The Buddhas of New Zealand
Amy George
For years I have been having dreams of a certain spirit-family of forty friends. They are creative, joyful, loving, and usually naked. In that dreams are expressions of oneself, the forty friends represent the spectrum of my optimal self functioning as one. A 1998 dream echoed this theme: The Self is a circle of friends.
I experience dreams and waking-life on one continuum, meaning that once my diverse inner-selves have calibrated to function as one, I will be ready to live amongst the family of forty friends in waking-life. Perhaps then the universe will bring us together in reflection of my inner-life.
In one dream, the forty friends were called “The Buddhas of New Zealand.” Being buddhas, the forty friends are perfectly self-aware. As such, they do not experience a need for romantic fulfillment. Men do not crave the balance of woman nor do women crave the power of man because each buddha is nourished from within by a harmony of balance & power. They receive life without craving it. The Buddhas of New Zealand are married to themselves, making marriage to another unnecessary and impossible.
For some people romantic love is the most cherished, transcendent, fulfilling, and available mystical experience one can have (without drugs). It is an experience of the complete soul. The reason romantic love does not last is that each person is responsible for the completeness of their own soul. A relationship can never substitute for the missing pieces inside oneself. Pieces of oneself, of one’s power & balance, will remain missing so long as one relies on a having a partner for fulfillment. From this perspective, marriage to another person cannot be more than a shadow of the most perfect marriage, which is to oneself. Moreover, children created through marriage are not more than a shadow of the divine creativity engendered in self-marriage.
Implicit in the creation of children is that their parents have not taken existential responsibility for themselves (as they may through self-marriage). A person integrated into adult life often has no means by which to take responsibility for their inner-child, so they take responsibility for external children. This would be a nobler act, were it less unintentional. People do not recognize that selfhood-or-marriage/parenthood constitutes a choice.
Recently, I was telling a friend about the Buddhas of New Zealand. He saw problems that could result from clothes-optional living, especially in terms of sex and relationship. However, norms that compromise sex, relationship and nudity do not apply to these people.
Generally, nudity in dreams corresponds to genuineness in waking-life. In 1998 – prior to being thrown together on a road trip with a group of born-again Haight-Ashbury street-kids – I dreamed of naked people with guns. Their nudity reflected the genuineness of the religious convictions of the street-kids, and the guns represented how they wielded religion like a weapon.
This dream, also from 1998, dramatizes the work of de-sexualizing nudity:
Me and a woman are in an alcove together that's adjacent to a doctor's office. The doctor is older. The woman and I are talking openly. She’s not like me. She's much more extroverted, oriented toward the world as if she is showing her beauty to it all the time because this is how she has learned to relate to it. From listening too much to compliments, she has formed a ready-to-be-praised orientation.
She's attracted to me because of our mutual openness. It's natural for emotional openness to imply sexuality. It always does this because sexuality is so closed off.
We get naked and we're still talking. I'm passive, not trying, just letting it go where it wants. Since I am not trying to appear desirable, my resulting mental state is a little morose. She comes to me and we hold each other, but then the doctor says he doesn't want this to lead to sexuality. Nakedness is not his concern. The woman keeps breaking the doctor’s rule and he keeps reprimanding her for it. Finally, she's fed up and decides to leave.
It is propitious to assume that the Buddhas of New Zealand will not have sex in the way it is currently experienced. To understand the naked people, one must look past the trappings of today’s sexuality, taking a perspective that is patterned after God’s. Getting to have sex is never a prime motivation for God and the buddhas, nor is sex sought or even hoped for. The buddhas are too alive to have sex (or to do anything) for its own sake. Were they to try to, they would feel fractured. They do not fracture when it is unnecessary. Everything they do is a means and nothing they do is an end.
Sexual mores and/or restraint are necessitated by people who forsake soul-life in exchange for sexual experience. The buddhas do not need mores or restraint because they know themselves. They are their souls embodied.
