Sometimes people get quite upset when I explore this in my my talks, but long ago I decided to continue, if I upset you then so be it. I have a responsibility to tell you just the same.
It is my job to upset you, to shake the very foundations of what you call reality, it is my job to destroy illusion, to reveal the truth and break you free from the prison of your perception. You don’t need to believe me, don’t believe anything I say, it is of no importance, because if you practice mindfulness and mediation with any degree of seriousness then illusion will be destroyed and a whole new depth to you and reality will show its self anyway. No belief is required.
We are taught to believe that there is nothing more to us than flesh and bones, that our consciousness, our very being, is just an evolutionary accident created by our brains. The world of things is everything, if you have things you are a success if you have no things you’ve failed, success is more things and bigger things and more high tech thing and lots of things to put things in.
We measure ourselves and others not by the depth of our humanity, by our capacity for love, for our contribution to the world but on the size of the pay cheque, our so called status, and the depth of our greed and obsessive drive to accumulate and posses things. We call it ambition, and we applaud people who exploit others and destroy our beautiful world in their pursuit of the material. But we shouldn’t applaud these people, they are just victims; we should offer them pity because they are blind, lost in darkness, in a pointless attempt to be something, to be safe and secure, and be immortal in the world of form. Desperate for permanence in a material world where, as the Buddha observed, “all things must pass” they suffer.
We see ourselves as a body, just flesh and blood, and nothing more, mortal vulnerable and alone. We know that things come and go, they age and decay and one day everything we think that we are will all be just dust. And then we suffer. We try to hold on to things, we fear to lose, we resist the natural cycle of things because things are everything. We give away our power to external forms, and false authorities who demand obedience and keep us separate and divided and here we remain in servitude locked into a two dimensional world of want, need, lack and fear. Paralysed by our ignorance we never begin to scratch the surface of reality, we cannot see the depth of who we really are and our place in the universe.
But what if you have been lied to? What if there is more to you than this? What if consciousness is not created by the brain, what if consciousness was there first, what if the brain can only exist because of consciousness? What if you are consciousness? What if everything is consciousness? It would change everything wouldn’t it?
You wouldn’t be separate and alone, lacking and fearful, you’d know yourself, through access to the field of consciousness from which everything arises and you’d reclaim your power from false authorities and derive your authority from within. You’d be free of material possession, free of material possession in both senses of the word, because when you no longer identify with your material possessions then you are no longer possessed by the material.
A research team based in the UK has spent the last four years seeking out cardiac arrest patients to analyse their experiences, and found that 46 per cent of survivors described having some form of “awareness” at a time when they were declared clinically dead. Scientists currently believe that the brain shuts down within 20 to 30 seconds of the heart stopping beating – and that it is not possible to be aware of anything at all once that has happened. But the new study heard compelling evidence that patients experienced real events long after brain activity ceased – and could recall these events accurately once they had been resuscitated.
Dr Sam Parnia, an assistant professor at the State University of New York and a former research fellow at the University of Southampton led the study which involved 2,060 patients from 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria. One man, gave a “very credible” account of what was going on while doctors and nurses tried to bring him back to life – and says that he felt he was observing his resuscitation from the corner of the room.
Speaking to The Telegraph about the evidence provided by a 57-year-old social worker Southampton, Dr Parnia said: “We know the brain can’t function when the heart has stopped beating. “But in this case, conscious awareness appears to have continued . The man described everything that had happened in the room, but importantly, he heard two bleeps from a machine that makes a noise at three minute intervals. So we could time how long the experienced lasted for.
“He seemed very credible and everything that he said had happened to him had actually happened.”
Dr Parnia said that “he previously thought that patients who described near-death experiences were only relating hallucinatory events but this is clearly not the case”. Consciousness exists when there is no brain activity.
Even the material sciences are realising the truth, consciousness is not the product of the material world, consciousness exists beyond the body.
That’s as far a Dr Parnia’s research has gone for now, but he intends go further with his study, maybe he’ll realises what can be realised through meditation. Consciousness in not created by the material world, but consciousness creates the material world. But you don’t need to wait for the research, do your own research, practice mindfulness and realise this for yourself.
