“...
The two weeks on A. Island flew by. Pragnil and I stayed with a small Aymara community outside the tourist circuit: friendly people and simple food. The weather was wonderful, warm days under the cobalt blue sky and pungent air 4000 meters above sea level; frosty nights spent under 6 heavy blankets. Days spent walking in absolute silence, long reflections in that desert landscape, interspersed with meditations. The silence in some parts of the island is surreal, to the point that a chirping bird or a ruminating cow can be heard in the distance. We brought leftovers from breakfast with us, so that we didn't have to interrupt the heavenly tranquillity to return to the village for lunch. I took advantage of the lunch breaks as an opportunity to ask Pragnil for opinions and clarifications on different topics; I obtained impressive clarifications on the themes of death and the post-mortem.
…”
Religions have always used the concept of death and the post-mortem to subjugate their faithful by leveraging fear, credulity, and obvious ignorance.
Religions incite fear in their own followers, and fear of the ruling god, with the idea that if such a god is displeased with a certain believer's life conduct, he will punish him with a terrible post-mortem, be it hell or reincarnation in an unworthy body. To this end, religions create psychological reprisals that force the believer to venerate this god and to beseech it to honour them with the coveted award of a better post-mortem.
To earn this coveted prize, followers usually give up some life's pleasures, limiting themselves in terms of variety of experiences, and depriving themselves of fully enjoying their time on this planet. Depending on the creed in question, moral restrictions imposed by religion can range from simple dietary restrictions to austere lifestyles, including the negation of healthy sexuality.
It's not necessary to mention that anyone who lives with imposed or self-imposed deprivations, negations, or limitations of any kind, already knows deep down that she is not entirely happy... sooner or later, disturbances and resentments will emerge, creating significant psychological issues, which generally result in psychosomatic problems of any types.
Life's only purpose is happiness: if there were a god to judge the work of human beings, the most serious, capital sin would be precisely this: voluntarily choosing to deprive one's own life.
The only positive aspect, if we must find one, is that by creating a fear of god, and as a result generating a fear of death, religions provide a reason for living to their followers, which main goal is to gain a better post-mortem; individuals with low Individual Consciousness, without an end goal to and rules of conduct for their existence, would not know how to live and would be perpetually depressed: psychological dependence and suicide would be the order of the day. Unsurprisingly, countries with high levels of education also have high suicide rates: people are not taken in the religions, atheism spreads more radically, and individuals who are educated and intelligent but possess low Individual Consciousness, having neither rules dictated by religions nor hope for the post-mortem, can find no reason for their existence.
There is a simple reason that society clings so tightly to religion: under the guise of providing instructions for earning the best post-mortem, religions provide rules that lead the faithful to the complacency of god; and by monitoring a large group of believers who follow these rules, religions thus render society more controlled and more controllable.
One of the many reasons that a person who is acquiring greater Individual Consciousness automatically turns away from religion is really a change in how they view death: death begins to no longer scare them.
The moment of death, complex though it may be, is nothing so terrifying: it is part of a cyclical process of Virtual Reality, completely natural and essential for Virtual Reality itself to remain self-sufficient as we know it.
Let's better analyse what happens to a dying person's consciousness, to get an idea of what we perceive when we die.
We have seen that the Conscious mind of an individual is practically the manifestation of Mens; hence, what Mens "feels" at the time of death is approximately what the person who dies feels.
At the time of death, the Virtual Reality perceived by the individual dissolves.
In those few moments as death arrives, Virtual Reality begins to dissolve and the individual tastes an existence beyond Virtual Reality; we could define them as "nirvana moments".
During those moments, the dying person might experience a general feeling of joy, a perfect tranquillity, a feeling of freedom that goes beyond the physical concept.
So death should be a wonderful, interesting, fascinating, and exciting moment for the individual, and it can only be so if the dying individual is psychologically prepared for death.
Unfortunately, in this society it is very difficult to be prepared for death.
From an early age, we were raised to be terrified of death: we grow up learning only to associate death with the grief of missing the dead, or with the physical pain of a violent death.
Changing one's concept of death is not easy; it requires much work to break down the walls of ignorance built by society and religion.
Changing one's concept of death also means changing what the concept itself makes us feel. The work we must do is to transcend the effects of our incorrect beliefs through reflection, introspection, and knowledge: once we understand the psychological mechanisms in which the fear of death has been instilled, such fear will dissolve.