This dream from 1993 humorously shows how far “outside the box” (the “box” being television, the computer, and the coffin) the Buddhas of New Zealand are:
I am in nature. I keep communicating with a certain flock of birds, especially with a certain female. She has the beauty of a woman. Soon I move into their group and live with them. We are half-human, half-animal. We are in a river and a train stops overhead. The driver of the train badmouths us and says we should be civilized. A bunch of anthropologists get out of the train to study us, which they can only do with eyes that are biased by culture. I put my hand in some of our shit and reach out to one of them to shake hands. He shakes my hand and then examines his hand, smelling it, maybe not even knowing it's shit that's on it, wondering what my strange, primitive gesture could mean.
For the buddhas, animal and human are harmonized. Within them, the lion lies down with the lamb. The river they are in is the River of Life. The train is civilization. The driver of the train personifies the patriarchal principles guiding civilization. While he has no use for the buddhas, and is even threatened by them, the scientific mind finds the buddhas worthy of study, but it is plain that they are beyond scientific comprehension. To understand the buddhas, the scientist would have to become one of them, thereby losing his/her identity as a scientist. In lieu of that, he studies their comic dung.
The Buddhas of New Zealand are Christian in the sense that they are in union with Christ consciousness. Implied in their moniker is not that they literally dwell in New Zealand, but that they have a renewed religious zeal, a zeal as foreign to Christian evangelism as self-marriage is to spousal marriage.
Also implied in the “Z” of “New Zealand” is the end-of-the-world. One might think of remote Australia as the end-of-the-world, but they then overlook the absolute end-of-the-world, at the end of the alphabet, in the Land of New Zeal. The end-of-the-world is always like this: One thinks they have grasped it, but then there is always another world (or land mass, as it were) to grasp, and incorporate into one’s worldview. Only this, the A to Z, Alpha to Omega, Beginning and End, can complete the World.
With these thoughts I mean to suggest that higher intelligence filters into civilization (despite humanity’s efforts to stave it off) through language as well as geography. A further example of this is that New Zealand is formed like an upside-down boot to pair up with the boot where the Pope dwells.
I have had a number of paradisiacal dreams of the buddhas. The one below I had in Greece. I was awakened from it by an earthquake that registered 6.3 on the Richter-Scale. I was a mile from the epicenter of the quake:
I am one of a group of beings who are like hippies, but without pretension. Our existence is love, joy and creation. At night, naked on a moonlit field alongside smoothly rolling hills, we are running and dancing in rows. I slip and fall on the moist grass and the others lift me back to my feet by my arms. There is no other place. It is the distant future.
Here is an excerpt from my memoirs that recalls a glimpse of the buddhas: “While my body slept, a being took me into the ancient past. A male spirit was there gazing joyously across a grassy expanse, at the place that would someday be home.
“Then the being showed me the distant future; 250 years in the future (2248 CE). The scene was outdoors and at night, lit from dancers’ incandescence. When certain dancers touched down to the ground, others lifted into the air. The dancers were harmonized like planets around the sun, or atoms around a nucleus. They were more embodiments of music and art than people. There was no drama. Drama had been a stage.”
I spent most of year 2000 submerged in visions, many of them buddhas. The one that most often replayed was of them dancing naked in a line on a stage. There were ten buddhas: five male and five female. There was a central figure, a female with short black hair, divine beauty and freakishly long arms reaching her knees.
Sharing the same mind, the buddhas were able to let themselves be puppeteered as a group by Kundalini, putting their movements in synch – not synchronized like a cheer squad, but the movements of each were relative to the rest, and none were planned. All were merged with the eternal dance. The buddhas danced as a single entity to the front of the stage appearing relentless and unstoppable.
Image by Jippolito, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
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married, pregnant, and OK with it
also ok with it
A few days ago I dreamed: There’s a public forum about the future as it is in people’s minds. It is amazing how unique mine is compared to other people’s. In fact, because of the discrepancy, no one believes my most meaningful ideas. I try to see everyone in terms of love.
