In rereading my email I see that I called David Hume “John”, I don’t know how I made that mistake, but there it is! Yes, I don’t doubt that there are other Beings that the Infinite must have “given birth” to, one wonders what our world would be like if our “Brahman” were a different Being.

Curtis

I was saying there is something beyond Brahman that must be infinite. That would be the field of infinite consciousness Brahman springs from. Indianism would like us to think that Brahman is the end-all-be-all, infinite and perfect, but it is actually engaged in a self-destructive feedback loop. Surely there are more children of the infinite, more universes, than Brahman alone, which is so negatively absorbed.

If you read my articles in the “Blowing the Whistle on Enlightenment” series (left-hand column of blog), you would see that your arguments and mine mirror each other.

About your observation that some people desire death rather than fearing it … that’s true, but doesn’t negate the point I was making. I was saying that Brahman, and we as its children, are engaged with life in a way that involves death, as opposed to simply engaging life on its own terms – fully, with endless enjoyment, eternally.

We think death is necessary part of living. We think every positive thing needs a negative polarity to exist. We can’t conceive of unending life, unending happiness, unending goodness or unending love. The reason is that our thinking is rooted in the limited consciousness that is Brahman. Brahman, like us, is constantly dying and destroying. It cannot conceive of an infinity of goodness.

Whether we express our human obsession with death and destruction as a fear of death or as a desire for it, the bottom line is the same: an inability to engage life on its own eternal terms, the constant corruption of life by suffering and death. Your examples just show another facet of the same thing I myself was observing.

Of course, when we raise our consciousness out of the box that is Brahman, we break free of the belief that death and destruction are necessary to life and start to engage life on more infinite terms. We are only incapable of this so long as we insist on accepting the old dogmas, the old paradigms, that tell us we are limited and that even the universe must someday die.

Bronte

You stated;
“Brahman knows this, and it is terrified. That’s why all its children are terrified. All beings are afraid of death, and are subject to death. Because the great entity we are part of, the universe, is subject to death. Like Brahman, the great torus, we little toruses must eat to continue our existence. Or so we think. But in fact, we are no more in need of consuming others to continue existing than a dog needs to chase its tail in order to stay alive. It’s a thought we had that became a belief.”
I do not believe for a second that all beings are afraid of death.Every day we have people who commit suicide, some who strap bombs to their chests and take others along, some who simply don’t want to live any longer, for whom living is a far greater pain than the thought of “release through death”. Some who long for death because of disease and a painful existence, some who are in no physical pain at all, but see the world as ugly.
As to not needing to consume others in order to live, well, perhaps I am missing something here and taking you too literally, but there are examples of people who try this every day for very long periods; Karen Carpenter was a famous example, if you remember her and there are many others. Physically, we must eat SOMETHING or we will die. True, we do not have to consume animals, but we will have to eat something that lives, even if it be plant life.
If Brahman is infinite “thought-energy-will” as you say, then that “perfect” (is that not what the term infinite implies when describing a being as “infinite thought”?) intellect could make no mistakes. This being would not, could not, have false beliefs about its own nature. I however, do not believe that this being is perfect, or that, as common religion has it; “God is all-powerful, all just, all loving”,etc,etc. John Hume tackled this idea centuries ago in stating that an “all loving being” could never have created this world. We do not know this being, yet we characterize “It”. Could that be the root of the problem? That is, that this being is inherently imperfect and as such must eat? Perhaps, at the end of the food chain are WE and that the energy that we give off in emotions in daily life and finally, in death, are what Brahman “consumes”. Perhaps Brahman “eats its children” not because it thinks it has to, but rather because it knows it has to. After all, we can know nothing about such a Being, one who is as removed from us as say, a bacteria on our skin is removed from ourselves. We know the bacteria is there, when we shower we know that there are fewer of them there, but we do not consider the bacteria, or its life since, after all, it is too insignificant to us.