One could draw an analogy with the concept of the pain of childbirth instilled by society and religion. The great monotheistic religions teach that god, in order to punish the disobedience of the first woman, decided to punish the entire female gender by creating labour pains (what a loving god!).
Since childhood, women have been brought up with the idea that childbirth is extremely painful by divine decision and that there is no alternative to the suffering... with this conception, the woman obviously experiences tremendous pain when the moment of labour arrives. In NLP it would be said that "the woman has been psychologically programmed to suffer more than necessary by her own socio-religious culture impressed upon her throughout her existence".
Despite all of this, there are women[27] who manage to transcend the concept of pain in childbirth, rejecting the stories propagated by religion, focusing their expectations only on the extraordinary moment of giving birth to a human being.
Such women in state postpartum declare that they suffered much less than they had expected. In NLP it would be said that "such women have psychologically reprogrammed themselves": indeed, such women succeed in transcending the obsolete religious legends with which they have been indoctrinated throughout their lives.
There are even some rare cases of women who manage to orgasm during labour.
Are these special women who are able to elude divine will? No; they are women who have deliberately prepared themselves to experience wonderful labour and who have transcended the effects of misguided indoctrination, thus changing a moment of immense pain into a moment of incomparable pleasure.
Transcending the pain of labour, like transcending anything else rooted within ourselves, is not an easy task, but it is possible.
Transcending is never easy, but if some women manage to transcend the indoctrination of pain in childbirth, at least partially, thus succeeding in suffering less and enjoying the miracle of birth more, there is no reason why all women should not be able to succeed (excepting pathological cases).
Anyone who manages to correct their incorrect interpretation of death, thereby transcending the fear instilled in them by their socio-religious system, will be able to enjoy those "nirvana moments" at the moment of death.
Those "moments of nirvana" are not "moments", but an eternity.
With the previously-learned ideas, we can briefly summarise what happens at the moment of death:
The triad of Mens, body, and Spirit ceases to exist as such.
Spirit is reinstated in the Gaya, as explained in the chapter on Spirit ⇒ . The Spirit-less body begins a slow process of biological degradation.
Mens enters into an eternity, where it relives the individual's entire life; although this experience lasts for eternity from the perspective of Mens, from the perspective of an observer in the Perceived Virtual Reality (for example, all living beings outside of the dying person), the experience of Mens lasts a very short time equivalent to one Planck time unit[28]. In this eternity experienced by Mens, Mens itself ceases to interact with any other form.
In the midst of all this, Soul is enjoying the spectacle of death while simultaneously enjoying the experience of the end of others' lives which are perceived by us as being in other time periods. It would seem that the moment of birth and the moment of death are the Soul's favourite experiences.
The death of the individual involves Mens in an interesting dynamic, which must be analysed both with the eyes of Mens and the eyes of an observer outside of Mens but within Our Virtual Reality (or at least possessing components in the Visible Virtual Reality):
At the moment of death, Mens undergoes a fantastic experience, also lived by the Soul as a spectator:
the manifestations of Mens (the Conscious mind) cease to exist; Our Virtual Reality, to which Mens was somehow bound, dissolves before its eyes. Space and time vanish, although Mens continues to have access to memories of just-lived life stored in the Universal Knowledge. Mens experiences this dissolution of Our Virtual Reality in a singular manner[29]: every space and every moment extends gradually to infinity[30], giving Mens a feeling of false ambiguity and eternity, during which, by accessing memories lived up until the moment of death, Mens relives the individual's entire life in an instant. In other words, during these temporal and spatial extensions, Mens accesses the life's memories and relives them: every moment of each memory of the lived life also expands, extending to infinity. During that space-time extension, Mens re-experiences every moment of every memory, rejoicing in the pure essence of it.
From the perspective of an observer in Our Virtual Reality, at the moment of death, one may notice the individual's Conscious mind extinguishing and the manifestation of Mens disappearing; manifestations of Mens enter between one quantum of time and the next and between one quantum of space and the next[31].
In other words, Mens, not having its own spiritual structure in our space-time dimensions, while its own manifestations collapse in the area between space-time quantums, experiences time and space as gradually expanding to become infinity.
Universal Consciousness couldn't find a better way to create death!
In the annotation The Relativity of the Near-death of Mens (⇒), the event of space-time expansion as experienced by Mens during the death of an individual is analysed, calling into question the theory of Special Relativity.