This is also a weird one because on one hand I remember very clearly that during a PCE I see that I have always been here, that ‘I’ only imagined that ‘I’ existed and that what I have been all along, underneath all the illusion is this very body.
And yet the ‘I’ that has to self-immolate could use this as a way of bailing out from total extinction? That ‘I’ could try to take ‘myself’ into actuality. It’s funny really ‘I’ have to truly die and yet once ‘I’ die I can see that I was this body all along, and even before ‘my’ total extinction ‘I’ can see/remember this.
Am ‘I’ able to give ‘myself’ up even though ‘I’ know that on the other side there is such security, it seems like it would not be a true sacrifice? Perhaps I still believe that it must be a drama, that it must be somehow ultimately costly.
I remember years ago my brother saying that the way you judge a ‘good person’ is how much they are willing to suffer to benefit others, it’s like I am smuggling this into my contemplations around self immolation.
But seeing it from this new angle there is no drawback at all, that would mean it is extremely easy.
It’s like if I have been driving this low spec, broken down car my whole life, and now there is the offer to trade it in for a brand new, high spec one with no extra cash to be paid.
I have to sacrifice the old car and yet what I am giving it up for is better in every way, there is really no drawback.
Which reminds me of what Srinath wrote in his report of becoming actually free :
Furthermore I realised that what was coming was going to replace me. This new consciousness – of a piece with the body, would do the job of looking after this body and of caring for all, in a way that I could never manage because I was just too self-involved. I experienced for the first time that I was at cross-purposes to this body and was doing it no favours. I had to graciously bow out like a clumsy, incompetent old fool who had bumbled through life just about holding on to his job out of dumb luck. He realised that he had to hand over the reins to super-smart and infinitely better qualified young man.