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turiya
25 m
193
"Nothing could prepare me for what I was going to witness when I saw it."
A startup company called StoryFile has pioneered a new product that allows deceased people to address mourners at their funerals through the power of artificial intelligence. Known as the 'digital afterlife' industry, StoryFile uses 20 cameras while asking a person 250 questions before death. This data is then fed into software that creates a so-called digital clone of that person. Marina Smith, an 87-year-old woman who passed in June, was given a chance to use StoryFile. Smith's Los Angeles-based son Stephen is the company's founder and shocked funeralgoers by creating an interactive illusion of her on a screen during the memorial service:
Earlier this year, a digital copy of former Screen Actors Guild president Ed Asner was made possible at his funeral by StoryFile. Axios reported mourners "conversed" with the holographic representation of Asner. "Nothing could prepare me for what I was going to witness when I saw it," Matt Asner, the actor's son, said last month. Asner added that some funeralgoers were "creeped out" because it was almost "like having him in the room." The digital afterlife industry is just taking off. Amazon has decided to jump into the game by providing an experimental Alexa feature that learns the voice of a deceased loved one. Even Microsoft has acquired patented technology using social media posts to reincarnate people as "chatbots." Article Link: https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/digital-clones-deceased-loved-ones-chat-mourners-own-funerals
turiya
3 y
159
† C †
BARDO
Tibet has not contributed anything else. It is a poor country, far away from the world -- the roof of the world -- unapproachable. Even today it is very difficult to reach Tibet.
Tibet developed meditation through Buddhist influence and finally became the only country in history where everybody was meditating, where meditation was a normal phenomenon. Every family had to give at least one of its members -- someone who was ready -- to a monastery, to meditate totally. So from every family at least one member went from each generation.
Almost the whole country of Tibet became a monastery. Just as Russia has become a concentration camp, Tibet became a monastery. There were hundreds of monasteries in the mountains, in beautiful places. Every family had contributed someone who was truly interested in seeking. It was the only place where people were encouraged to go on the search; it had become part of the style of the whole country.
And those who were not in the monasteries were also meditating as much as they could manage, so by the time of death, bardo was possible for everybody. There were many masters available, many evolved beings available who could repeat those instructions -- and everybody had a master of his own. It was a totally different world.
In this century many beautiful things have been destroyed but Tibet is at the top. Tibet has been destroyed by a communist invasion from China. Monasteries have been changed into schools, into hospitals, and monks have been forced to work in the fields. Even to mention the word "meditation" became a crime. And it was not hurting anybody: the country was so aloof, so cut off from the world.
But it has been destroyed, and I don't think there is any possibility to recover its beauty, its grandeur. That is impossible because now there are roads joining it to Pakistan, to China. Now buses are moving, now airports are there and planes are coming and going.
The army is there. It has become a military base for China. It has lost its golden age. Soon it will be difficult to find a person who is capable of listening to bardo instructions and almost impossible to find a person who can give those instructions. They will be in the books; they are available now in all the languages. They are simple instructions but they can be improved, and I have the idea to improve them because they are very ancient and very crude. They can be polished. Much can be added to them, more dimensions can be given to them. But the basic thing is that the people should be meditative. My people are meditative, and it will be part of our basic work to revive the bardo in a more refined form so we can use it for our people.
Tibet is no longer the same Tibet. But we can create the situation, the psychology, where bardo -- or something like bardo but even far more evolved -- can help people. It is a beautiful process. Just as Japan has brought Zen from Buddhist sources of meditation, Tibet has brought, from the same Buddhist sources of meditation, bardo. These are their immortal contributions.
When nuclear weapons are forgotten, still these discoveries will have the same significance.
The Path of the Mystic
Chapter #7
Chapter title: Between these two dreams...
7 May 1986 pm in Punta Del Este, Uruguay
turiya
5 y
826
The Art of Dying by Osho, Chapter 1 (pages 1-2)
turiya
5 y
728
In India they say the messenger of death is very ugly - dark, black - comes sitting on a very big ugly buffalo...
Everything returns to its original source, has to return to its original source. If you - understand life then you understand death also. Life is a forgetfulness of the original source, and death is again a remembrance. Life is going away from the original source, death is coming back home. Death is not ugly, death is beautiful. But death is beautiful only for those who have lived their life unhindered, uninhibited, unsuppressed. Death is beautiful only for those who have lived their life beautifully, who have not been afraid to live, who have been courageous enough to live -- who loved, who danced, who celebrated.
