what happens when we
die?
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT FAIR LADY
(SEPTEMBER 2008)
WORDS JACQUI L’ANGE
Tibetan Buddhist - “Absolutely everything counts”
Beryl Schutten
teaches Mahamudra Meditation at the Kagyu Samye Dzong Tibetan Buddhist
Centre in
“In Buddhism there is an enormous field of learning about what lies
ahead, and what to expect and recognise in the afterlife.
As Rob Nairn puts it, the emphasis is on learning to die skilfully. To
do that we practice letting go, and mindfulness – huge subjects in themselves – in order to develop a peaceful and harmonious
mind, because the teaching says that, at the moment of death, the last thought
is of most importance. Whatever we have
done with our lives makes us what we are when we die. And absolutely everything
counts.
There are three ‘bardos’ involved in the
process of death: the chikae (the “mind at the moment of death”);
the chöny (the “mind of being dead”); and the sipae (the
“mind of re-becoming”, when we are about to take rebirth).
When we die, consciousness leaves the body in elemental stages (earth,
air, fire, water, and space). As each element dissolves, there is a moment when
consciousness falls apart and we can see our true nature – the essence of what
we are, our primordial purity – and become enlightened. But in this moment,
when the true nature of the mind flashes, it does so with such brilliance and
vastness and brightness that it can be overpoweringly fearful if we haven’t
trained for it. This is why we cultivate mindfulness in life, so that we can
recognise what is happening.
If you recognise this enlightened nature, you can opt out of the whole
process, out of the wheel of life death and rebirth. You go straight to the
pure land where you can remain, or choose an auspicious rebirth (as a teacher
or a bodhisattva, to help others). If we don’t recognise this true nature of
the mind, then in the last bardo stage, sipae, we
experience a great longing for a manifestation or a body of some sort. At this
point we are drawn to the karmicly appropriate
rebirth. At the moment of conception, the consciousness goes into the womb and
the whole thing starts all over again.”
African traditional - “To go back to where we came from to understand and respect one
another”
Sangoma Nolitha grew up in
the
“As an African, my custom demands that a cow must be slaughtered to
say goodbye to a person when he or she dies. We do this to make the way easier
so they can go in peace – it is to show that we appreciate what they have done
for us in their life.
The body of the person goes to the soil but the person doesn’t die,
just the body dies. The soul of the person is still alive. It travels
everywhere. The souls can see everything; they even walk with us although we
cannot see them.
After about a year we have a special memorial ceremony. We call the
person to come and protect us; another cow must be slaughtered. If the family doesn’t have a cow or a goat to
slaughter, because they haven’t got the money, or because there are no cows, then
the ancestor cannot come back; that is why there is so much bad luck and
misbehaviour in children – it’s because our great forefathers have not been
respected. Once they are in the spirit world, they see the need to make right
what they did in their life. They come back because they know it has to be
done; they come to their family and chose one to work though. They want to make
peace, and you must make peace with them. If you fight with them they become
angry. In the spirit world they speak one language – everybody understands one
another. We are all one family, united together; it looks like a spinning
wheel, and each and every body just holding it, white ancestors and black ones
all together. They tell us we need to go back to where we came from to understand
and respect one another. And we must first start as we are living now.
If you know that you are going to die, you need to clean yourself,
purify yourself. There are certain rituals. Most important is to make sure that
there is nothing unfinished that you are leaving behind. Then you will always
be in peace.”
Christian - “You don’t have a soul,
you are a soul that incorporates this
physicality.”
The Rev Tim Attwell
is Minister of Rosebank Methodist Church in Cape
Town, Secretary of the Cape of Good Hope District of the Methodist Church of
Southern Africa, and a member of the Doctrine Ethics and Worship Committee of
the Methodist Church of Southern Africa.
One of the things that Christian theology,
specifically as founded on the New Testament, never tires of pointing out –
often to the great surprise of Christians themselves – is that the New
Testament doesn’t have a concept of an immortal soul. That’s a concept that
goes back to Hellenism, and the dualism derived from Plato; the idea that you have
a physical body in which there is entrapped, as it were, and immortal soul and
when the body dies this soul ‘leaves the body’. That is not a New Testament
idea.
The New Testament idea is that of resurrection,
which implies bringing to life again in a
new way. Paul, writing in I Corinthians 15, a key chapter around the
subject of life after death, uses the analogy of the seed – dying is like the
planting of the seed. Another example, although its
not an ancient Christian symbol, is that of the butterfly: when it emerges from
the chrysalis those aspects of the pupa that are no longer appropriate to its ‘butterflyiness’ have been shed. The same principal applies.
