The OBE and the Meaning of Life
By Don DeGracia (72662.1335@CompuServe.COM)
The question: "Can you speculate on the larger meaning of life and how one should live in the physical? From your experiences, what is the reason for existence on this plane?"
Well to begin answering these questions, the first thing to appreciate is that we have grown up in a society that has lost touch with these answers. Overall, our society has lost touch with the essential purpose of life, unless you feel this is to aquire things and be real important.
So, once you realize this, the idea is to look to the ideas of other societies and see what they thought the meaning and purpose of life is, or was. When you do this, what you will see is that every society has different answers to these questions. But some of the answers are broder than others, and some have more peacefulness to them than others.
If you look to the socieities that have the broadest ideas about the meaning of life, what they teach is that ALL of life is an expression of God's will, and that all things are an expression of God's essence. And that the purpose of life is that God should express itself (notice that God is an "it") with harmony. THAT is the purpose of life according to societies that think big.
Life is made up of cycles within cycles within cycles within cycles. Everything is spinning around everything else, and this movement is the dance of God. The reason we are here is because God created all this. It really has no purpose beyond that. But, since each and everyone of us is an expression of God, then our will IS God's will. This is what Aleiter Crowley meant when he said "do what thout wilt is the whole of the law".
But also, what you are changes. You are not the same thing for very long. So, what you think "your" will is today may be different tommorrow. Life itself is everchanging. When you ask, "how should one live their life?" what you should do is recognize that life itself is a vast dance of everchanging things, and see this as a great dance and dance along with it. Or you can see it as a great wave and surf upon it.
I don't know if you've seen my book DO_OBE, but at the end of it, I speculate on the very things you asked about. And, based on all my expereinces here in this plane and out on the inner planes, I've come to realize that certain ideas do a better job at making sense out of the "big picture" than do other ideas. I describe these ideas in my book. You might want to check this out if your curious. Matter of fact, here is a short exerpt:
" We have now come to the end of these notes. To conclude my lessons on how to achieve an OOBE/astral projection/lucid dream, I will present the "big picture" presently in my mind by which I understand what an OOBE is and how it fits into my life. You can take my philosophy or leave it as you wish. However, these ideas are the fruition of a tremendous amount of study, reflection, more study, numerous experiences with altered states of consciousness, numerous qualities of experience here in my physical life, and more study and more reflection. There is a cycle: learn, do, reflect, learn some more, do some more, reflect some more. This cycle goes on and on for our whole lives.
Presently, one of my major interests centers on understanding ancient Hindu ideas. I have been led to study Hinduism because, as far as I can tell, the Hindus probably had the most complete understanding of altered states of consciousness of any other culture I know of, even our own. In our culture today, we are completely preoccupied by physical consciousness, by the experience of our consciousness here in the physical world. As I already said, we, as a society, do not even understand the nature of the fact that we dream. And it seems that everything we attempt to understand today has to be fit into physical terms or we consider it irrelevant, fantasy, mythology, or meaningless.
The ancient Hindus, on the other hand, had developed an elaborate science of human psychology while our ancestors were still barbarians in the forests of Europe. This science they called "yoga", and behind this science is an elaborate system of philosophy that has been captured in the Vedas, Upanishads, Tantras and in other ancient Hindu holy writings.
The Hindus were *introspective* and the things they discovered through the introspective science of yoga are completely amazing. Millenia ago, the Hindus mapped out the inner planes, and mapped out the methods and techniques needed to access these inner planes. The ultimate achievment of Hindu civilization, was, however, to create methods by which we humans could experience a direct relationship with the SOURCE of all creation. Hindus called this "becoming enlightened", and they call this SOURCE "Brahman". Call it God, call it Brahman, call it whatever you want. It doesn't matter what name you give it, because the source of all existence is ALL names, and ALL things. And the Hindus learned how to directly experience this source through the methods of yoga...."