Death becomes the ultimate celebration if your life is a celebration. Let me tell you in this way: whatsoever your life was, death reveals it. If you have been miserable in life, death reveals misery. Death is a great revealer. If you have been happy in your life, death reveals happiness. If you have lived only a life of physical comfort and physical pleasure, then of course, death is going to be very uncomfortable and very unpleasant, because the body has to be left. The body is just a temporary abode, a shrine in which we stay for the night and leave in the morning. It is not your permanent abode, it is not your home.
So if you have lived just a bodily life and you have never known anything beyond the body, death is going to be very, very ugly, unpleasant, painful. Death is going to be an anguish. But if you have lived a little higher than the body, if you have loved music and poetry, and you have loved, and you have looked at the flowers and the stars, and something of the non-physical has entered into your consciousness, death will not be so bad, death will not be so painful. You can take it with equanimity, but still it cannot be a celebration.
If you have touched something of the transcendental in yourself, if you have entered your own nothingness at the centre -- the centre of your being, where you are no more a body and no more a mind, where physical pleasures are completely left far away and mental pleasures such as music and poetry and literature and painting, everything, are left far away, you are simply, just pure awareness, consciousness -- then death is going to be a great celebration, a great understanding, a great revelation.
If you have known anything of the transcendental in you, death will reveal to you the transcendental in the universe -- then death is no longer a death but a meeting with God, a date with God.
So you can find three expressions about death in the history of human mind.
One expression is of the ordinary man who lives attached to his body, who has never known anything greater than the pleasure of food or sex, whose whole life has been nothing but food and sex, who has enjoyed food, has enjoyed sex, whose life has been very primitive, whose life has been very gross, who has lived in the porch of his palace, never entered it, and who had been thinking that this is all life is. At the moment of death he will try to cling. He will resist death, he will fight death. Death will come as the enemy.
Hence, all over the world, in all societies, death is depicted as dark, as devilish. In India they say that the messenger of death is very ugly -- dark, black -- and he comes sitting on a very big ugly buffalo. This is the ordinary attitude. These people have missed, they have not been able to know all the dimensions of life. They have not been able to touch the depths of life and they have not been able to fly to the height of life. They missed the plenitude, they missed the benediction.
Then there is a second type of expression. Poets, philosophers, have sometimes said that death is nothing bad, death is nothing evil, it is just restful -- a great rest, like sleep. This is better than the first. At least these people have known something beyond the body, they have known something of the mind. They have not had only food and sex, their whole life has not been only in eating and reproducing. They have a little sophistication of the soul, they are a little more aristocratic, more cultured. They say death is like great rest; one is tired and one goes into death and rests. It is restful. But they too are far away from the truth.
Those who have known life in its deepest core, they say that death is God. It is not only a rest but a resurrection, a new life, a new beginning; a new door opens.
turiya
5 y
752
Life is already there bubbling within you. It can be contacted only there. The temple is not outside, you are the shrine of it. So the first thing to remember if you want to know what life is: never seek it without, never try to find out from somebody else. The meaning cannot be transferred that way. The greatest Masters have never said anything about life -- they have always thrown you back upon yourself.
The second thing to remember is: once you know what life is, you will know what death is. Death is also part of the same process. Ordinarily we think death comes at the end, ordinarily we think death is against life, ordinarily we think death is the enemy, but death is not the enemy. And if you think of death as the enemy it simply shows that you have not been able to know what life is.
Death and life are two polarities of the same energy, of the same phenomenon -- the tide and the ebb, the day and the night, the summer and the winter. They are not separate and not opposites, not contraries; they are complementary to each other. Death is not the end of life; in fact, it is a completion of one life, the crescendo of one life, the c1imax, the finale. And once you know your life and its process, then you understand what death is.
Death is an organic, integral part of life, and it is very friendly to life. Without it life cannot exist. Life exists because of death; death gives the background. Death is, in fact, a process of renewal. And death happens each moment.
