I Die Daily

There is an ancient Tibetan Buddhist saying: "When you are born, you cry, and the world rejoices. When you die, you rejoice, and the world cries".

What is death, exactly, and what does it mean to us as we are living? Throughout the world, death and the rituals that surround it are steeped in taboos. Death is celebrated, embraced and feared. Around death and the dead, cultures put in place diverse restrictions and practices associated with clothing, food and ritual.

For the Roman Catholic Church death is the "complete and final separation of the soul from the body". However the Vatican has conceded that diagnosing death is a subject for medicine, not the Church. In 1957 Pope Pius XII raised the concerns over whether doctors might be "continuing the resuscitation process, despite the fact that the soul may already have left the body."

Some Orthodox Jews, Native Americans, Muslims and fundamentalist Christians believe that as long as a heart is beating--even artificially, you are still alive. Followers of religions like Zen Buddhism, and Shintoism believe that the mind and body are integrated and have trouble accepting the brain death criteria to determine death.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, whose actual title is "The Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Intermediate State" or "Bardo Thodol", is ostensibly a book describing the experiences to be expected at the moment of death, during an intermediate phase lasting forty-nine days, and during rebirth into another bodily frame. The Bardo Thodol is a guide that is read aloud to the dead while they are in the state between death and reincarnation in order for them to recognize the nature of their mind and attain liberation from the cycle of rebirth.

Some think, however, this book is merely the esoteric framework which the Tibetan Buddhists used to cloak their mystical teachings. The language and symbolism of death rituals of Bonism, the traditional pre-Buddhist Tibetan religion, were skillfully blended with Buddhist conceptions. The esoteric meaning is that it is death and rebirth of the ego that is described, not of the body. Either way, or perhaps for both, the death/rebirth process is examined.

A graduate of Columbia University and Yale Medical School, Brian L. Weiss M.D. is Chairman Emeritus of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami. He has written many books on reincarnation, and maintains that we have all lived past lives. All of us will live future ones but at some level time probably does not exist. All lives might be occurring simultaneously. He thinks that what we do in this life will influence our lives to come as we evolve toward immortality. This would make death more of a marker between lives.

What do YOU think?

Time and the Transformation of Consciousness

Some people believe time is speeding up. For instance, time seems to be flying by faster than ever, or what used to take several years to accomplish now seems to be taking place in just a couple. You may have changed more in the past two years than you did in the five years before that. When more personal growth is crammed into a shorter amount of time, it appears that things have picked up pace and more ground is being covered more quickly.

In the 2012 paradigm, this idea serves to correlate the prophesied dissolution of time, or a change in our perception of time. Yes, there's more to it and the bottom line is the Mayan calendar is tracking the evolution of consciousness through nine sequentially ordered cycles of creation. The nine steps aren't linear which means you wouldn't lay them out end-to-end in a linear fashion. They are instead holographic in nature. All nine levels are nested into each other like a set of mixing bowls. That's how this calendar actually works. Each step up the nine leveled pyramid expands and develops the previous level with a 20 times faster frequency that continually drives evolution forward.

In his book The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness, Carl Johan Calleman offers this idea: "The liberation of human beings from the negative effects of the frequency increase, such as stress, is a matter of entering the natural, nonphysical, divine flow of creation leading toward enlightenment. Today more than ever before, people are becoming aware of the stressful effects of subordinating their lives to physical time." What do YOU think?

Awaken to Multidimensionality

There is much discussion about the notion of human multidimensionality. What, exactly, does it mean? We know that physically, our world consists of three dimensions. The first dimension begins with a point in space, the second, a line between this and another point, the third, allowing depth - length, height, depth. The fourth dimension is said to be time, and if we add time to the first three dimensions we can measure a three dimensional object as it changes over time. Time is the dimension of changeability. Scientists tell us that there are an infinite number of dimensions and each dimension is infinite. There are those who believe that the fifth dimension is compassion and that bringing the highest form of feeling into our dimensionality allows us to embrace all dimensions, infinitely. What do YOU think?