The point is you don’t have a soul, you are a soul that incorporates this physicality.
Folk religion tends to make entry into heaven
dependent on good behaviour. You be good, you go to
heaven – you become the butterfly. If you are bad you go to hell – and there
you fry eternally.Again, the New Testament doesn’t
actually say that. It talks about entering into the fullness of life, eternity,
heaven, as a result of our receiving love. And in receiving love, one’s
relationship with God, and all that makes up all that is – people, the planet,
oneself, one’s relationships – are put on a different footing. Hell is the
opposite – a state of alienation, of being out of sorts with yourself, with
other people, with your environment, the whole works. It is our choice as to
whether we are going to engage positively with the emergence of life and being,
or whether we are going to withdraw from it.”
Islam - “All human
beings are fellow travellers toward eternal life”
Dr A. Rashied Omar
is Imam of the Claremont Main Road Mosque and a Research Scholar of Islamic
Studies and Peacebuilding at the Joan B. Kroc Institute
for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, U.S.A.
“Belief in the afterlife is one
of the central and core teachings of Islam; it is so crucial to the Islamic
faith that a doubt in belief in the afterlife would be a doubt in the belief in
God.
The Muslim perspective is that we not only have a physical body, but
are endowed at birth by God with something we call the ‘Ruh’, or soul. This is described
in the most important source of Islamic guidance, the Qur’an:
"God breathed into the human beings of His Spirit" (32: 9).
Every human being, Muslim or non-Muslim, is endowed with this divine
spark. So honouring the dignity of human beings is honouring and praising god.When we die, the soul gets separated from the body
again, and returns to God. So death is
not the end, it is the gateway to eternal life. It’s when the soul returns to
its destiny, if you will. On this earthly journey, all human beings are fellow
travellers towards eternal life. Each one of us is therefore accountable for
moral choices. We are expected to nourish the soul – to develop it through
worshipping god, through prayers, through righteous acts. This life is as
important as the afterlife; it has consequence for the hereafter. ‘Falah’, or
salvation in the hereafter, is achieved through our relationships with others –
family and friends, Muslims and non-Muslims.
If your belief doesn’t make you morally responsible, but develops in
you arrogance – as in, ‘I am superior to others because I have this belief’ –
then it hasn’t served its purpose. No matter your faith, no matter the colour
of your skin, no matter your status in life, all of us are servants of God, and
no one is excluded from standing in need of the compassion and mercy of god.
Humility is, for me, the essence of being a believer. It is wonderfully
illustrated in the Muslim daily call to prayer. The most important part of that
call is ‘Allahu Akbar’, ‘God
is the greatest’. God is greater than. It is a very powerful thing.”
Jewish Mysticism - “The soul is always working on refinement and elevation.”
Rabbi Doctor Arthur Seltzer came to
“The Hassidic world is concerned with the inner mystical meanings of
the Torah and the Jewish tradition. I personally live in a world in which
reincarnation is as obvious as the rising and setting of the sun.
According to the Zohar (the classic work of
Jewish Mysticism), human beings have five levels of soul, and in a given
reincarnation we are to rectify and elevate our level of soul. Every soul comes
into this world with a life task. (If you want to know what your life task is, take a look at aspects of your personality that resist
change.) Spiritual work in the next life is a continuation of what we do here;
the soul is always working on refinement and elevation of itself and the
physical world.
There is this interesting notion that the act of dying itself is a
process of insight. Before a person dies his soul sees the shechinah; a moment of illumination in which he sees his life and all of
reality around him like never before, and allows him to begin his journey in
the next world.The separation of the soul and the
body, or ‘leave taking’, is understood as a time when a person can make amends
for what he has done. So there is an intimate relationship between the quality
of life one has lived and the success, to use a strange term, of the process of
death.
A soul begins its transition with a life review – like watching a DVD
of the life’s events. It then goes to ‘Gehinnom’, a
place of purification and refinement, commonly known as hell or purgatory (a
soul never remains there more than a year) before moving to the lower Garden of
Eden, where there is a further life review dealing with the ‘bigger picture’,
the past life in the context of other incarnations. The soul then goes to the higher Garden of
Eden, where it returns to its godly source.
Our understanding is that souls are created for the purpose of
incarnation and reincarnation to purify themselves and
the world by recovering the holy sparks hidden in physicality and to unite with
the divine.”
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