Can ego come back someday after enlightenment?

[pluto]

A good example to see how this works is Martin Ball's perfect symmetry example. When one starts to act, be, express, think, speak ect.. outside of that perfect symmetry thus the source expression is no longer in perfect alignment however one can still be expressing a very enlightened state or energy frequency(if you will) although absolute enlightenment/source expression at all times is very rare even among most enlightened beings.

Using an opening flower or a finger clasping example as the layers open out in complete surrender then slowly layer back in a more divine disciplined manner in order to play your role unless you have a higher path/choice. That true inner source essence can never really be lost once you crack open but can be faded out(So to speak). After Enlightenment all it takes is a shift in awareness to get back, we just must remember how and everytime we do we realize how simple it is.

You forget only to remember again for your own growth to the next level, its an ongoing spiral of ascending order until the absolute oneness is reached again.

 

[Highest]

No, not after true liberation. A man is born into the ego, it is only when he self-inquire and meditate that a doorway is opened, the doorway to his own spirit. The journey is long and full of supernatural phenoma, he literally dies and is reborn, then finally is he liberated (Moksha, enlightenment). He becomes emptiness and nothingness, all identification dies. That's the hero's journey for all saints and prophets.

[How to be wise]

@Buba according to sadhguru, 99% of all people who are enlightened, leave their body in the moment of enlightenment. The only people who can stay in the body after becoming enlightened are those on the path of Kriya yoga, because they understand the mechanism of the body inside out.

Video of sadhguru saying it:

 

[Shanmugam]

@How to be wise He is not only wrong, misleading and even discouraging people in a sense by saying 99% of people die during enlightenment, but he also claims that in his own ashram he pegs people down  (people who are kriya yogis, according to him) when they are about to reach enlightenment so that they don't die. And this is what started my whole criticism about him in the last few months.. In the process of doing that, I found many other things, which is a long story...

Don't worry, if anybody dies at the time of enlightenment, it is a rare exception.. It is not even 1%... definitely not 99%

Make sure you read the following word by word because if you are Sadhguru's follower, you will feel a strong tendency to defend him, you may lose awareness for a moment, assume what is written below without fully reading it and may want to refute what I am saying without fully understanding it. 

The best thing for me to do here is to post an answer that I wrote in Quora. The question which was asked was "How many enlightened persons has Isha Foundation produced through its methods? "

Good question! I had attended programs in Isha, attended Sadhguru’s satsangs a few times and I lived in Coimbatore for two years… I know Sadhguru since 2004 and I would like to answer this question.

Let me first tell you something that Sadhguru says, which is very important for you to know:

Quote

 

"If you are not aware of this, for over 90% of the people, the moment of Enlightenment and the moment of leaving the body are same. Only those people who know the tricks of the body, who know the mechanics of the body, who understand the nuts and bolts of the body, can hold on to it.

Of the people who manage to stay back, a majority of them spend the rest of their lives in silence. Only a very few are stupid enough to try to do something with people around them because it is so hopeless talking about another dimension which is not in people’s experience. These people are trying to be logically sensible, but it is quite a hopeless thing…”

 

It is also written in cover of the book ‘Enlightenment - An inside story’

And in the same book he also says the following:

Quote

 

"Have you noticed in India, most of the Enlightened beings died very young? Any number of them, by the time they are thirty-two, they are over. Have you noticed this? Because, retaining the body needs lots of tricks. Realization is one aspect, but what the science of this body is, is another aspect. If you do not know the science of the body, if you do not have a grasp and control over the science of how this life and body are functioning in tandem, you cannot retain the body.

So you will have to play some tricks to retain the body. Various kinds of tricks are played by various Masters, but generally, only those who are on the path of Kriya generally manage their body; others cannot hold on to their body.

This is the reason why generally, when people attain to a certain peak, we will not let them reach the ultimate peak; we peg them down there. I have lots of people around me like this — they are just one step behind. They are in a certain exalted state, they have grown close to it, one more step means they will leave, but we will always hold them down there, so that their physical bodies run their full course. They have much more sense than other people, they are good manure for the world so we want them to be useful in the world. We want to enslave them and use them for everybody's wellbeing, otherwise all the beautiful people will leave. (Laughter).

