January 14, 2020 Tuesday Evening, Dharma Path II Class, Small Group
Aaron’s Transition Out of His Final Lifetime
Aaron: We have had a good discussion here, and I’m not going to try to sum it up. Just now, I am talking about the question, once one is wholly awake, does the whole concept of the bridge dissolve? Yes, but it also can come back in a moment of extreme pain. There’s not solidity to it. It comes up and it passes away—if one is truly awake, it passes away because you recognize where it’s taking you and you say no to it. But it still may come up.
Illustrating this, I’ve never talked much about the end of that life after I awakened, this 15th century Thai monk. There were years of living somewhat peacefully, sharing the dharma. Just living as a monk in that part of Thailand. Quiet mornings walking through the forest. The coolness of the rains, the warmth of the sun. The joy of watching the monks around me awakening. Some of them were you. Not yet fully awake, but awakening.
The end of that lifetime— I was walking in the jungle and stepped on a thorn. Brothers immediately helped me to extract the thorn and wash it out well, to use certain poultices to withdraw any poisons. But some of these thorns are quite lethal. My foot began to swell, as the days passed, becoming huge, swollen, painful. We could call it a test to see if I was truly awakened! There was the part of the human that said, “I don’t want this pain.” I was not afraid of death; I was not afraid of pain. But there was aversion to pain. There was close to but not yet 100% compassion for this human who was experiencing aversion, so there was a subtle, very, very subtle thread of thought, “I should be an example to the monks for whom I am the meditation master. I should be an example of how to die with ease.” But I did not want to die in agony.
This is a piece of the story I have never told because none of you were really ready to hear it, but I think more of you are ready to hear it now. Many loving monks surrounded me, and townspeople. I lay on a comfortable bed of grass, with leaves to shade me. People applied poultices to my foot to help draw out the poison and the pain. I knew that it was inevitable I would die, not later but sooner. I was already older. Death would come sometime in those years anyhow. As I said, it was not about dying, it was about the concept, “I should not feel aversion. I should be openhearted, fully accepting of what has come to me.” And then, not shame but irritation with myself.
The pain became agony. My meditation was such that I could literally lift myself out of my body into a place of pure bliss. In other words, I could have stayed alive but left the body days before I fully left the body in what you call death. At some level, I recognized that as an escape, that I could not do it that way. And I could not bear to stay 100% conscious of the agony.
I knew that I was awake, and that if I were careful not to create new karma with this happening, I was free. But I also had a sense of, if I do create karma then I’m not really free yet and I do need more incarnation experience to find that full freedom.
I was at the level, let us call it of non-returner, but not of arahant. I had not chosen to go to that level. I knew I wanted to remain available to the possibility of taking new incarnation, in the bodhisattva sense, or to work with you all as I do now. But who knows where I’d go next.
I did not want to simply (long exhale). You do have a choice not to just completely dissolve. But the human incarnation is one of agony. How do we open our hearts to the true agony? Losing our loved ones. Losing limbs. A friend wrote recently of his agony seeing the world destroying itself. How to stay here and live with that. How do we do that?
Those final days gave me the opportunity to not go to one extreme or the other of the bridge, but to stay just near the middle. Moments of heart being fully open to the human in agony, and not just my agony but the agony of human experience. Then shifting to that place that was free of agony, but not using it as an escape, only as a resting place, until at some level I knew it’s time to come back more fully into the body. Just a slight shift from the center of the bridge—a little this way, then a little that way. Not extreme; a little bit.
At that point, being able to manifest—it’s hard to find the right phrase for it—to allow the body to experience the agony without owning it as my agony, and yet knowing when it was all that the human could tolerate, allowing it to move off. Not into unconsciousness, because the agony is still there in the unconsciousness. To move enough into the Dharmakaya to look down at the body in agony with the deepest love and compassion. Then, come back into the experience of the body again, back and forth.
I began to see the path open before me, that once I was fully awakened, that was not going to be an end to agony, it was only going to be an end to my agony. Because the heart breaks. I don’t think anyone experiences the agony of the human condition more than an awakened master who truly knows the agony of the human condition and is still willing to be present with it.
So those final days, 3 or 4 days, allowed me to reach that deeper level of awakening. And then, literally to choose: “I release the body. I’ve done enough. It is finished.” There was some degree of conscious choice to stay with the body until what needed to be learned was learned.
I pause.
Q: Did you share this with the monks, what he was experiencing?
Aaron: The first day, perhaps, and then I no longer retained the ability to speak. (smiling) So, for those of you who were monks with me then, I am sharing it now! What is a few hundred years?
Q: Is there an experience of bliss when you leave the body finally?
Aaron: Yes. Yes. All the heavy elements dissolve. All that is left is light, and the deep knowing, “I am That. I am that light.” And no, no frustration that I have no voice to express it anymore. I knew I would have the ability to come back and share it, one way or another.
But for those who have not fully reached that non-returner phase, truly dissolving into light and letting go, those who are on the edge of that, there’s still an experience of bliss. But coming through that and into the transition, one recognizes there’s still just this little edge of karma, and it may be wisest and most compassionate to come back in a body and move through this again, and take it the last step. Or it may be that is not necessary. So, your own wisdom and compassion will guide you as to what you do next.
But for me there was the letting go—I think you’ve heard of the rainbow body. So, at that point I had not reached that level of rainbow body in which there would be complete transition and dissolution. At that point, one simply moves off into the arahant. Nothing left. No ability, really, to come back and talk about it.
Q: Are your spirit guides meeting you when you leave your body?
Aaron: How could they meet you—they are already with you! “Meeting” means they haven’t been there and they’ll be there when you get there. Where would they go?
