WHAT LEAVES THE BODY AT DEATH?
An edited conversation with a friend:
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Friend: What leaves the body at death? It can’t be consciousness, right?
Reply: The body leaves every night in deep sleep 😴.
The body leaves in the absence of mind.
When identification is absent, the body is experienced as the weather is experienced with the addition that usually, you can manage the body more readily than you can manage the weather.
In your question there is the assumption that the Self is inside the body.
It’s the other way around. The body is a manifestation of Self. The body is a magnificent manifestation of consciousness. It is via this manifestation that contemplation of truth is possible. 🙏🏻💗
The body is appearance. The Self is reality. The reality of body is Self.
Like the reality of the pink flying elephant 🐘 (in pink) of your night dreams is the dreamer.
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Friend: 1) What is the You that can manage the body more readily than weather?
2) At death the body continues to appear, but something has changed.
3) The body doesn’t disappear in sleep to an observer. if I close my eyes, the world disappears. But it’s still there when I open them. Isn’t that like the deep sleep analogy?
Reply: 1) there is only one Reality. One Self. One “I” which we call consciousness.
Given one reality and given the reality of consciousness, it follows that it is consciousness that conceives, creates, witnesses and manages all its creations, all its dreams. The body is an appearance, managed by consciousness. Blood flow, gravity, feeding, resting the body are the doing of the one and only doer.
2) At the death of the body, the body no longer appears as the body that was. This does not mean the end of appearance. As long as there is a subject, there is an object. As long as the separate self impression remains, the game is not over.
3) In deep sleep, there is no body that is observed.
Is it not your experience?
You say: “if I close my eyes the world disappears. But it’s there when I open them. Isn’t that like the deep sleep analogy?”
Yes, it’s an analogous analogy except to clarify that upon opening your eyes, the world that you perceive refers to the reality and eternity of consciousness. It does not refer to itself. It refers to its changeless source.
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Friend: If the body is in the Self, and not the usual misinterpretation, then Consciousness remains after death. So what if anything leaves?
Reply: Upon the dissolution of ignorance and upon the end of identification, unhappiness and the sense of lack and separation ends.
The body leaving and reappearing is of little significance. The appearance of the body is a gift as it provide another opportunity to contemplate truth and awaken from ignorance. But why delay? Why not make the best out of this incarnation?
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Friend: You read my mind. “When does that happen?” — when does the end of ignorance happen?
Reply: Only your dedication, love and commitment to truth make it happen. God loves the ones who love 💕 her.
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Friend: We’ve been at this more than a couple weekend seminars 
Reply: Love is unending and our commitment to live the love and to honor our understanding is ever deepening. When we love, there is no time. Our love and dedication to living inquiry into truth reveals that i am that which I seek.
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Friend: So what needs to be abandoned to embrace love?
Reply: All resistance and seeking.
The practice of dispassion.
And the practice of discrimination and non-action. Also the contemplation of the teaching of emptiness leads to clarity of the mind.
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Friend: I get resistance and seeking. But Discrimination and non action? Emptiness?
Reply: Discrimination (Viveka) refers to clarity. Making the distinction between what is illusion and what is real.
The teachings of impermanence refers to the changing (that which appears and disappears).
The contemplation of Consciousness/Awareness refers to the changeless (the real).
The teaching of emptiness refers to the void aspect of all forms. The emptiness aspect of form. Images on the screen.
Non action and dispassion refer to the teaching of stillness and impersonal witnessing without engagement in the negative emotions and without pursuing the I-thought.
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Friend: Thanks. So when there is engagement, as there often is, then what? My answer: return to disengagement from the engagement and let the whole mess be.
Reply: Remaining as ‘One Is’, remaining unmoved and not moving reveals the emptiness of engagement and releases it.
It’s a silent recognition. A non doing.