So we don't let them go, climb the final step, until their bodies wear themselves out through the natural process of living. When they go beyond a certain age, then we take off the peg — then it is up to them. Until then we fix them down, because if full Enlightenment happens they will not know how to sustain the body unless they put in an enormous amount of study. You don't like that? Personally, even I don't like it, but I have some social responsibilities. (Laughs)."

 

 

So what do you get from this? In spite of the practitioners of Isha yoga being kriya yogis, they will still leave the body (die) when they get enlightened. But Sadhguru will not let them die but peg them down so that they don’t reach enlightenment. Or he will let it happen only when they reach a certain age. But for some reason, Sadhguru was not able to do this for Viji, his wife.(He wasn’t able to peg her down and she left her body before the consecration of Dhyanalinga). This is ridiculous!.Read this for further info: https://ksmphanindra.wordpress.com/2017/11/02/the-controversial-death-of-sadhgurus-wife-vijji/

But I know how Sadhguru got such an idea about enlightenment. He got it from Osho:

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” Most of the people who have become enlightened have died either immediately or within a few minutes or a few hours. The experience is so great, and the shock to the system of the body is unabsorbable. Out of thousands, perhaps a few have survived. And there are reasons why they survived.

But they suffered tremendously from sicknesses. These are not sicknesses taken away from disciples, these are sicknesses intrinsic to the experience of enlightenment. Enlightenment means suddenly becoming aware that you are not the body, and a distance is created. The old identity that, “I am the body,” was keeping you together. You start falling apart. Mostly, the shock is so much that people have died.”

- Osho from Hari Om Tat Sat

 

In the above excerpt, Osho has stated that most of the people die during the moment of enlightenment and only very rarely few people survive. Sadhguru simple repeated Osho as he always does. Please read this answer if you need a solid evidence for the fact that he repeats Osho most of the time: Sadhguru and Osho

But Osho is known for his contradictions. What Sadhguru didn’t realize is that he stated the exact opposite which is published in a different book:

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“Try to understand this. A jivanamukta will live in a state of liberation but around him the activities of his body and mind will continue. Nothing new will be fed, but until the old feelings are exhausted the activities will continue.

Understand it this way. Suppose you decide to leave your body by fasting. You won’t die the very day you begin your fast, it will take at least about ninety days — it may take even longer, but ninety days are a minimum — before death can happen. Why? You fasted today, you should die today. But no, your body has an accumulation of flesh from the past and it will take about three months for that flesh to be consumed. You will have become just a skeleton of bones by then, all the flesh stored in the body will have been consumed. This is how when you fast for a day you lose weight by nearly by a pound. So the fatter a person, the longer he will last when fasting, because he has a larger accumulation of fat. Thus one goes on losing a pound or so every day, and you will not die while the stock of accumulated flesh lasts. It will take about three months.

Similarly, when the consciousness is fully awake, one should attain to mahanirvana, the ultimate merging, at once. But that does not happen. Once in a while it has happened that way, but such events are very rare — as good as non-existent — that a person has died immediately upon becoming enlightened. It would be as if someone was already a skeleton, there was nothing at all of any accumulation, and the person died the very first day he fasted. It would mean that such a person was just ready to die, he had no savings at all. But it is difficult to find such a person; even a hungry beggar’s body keeps savings, some accumulated stock necessary for any emergencies.

Such a coincidence may happen sometime that a person’s actions also come to completion at the same moment as enlightenment. It is, however, a very rare phenomenon.

Normally they have stayed and lived for many years after enlightenment — be it Buddha or Mahavira or someone else.

What is the reason for continuing to live? — because liberation has already happened. It is the burden of past action, its momentum, that goes on pushing the body ahead on the journey for some time. When that momentum is dissipated, jeevanamukti, the liberation while living, will become mahanirvana.”