These must be some of those ideas. Just now I woke from a dream that gave me guidance in how to respond to this comment, firstly using the lesson of another dream, had earlier this week, in which someone defends me from being called a “spiritual tourist” by telling my critic to check out my dream-interpretation blog, assuring the critic that it is really good stuff. Here’s the link. You are welcome to have a dream sent for interpretation.
In my dream my friend also defended me telling my critic about the "big black statue in my backyard," by which she meant my background, which you can read about at www.amygeorge.net.
In “The Buddhas of New Zealand” my intention is to offer perspectives on Paradise. A crucial step toward realizing Paradise is to first imagine it and ask questions about it, which I have been doing ever since I was a single digit in age with God as my teacher. Through dreams I study how God sees this place (I am writing a book about this called “Dream Royale”). I have been given to believe in the eventuality of Everlasting Life in the physical body. In a word, the Buddhas of New Zealand are immortal, their egos reconciled with immortality, achieved in a self-marriage which is consummated by the cleansing of history from the individual psyche so that the individual is as pure as they were at conception, but now completely cleansed by Apocalypse and Salvation. They have realized more than us what is meant by being “made in the image of God.” The buddhas represent potential, a state in which there is no humanness per se, only being. The buddhas exist in a future time when we are all married to each other, and to existence. One can’t be married to all if one is married exclusively and only to a single other.
I have a couple essays about sex I hope you’ll look out for on Reality Sandwich (the one I am soon to submit (partly in response to your misunderstandings) is called “On Erotically Insensitive Men.”)
I am a child. I love children. I like them better than adults a lot of the time. Don’t fool yourself that you can behave nobly and also call me a terrible parent and make assertions about my chakras and sexuality that insinuate I am inferior. As the Bible says, “You tell someone they have a mote in their eye while you have a log in yours.”
Dear Amy
I have yet to discover all fourty of my Buddhas, but I've gotten to know about five of them so far by name.
I love the images your writing place in my mind, especially in this piece.
You're a good friend I've yet to meet in person. Peace to you, my new friend.
"everything means something"
A circle of friends
Thank you for sharing these visions, Amy. I would like to comment on, "A relationship can never substitute for the missing pieces inside oneself. Pieces of oneself, of one’s power & balance, will remain missing so long as one relies on a having a partner for fulfillment."
My experience has been that I can only access these missing pieces through relationships. Romantic, sexual relationships in particular have the power to dredge up lost and wounded parts of myself that I didn't even know existed. This can be uncomfortable as they come into the common space of awareness, but at least now they are being exposed to the healing light of witness consciousness, both my own and my partner's. I think that all authentic friendships serve this function.
So while it is true that a relationship cannot substitute for the missing parts, relationships -- with a sexual partner, friend, animal, plant, or other being -- are still a potent means of recovering wholeness, and maybe the only means. You could even say that the very purpose of the outside world is as a vehicle to manifest hidden parts of ourselves. What we cannot see on the inside, eventually projects onto the outside so that we can Know it.
Charles Eisenstein
www.ascentofhumanity.com
Adam Is a Dam
Thank you for your thoughtful comment, Charles. I totally agree with your observation that parts of ourselves can only become known in the context of external relations. Please note that I was saying relying on the external world for fulfillment is a dead end. It sounds like your inner and outer realities flow with each other, which is ideal in my opinion. Such a free flow is what sustains the Buddhas of New Zealand, or whatever name you like for the beings we are destined to become.
Historically, the collective dammed this flow. Revolution, catastrophe, new ideas and the like un-dammed it. In modern times - when people are duly individualized - relationships and identity dam the flow (for many people). Then, the only way to undo the dam is by self-destruction (catastrophe) and/or self-deconstruction (new ideas). People tend to undulate through dam-less and dammed phases, life-in and life-out, undulating like snakes toward Paradise.
indeed
Beautifully put. I appreciate your vision and insight.
