Conscious Death in the Power of Now

[Fadious]

I read in The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle that during physical death "A portal opens up only very briefly, and unless you have already encountered the dimension of the Unmanifested (your own true self) in your lifetime, you will likely miss it. Most people carry way too much residual resistance, too much fear, too much attachment to sensory experience, too much identification with the manifested world. So they see the portal, turn away in fear, and then lose consciousness. Most of what happens after that is involuntary and automatic. Eventually, there will be another round of birth and death. Their presence wasn't strong enough yet for conscious immortality."

Reading this passage startled me..

Is reincarnation and cycles of birth and death true? How did Eckhart know this? Is this based on beliefs in Hinduism, Budhism, Sikhism etc.. and can one know this for themselves BEFORE physical death?

So is this really the goal? To escape the cycle of life and death?

Isn't there a point to God experiencing itself through its forms also?

I believe we should honor our life, live it, follow goals and desires coming from higher intuition, yet remain detached from outcome, surrender, and keep turning attention inwards.

After reading this I feel some pressure, where before I was approaching my self-inquiry practice from curiosity about my true nature, now I feel like I don't want to "miss that window"..

Also I didn't understand what was meant by "Most of what happens after that is involuntary and automatic."

[Someone here]

1 hour ago, Fadious said:

Most people carry way too much residual resistance, too much fear, too much attachment to sensory experience, too much identification with the manifested world. So they see the portal, turn away in fear, and then lose consciousness.

If I were faced with a choice between stepping into a portal into the unknown or returning for another incarnation.. I would need absolute certainty that my ultimate destination is safe ..which I do . There has to be a deep knowing that nothing can truly harm you in the end..that love ultimately prevails no matter what. Reaching that certainty requires work . 

If someone has not realized this.. then fear and resistance are completely understandable. The heartbreaking part is that if such a moment ever comes..whether you are able to surrender will ultimately be by God’s grace. The ego cannot make surrender happen through its own effort because the ego itself has no real independent existence. That is precisely the obstacle.. the one trying to surrender is the very illusion that stands in the way. In the deepest sense.. there is no separate self to surrender. Many people who awaken through psychedelics have no idea how they were guided toward that experience. They often assume it was their own choice..without recognizing the unseen forces that may have led them there. Take Ramana Maharshi…He seemed destined to become a realized sage. It is difficult to argue that his realization came solely through personal effort. Perhaps it was the unfolding of karma or some deeper grace..something I don’t fully understand..but his life suggests that realization is not simply something the ego achieves through willpower.

 

[gettoefl]

Here is suffering, one way or another. You want here until you don't want here. Stay as long as you want. Go when you choose. Everyone will leave. Some linger, some hasten. Cool either way. When oneness prevails, there isn't suffering. But you need faith to grasp that and to walk the walk.

[Hojo]

After I awaken a portal opened up behind my head.

[Breakingthewall]

4 hours ago, Fadious said:

read in The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle that during physical death "A portal opens up only very briefly, and unless you have already encountered the dimension of the Unmanifested (your own true self) in your lifetime, you will likely miss it. Most people carry way too much residual resistance, too much fear, too much attachment to sensory experience, too much identification with the manifested world. So they see the portal, turn away in fear, and then lose consciousness. Most of what happens after that is involuntary and automatic. Eventually, there will be another round of birth and death. Their presence wasn't strong enough yet for conscious immortality."

How Tolle knows that? He's just inventing

[Lunatic]