 

Osho simply confuses people so that people don’t believe in anything.I have elaborated why he contradicts himself many times: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Osho-give-contradictory-statements-at-different-times/answer/Shanmugam-P-12

But what Sadhguru says is not true at all. Let me explain a few things first.

I myself went through a transformation in 2014, but I don’t call it enlightenment. I have a reason for it. When I use the word ‘enlightenment’, it only points to a concept you have about enlightenment in your mind. But what happened to me blew my mind and it was nowhere related to whatever I thought about enlightenment.

The words like ecstasy, bliss or peace are not the right words to describe the reality that I am living in right now. Thats why Lao Tzu said ‘The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao’.. The more complicated theories are used to describe the absolute reality, the less they sound like the experience of it. My seeking completely ended in 2014. There was nothing to seek anything any longer.

At that point, I could no longer doubt ‘Am I enlightened’ but I doubted ‘Is this enlightenment?’.. There is a difference between these two questions..

The first question ‘Am I enlightened’implies that there is still a personal limited self which is asking this question. But whatever happened to me completely broke the mental boundaries between ‘me’ and the ‘world’… There was no one to get enlightenment in the first place. But I still couldn’t stop wondering ‘Is this enlightenment’. This second question is related to the concept of enlightenment that I had all along. It didn’t fit with that concept at all. So many things happened after that and I couldn’t understand why.

Usually I was very happy and energetic at work and I received some compliments from my colleagues like ‘You are the happiest man in the world’, ‘You are the only one here who is working joyfully’, ‘You are the only one who comes to work happily and goes home happily’…

But I also went through some occasional mental pain and I was also faced with some old patterns of thoughts from time to time. In fact, at one point, there was an extreme mental anguish which lasted for a couple of months. But none of them touched my inner core and none of them left a trace in my psyche. I couldn’t explain these moments of occasional mental pain because neither Osho nor Sadhguru explained anything about what happens at this stage. And I never labelled my way of functioning as ‘enlightenment’ because it is just a word and it didn’t mean anything to me.

After 2014 , the next three years passed like a cakewalk, as if nothing happened. Except for those occasional painful moments, my life was certainly a blessing. But I didn’t think anything about spirituality those days.. The extreme mental anguish that I talked about which lasted for a couple of months actually happened during September 2016. Only at that point, I actually started thinking what exactly happened and where I can find some explanation for it. I studied the scriptures that I never studied before. It was fun because nothing was serious in my life after the transformation. It was as if I had taken a permanent vacation from life. When I studied Advaita Vedanta, I could relate with it because it described what was happening to me more than any other tradition could describe.

I read Adhi Shankara’s Bhasyas and I came across the following:

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"No wrong notion arises for the enlightened person. For in his case there is no reason for it.... Sometimes, however, memories which appear like erroneous cognitions may arise from latent impressions left by erroneous notions that had arisen previously, and may occasionally produce the delusion of erroneous cognition. It is the same as when one who has correctly learned the directions of the quarters is (even afterwards) occasionally visited by a wrong notion of them (which does not seriously affect his correct conviction). If one who had attained right knowledge could have erroneous ideas exactly as before, that would undermine all confidence in right knowledge and the whole enterprise of inquiring into the meaning of the Vedic texts would be rendered vain. "

- Brihadaranyaka Bhasya I.iv.10

 

Even though I didn’t label myself enlightened (I couldn’t label myself anything), the above was the only thing that could explain what was happening during those occasional periods of mental pain. When I went through many scriptures in Vedantic and Buddhist traditions, I could realize one thing: Many things about enlightenment has been generalized for all people based on their observations on a very few human beings.

 

Edited January 11, 2018 by Shanmugam

[egoless]

@Shanmugam How could someone die from Enlightenment? Is that even possible? And if yes how and why?

