sure as I live that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to myself... " Meister Eckhart Nisargadatta , " Tim G. " <fewtch wrote: > > " The soul comes to the end of its long journey and, naked and alone, draws near to the divine. " -- from the movie 'fearless' > Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 22, 2009 Report Share Posted December 22, 2009 " that's almost near the close side.. of something that slightly resembles.. a near but not actual simulacrum of a somewhat.. that is maybe nearing the truth or maybe not. at least on every other Tuesday of the calender year. but i don't thinks so. " Master .b b.b. Nisargadatta , " dan330033 " <dan330033 wrote: > > " I have a capacity in my soul for taking in God entirely. I am as sure as I live that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to myself... " > > Meister Eckhart > > > Nisargadatta , " Tim G. " <fewtch@> wrote: > > > > " The soul comes to the end of its long journey and, naked and alone, draws near to the divine. " -- from the movie 'fearless' > > > Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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