I recently finished reading a pretty "woo-woo" book that a friend let me borrow. It's called "The Ra Material: An Ancient Astronaut Speaks." The book is a verbatim transcription of many channeling sessions. A group of three in the 80's supposedly channeled an extraterrestrial, extra-dimensional race called Ra, asked them a ton of questions, and wrote down their conversations. Fascinating stuff, to be taken with a grain of salt, of course. However... even if Ra is a hoax, I've found that there are a LOT of similarities with Buddhism and the philosophy that Ra expounds. A lot of it makes intuitive sense.
For instance, Ra embraces the Law of One. The Law of One states that absolutely everything in the universe is essentially the exact same thing. We're all branches of the same tree, but we're all the same tree. Other humans, animals, plants, seemingly insentient matter, the vacuum of space... all of it is the exact same thing. Source. Or as Ra calls it, intelligent energy. The pyramids in Egypt were (supposedly) created by Ra's supreme understanding of this principle. Since there was essentially no difference between Ra and the building blocks of the pyramids, Ra was able to manipulate the building blocks as easily as we are able to wiggle our fingers. So the pyramids were "willed", and they were. Easy as that!
Ra talks about different levels of consciousness, which they call densities. Every individualized being experiences life through a particular density. Life is a series of progressing through the densities throughout a very long expanse of time until... the end. Things like rocks and plants could, for the most part, be considered second density; most humans are third-density (distinguished from second density by their self-awareness); but some humans occupy the fourth-density, distinguished from third density by an awareness of other-self, so an intuitive knowledge of the Law of One. Knowledge keeps increasing and expanding throughout countless life spans, until... the seventh density (Ra, by the way, is sixth-density). The seventh density, according to Ra, is when you "become one with all, thus having no memory, no identity, no past or future, but existing in the all." During one of the channeling sessions after Ra said those words, the questioner said, "Does this mean that you would have awareness of all that is?" And Ra said, "This is partially correct. It is our understanding that it would not be our awareness, but simply awareness of the Creator. In the Creator is all that there is. Therefore, this knowledge would be available."
All that to say... I have always wondered, what is at the end of samsara?
Samsara is a concept in eastern philosophies/religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. It's a Sanskrit word meaning "the cycle of death and rebirth to which life in the material world is bound." Samsara is also known as reincarnation, karmic cycle, and transmigration. The final goal of Buddhism is to, essentially, escape from samsara; to break the cycle of reincarnation and enter Nirvana. The dictionary has a good definition of Nirvana, so I'll use it here: "a transcendent state in which there is neither suffering, desire, nor sense of self, and the subject is released from the effects of karma and the cycle of death and rebirth. It represents the final goal of Buddhism." Nirvana cannot be attained until a being is enlightened and has learned all the important lessons there are to be learned. In Buddhism there is a concept of Bodhisattvas— enlightened beings who could attain Nirvana if they wanted to, but instead choose to remain in samsara in order to spread their knowledge and compassion to other beings and in this way ease their suffering. This is the ultimate act of compassion.
I have a lot of questions. What exactly is Nirvana? When someone becomes an enlightened being, and no longer opts to be a Bodhisattva, do they merge into the seventh density, so to speak, fusing their essence with all there is so that there is no longer any separation at all? This makes sense to me...
Of course, I asked my uncle. For those who don't know, my uncle is the wisest person I know. He is a practicing SGI Buddhist and has been for about fifty years. He said, "As I have come to understand Nirvana– it is considered to be the end game for the disciples of Hinayana Buddhism—where the cycle of life and death is permanently ended and life continues in a state of Ku. I have become a fan of "Myo Ho” as the defining perception of life and death— it has been described as the duality of permeation and containment. At our birth we are a chip off the universal block of life that contains the essence of it all. At death, our ‘chip’ releases its host body and fully permeates back into the whole. I like the visual of a drop of water from the ocean containing the essence of the entire ocean - and the larger image of our overwhelming interconnectedness in both manifest and dormant stages."
Part of what makes life so wondrous is its mysterious and mystical nature; the big questions that no one knows the answer to. I will not say that I know what happens when we die, because I don't. I won't say that my uncle knows or that Ra knows, either. But conceptualizing life as an infinite process of learning and growing ever more knowledgeable and more compassionate throughout time until we rejoin Source... that makes sense to me. That's what I believe and what I feel in my bones. It's so, so, so beautiful.
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