Charles
www.ascentofhumanity.com
i dont' assert...
Our dreams and ourselves
You really have made assertions about me.
Our dreams and ourselves come from the same source, so I honor you-and-yours the same as I do myself and my own.
Buddhas puppeteered as a group by Kundalini
Hi Amy,
Quite often in my explorations, the idea of “nakedness” appears in conjunction with an escalation of energy, a leap of consciousness leading to an apocalyptic breakthrough. In this context, it is not so much that nakedness ceases to be sexual, but rather that the sexual force is channeled along the vertical rather than the horizontal axis, catalyzing a new experience of space.
In a series of visions that began around 1990, nakedness was a key aspect of a divine figure that I called “Akasha”, and was connected to the idea of “apocalypse” as being a rolling away of the sky, a stripping away of the illusion that was history, and the revelation of the pattern that once gave birth to appearance.
Here is a poem that I wrote in 1991 that illustrates this idea. It is section 8 from “To Akasha/ Part 2”:
8
It is morning in America when the UFOs destroy Alaska. Exxon to Valdez brings gold. Gorbachov has jigged out singing love songs onto Noah’s ark. His nakedness becomes him.
A birthday suit puts on Bukhara. Aladdin’s lamp has brought instructions for Czar Nicholas the 3rd. "Attention! The mother of all battles is to give birth to the sun. Arms cannot find human owners." The Brahmins dance from funeral pyres in Boston.
Midnight dawns on Katmandu. Tamberlane ascends to Pluto in a cage. Used graves turn in Tauregs. The fire walk of the Rum Rico Buddhas has ended in disaster.
What new sun boils from the western wave? To Alpha Centaur has a blue Columbus sailed on semen. The great snake of the ocean flames. Its plumes have made a robe of Texaco. It has swallowed several continents.
Light violates from Sirius the Virgin Gorilla Mary. A marriage is performed at Cana. The age of iron has been swallowed by the 3rd. It has ended before it started. The Ark de Triomphe has made peace with war. The keys to hell have opened iron.
For the Atlantic Ocean has a drain been built. Light’s mountains have appeared. 10 thousand spotlights have been set on crags to illuminate atomic structure. They shine upon the shell of Belgrade. Benares’ bank vaults have reclaimed their Brahmins.
On a virgin’s back the Great Beast rides. He rises, fuming, from a pinhead ocean. What mother’s milk has caused the holocaust? From a fractured shell he looks towards Gaia. Armageddon has now ended. A 5th sun has been made.
Exchanging History for Apocalypse
Thank you, Brian. Your thoughts and the types of imagery in your poem resonate with me. I am drawn to such apocalyptic consciousness.
I think the importance of transcending history for the sake of apocalypse is too little understood. It is a subject I have worked with a long time. Here’s a link to a blog entry I posted that sets out some of my ideas about it.
In 1995 I dreamed Tom Robbins and I speak about the extent of insanity in the world and about how we arrived at this state. I say that since God created everything, God created the insanity. Tom Robbins says, with some anger, "Girl, God stopped creating long ago. God stopped creating after six days."
I understand. "We created it," I say.
He agrees. He constantly speaks about spending three minutes with God each day. Beneath all this and beneath the discussion, in another part of my consciousness, are the huge journeys of masses of people - wars, revolutions, migration, the movement of humanity across the long gaping stretch of its life. It is actually going somewhere, to a new place. It's not just cyclical. There is change. And maybe there is an end, as in a novel.
Thank you for your thoughts on nakedness. For me, nakedness had to cease to be sexual for a while so that I could de-objectify myself, take my body back from sex and get back to square one. It was purgation.
this reminds me
of a lucid type dream, i had or had me, recently, but it also reminds me of something the meditation teacher i spent a year in his community said:There is the big Buddha, then there is the bigger Buddha, then the bigger bigger Buddha, and then the really big big big Buddha, and it goes on like that forever.
