-Caveat Lector-
In a message dated 99-10-30 13:44:58 EDT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>Just to add a little bit to this, contrary to Christian teaching which
>says that everyone has a "soul" which ascends to Divine Realms
>or descends to Hell, depending on the individual's behavior in life
>regarding good and evil, Gurdjieff (also drawing on Tibetan
>Buddhism) taught that a soul had to be created by an individual
>using conscious effort to do so. And that very few humans troubled
>themselves to make that effort. He was the first teacher to offer
>Westerners a method by which this could be done. It is in this vein
>that Buddhists train themselves with an eye to achieving a
>"conscious" death. In such training a "soul" can be created and in
>a conscious death, that soul is released safely to its further destiny
>and does not "feed the moon."And yes, both John Lilly and Colin
>Wilson can both be better understood through an understanding of
>Gurdjieff.
Well stated. And yes, contrary to the popular misconception, the Tibetan
Buddhists do (did?) not believe in "reincarnation" for EVERYONE, but ONLY for
"enlightened ones," chiefly the Dalai Lama. Just as in the most ancient
religions --e.g., the Egyptian-- only members of the Ruling Class had "souls"
and could "rise up" to become "immortals."
(Until the advent of Osiris-worship "popularized" that prospect -- the Book
of the Dead being later than the Pyramid Texts, wherein the Pharaoh after
death battled monsters and fed on the flesh of other ascended souls before
assuming new status as a "star.")
The Tibetan Book of the Dead served the same purpose as the Egyptian Book of
the Dead, as an "instruction manual" for the options of the
becoming-disembodied spirit,
who was typically one "nobly born" (literally) attended to by the "royal"
priesthood ...
Originally, the Tibetans appear to have believed, just like the Egyptians and
Sumerians, that COMMONERS could only expect a dissolution of their lifestuff,
alongside animals,
in an "astral" worldgloomily pictured as being UNDER, not ABOVE, the earthly
plane.
Funny how, almost universally, cosmology-as-theology mirrors sociology --
"religion" functioning as a way of "spiritually" legitimizing a
political-economic class structure.
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