Maranasati is the Buddhist word for mindfulness of death. To that end, Buddhists created a series of corpse meditations that involve looking at and contemplating over corpses in various states of decomposition. The effects of meditating thus are supposed to be humbling. One realizes that one’s body is the same as the dead body. We all end up there. And this calls attention to the farce of judging people by their appearance. We focus on the outside to ignore the inside; essentially, to ignore death. The outer appearance, the external world, is the illusion of separation. To understand oneness, the real, the timeless, is to understand death.
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What does it mean to be humbled? To be silenced? Is being silenced the same as being silence? If I, even with the best intentions, dictate to you a meditation that promises an effect, if you do it right, then is the effect going to be a self-fulfilling prophesy? Is it going to be my prophesy for you coming true? And if it is, if it’s my revelation blossoming in you, then is it real? Or is it another separation disguised as the door to oneness?
Is, in fact, unity separate and apart from oneness?
The power of suggestion in this context is the drop of thought poisoning the waters of one ocean. One dies into one ocean or one dies into a cunning facsimile created by thought from the real. Thought creates this because thought wants to live. Buddha may be off the wheel of life and death, but the second he gives you helpful instructions, he has doomed you to the wheel.
Humbling you as an instruction is dictation, whether it comes externally from a master or internally from a master’s meditation. You cannot humble yourself. One is either humble or one is not. That is the state of one’s being when it is. It’s not up to you or anyone else, dead or alive.
Doing a corpse mediation may, in fact, bring you to a humbled state, but thought has already given you a context for what is transpiring. The being humbled becomes an experience of this context for you, not the stage upon which one lives free of the I. This is because thought is like quicksand: the more you pull yourself out, the deeper you sink.
And when you sink, you suffocate. And when you suffocate, you think you’ve died.
But what you’ve died into is more thought.