Preparing For Death

Plato wrote that philosophy was preparation for death, preparing to think without a body.

Christians believe that their religion prepares them for judgment after death.

Tibetan Buddhists believe that meditation prepares them for the bardo or intermediate state.

I suggest that meditation does prepare us for death - for letting go of everything, including thought and belief.

We are always close to death because life is temporary local negative entropy. We cannot swim against the stream indefinitely and will be swept down to the lowest energy level, the heat death of the universe.

Embodied Divinity II

Paganism	many morphic gods; the Wanderer
pure monotheism	one never incarnated god; prophets
Petrine and Pauline Christianity	a man raised up by God
Gnosticism	apparent incarnation
Hinduism	many temporary descents
Johannine Christianity	one permanent embodiment
Krishna and Aslan	perennial embodiment

This sequence begins and ends with gods like men, and sometimes like animals. "Morphic" means anthropomorphic and sometimes zoomorphic: Anubis, Ganesh, the evolutionary avatars of Vishnu. The Wanderer is simply Odin/Wotan on Earth. Krishna is the supreme deity on Earth according to some of his devotees.

Embodied Divinity

Non-Incarnational Traditions
In Jewish, Muslim and Sikh traditions, there is only one god who is never incarnated.
In Peter's Pentecost sermon and in Paul's Mars Hill sermon and Epistles, Jesus is a man raised up by God, not God.
Petrine Christianity was a Jewish sect; Pauline Christianity was transitional to Gentile Christianity.

Incarnational Traditions
In most Hindu traditions, many gods temporarily descend in animal or human form.
In Johannine Christianity, the power that created the universe in Genesis was permanently embodied at the Incarnation. An invisible spirit became a visible person. Divinity created, transcended and was embodied in the universe, then re-transcended it while remaining embodied. The key texts are the First Book of Moses and the Fourth Gospel.
In the Christian-influenced Krishna Consciousness tradition, the supreme god is permanently embodied as a blue man.
In a work of Christian fiction, the creative power was embodied as a talking lion in the beginning but returned to the human form at the end.

I discuss acknowledged fiction alongside scriptures in accordance with Alan Moore's dictum that "Religions are higher fictions." Here are four divine-human interactions:

never incarnated;
raised up;
temporarily descending;
permanently embodied.

Christ, Krishna and Aslan are the three permanently embodied divinities.

Addendum, 25 Mar '14: I omitted Gnostics and Docetists who, generally, assert that matter is evil, therefore that God cannot have been incarnated, but who also give an account of the apparent Incarnation as only an appearance. Their views may be akin to those of the Hindus for whom an incarnating deity merely descends, then re-ascends, without remaining permanently embodied.

He Is Risen?

Everyone dies. In fact, nothing lasts. Inanimate objects are only apparently permanent. Some products of manual and mental labor endure for considerably longer than individual human beings. When it was pointed out to a Northern Irish coal delivery man that he was careless about leaving coal stains in a house, he replied, "There'll be fluers 'n' duers when we're a' deed." (There will be floors and doors when we are all dead.)

Long-lasting mental constructs include religious beliefs ("God"), philosophical concepts ("the Word") and religious-philosophical syntheses ("...the Word was with God and the Word was God"). Long-lasting physical constructions include temples and cathedrals which can even be adapted to express changing beliefs. (One building has been temple, church and mosque.)

Religions usually offer some form of immortality. Buddhism emphasizes mortality while also referring to a timeless Nirvana that is not endless survival but is also mysterious. Some religious post-death states negate or transcend individuality whereas others preserve it.

Spiritualists claim to prove immortality of the soul. Christianity is differentiated from all other religions by the proclamation that "Jesus is risen," not that he was revived two thousand years ago but that he is now and forever alive, having conquered death not as a spirit surviving a body but in a new kind of spiritual body. Quite a claim, if it were true. Christians can access Jesus' immortality but in entirely different ways: Catholics receive Communion; Evangelicals merely believe.

Jesus is also believed to be both Messiah and Savior but the Resurrection is supposed to verify both the Messiahship and the salvation so the Resurrection remains crucial. The belief that he is risen could only have been founded after his death so it was not founded by him. Peter proclaimed the Resurrection and thus founded Christianity. Jesus' teaching, while he was alive, was not Christianity but the same as John the Baptist's, "The Kingdom is at hand." Christians claim that the Kingdom came in the Resurrection but that was not its original meaning.

Two Ways

Two ways that meditation might go:

attention focused entirely on the present - no memories arising;
memories still arising but also a resolution of the identity yet difference between the self that performed past actions and the self that remembers having performed them.

The present self must neither deny responsibility for past actions and their consequences nor remain attached to guilt about them. I performed and remain responsible for discreditable actions even though it was not the present I that performed them. Intuitive understanding of the causes of the past self's actions might help the present self to resolve guilt and continued meditation might generate intuitive understanding.

Divine Schizophrenia

I may have thought of a slightly different angle on the Christian Trinity. The Jews, including Jesus, Peter and Paul, were, and still are, pure monotheists, like Muslims and Sikhs. Peter and Paul regarded Jesus as a man raised up by God, not as God.

However, the author of the Fourth Gospel deified the Son of God and personified the Spirit of God but remained monotheist. Thus, he had three divine persons but only one divine being. Is this a contradiction?

Can there be three human persons but only one human being? Yes, in schizophrenia, originally called demonic possession: "My name is Legion for we are many..." So the Johannine God might say, "My name is Trinity for We are three." Maybe this is divine self-possession?

Getting Serious About Meditation

Meditate early in the day. If it is left too late, it might not happen. Easier when you are retired.

Two kinds of thoughts come up during zazen:

unimportant, superficial, trivial, fleeting;
deeper problems.

Maybe both kinds are equally serious but we don't realize it?

Deeper problems need to be addressed only when they arise. They are addressed only by sitting with them until they pass, not by thinking about them.

I must accept responsibility for my actions but must also differentiate between the self that acted in the past and the self that is aware now. Total identification with a past self impedes present awareness.

The word "I" connects present awareness to a set of memories but does not refer to any permanent entity. There is a different "I" in each organism. Organisms change and end. I do not think that consciousness continues after an organism dies any more than that the message in a letter continues after the letter has been burned. A letter can be photocopied but what evidence is there that memories are copied either in a psychic medium or in later organisms? - and, even if they were, later bearers of the memories would not be identical with the original.

There may be some evidence but it is outside my experience. The Buddha taught that:

karmic consequences affect later organisms (yes);
such consequences can include memories (?);
the later bearers of the consequences are not the originals (yes).

Thus, I accept teachings 1 and 3 but question 2.

Was his rebirth teaching based on his experience or merely on his reinterpretation of the reincarnation teaching?
Was reincarnation teaching based on any experience other than that the psyche seems to leave the body temporarily in sleep, therefore is inferred to leave it permanently at death?

It is easier to say, "That was not me," when remembering the actions of a young child. It was not the present "I" - it was an earlier cross-section of the same world-line or an earlier event in the same causal sequence. A character in a Maigret TV episode said, "A child with my name did it."

Eternally present awareness receives memories from the temporal past but needs to let them go.