Q: You mentioned the bliss that you found during that lifetime, and the bliss after death. Was that a continuous experience, or did the character of it change somehow? Were you able to maintain a focus or a continuity through the death experience?
Aaron: Let’s use a simple metaphor here. Imagine yourself in a scene such as Barbara has here on her computer: beautiful turquoise water, a lovely beach, some small bits of sand, little islets of sand, and then beyond all of that, the waves breaking in the distance. Let’s add to that a palm tree with broad leaves and a comfortable mat on which to rest. There you are. If you are warm, you can get into the water. If you are cool, you can move into the sun. Everything is radiant and beautiful.
Lying there, you begin to experience, because you’re in a body, some achiness from lying in one position too long. If you have the habitual patterning to move into the achiness from an ego perspective, contracting and wanting to fix it, the bliss is gone. If you have developed the practice to note the achiness with compassion, to attend to the achiness without losing the bliss, then the bliss does not leave. The experience of this afternoon on the beach is no different than the experience of transition or any aspect of the awakened transition.
If it’s truly stable, you can’t lose it. If you lose it then there’s still some karma that needs attention.
Q: Over the years and just recently Aaron tells me to have compassion for myself and include myself in my heart. I’m stumped about that.
Aaron: I’m not getting the question. Asking you to have compassion for yourself in your heart. What are you puzzled by?
Q: What does that look like?
Aaron: I cannot take you there, Q, I can only provide directional signs. The bottomless well of wisdom and compassion, how could you ever lose it? And yet as long as you contract into the separated human that is not fully compassionate and not fully grounded in infinite wisdom there’s going to be suffering and experience of separation.
First of all, we have faith. We listen to those who seem a little further ahead on the path, and who seem to live their lives with great clarity and kindness. And we begin to trust, “this path can carry me home.” It hasn’t fully done that yet, but it can. And we just keep practicing.
There are no shortcuts. Any time you get caught up into the individuated self and its challenges it’s just a place saying, “Slow down. There’s something here that needs your attention.”
I talked about this once years ago in terms of the grade school math student, who understood so much but still could not quite do long division, couldn’t pass the test for long division. She understood the concepts in her head. She could be given a complex problem and give you an quick answer. But somehow, she didn’t understand the process, what it meant to divide this into that because she saw everything as one whole; how could you divide anything? So, there was some place where she was stuck. She took the final test. The teacher said, “I see you don’t really understand this, so I want you to repeat this class.” And the student says, “Ohh! But I thought I understood it!” “Well, you do understand it, but not quite. There’s still something that needs to be learned here, and if I pass you on, you’re never going to come back and learn it.”
Karma is like that. It’s not punishment; it’s just a reminder there’s something here that needs a bit more of your attention. Once you get it you won’t have to pay attention to it again in the same way. You’ll know it in your heart.
Q: I understand, I believe, standing in the middle of the bridge and recognizing karma as it arises. But that doesn’t match up to me with opening my heart to myself. Is there a particular karma that I need to work on to accomplish what you are asking of me?
Aaron: Just keep present with mindfulness, watching contraction, judging thoughts, separative thoughts. Noting them without judgment. Opening your heart: here it is again, ahhh. Coming back to the middle of the bridge again. Just relax.
As human, just as in that final lifetime for me, I did not want the pain. I did not want that agony. I didn’t want to die that way. I had somehow—this last thread of ego had envisioned myself just sitting calmly in meditation, surrounded by my monks, and my heart stopping. An “easy death”. I didn’t want agony. I had to work with it. What is not released will either lead you into a new lifetime, or there will be the readiness to do it on the other planes without needing to come back into an incarnation.
Q: Is opening the heart the same as coming back into presence on the bridge?
Aaron: If your heart is not open, you cannot be present on the bridge. You’re pulled this way and that way. When your heart is open, you can feel the pull— the pull toward bliss; the pull toward ego and fix-it energy— but the ego becomes so very thin that there’s very little of it left, unless there is an extreme situation, like the agony I was experiencing. That kind of agony will bring up the ego self. If the practice is stable, there will be the wisdom to literally step out of the agony, to step out of the body, take a breather. Rest in another plane of being until there’s a readiness to come back into the body knowing there’s going to be agony.
My dear ones, this is how Yeshua experienced the crucifixion. He did not stay present with that agony that the body must have felt on the cross, nor did he avoid it. He was kind enough to himself to move out of the body to rest, and then to know to complete his work he had to come back into the body. But if it became more than he could bear, he could step out of the body again.
Q: It sounds like you’re predicting agony for us!
Aaron: Not necessarily. Perhaps some of you will die peacefully in your sleep. I don’t predict the future. Only, if agony does arise, know that there’s a karmic reason for it and you’re ready to handle it. If it doesn’t arise, don’t invite it! Why would you want it?
You are in charge. If there’s something karmically that needs to be looked at, and you’re willing to look at it, then it will come up. But maybe there’s nothing karmically that needs to be looked at. Maybe you have finished that.
Q: How can I connect with spirit guides and feel their presence more clearly? I often sense them. I have a lot of intuition and knowing. But I don’t necessarily hear my spirit guides.
Aaron: I’m not going to speak to this small group about this now. Perhaps we’ll talk about it in class next Thursday with the whole group. That might be a good place to go.
So, it’s quarter of 9. Perhaps this is enough. We’ve covered a lot. I think I will give the body back to Barbara to see if you have any other questions.
(referring Q to resources on contacting guides)
I do want you all to connect with your guides. It’s valuable. As I said, one does not meet the guides upon transition; one is with the guides and they help one through transition.
My blessings and love to you all. And my wishes for a beautiful year of 2020. I release the body to Barbara…