My question is about the bodymind. I saw a documentary about near-death experience
where people say that in their mind they see themselves, they see their own bodies.
And I was wondering because as long as we live here on Earth, our view will always be limited
because it's a mix of awareness and our minds. Yes.
And so my question is when there is such an experience where the mind...
I assume it's a mind that sees the dead body. What is that that remains because we...
people also speak about astral bodies and seven layers of bodies and...
Is our mind fixed or can it also with awareness, widen and become more or...
Yes. I don't know if my question is clear. Yes, your question is clear.
In this approach we start with unlimited awareness.
Yes. And each of our minds are a temporary limitation of that unlimited awareness.
That's why when we close our eyes, we don't experience ourselves as a body.
We experience ourselves as a bundle of thinking, feeling, sensing and perceiving.
A newborn infant, for instance, has no idea that it is a body or that it has a body.
It hasn't yet learned to conceptualize its experience in those terms.
But it does experience sensing and perceiving. This little bundle of sensing, let's just call it
thinking and perceiving. This bundle of thinking and perceiving that we experience from the inside
when viewed from the outside, that is from another bundle of sensing and thinking and perceiving — looks like a body.
When I look at you, I don't see thinking and perceiving. I see a body.
But when you experience yourself, you don't experience the body as we perceive it.
You experience mainly thinking, sensing and perceiving. In other words, what I'm suggesting is that the
body is how your finite mind appears from a second person perspective.
So, if we take that as a possibility,
I'm not asking you to believe it, just take that model as a possibility.
Then what is the death of the body? What internal experience would that correspond with?
The death of your body, the appearance of your dying body, would correspond to the delocalizing of your mind.
Remember, each of our minds is a localization, a contraction of infinite consciousness.
That contraction appears from the outside like a body. On death, we do the opposite.
The mind expands back. It goes back home. As it does so, the appearance of the mind disintegrates.
That is the body disintegrates.
So the body could disintegrate and die and the mind could continue
to expand back. It doesn't necessarily go all the way back to infinite consciousness straight away.
There's nothing to suggest that it may not take time to de-contract, go back to its source
and there's also nothing to suggest that it may not pause and coalesce again
rather than going all the way back.
This is just a model, Lucas. I'm not suggesting it's accurate.
But it would account for near-death experiences all these different types of body.
It would account for these types of theories - include them all...
accommodate them all within the consciousness-only model that we speak of here.
That's very clear. Thank you very much. I was wondering about disintegrating of the
mind that it disappears completely, but like supernatural experience or...
makes me wonder about that. Yes, you see, we get a hint of this, when we fall asleep at night.
When we fall asleep at night, and thinking and perceiving
that we experience in the waking state comes to an end,
but we don't go straight to deep sleep. We go into this intermediary realm
of a dream state, which is still mind, but it's not the mind that we know in the waking state.
Now, take this as a little, a kind of mini version of what happens at death,
that the waking state world that we know it, we cease thinking and perceiving,
our mind begins to delocalize, but we enter into a kind of dream state,
which is not where the objects are not as concrete and solid and separate
as they seem to be in the waking state, but nor is it the emptiness of deep sleep.
It's an intermediary realm, which is still our mind, but it's
much looser than the world we experience in the waking state.
And this would be a little replica, could be seen as a replica of what takes place at death.
I understand now how it is also possible to, in your mind, interact with people who are gone.
Yes, exactly, because all of our minds are connected
simply by virtue of the fact that they're all localisations of the same consciousness.
One mind could still be, so to speak, alive in this realm.
Another mind could have died, it could be disintegrating — it could be going back.
So from this mind's point of view, the person has died, but the mind still may exist
in some disembodied form, and because all minds are connected — everything in infinite consciousness is connected —
there could be some connection between the mind in this realm and the mind of the so-called dead person. Why?
Because they're only in two different realms from the perspective,
from the materialist perspective, of this mind. From the perspective of consciousness, they're all
contained in the same field, and there's no reason why there shouldn't be connection between
this so-called alive person and this so-called dead mind.
Okay, that really answers my question and I thank you so much for taking your time, because
it enlightens a lot about what we are as a body and our mind, the difference between our body and our minds,
and that reality is really as wide as our limited mind can see.
Yes, you see, we don't feel
when we feel ourselves, we feel I am one being, whatever I am, we feel I am one entity,
one thing, one person. We don't feel I am a body and a mind.
No. We feel we are one.
The body and the mind are just two different perspectives of the same thing.
We experience ourselves as mind on the inside and as body on the outside,
so they're two different views of the same thing, and this is in line with our intuition that
I am one thing, I am not two completely different types of substance — one material and one mental.
That's not how we experience ourselves. We feel I am one homogeneous entity.
Until we realise we are neither of them.
Yes, until we realise that we are — that the reality of the so-called mind and the so-called body —
that they're both activities of the same immaterial reality. Yes, yes.
I understand, and I understand for the knowledge, for this explanation and for you bringing me home also.
Thank you so much. Thank you. Nice to meet you. Thank you.