Life is interesting in every phase… Every moment of life has its particular experience, one better than the other, one more valuable than another. In short, life may be said to be full of interest.
Sorrow is interesting as well as joy; there is beauty in every phase, if only one can learn to appreciate it. What dies? It is death that dies, not life.
What then, is the soul? The soul is life, it never touches death. Death is its illusion, its impression; death comes to something which the soul holds, not to the soul itself. The soul becomes accustomed to identify itself with the body it adopts, with the environment which surrounds it, with the names by which it is known; with its rank and possessions which are only the outward signs that belong to the world of illusion.
The soul, absorbed in its child-like fancies, in things that it values and to which it gives importance, and in the beings to which it attaches itself, blinds itself by the veils of its enthusiasm.
Thus it covers with a thousand veils its own truth from its own eyes.
From The Sufi MEssage of Hazrat Inayat Khan
(image by axinia)
axinia
1000 petals by axinia 
I heard an interesting comment from a celebrity who turned his life around. It is probably a cliche but hearing the first time is sweet even so.
“I used to think I was a person carrying a soul inside. Now I realize I am a soul wearing a person outside.”
great quote, Terry! hit the nail 🙂
Good one 🙂
…I don’t know where and how life started, how silly I should be to think it can end.
It’s common belief across cultures that once the soul departs from the human body after death, what is left behind is a lifeless corpse, the outer discarded shell. Some bury the left-behind shell in the earth, some others cremate it, a few others (especially in ancient times) embalmed it and preserved the mummies in tombs.
There are a few others who take the philosophy of death leaving behind a discarded shell to the maximum, like the Parsis and Tibetan Buddhists. They leave the shell alone and enable it to be consumed by vultures, so that by returning the lifeless flesh to the food chain, the shell goes back to where it obtained its nourishment from, namely nature. It completes the natural cycle of the shell:
(Warning: That slideshow may not be a pleasant thing to watch 😐 )
Do I believe in what the Parsis and Tibetan Buddhists believe? Probably no, maybe yes. But it’s interesting to observe that some peoples take the concept to the logical maximum.
🙂
i think that is normally done in many cultures when peope are just get bured, right?
After watching slide show I just remember how we are performing Suction Evacuation ?. This is dead body that is live one, we are taking out in parts.!!!!!
If we can not able to give life at least should stop killing baby girls in womb and that to in pieces,with permission!!!!!?????
I’m not sure of that, Axinia.
Speaking from a purely technical point of view, burial and consumption by vultures (they even call it “sky burial”) may be similar, as when a dead person is buried in the earth, in the course of time, ultimately it will get consumed (or broken down or whatever) by organisms and the flesh will indeed return to the food chain and complete the cycle.
However, from the point of view of traditional beliefs and customs which led to those cultural practices associated with the dead, they seem very, very different. I don’t think the cultures that bury their dead ever do so with the main intention of letting the flesh return to the food chain. Burial seems to have originated as a way of treating the lifeless body with utmost dignity, a solemn way of making the journey to the “afterlife” as pleasant as possible.
In that aspect, burial seems to have more in common with the practice of embalming, where the cultures that practised it believed that by embalming the body and preserving it in tombs, they made the journey of the dead to the “underworld” easy. In fact, I think that burial in graves can be more likened to a process of “incomplete/partial embalming”, with the intention being more on giving a dignified farewell to the deceased than on preservation.
“Sky burial” seem to have originated with different intentions in mind and cremation with completely different intentions.
Speaking of funeral methods, have you heard of a certain kind of sadhus known as Aghories? If not, you must check out videos on them. YouTube has many, I have no intention of posting a link here. (WARNING: The Tibetan “sky burial” slideshow simply pales away in comparison to what the Aghories practise.)
Those sadhus are a part of what makes one particular “culture” so “special” and “spiritual”, Axinia 🙄
🙂