[Faceless]

@egoless

perhalps to many psychedelic trips chasing the image of enlightenment. Lol 

 

 

[Shanmugam]

@egoless probably so many reasons.. first reason, it could be just a coincidence..or even a shock of sudden awakening: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2218009/Why-shock-kill-good-news--Release-adrenaline-sudden-discovery-lead-heart-problems.html

But it is too rare to even take into consideration..

Do you know most of the people in the world die in their bed? Does it mean going to bed at night is dangerous?

 

[Shanmugam]

@egoless And Sadhguru's statement invalidates the biggest schools of non-duality: Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism

Advaita Vedanta is all about Jeevanmukthi - which means 'enlightenment' while living. And many masters in the tradition of Vedanta have lived with no problems at all.

Mahayana tradition is about not only becoming enlightened but also helping others towards enlightenment after that. The Bodhisattva vow is the vow taken by Mahayana Buddhists to liberate all sentient beings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhisattva_vow 

The problem is, 90% of what  Sadhguru says comes from Osho. But Osho never really meant much of what he said. His talks were only devices to make sure that people don't cling to a certain set of beliefs or ideologies. So, one of his methods was to intentionally contradict himself.

 

[pluto]

3 hours ago, How to be wise said:

@Buba according to sadhguru, 99% of all people who are enlightened, leave their body in the moment of enlightenment. The only people who can stay in the body after becoming enlightened are those on the path of Kriya yoga, because they understand the mechanism of the body inside out.

Video of sadhguru saying it:

 

I actually have experience with this and i believe to some degree because in absolute enlightenment the body transcends beyond your physically projected reality. It ceases to exist along with everyone else and everything else in it as you go beyond time/space. You become one with source consciousness but it is impossible to explain or even grasp only direct experience can give you a taste of this understanding sadly it cannot be explained properly because it goes beyond physical comprehension. Somethings are best left to oneself because its pointless trying to share with others.

Its the biggest mindfuck of all
 

Edited January 11, 2018 by pluto

[Faceless]

This state that this word enlightenment points to is a centerless state. It’s a freedom from the self or the known. In this freedom there is joy, beauty, creativity, and compassion,love. Seems that these are actually all in one. 

That’s why it’s very important to have a grasp on the nature of thought/reality. If we understand the substance reality we can steer clear from various illusions, self deception, and not be so easily gullible. Only in the understanding of reality can we see with clarity what is true or false. Correct and incorrect. 

 

 

 

[Shanmugam]

@pluto Sadhguru is talking about death, not just temporarily leaving the body.. 'Leaving the body' is a slang in spiritual circle to mean 'death'. If you had an experience of it, then your body should be dead by now..

Edited January 11, 2018 by Shanmugam

[Faceless]

Wouldn’t that be terrible though. From the psychological death one finally starts to live then bang that’s it. ?

[egoless]

@Shanmugam than maybe sadhguru also uses the method of contradiction? I can’t imagine someone dying from Enlightenment. It is just knowledge. In my experience of satori there are two possible dimensions to Enlightenment.

1) awareness becomes aware of its infinite nature.

2) body mind follows after that realization with understanding on the mind level.

Edited January 11, 2018 by egoless

[Faceless]

Watch out for them gurus man, they’ll get ya ?

[Shanmugam]

@egoless Don't talk about any 'may be's when it comes to Sadhguru... I know what he means... He doesn't contradict himself as much as Osho. He makes everything quite rigid and solid. 

[egoless]

@Shanmugam ok as you have told me you have been on his satsangs so you definitely know him better.

based on your experience do you think Enlightenment can possibly cause death in someone? What could be the main issue very fast heartbeat?

[Shanmugam]

@egoless First of all, this is actually a rumor.. :)  I know that you already worry too much about 'what is going to happen after enlightenment'... Just let go of the worry... If someone offers you a trip on a plane to go around the world and visit all interesting places, will you say 'no' by saying 'what if the plane crashes'?

 

Here is a copy -paste of my another answer in Quora:

Read this conversation between Ramana Maharshi and a seeker:

TALK 286:

Seeker: Sri Ramakrishna Paramhamsa says that nirvikalpa samadhi cannot last longer than twenty-one days. If persisted in, the person dies. Is it so?