The moment you breathe in and the moment you breathe out, both happen. Breathing in, life happens; breathing out, death happens. That's why when a child is born the first thing he does is breathe in, then life starts. And when an old man is dying, the last thing he does is breathe out, then life departs. Breathing out is death, breathing in is life -- they are like two wheels of a bullock cart. You live by breathing in as much as you live by breathing out. The breathing out is part of breathing in. You cannot breathe in if you stop breathing out. You cannot live if you stop dying. The man who has understood what his life is allows death to happen; he welcomes it. He dies each moment and each moment he is resurrected. His cross and his resurrection are continually happening as a process. He dies to the past each moment and he is born again and again into the future.
If you look into life you will be able to know what death is. If you understand what death is, only then are you able to understand what life is. They are organic. Ordinarily, out of fear, we have created a division. We think that life is good and death is bad. We think that life has to be desired and death is to be avoided. We think somehow we have to protect ourselves against death. This absurd idea creates endless miseries in our lives, because a person who protects himself against death becomes incapable of living. He is the person who is afraid of exhaling, then he cannot inhale and he is stuck. Then he simply drags; his life is no longer a flow, his life is no longer a river.
If you really want to live, you have to be ready to die.
turiya
5 y
780
turiya
5 y
750
turiya
5 y
747
Question 1:
HOW CAN WE PREPARE OURSELVES FOR DEATH?
DON'T accumulate anything whatsoever: power, money, prestige, virtue, knowledge, even the so-called spiritual experiences. Don't accumulate. If you don't accumulate you are ready to die any moment, because you have nothing to lose. The fear of death is not really fear of death; the fear of death comes out of the accumulations of life. Then you have too much to lose so you cling to it. That is the meaning of Jesus' saying:
Blessed are the poor in spirit.
I don't mean become a beggar, and I don't mean renounce the world. I mean be in the world but don't be of the world. Don't accumulate inside, be poor in spirit. Never possess anything -- and then you are ready to die. Possessiveness is the problem, not life itself.
The more you possess, the more you are afraid to lose. If you don't possess anything, if your purity, if your spirit is uncontaminated by anything, if you are simply there alone, you can disappear any moment; whenever death knocks on the door it will find you ready. You are not losing anything. By going with death you are not a loser. You may be moving into a new experience.
And when I say don't accumulate, I mean it as an absolute imperative. I'm not saying don't accumulate things of this world but go on accumulating virtue, knowledge, and so-called spiritual experiences, visions -- no. I am talking in absolute terms: don't accumulate.
There are people, particularly in the East, who teach renunciation. They say, 'Don't accumulate anything in this world because it will be taken away from you when death comes.'
These people seem to be basically more greedy than the ordinary worldly people. Their logic is: don't accumulate in this world because death will take it away, so accumulate something that death cannot take away from you -- accumulate virtue, punya; accumulate character, morality, knowledge; accumulate experiences, spiritual experiences, experiences of kundalini, meditation, this and that; accumulate something that death cannot take away from you.
But if you accumulate, with that accumulation comes fear. Each accumulation brings fear in the same proportion...then you are afraid. Don't accumulate and fear disappears. I don't teach you renunciation in the old sense; my sannyas is an absolutely new concept. It teaches you to be in the world and yet to be not of it. Then you are always ready.
I have heard about a great Sufi mystic, Abraham Adam. Once he was the Emperor of Bokhara, then he left everything and became a Sufi beggar. When he was staying with another Sufi mystic he was puzzled because every day the man was continuously complaining of his poverty.
Abraham Adam said to him, 'The way you abuse it, it may be that you have bought your poverty cheaply.'
'How stupid you must be!' the man retorted, not knowing to whom he was talking, not knowing that Abraham was once the emperor. He said, 'How stupid you must be to think that one buys poverty.'
Abraham replied, 'In my case, I paid my kingdom for it. I would even give away a hundred worlds for a single moment of it, for every day its value becomes more and more to me. No wonder then that I give thanks for it while you lament it.'
The purity of the spirit is the real poverty. The word 'sufi' comes from an Arabic word 'safa'. Safa means purity. Sufi means one who is pure in the heart.
And what is purity? Don't misunderstand me, purity has nothing to do with morality.
Don't interpret it in a moralistic way. Purity has nothing to do with Puritans. Purity simply means an uncontaminated state of mind, where only your consciousness is and nothing else. Nothing else really enters into your consciousness, but if you hanker to possess, that hankering contaminates you. Gold cannot enter into your consciousness.