    “The evolution of souls involves a transition from imperfection to perfection based upon overcoming many difficult body assignments during their task-oriented lives.” (Newton 2013, 48) “Most errant souls are able to solve their own problems of contamination. The price we pay for our misdeeds and the rewards received for good conduct revolve around the laws of karma. Perpetrators of harm to others will do penance by setting themselves up as future victims in a karmic cycle of justice.” (Newton 2013, 51) “At the end of every life, rather than having a monster waiting to devour our souls, _we_ serve as our most severe critic in front of teacher-guides. This is why karma is both just and merciful. With the help of our spiritual counselors and peers we decide on the proper mode of justice for our conduct.” (Newton 2013, 52) “The test of reincarnation for a soul coming to Earth is the conquering of fear in a human body. A soul grows by trying to overcome all negative emotions connected to fear through perseverance in many lifetimes, often returning to the spirit world bruised or hurt, ….” (Newton 2013, 63) “The only purpose for being in this world is to discover our freedom. The only purpose to come here is to get rid of all the limitations. And where are the limitations? In the mind. I'm afraid I can't. I'm guilty. I don't deserve it. I'm angry. Apathy. The whole purpose of being here is to rid ourselves of all these mentations that are deeply programmed and are the accumulation of many, many millions of years. Millions of lifetimes. And yet when you release at the bottom line you can go free in a matter of months.” (“Lester Levenson, Hale Dwoskin - Lester Levenson (Sedona Method) Magnum Opus PDF-Lester Levenson _ Sedona Method (2024)”, 23) “And you can spend far more millenniums in the astral than you do here because it's an easier way of life. […] But if you understand what the ego is you can go all the way from the lowest realm that we are in now back to the highest by eliminating the ego sense [“Saṃsāra ends when a being attains nirvāṇa, which is the extinction of desire and acquisition of true insight into the nature of reality as impermanent and non-self.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saṃsāra_(Buddhism); https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/truth_of_rebirth.html; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruits_of_the_noble_path]. When we lose all of our ego sense we are fully realized. We go all the way. We return to being the all. The opportunity the opportunity to do this exists more in this realm than any other realm because it is so difficult that the incentive is greatest in this realm. As life gets easier the incentive to grow gets less.” (Sedona Method) Magnum Opus PDF-Lester Levenson _ Sedona Method (2024)”, 427) “I have said souls do have the freedom to choose when, where, and who they want to be in their physical lives.” (Newton 2013, 203) “Souls who become involved in these tragedies are not caught in the wrong place at the wrong time with a capricious God looking the other way. Every soul has a motive for the events in which it chooses to participate.” (Newton 2013, 219) “Of course, but it wasn't an accident-it was supposed to happen [“Karma is the law of compensation. Whatever a man soweth, …” “Karma is destiny as it determines exactly what happens in this life. We can do nothing in regard to all actions happening. Whatever has been destined to be done by us will be done by us.” “If all our action is karmic and predestined, then our will that directs that action must necessarily be predestined. However, we can conquer karma and destiny. There is a free will, — to identify with our body, or to identify with our real Self.” (Lester 1962, 64–65)].” (Newton 2013, 227) “The idea that each of us voluntarily agreed to be the children of a given set of parents before we came into this life is a difficult concept for some people to accept. Although the average person has experienced love from his or her parents, many of us have unresolved, hurtful memories of those near to us who should have offered protection and did not. We grow up thinking of ourselves as victims of biological parents and family members whom we inherited without any choice in the matter. This assumption is wrong.” (Newton 2013, 246) “Q: We have two children and they’re really different. They desired to be our children and we desired them, right? Lester: Yes. We often choose parents who have characteristics similar to ours so that we can have a constant lesson in front of our eyes. This is why we find parents so difficult sometimes. If there’s anything that I see in you that annoys me, it’s because I have it in me. If I didn’t have it in me, I couldn’t even see it in you.” (Levenson 1993, 236)
    The knowledge of past lives is the first of the Buddha’s three knowledges on the night of his awakening.
    ““When the mind was thus concentrated, purified, bright, unblemished, rid of defilement, pliant, malleable, steady, & attained to imperturbability, I directed it to the knowledge of recollecting my past lives. I recollected my manifold past lives, i.e., one birth, two… five, ten… fifty, a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, many eons of cosmic contraction, many eons of cosmic expansion, many eons of cosmic contraction & expansion: ‘There I had such a name, belonged to such a clan, had such an appearance. Such was my food, such my experience of pleasure & pain, such the end of my life. Passing away from that state, I re-arose there. There too I had such a name, belonged to such a clan, had such an appearance. Such was my food, such my experience of pleasure & pain, such the end of my life. Passing away from that state, I re-arose here.’ Thus I remembered my manifold past lives in their modes & details.
    “This was the first knowledge I attained in the first watch of the night. Ignorance was destroyed; knowledge arose; darkness was destroyed; light arose—as happens in one who is heedful, ardent, & resolute. But the pleasant feeling that arose in this way did not invade my mind or remain.” (https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/OnThePath/Section0007.html)
    “Q: Still, getting rid of your body isn’t going to help much though, is it?
    Lester: I’m not suggesting you do that. Until you consciously leave your body, if you forcibly got rid of your body, you would just come back again through the womb and wait twenty or so years while growing up, before starting again to learn that you’re not the body. So forcibly dropping the body would be a very wrong thing to do.” (Lester 1993, chap. 36, 364)
    “Dr. N: When a person kills himself on Earth does this mean they will receive some sort of punishment as a spirit? S: No, no, there is no such thing here as punishment-that's an Earth condition. Clodees will be disappointed that I bailed out early and didn't have the courage to face my difficulties. By choosing to die as I did means I have to come back later and deal with the same thing all over again in a different life. I just wasted a lot of time by checking out early.” (Newton 2013, 58)
    https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/truth_of_rebirth.html
    “Reincarnation doesn't help you if in your next incarnation you still don’t know who you are.” (Tolle 2003, 52)
    “Physical suicide, killing the body, doesn’t solve the issue, since the body wasn’t you in the first place. You don’t kill your ego just because you stop one particular object from moving. The clear mind sees that even though the body stopped, the mind didn’t, and so there is still work to do, until there isn’t.” (Katie and Mitchell 2017, 135–136)
    “My cousin once called me at two in the morning, very depressed, and said that he was holding a loaded pistol to his head and the hammer was cocked. He said that if I didn’t give him one good reason why he should stay alive, he would blow his head off. I waited for a long time. I really wanted to give him a reason, and no good reason came to me. I waited and waited, with him on the other end of the phone line. Finally, I told him that I couldn’t find one.” (Katie and Mitchell 2021, 345)
    “Getting back to the quote, Lester told me we set up our next physical life between lives so that we can overcome mistakes we made last time and to satisfy desires.” (Seretan 2008, “Is everything preordained .doc”)
     “__Astral Plane –__ The place where we all go to after death if not Free. There we are in a “rubber body” as Lester told me, meaning it cannot be hurt like in the physical world. We see long lost friends and family from former lives. If we have any unfulfilled desires remaining, we karmically must return to the physical plane to experience them.” (Seretan 2004, _Lester and Me, My Unforgettable Conversations With American Master, Lester Levenson_, 57)
    “As long as there's one desire in us for something in this physical world, we'll come back into this physical world to try to fulfill it.” (“Lester Levenson, Hale Dwoskin - Lester Levenson (Sedona Method) Magnum Opus PDF-Lester Levenson _ Sedona Method (2024).pdf”, 60)
    ““When a being sets this body aside and has not yet attained another body, I say that it is craving-sustained. Craving (= taṇhā; “Craving or excessive or inappropriate desire”), Vaccha, is its sustenance at that time.” — SN 44:9” (Thanissaro Bhikkhu 2024, “The Paradox of Becoming”, 14 June 2026, https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/ParadoxOfBecoming/Section0007.html, 19)
    See also `The Michael Newton connection` (https://mega.nz/folder/h5pG3Dia#6K7_dyn22-W5dR9C2MauHg), https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/113610-trump-is-god/?page=3#comment-1751305.
    