Or you could have infinite Buddhas in a peace phalanx holding balls of light.
also, i think one of the best dreams i ever had, was that almost naked Goddess, it was like her veil and her wrap were naked too, bathed in some kind of naked light.
yes i have made assertions about you...
Everlasting Life
I assert that in the future we will evolve into complete knowledge of ourselves and thereby achieve Everlasting Life in the body in a world where tragedy, comedy, and drama have ceased, where the unity of God is everpresent, where there are realms of eros we can scarecely conceive of presently, where children will be created perfectly through our mastery of DNA, and will roam the World with Jesus Christ. And that some of us (not necessarily you) will sacrifice some ego to get there.
sex-havin' pregnant married people
"The only thing constant in life is change" -François de la Rochefoucauld
The Rescuers
I respect marriage, sex, and motherhood as irreplaceable and wondrous on the path to Paradise and Everlasting Life in the body. You and I exist to master biology through consciousness. You and I also exist to live harmoniously with biology, which married, pregnant, sex-having ladies undeniably do. Without them there could be no Everlasting Life in the body. I kiss your feet. You stomp on my head.
Since before “The Buddhas of New Zealand” was posted I was already dreaming about the volatile response to the assertions in the passage that Bridget excerpted. This dream is the most poignant:
We rescue a woman who has been committed to a mental hospital. In so doing we keep her from being kept in a drug-induced stupor by an evil doctor. During the rescue a woman and I beat someone, perhaps the doctor, within an inch of his life. We leave through secret entrances that open into the front of movie theaters. In the glare of the film the audience can’t see what we’re doing, that we are transporting the rescued woman in a canvas tarp. After going through the last theater, we go out to our car. The rescued woman now looks like G., [the hottest girl at my high school who I admired as someone with great character]. It’s crowded so she’ll have to sit on my lap. Our cheeks come together and he’s is so soft. I ask if they’ll ever catch her. She says no.
The drug-induced stupor in the mental hospital is illusion, invented, propagated and administered by the power structure of culture, represented by the evil doctor. The committed woman represents the woman whom cultural ethos has “drugged” into complacency. She doesn’t have to be there, but she doesn’t realize it. My group is rescuing her, our assertions beating the power structure of culture within an inch of its life.
The collective in the movie theater watches the same movie, the same narrative (the marriage-sex-babies narrative), and believe what they see must be the same for all, since there it is, objectively on the screen. It is a shared reality.
But wait, my group breaks in effectively blending into the movie, becoming a three-dimensional (realer) part of the movie, and people have difficulty getting it, and completely miss that we are on a rescue mission, rescuing woman from enculturated complacency. They don’t see any of this. All they see is an interruption of their narrative.
Teen suicide for girls in the United States is at an all time high. It is no wonder why when their potential is on a collision course with the culture of the evil doctor. In this age, the collective soul of the teenage girl casts rays of hope past the evil doctor, but not brightly enough to empower her against marriage and babies – only enough to drive her mad, so that she will end up “committed” to an institution instead of the institution of marriage.
In a more positivistic light, I am not anti-marriage, anti-sex or anti-babies. These matters notwithstanding, what is most crucial for woman is financial and worldly empowerment. After all, she’s not making a stairway to heaven out of babies and wedding vows: She’s buying one.
You and I are on a train to eternity, but not in the same car. As you – the married, sex having, pregnant ladies - seem to see it, people in your car are marrying and procreating. Your response to my ideas is as if I’m the conductor and I am telling you your tickets are invalid. You are furious because you know you paid for them. I take out a gun and say, “Off the train, now, while it’s moving!”
