Yes, I have to! I must have about 1500 "facebook friends" at the moment, and most of them are "supposedly" spiritually oriented. But I wonder about this spirituality. The spirituality of the physical body? The spirituality of Illusion? The spirituality of the "Care Bear, everything is nice"?
Yesterday I shared a video of a Tibetan funeral. Strangely, the comments were hidden by Facebook, it is noted that only I can see it. Or maybe you can? Anyway, it's not whether you see it or not that's important, but the comments that came in which were reproving.
A comment quickly posted indicated that it was not possible to share such a video, that it was shocking, that it was necessary to put warnings (which I had done), even that it should not be published... in short, it is done since it was reported by one of my 1500 "facebook friends" and that I had to sign Facebook charters, ...
I would now like to ask a question. What is your body? Muscles, flesh, fat, blood, bones, marrow, essences,... If you are in a spiritual belief, it means that you think that there is more to your body than a bunch of organic matter. It means that you are aware of a consciousness and that this consciousness is independent of your body.
Do you think, then, that when you die you will take this pile of physical matter with you into the afterlife?
Whatever the conceptions that we have, according to the different spiritualities, of what consciousness is, of what the afterlife is, the common point to all paths is that the only thing that will remain here in this world is the set of organic matter that constitutes our body.
In our society, this body is usually put in a box and devoured by maggots, beetles,... not forgetting our billions of bacteria which will then start to spread to all parts of the body in order to digest us from the inside, we are talking about natural decay... The other funeral solution, increasingly used in our society, is to be consumed by fire.
In both cases, we can see that this set of organs in which we have lived, for which we have developed so many attachments, will only be a pile of ashes or will allow thousands of insects to feed.
So this is nothing different from the Tibetan funeral rites where the body is eaten by vultures.
So what's the shock? Or why be shocked by these images?
Simply because we live in a world of illusions.
A world where everything is hidden. Whether the body is buried or cremated, in both cases we will see nothing. When the body dies, the undertakers take care of dressing it, putting make-up on it to make up for the obvious lack of vitality, perfuming it to avoid bad smells, in short, when we see it one last time before the box closes, the body seems perfect.
So we have very little opportunity to really look at reality and question our attachments to the physical body, especially as our society creates absolutely every possible ploy, especially through the advertisements on our social networks and our television sets, as well as all the innovations to get us to idolise this physical body more and more...
I would therefore like to say to all the "spiritual illusionists" that spirituality is not a dream. It is not a golden Care Bear kingdom. Spirituality should not be separated from the reality of life. The reality of life is that from the moment we are born, we are already on our way to death, because we are born and therefore already growing old. From the age of 25, our bodies show the first signs of ageing and therefore of decay. The moment this physical body stops functioning, it will enter its decay process.
Why is it essential to bring up this point that we reject so strongly in our western societies? Most of the neo-spiritualities totally hide this aspect which is inherent to life! It is impossible to deny it, that is how it is. We are born, we grow old, we die, we rot. Do we? No! Our rotten body! This mass of muscles, flesh, fat, blood, bones, marrow, ...
Tibetans are a people who have fully integrated spiritual understandings into their culture. The body is only a shell that we inhabit for a given time. It's a bit like when you go to a hotel. We rent the hotel room for one night. The next morning we have to return the room and leave. Are we attached to the bed in the room? To the bathroom? Do we want to take the room with us because we are too attached to it? Of course not. So in everyday life, we have to learn to perceive the body as a simple hotel room that we inhabit for a given time. We take care of it, of course, but we must remain aware that this tenancy is only temporary, and that it is only a tenancy. We live in it, but it is not us. It is not our consciousness, which is much more subtle than the grossness of this physical body.
It is essential to meditate on these aspects in order to die in peace because one of the 3 main causes of our suffering is attachment. Attachment to this self, to this self, which is rooted in attachment to this body.
It is therefore essential to detach ourselves from this attachment, without losing sight of the fact that the body remains our temple on the path to enlightenment, its doors being the senses, but this relationship of the body to the senses must be lived in detachment.
In Tibetan circles, there are many meditations aimed at teaching us to free ourselves from attachment to the body, and the funeral rites are in some way part of this understanding, or rather denote the realisation of this understanding.
In the end the dead body is just a pile of meat to feed vultures rather than flies... so it's all the same.
I close this post to say to my "Facebook friends" that if their spirituality does not allow them to understand the essence of life, that is fine, but please, if it bothers you, move on rather than "reporting to Facebook" a video that is merely a reflection of a spiritually evolved culture with over 18,000 years of experience....