[Joseph Maynor]

7 hours ago, Someone here said:

If I were faced with a choice between stepping into a portal into the unknown or returning for another incarnation.. I would need absolute certainty that my ultimate destination is safe ..which I do . There has to be a deep knowing that nothing can truly harm you in the end..that love ultimately prevails no matter what. Reaching that certainty requires work . 

If someone has not realized this.. then fear and resistance are completely understandable. The heartbreaking part is that if such a moment ever comes..whether you are able to surrender will ultimately be by God’s grace. The ego cannot make surrender happen through its own effort because the ego itself has no real independent existence. That is precisely the obstacle.. the one trying to surrender is the very illusion that stands in the way. In the deepest sense.. there is no separate self to surrender. Many people who awaken through psychedelics have no idea how they were guided toward that experience. They often assume it was their own choice..without recognizing the unseen forces that may have led them there. Take Ramana Maharshi…He seemed destined to become a realized sage. It is difficult to argue that his realization came solely through personal effort. Perhaps it was the unfolding of karma or some deeper grace..something I don’t fully understand..but his life suggests that realization is not simply something the ego achieves through willpower.

 

Someone here realized this.  Good for you!

[Lunatic]

    The URLs are not formatted properly in the post above so I attached it as as `rebirths.txt`.
    
    Change the extension to .md for syntax highlighting.
    
    I can't attach it with an .md extension.

rebirths.txt

[Someone here]

21 minutes ago, Joseph Maynor said:

Someone here realized this.  Good for you!

Plot twist: someone became enlightened… then discovered there was no someone. Yikes 😬