Daily Theosophy

All problems had vanished. There was no God, no reaching of God, no unity with God, no Grace of God, no properties of God, no help of God. They didn’t exits. Even he himself had vanished, yet he was. … a god, not God. For now.

(173)

(the heart on the scale)

Mustafa had arrived more than ten years before Shano came and had been taught about life and death, about the nature of the mind and the universe. Mustafa had seen snow for the first time in the scary mountains, and that in its most scary aspects, and was amazed about the coldness of this white soft sand. But otherwise it had much in common with the desert.

Shano and Mustafa became deep friends. They spoke little – who could expect otherwise? – but understood each other deeply. And it was this Mustafa with whom Shano wanted to discuss about death. And they talked normally, I mean, with their mouths and lips.

Shano said: “You must have been taught about the processes of death years ago, and I presume you have learned the same thing as I did, from the same teachers. What do you thinks about the four dissolutions and the experience of the white, red and dark light?” “Huh?’ said Mustafa. “I have never heard about that. I got a lot of lessons on this subject, and meditated deeply about it for years. But about dissolutions and lights I never heard.” Shano frowned: “Then, what is your story?”

Mustafa began to tell his story, the knowledge he had been taught in the monastery.

As soon as you die you are a man just as before you died. Then you have an invisible body for people on earth – who only pay attention to the dead body now laying on a stretcher. Priest would perform prayers at the body, and they would clean it and preserve it. It would not be burned. Most bodies were just buried, but in exceptional cases – hardly practiced nowadays, the body was cleansed, outside and inside: its organs would be taken out and put in puts, and only the skeleton, skin and hairs would remain. Later these people found the dead body so important, that, if they were rich enough to pay for the process, would use every means to preserve it as it was, so that it would never rot away, never shrink, never would fall to powder. The people believed that the person who had died would need that body to return to earth, or to be able to look at their former body when and if they returned to earth in a new body.

In the country were Shano came from, dead bodies were burnt after a few hours, at most the next morning, after the dying person had left it behind, and that was mainly to prevent it from returning to the old body. It would indeed help the dying person to mentally detach from the old body and go further on his own path of death, the path of clarity of mind and distinction of the spiritual versus the mundane. But Mustafa had been told entirely different things … by the same teachers at the monastery. He had been told that after dying he would have a body just as before, the same Mustafa, but of a type of matter that was invisible for mortal eyes. While the people were burying or conserving the body, the real Mustafa would be taken by the hand by a deity with a human body, but the head of a jackal. The jackal-god would lead him safely through the realm of death until he would meet the place where God was sitting. God wanted to speak with the dead person. God was not at all interested in the dead body on the people were burying or mummifying. He was only interested in the purity of the soul of the dead person. Next to the God stood a balance with two scales. Around were assessors who during life had noted down everything the dead person had done, and now witnessed the ritual that was going to take place. And behind the balance was sitting a monster with a crocodile head and a hippopotamus’s body. The dead person was told by an inaudible voice that his heart would be put on one scale of the balance, and a bird’s feather on the other. If his heart would be heavier than the feather, the balance would go down the wrong side, and the monster would eat it – and that might be a very unpleasant experience. In that eerie world were innumerable people without a head, there were poisonous snakes and other monsters, and there were people walking upside down under the ceiling. They were the victims of their own spiritual ignorance and desires and fears. Then, after such experiences, the deceased person would return to earth rather quickly – death and rebirth were just like the setting and rising of the moon.

The feather was not a real feather, and his heart was not his heart of flesh and blood and nerve cells. It was not even of the material of his subtle body that had been led there at the hand of the jackal-deity. The feather was Truth, and the heart was his soul, i.e. his mind and feelings. Was his ‘heart’ pure, completely truthful, honest, courageous, without stain? Then it would not way out against Truth itself. When the dead person succeeded, which meant that his heart had to be as pure as that of a god, without untruthfulness, he would continue. He would be put to many tests, of which he had to distinguish the reality from the illusion by calling out the name of certain symbols. The greater his nobility and spiritual wisdom, the further he would come, and finally he would become consciously one with God Himself, which was not God as Mustafa had learned in his young years, but he himself, his own heart as well as the Heart of the Universe. But if he would not meet all the tests, he would remain in a state of bliss for a long time, and then return to earth.

Shano had never heard of such balances and feathers and tests. And Mustafa had never heard about clear lights of various colors after death. They looked at each other, and were flabbergasted. 

How could they have been taught such entirely different stories about the same thing?