Life and Death: Full Circle

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ABOUT THE BOOK As the tile Life and Death - Full Circle suggests, this book looks at the full picture of human experience Traditions of all times emphasize that a change in attitude is necessary to journey through life with peace and harmony and to prepare for the onward journey past the gates of death.

The book concludes with meditations given by Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati which purify one's intentions and give strong, resilient and positive samskaras, uplifting life after life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Swami Yogakanti has been studying and teaching yoga for the past 40 years.

She was initiated into poorna sannyasa by Swami Satyananda in 1980, and since 1984 she has been based at Bihar School of Yoga Munger, undergoing yogic and sannyasa training.

She has authored The Contemporary Position of Yoga in the Dasnami Tradition of Sri Adi Shankaracharya (MPhil thesis for Sydney University, Australia, 1996), The Advayataraka Upanishad: A Study in Yogic Techniques for Liberation (MA Phil thesis for Bihar Yoga Bharati, Munger, India, 1999). She has com piled and edited Past, Present and Future (Consolidated History of Bihar School of Yoga) Vols. I and II (Bihar School of Yoga, 1989 and 1995), the Sanskrit Glossary of Yogic Terms (Yoga Publications Trust, 2007) and authored Living Shankara (Yoga Publications Trust. 2018), a scholarly yet lively tribute to the life. and teachings of Adi Shankaracharya. She has also edited various other YPT Yoga philosophy and the study of Sanskrit have been areas of special interest and Swami Yogakanti continues to contribute her extensive knowledge to many of the ashram publications.

INTRODUCTION Thile researching the life of Adiguru Shankaracharya, Wi became intrigued by what appeared to be authentic evidence of him living at quite different times. It began to be clear to me that this great yogi had taken birth several times over the last three and a half thousand years or so. Each time he had been recognized as a great authority by his contemporaries, and had continued the work of preserving and teaching the ancient wisdom or vulya. This led to renewed reflections on rebirth, and how rebirth is accepted in many eastern traditions but is often rejected or regarded skeptically in the west. I wondered if many of the emotional problems of people in the west, and the way western society has become so estranged from nature, could be traced to this view that our present life is the only dimension) of consciousness that we will ever experience. It's a very isolating perspective, in fact, it's hardly a perspective at all.

A much wider perspective is that reality encompasses and transcends this present existence, and that death is a portal into the next phase of our evolution.

To look more closely at death and life, to look at both of this circle more fully, this book presents teachings from some of the ancient scriptures aimed at helping us to understand what is going on in life and death. I felt fortunate that I had, through working in hospitals and by chance, quite a lot of experience of being with people as they were dying, and was well aware of how people die dillerend Also, several of those people, and some animals too, ha been kind enough to contact me after their deaths The undeniable experiences did not fit in with my western cultural background and were therefore ignored for many years. Though unconscious, they caused me to gravitate to the eastern philosophies and spiritual disciplines which frankly aim at expanding the consciousness into deeper aras that continue after dropping the body.

Reading Myers, Professor Stevenson, Moody and othe western researchers makes it clear that these insights are te emerging now in the western scientific mind-set. The derper time-tested understandings of the scriptures regarding the nature of existence should therefore be consulted and incorporated into the way we live. Dying becomes a different experience when one realizes that death is a transitional stage of existence necessary for the evolution of the consciousness.

Humans and human society do not have to be ruled by materialistic concerns, the consciousness of humankind can be expanded to incorporate concern for all human beings and for all of nature. It's an unsettling experience to come face to face with embodied consciousness in the form of a dog, an elephant, or some other animal that society treats as unaware, and to realize that this denigration of other life forms is happening routinely around the world. Human sensitivity needs to evolve beyond 'me and mine', and we need to be able to maintain this sort of expanded awareness il we wish to evolve into human beings who are ready for the next step in evolution.

The scriptures speak of the soul evolving as it takes birth in the form of various creatures, and in various dimensions. It's a long journey through expanding states of consciousness, but we can start work on ourselves right away. Swami Satyananda Saraswati in 1976 had the slogan, Yoga is the way to uplift the consciousness of mankind. He was speaking about how one can live with more awareness-but to complete the circle, we have to die with more awareness on And in the end, he demonstrated how to do that also transforming death into mahasamadhi.

How to deepen and expand awareness.

We so often avoid communicating with people on the subject of death, even if they are dying, or sullering became someone they love has just died, but we need to learn how to die well, as a peaceful conclusion to a well-lived life. Deaths is not defeat, and the attitude towards death that people have as they are dying is crucial to the actual process of dying. and to what happens to the spirit after death and in the next birth. We should embrace the perspective that life and death are part of a full circle. We may not be able to approach such mastery in life or death right now, but even lesser yogis, who are not enlightened but who have experienced out of body experiences, or faculties such as telepathy and clairvoyance which operate beyond the senses, are more likely to understand and accept the scriptural view that the body is merely a dwelling place for a spirit that is multi-dimensional.

Ramana Maharshi and Paramahamsa Ramakrishna remained peaceful and concerned with the welfare of others throughout their long and painful fatal illnesses and transformed their deaths into mahasamadhi. Swami Satyananda voluntarily, willfully, raised up his pranas while chanting Aum and dropped his body while his consciousness). achieved mahasamadhi. His mastery was such that, when he died, he used the opportunity to perform this greatest of all the kriyas as a teaching for all of us. It led to wanting to know what the teachings concerning death are in our own tradition of yoga and Vedanta. The longer we live, the more often we meet death, whether of family or friends or of people we hardly know at all, and our own experience of death is coming closer each day. Why not look into this subject of death more closely? Why not try to overcome our fears and build up sure understanding of how we can help ourselves and others through death into new dimensions of consciousness?

**Contents and Sample Pages**