The Institute for Real God: Spiritual Life Department

Institute for Real God Spiritual Life SL101: The Problem of Mortality: Transcending Life and Death in God

SL101: The Problem of Mortality:
Transcending Life and Death in God

OVERVIEW: This course is an introduction to mortality, death, beyond death, and what a fully adequate spiritual address to the matter of death would involve. The course has three parts.

Part 1: You CAN'T Take It With You — Does your life have a purpose? If so, is it one that isn't going to get instantly ripped off when you die? Many of us spend our lives denying death, allowing ourselves to be completely consumed and distracted by our responsibilities, our indulgences, and our search for things we cannot take with us after death in any overt form (knowledge, accomplishment, fame, or friendship). But death is still coming. We get little support from culture, society, biology, or even conventional religion for becoming adequately prepared; indeed, we are actively discouraged from even considering the matter. In Western society, the “dying business” at best tends to help us come to the point of acceptance of death (which already should be true for us right now). And the “death business” tends to assist the living go on living rather than assist the dead in their transition, as more informed cultures do. This part of the course sensitizes us to our mortality, and encourages us to start preparing now.
Part 2: You WILL Take It With You —What will occur after we die? This question can be answered, on the basis of a large body of reports across the centuries — on near-death experiences, after-life experiences, reincarnation experiences, paranormal phenomena, and the direct awareness of Spiritual Masters — as well as by studying the laws of the psyche as we observe it in life, to predict its destiny after death. The report is not all roses, though. In fact, its conclusion is that there is life after death, and re-birth, but it is also likely that we are going to suffer greatly during the period between lives, unless we develop, during our lifetime, a powerful Spiritual practice that truly links up with God.
Part 3: You CAN Take It With You —What can we take with us after we die? True wisdom takes into account both the fact of our mortality and what we are likely to carry with us after death, and uses the course of a lifetime proactively, for the purpose of understanding our limits, and linking up now with That which is greater than life and death. We focus on three key issues of the after-life, and the means for addressing these issues: psychic attractors, which have the power to draw us out of the Presence of God after death; psychic bullies, from which we are constantly on the run while alive, and which can form the stuff of “hells” after death; and our nonrecognition of all that arises after death as our own mind-forms (as in a dream). In the Spiritual practice we describe, psychic attractors are outshined by Divine Distraction; psychic bullies are “stood up to” and disempowered by unlimited feeling; and the nonrecognition of conditional reality as a dream is dealt with by progressive Waking Up, first by absorption in God, and then by identification with God.

REQUIRED READINGS:

Chris Tong, Ph.D., You CAN'T Take It With You, The Practical Spirituality Press, 2000.
Chris Tong, Ph.D., You WILL Take It With You, The Practical Spirituality Press, 2000.
Chris Tong, Ph.D., You CAN Take It With You, The Practical Spirituality Press, 2000.

OPTIONAL READINGS:

Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Harper SanFrancisco, Reprint Edition, 2002.
Avatar Adi Da Samraj, Easy Death, The Dawn Horse Press, 1991.
Ian Stevenson, M.D., Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect, Praeger Publishers, 1997.
Raymond Moody, Life After Life, Harper SanFrancisco, 2nd edition, 2001.
Barbara Rommer, M.D., Blessing in Disguise: Another Side of the Near-Death Experience, Llewellyn Publications, 2000.
Avatar Adi Da Samraj, The Seven Stages of Life, The Dawn Horse Press, 2000.