There is no way. How can you take gold into your being? There is no way. Money cannot enter into your consciousness. But if you want to possess, that possessiveness can enter into your consciousness. Then you become impure. If you don't want to possess anything, you become fearless. Then even death is a beautiful experience to pass through.
A man who is really spiritual has tremendous experiences but he never accumulates them.
Once they have happened he forgets about them. He never remembers, he never projects them into the future. He never says that they should be repeated or that they should happen again to him. He never prays for them. Once they have happened they have happened. Finished! He is finished with them and he moves away from them. He is always available for the new, he never carries the old.
And if you don't carry the old you will find life absolutely new, incredibly, unbelievably new at each step. Life is new, only the mind is old; and if you look through the mind, life also looks like a repetition, a boring thing. If you don't look through the mind.... Mind means your past, mind means the accumulated experiences, knowledge and everything.
Mind means 'that through which you have passed, but on to which you are still hanging.'
Mind is a hang-over, dust from the past covering your mirror-like consciousness. Then when you look through it everything becomes distorted. Mind is the faculty of distortion.
If you don't look through the mind you will know that life is eternal. Only mind dies -- without mind you are deathless. Without mind nothing has ever died; life goes on and on and on forever. It has no beginning and no end.
Accumulate, then you have a beginning, and then you will have an end.
How to prepare yourself for death.... When I say 'how to prepare for death', I don't mean preparing for the death that will come in the end -- that is very far away. If you prepare for it you will be preparing for the future and again the mind will come in. No, when I say prepare for death, I don't mean the death that will come finally, I mean the death that visits you every moment with each exhalation. Accept this death each moment and you will be ready for the final death when it comes.
Start dying each moment to the past. Clean yourself of the past each moment. Die to the known so that you become available to the unknown.
With dying and being reborn each moment, you will be able to live life and you will be able to live death also.
And that's what spirituality is really all about: to live death intensely, to live life intensely; to live both so passionately that nothing is left behind unlived, not even death.
If you live life and death totally, you transcend.
In that tremendous passion and intensity of life and death, you transcend duality, you transcend the dichotomy, you come to the One. That One is really the truth. You can call it God, you can call it life, you can call it truth, samadhi, ecstasy, or whatsoever you choose.
The Art of Dying, Chapter 2
turiya
5 y
691
"Any chance we could stop by my broker's house?"
For most, death comes when one least expects it. It always comes when you are right in the middle of doing something.
The thing is that death is happening in this very moment. It is happening at every moment of every day. But most think that it will happen to them some time down the road - in some distant future.
Consider one's own breathing.... It consists of two parts: The in-coming breath. And the out-going breath. It goes on continuously every single moment of every single day.
When a child is born the first thing is the in-coming breath. It signifies that Life has begun. And then consider the last thing that a dying person does... breathes out. It is the out-going breath. It signifies the end of Life.
The in-coming breath is Life. And the out-going breath is Death. Death is a part of Life. They are not separate.
When a breast-feeding infant moves into the stage of feeding oneself... One dies to infancy, and is born into childhood. When a child moves into puberty... One dies to their childhood, and is born into being a teenager. Then the teenager dies to his teens, and born into being a young adult. Dies to being a young adult, and born into being middle-aged. Dies to being middle-aged, and born into being old-aged.
Question 1
HOW CAN WE PREPARE OURSELVES FOR DEATH?
How to prepare yourself for death....
Start dying each moment to the past. Clean yourself of the past each moment. Die to the known so that you become available to the unknown.
With dying and being reborn each moment you will be able to live life and you will be able to live death also.
And that's what spirituality is really all about: to live death intensely, to live life intensely; to live both so passionately that nothing is left behind unlived, not even death.
If you live life and death totally, you transcend.
In that tremendous passion and intensity of life and death, you transcend duality, you transcend the dichotomy, you come to the One. That One is really the truth. You can call it God, you can call it life, you can call it truth, samadhi, ecstasy, or whatsoever you choose.
The Art of Dying, Chapter 2
And, the beat goes on.
turiya
5 y
759
BSA Educational Eric B
7 y
4,149
† C †
Eric B
7 y
2,935
BSA Educational Eric B
7 y
4,049
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7 y
2,871
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