As I see it, I am one of the conductor’s apprentices, and I am saying, “Baby, these tickets are counterfeit, but so what? You can go get seats in first class if you like. It’s empty, you know. People have been so poor for so long they forgot it’s there. The seats are little dusty and in disrepair, but you can fix it up.”
Eternal versus external children
Hi Amy,
As a parent, I take no offence at the idea that external children can be a substitute for the reclamation of primordial wholeness. This is an argument that each parent should confront, and is, after all, just a modern rephrasing of the classic Gnostic position, which should be familiar to all spiritual explorers. I have not eaten of the honey of generation! I have not sown children to the Archons! It's not as though there are vast hoards of Gnostic warriors beating us over the head with their anti-generative weapons.
Parents are not a band of 300 Spartans left to defend against the Persian army at Thermopylae, nor are Christians a persecuted minority in the United States of America.
For me, having waited many years, during which I was focused on my own spiritual development and creative explorations, it came as a great surprise to discover that I was ready to become a parent. This discovery signaled that some deep, alchemical change had already taken place; I was no longer the person that I was. For many, the fact of parenthood might precede the transformation, and provoke a radical redefinition of the boundaries of the self and other.
The universe is big. There is plenty of room for more than one approach to realization, or for one person to explore a number of approaches, as the requirements for each stage of development become clear. The pattern of each individual story is peculiar; there is no reason that one size should fit all- at least not on this dimension of existence.
In the Yoruba tradition, about which I will be posting an essay in the near future, there is no real concern for an abstract ideal of behavior or system of belief. Divination pertains to the unfolding of a mystery at the moment that the shells are thrown, to one individual’s alignment with the larger cosmic order, as expressed through the preexistent pattern of his/her fate. This approach does not imply a preoccupation with the narcissistic ego, but rather quite the opposite; the act of divination is a return to objectivity. It is the ego that is often out of touch with these signals.
There is finally no contradiction between the care and feeding of the self and the care and feeding of the other; an exchange of information helps to keep the gift in motion, and to reconnect each action to a story that was old already when the Earth was young. An obstruction is just another name for a door. The many powers of creation have agreed to disagree.
In any case, I do not feel in any way diminished by your slightly different perspectives on these issues. They are your perspectives, and you are exploring them with great energy and inventiveness and courage.
retraction
I had not known of the Gnostic precursor. That is very neat, and edifying, too.
Brian, with your support I have been able to let down my guard a little, to see the hurtful ignobility of this sentence: “[Parenting] would be a nobler act, were it less unintentional.” I think the statement has some objective truth, but its truth is colored with spite. “You are not as noble as you think you are!” it is saying. I live by “judge and be judged,” and there was judgment in the sentence.
I was rightfully judged for it alone, by Watery Tart & Bridget Algiers. About their judgments I wrote, “I kiss your feet and you stomp on my head.” Thank you for cracking open my skull so that I can see my lack of nobility in accusing you of lacking nobility. Please accept my apologies for it. (It doesn’t even really flow with the other thoughts around it anyway, now that I see it/myself more clearly.)
Your fatherly wisdom is a comfort, Brian!
ps: Last night I dreamed someone taught me this lesson: 200 years ago 1 person could grasp an idea, then 100 years ago 6 people could grasp the idea, and now everyone grasps the idea, and it has transformed everything.
Not judging!
"The only thing constant in life is change" -François de la Rochefoucauld
Reacting from Hurt
Thank you to everyone who has responded to my piece. I have really learned a lot.
Bridget, the reason I lumped you in with Watery Tart as one who is being judgmental was your assertion that I would come around to see marriage & babies are not necessarily contrary to self-marriage, as if I just hadn’t experienced enough to know better. Your wording of the idea sounded conscientious, but still there was condescension in it.
I essentially was regarding you in the same way with my protracted train analogy as well as my other defenses, trying to make it seem I had the right to say what I was saying about parents because of the profundity of my vision. "You'll come around once you reach Paradise," I was saying.
