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I am writing this article because there have been several
very prominent cases in the news in recent years regarding people being kept at
least temporarily on life support and some for many years as in the case of
Ariel Sharon (8 years) and Terry Schiavo (7 years). For simplicity's sake I
will comment on the general details of these cases, the principles will remain
the same in all such cases.
In one of these recent cases, a young girl went to the
hospital for a routine operation and because of unforeseen complications, ended
up brain dead, at least brain dead in the opinion of several attending doctors.
The medical consensus seems to be that the young girl being brain dead, for all
practical purposes is truly dead. But for the fact that she shows some small movements
from time to time, she shows no discernable brain activity. Her parents hold a
different view and insist that she is still alive.
As many of you will no doubt remember several years ago, a
similar case of Terry Schiavo gained prominence in the news after she suffered
severe cardiac arrest in her home in St. Petersburg Florida. She suffered
severe brain damage due to lack of oxygen leaving her in a coma and was
eventually diagnosed as brain dead and in a permanent vegetative state.
The ensuing legal challenges between her parents and her
husband disputing her condition and the disagreement on whether or not to
remove her from life-support resulted in her being maintained in this unresponsive
state for over seven years. Different procedures were tried attempting to coax
her back to a state of semi-awareness, but to no avail. Finally courts granted
permission to remove her feeding tube and in accordance with several court-ordered
legal decisions, the feeding tube was permanently removed and she died thirteen
days later.
The question still remains on the Schiavo case and in most
other similar cases, that question being, when
is dead really dead and when should one who is presumed dead be removed
from life support and allowed to pass from coma to true separation of
consciousness from the physical organism and termination of pseudo life
functions? This question is complicated by religious beliefs regarding
termination of life.
As long as there are misconceptions about what life is, there will always
be questions about who is alive and who is not, who is in a coma and who is
dead. Unfortunately, few if any people know what truly constitutes life and
still fewer understand the true nature of death so no wonder such difficult
decisions are usually made on incomplete knowledge based on ancient myths,
legends and superstition as interpreted by various religions.
I will ignore religious discussion here for two reasons, one
being that we are not discussing individual beliefs and I think most of my
readers are evolved enough to understand that much of religious belief is based
on the aforementioned myth and superstition and parables and is something that
must be evolved through and beyond before any true spiritual and psychic understanding
is possible, and that takes time, usually much time.
So, if you are deeply entrenched in religious dogma, this
may be a good point for you to exit this discussion, for it will be impossible
for you to understand what is said here. I am not attempting in any way to pass
judgment or determine the state of life or death of any particular human being
or for that matter, any living entity regardless of species.
I think most of you understand by now, that there is a
division of the personality with one aspect being a psychic focus of the mental
portion of the overall identity focused consciousness commonly known as the
"personality". The other aspect constitutes the collective biological
focus of the physically materialized consciousness of the atoms, molecules and
cells, each responsible for separate bodily and mental functions of the human
personality. In other words, one aspect of your being is subjective and the
other is biological. Before you are born as an independent personality, your consciousness
had already existed as an undifferentiated portion of your Soul/Entity.
In that undifferentiated state before "life" as
you know it began, you have existed eternally although not as in an individualized,
self-aware identity. You were given what you refer to as independent
"LIFE" by your Soul/Entity through a process that could be called a
partitioning of the Soul consciousness, splintering off a portion of his/its
consciousness and projecting it into the three dimensional, physical, Earth
reality system. In other words, you existed but not as an independent
self-aware personality. You became self-aware later on in the process.
We may as well go all the way with this thought stream, if
you are reading this, you are alive and you are alive eternally. Life is
a state of becoming and death is a
progression in that becoming.
Your physical form will change and your consciousness will
evolve until it will be unrecognizable from its present state, but you will be
as frisky and alive a thousand years from now as you are today, just in
different ways. In other words, you are just beginning the journey and the
journey never ends.
Your main self-aware directing consciousness is but one
aspect of your personal independent consciousness. Early on your self-aware,
directing consciousness had to be able to handle the intense focus of the
biological body dealing with physical reality. It could not afford to, nor does
it have the ability to handle the precise and necessary functions of the
countless involuntary systems of the physical body.
If you had to consciously think and direct the countless
functions of your physical body to breathe, your heart to beat, your nervous
system to function, interacting with your sensual apparatus carrying your
perception to the brain, sorting out the meaning of those perceptions and then
directing the instantaneous bodily reactions, you would be swamped with data
that you could not handle.
Your physical body is a gestalt accumulation of untold
millions of small independent consciousnesses. "Everything That Is"
possesses consciousness. Electrons, atoms, molecules and all other particles,
seen and unseen, all possess their own independent generalized type of consciousness,
and these together form a "body
consciousness" that handles the spontaneous and instantaneous bodily
functions that are far beyond your consciously aware abilities.
So, there is a division of consciousness into the main
directing consciousness that you call your ego self and the body consciousness.
This partitioning works well so the main consciousness is not distracted from
its duties of maintaining the personality in the three-dimensional reality
system.
In other words, you don't have to consciously know how your
lungs breathe; you don't have to know how your heart beats automatically or
your fingers can pick up a pea on a table. If you had to give your hands and
fingers directions to do that one simple task, it would never be done. Your
inner bodily consciousness works in perfect unison with the main directing consciousness,
to the extent that it can maintain the biological portion of the identity even
when the main consciousness is traveling out of the body, and this happens
quite often.