Ramana Mahirishi : When the prarabdha is exhausted the ego is completely dissolved without leaving any trace behind. This is final liberation. Unless prarabdha is completely exhausted the ego will be rising up in its pure form even in jivanmuktas. I still doubt the statement of the maximum duration of twenty-one days. It is said that people cannot live if they fast thirty or forty days. But there are those who have fasted longer, say a hundred days. It means that there is still prarabdha for them.

Talk 391:

Seeker: It is said that one remaining in nirvikalpa samadhi for 21 days must necessarily give up the physical body.

Ramana Mahirishi: Samadhi means passing beyond dehatma buddhi (I-am-the-body idea) and non-identifcation of the body with the Self is a foregone conclusion.

There are said to be persons who have been immersed in nirvikalpa samadhi for a thousand years or more.

……………………………………

Do you see how the opinions of two enlightened mystics Ramakrishna Paramhamsa and Ramana Maharshi differ? Ramakrishna Paramhamsa got this idea from Trailinga swami (mentioned in Gospel of Ramakrishna). Who knows where Trailinga Swami got this idea from?

But I don’t think anybody ever took a survey, counted the total number of enlightened people in the world, found out how many of them died at the moment of enlightenment and came up with a percentage.

Also, I have went through the life and talks of many mystics.. No one is 100% infallible and even enlightened people have certain beliefs which were never verified.

So what you heard is a rumor which spread like this: Trailinga Swami whispered it into the ears of Ramakrishna Paramhamsa, Ramakrishna said that in a casual gossip to a group of devotees. Osho read that in a book and said that to an even bigger audience. Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev said it louder in Youtube to millions of viewers and even printed it in the back cover of his book.

 

[RossE]

Enlightenment has no end. One thinking they have reached it is just another realisation along an infinite plumbline.

Our separate identities are very strong. So strong that I think only a few people are 100% free of self, to the point that they could be hung drawn and quartered alive and feel no pain. So, some identification will remain.

I find it's a mixture of both of those things you mentioned in the OP.

There will be cliff-like falls where identity is torn away from you. You look around and suddenly realise there is no self, nothing outside of self, your true nature is God but you've disguised this, etc. 

There will be gradual sliding and falling away. You'll realise that the identity has fallen away, but not dramatically. Slowly it has slipped away, like ice melting overnight, invisibly while you sleep.

But this is along a never ending downward, outward, inward plummet to God, nothingness, empty source.

Imagine a never ending ski slope. You never reach the end because the end doesn't exist. 

You are on the never ending ski slope. 

Edited January 12, 2018 by RossE

[pluto]

27 minutes ago, Shanmugam said:

@pluto Sadhguru is talking about death, not just temporarily leaving the body.. 'Leaving the body' is a slang in spiritual circle to mean 'death'. If you had an experience of it, then your body should be dead by now..

Ultimately same thing, when the experience happens you don't "leave the physical body" you transcend illusion/physical existence along with everything else in your existence thus you and everyone and everything else cease to exist in that absolute infinite moment. We cannot grasp this because physical limitations but all is one as one is all., Ultimately.

Now one may have the argument but i am here and your physical body still remained there while you claimed it had happened yet we are not entirely sure we are even here to begin with so we nor are separate from anything else in existence.

This is source understanding, a source expression experience and it can Only be experienced but it cannot be grasped and that is the whole joy of it. This may sound mumbo jumbo to many even most highly developed spiritually attuned people but when it happens it blows everything else beyond, even a nanosecond is enough to humble and surrender to all that is indefinitely.

 

Edited January 12, 2018 by pluto

[Joseph Maynor]

51 minutes ago, Faceless said:

Watch out for them gurus man, they’ll get ya ?

Yep.  Learn to be your own guru.  You gotta get off the teet after a while in this work and man your own ship.  Too much clinging to gurus can be a problem in this work.  Enlightenment is about unlearning.  

Edited January 12, 2018 by Joseph Maynor