I hope the heart of the piece is not lost because of the noise that has been made. The piece would have essentially been the same, and perhaps better, were my views of self-marriage vs parenthood withheld - but then I would not have learned so much!
I feel & think that neither me, nor Bridget nor Watery Tart was being optimally respectful of the other. I apologize again for my oversight.
When people’s best intentions are disregarded they feel hurt. When hurt people act they tend to hurt others. Christ did not act out of hurt. He accepted it, so that later, in a future era, once the world’s healing was done, he could act from his whole, self-married Self.
Just Maybes Baby!
I felt that maybe you would. It now seems like it wouldn't fit into your personal path but perhaps in the future it could. I don't think we as humans ever really know what we're in for, and that sustains endless possibilities for all of us, most exciting! You have the right to say what you're saying and I was just hoping I didn't make you feel like I tried to deny you that. My own visions are also most powerful and conciousness-altering and (as I also hope you see) healthy critisizm of them is a great learning opportunity but ultimately does not take away from the profundity. You know the heart is still there in your piece beating to your own beautiful rhythm!
"The only thing constant in life is change" -François de la Rochefoucauld
On Immortality
This essay and the discussion that followed has me thinking: Is immortality in the physical body truly characteristic of Paradise?
In my mind, the idea of physical immortality brings forth associations with more dystopian hypothetical scenarios. Is not death the necessary balancing principle of life? Does not death facilitate the process of evolution by allowing us to be reborn in a more advanced form? The pursuit of physical immortality seems futile in light of the universal principle of impermanence. Indeed, Buddhism describes this pursuit as the cause of great misery, because it contradicts that fundamental truth. In Buddhism, as well as nearly all mainstream religions, the euphoric transcendence of causation, the reunification with our source, can only be accomplished in full after biological death.
What are your thoughts on this subject?
~ Evan
Immortality Is a River
Hi Evan, Before reaching Paradise, conceptions of God/the individual must die and be reborn. While contra-paradisiacal conceptions still hold sway, any way Paradise is overlaid onto the present day is going to come out dystopian. The only way to glimpse Paradise through the lens of the present is to look into the cracks: handicaps, animals/nature, neutrality, silence, dreams, schizophrenia, pathos, compassion, transsexuality, art, music, synchronicity. One has to look for Paradise egolessly at times (in which case one is not looking for anything at all, but is just listening), and at other times positivistically, focusing on Paradise’s characteristics and learning from what does not characterize it.
Paradise already exists in God’s mind. It has been seeded in the collective mind. Little bits of it grow here and there, but mostly the collective mind is still reeling from history. Once history is evacuated from the mind, Paradise flourishes inside it – and then outside as well.
Once death/crucifixion has duly balanced humanity - when there is no more balance to achieve - Paradise flourishes.
Anything characteristic of God is characteristic of beings in Paradise. In answer to: Is immortality in the physical body truly characteristic of Paradise? I would ask, why wouldn’t it be?
In Paradise, there is comprehensive awareness of what it means to be made in God’s image.
Immortality is not contrary to impermanence. Immortality is a river. No part of a river is ever permanent. Immortality is something received and integrated, not something taken and manipulated.
Death does facilitate the process of evolution by allowing us to be reborn in a more advanced form. If a person’s ego is lucid and flaccid enough, and duly illuminated, physical death is not required to evolve.
“In Buddhism, as well as nearly all mainstream religions, the euphoric transcendence of causation, the reunification with our source, can only be accomplished in full after biological death.”
“In full” is the key qualifier. Reunification with our source in life is intermittent. This intermittent reunification is the seed of Paradise in the cracks of the present. Amy
On Immortality, Part 2
Thank you for your interpretation. I agree with nearly everything stated, and I especially like your analogy of immortality as a river. Your writing style fascinates me -- so much wisdom, poetically infused, but rarely compromising lucidity. I look forward to reading more of your work! Take care.
~ Evan