The main personality consciousness can leave the body as it
often does when projecting from the dream state into other dimensions. The body
consciousness maintains the body in a subsistence state until the main
consciousness returns home from its travels. Biologically, the body is well
taken care of even while the personality is "out to lunch" so to
speak, and this "out to lunch state" could be while traveling in your
familiar neighborhood or entirely out of this universe.
In short, your consciousness leaves your physical body often
from the dream state, even though you may be totally unaware that you have done
so, since you are usually not consciously aware of the feat you have performed
when you awaken.
Personality consciousness can forsake the physical body for
varying lengths of time and this does not constitute a state of death. The
main consciousness is gone, no more and no less than in death. The body
consciousness is well aware of the vacancy and is well prepared to carry out
its duties and maintain the body during the absence, until the personality
consciousness returns. These projections are commonly referred to as "Out
Of Body" states.
As I have said many times before, I am not a physician,
psychologist or any other health professional and have limited knowledge of the
medical profession and I know absolutely nothing about sickness or illness. My
interests have always been slanted toward knowledge of the origin of sickness or illness and here I include what you commonly
call a more permanent illness called death.
What most people don't understand is that in greater terms,
death as you know it does not really exist, at least in terms that you usually
apply to the word, but I know what you mean, so I will discuss it briefly along
those lines. Please bear this in mind, bodies die, identities live forever and
utilize many bodies. Consciousness creates and then adopts form and not the
other way around; it did not erupt from dead, inert physical matter.
In the cases now in the news, there is disagreement on
whether or not the patient is alive or dead. There is enough written about the
varying opinions, so I need not go there, but there are other aspects that are
more important in this discussion.
You cannot identify a particular point of death with medical
instruments to any degree of accuracy because death is something that the personality
goes through as it begins the process of disentangling itself from its physical
body. You are your Soul in physical clothing while you are alive, but your Soul
is more.
While you are alive, you are "Soul Stuff"
interwoven through every cell, every molecule and every organ of the physical
body. Every memory or thought that you have ever had is maintained, and the
separation of Spirit from Body does not happen instantaneously, even in cases
of fatal accidents.
You are aware that even in the case of absolute physical
death, the body consciousness does not die immediately and may maintain certain
parts of the body for years after death. Hair and fingernails can continue to
grow for years, even centuries after the main personality consciousness has
left the physical body behind.
The medical profession has contributed to much of the
confusion about physical death and now has the technology to prolong what
should be a natural progression through utilization of artificial means into an
unnatural coma-like state indefinitely. I realize that this statement will meet
with some trepidation, but some of you will recognize its validity. No man,
woman or child has ever died that did not want to die. Conversely, no fetus was
ever born that did not desire to live.
As you know, or at least I hope you know, consciousness
exists before and after the physical body.
The identity consciousness is well aware when death
is imminent and can choose to accept the death event or make necessary
adjustments. No death will ever be died that is not prepared to die.
(Translation; in death nothing is ended, the body is discarded and you take a
huge step forward into a new beginning. Unknowingly, you are probably already
familiar with this process.
The real reason why you are so reluctant to let death take
its natural course is that you identify your personality almost exclusively
with the physical body and so you equate death of the body with annihilation of
the Soul or Self. Physical bodies die but consciousness is eternal.
This mistaken assumption is mostly because of identification
with the ego and the ego fears its extinction. The identity of a tree, plants
and most animals, have no compartment of the ego to cut short their ability to
sense their existence beyond their physical destruction, and so they can follow
their continuity of life through many consecutive lives with no fear of their
death or destruction.
Medical advances have given you the ability to prolong the
death experience of the patient for years in a coma or coma-like vegetative
state. The patient will remain alive until the main consciousness has vacated
the physical body and the main consciousness will never sever the thread of
life until the physical body is rendered inoperable either through results of
injury or advanced age.
If the self-consciousness for some unknown reason desires
not to live, it will find a way to die and no potions, incantations, procedures
or life support paraphernalia will be able to keep it alive against its wishes.
The body consciousness gestalt can minimally sustain the
body for years when supported by artificial breathing and feeding tubes and
other medical devices. In many cases doctors and family don't realize that they
are maintaining a shell that will never be reactivated once the directing main
consciousness has decided on death and it has been allowed its freedom.
In short, the presence of the main ego consciousness is the determining
factor of whether or not life still exists in the physical body. It can appear that life exists as long as
the body consciousness is even minimally present.
In many cases where there is little if any apparent bodily
activity, the main consciousness has long ago turned its attention to the new after-death
dimension, which it will easily transition into the instant the plug is
pulled.
Generally the personality has already re-established
contacts with old friends and family from the current and previous lives that
have already transitioned. They are focused in the after-death dimension even
though their physical body may still have the appearance of life or un-life.
It is pure lunacy to assume that the dying person given a
choice would want to remain on life support as a vegetable when they are
already involved to some extent in a new life of total freedom. The Soul knows
what it is up to, so why do you think you know better?
Terminal patients are kept alive unnaturally not because of
the wishes of the patient, but for the gratification of the remaining family.
It would make things easier it you realized that death is not a bad thing; it
is a perfectly natural progression that leads to new life and that is a good
thing. If that were not the case, you would not be reading this article.
Maintaining the life of a vegetable makes no sense unless
you are growing vegetables.
You must quit it!
If you have questions about this or any other article,
please post them on the comments link below.
William Allan
