Death Rites And Rituals

A lot of people who are about to die do not believe in life after death, so they remain hovering over their physical body when it is lifeless. Astral-plane helpers have to come and "wake them up" and tell them that their physical body is dead and explain that they are all right and are alive in their astral body. It is often not an easy process getting them readjusted.

Is there really a Lord Yama, a Lord of Death, devotees often wonder? The answer is yes, not only He, but there are a lot of Lord Yamas, a wide group of well-trained helpers. These tireless inner-plane attendants work, as part of the Yama group, with the doctors and nurses who are involved with terminal cases, those who assist in the transition process, those who take care of disposing of bodies. These are the Yama helpers in the physical world. Executioners, murderers and terrorists are a less noble part of the Yama group. Anyone, other than family and close friends and religious helpers, who is involved in the transitional process two weeks before and after death is part of the Yama group, including ambulance drivers, hospice staff, nurses, morticians, medics, autopsy staff, insurance agents, grave diggers, wood cutters who prepare fuel for funeral pyres, body baggers and coffin makers. Medical doctors and nurses who secretly err in their practice, after dying, join Lord Yama's recruits, in the inner world as prayaschitta to mitigate the karma they created.

speaking especially about modern doctors who operate too freely, even when sometimes it may not be necessary. It is not uncommon that the patient dies on the operating table due to a known mistake on the surgeon's part. Yet, somehow or other, physicians are regarded by the public as monarchs, Gods, above the law. But the karma relating to manslaughter nevertheless is constant and unfailingly takes effect in this life or another. A common civilian, or the same doctor, running down a pedestrian would naturally be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, fined and maybe jailed. But the secret man slaughters are never admitted, never accounted for; no one is held accountable--except that the unrelenting law of karma reigns as supreme judge and jury.

There is an entire industry that lives on the fact of death. If a doctor says, "Two weeks to live," then the inner-plane Yamas are alerted and step in. Lord Yama is Lord Restraint, restraining life and getting it started again on the other side. Then the Yama workers, who are like nurses, say, "You are Catholic; you go to Rome. You are Jewish; you go to Jerusalem. You are Muslim; you go to Mecca. You are Hindu; you go to Varanasi," and so forth. In the lower astral, it's all segregated. In the higher worlds it is all oneness.

In preparing the body for cremation, embalming should not be done. It is painful to the astral body to have the physical body cut or disturbed seriously within seventy-two hours after death. The soul can see and feel this, and it detains him from going on. As soon as you tamper with his physical body, he gets attached, becomes aware that he has two bodies, and this becomes a problem. Ideally when you die, your physical body goes up in flames, and immediately you know it's gone. You now know that the astral body is your body, and you can effortlessly release the physical body. But if you keep the old body around, then you keep the person around, and he is aware that he has two bodies. He becomes earthbound, tied into the Pretaloka, and confused.

Embalming preserves the physical vehicle. For a jivanmukta, he might want to leave, but some people might want to keep him around for a while for their own benefit. The best way for him is to go off into the hills, to die in the forests where no one knows and none of these questions arise. More than many great sadhus have done this and do this to this day. To come and go from the Heavenly abode to the Pretaloka is his choice and his alone. To me, embalming or entombing is a divisive way to hold on to the holy man, and I feel it will draw him back into birth. True, in our scriptures it is recommended that the body of a perfectly liberated saint not be cremated but interred instead in a salt-filled crypt. This may be done so that devotees can continue to be served, but in our lineage it is not the way. In our tradition, the body of the departed is cremated within twenty-four hours. This purifies the physical elements and releases the deceased to the inner worlds. In contrast, the Egyptians wanted their pharaoh to be born again as a king. They didn't want a young soul to be their king. So all their preparations helped him to be born into the royal family. The Hawaiians did the same thing, royalty perpetuating royalty.

Source KHM

Only for reading & not for any comments please.

Commitment:- Its importance and significance for happy living.

Commitment is a big word and a very scary word to many people nowadays. The word commitment means responsibility. The word commitment brings up our willpower. Many people think the word commitment is too limiting. We can sum up commitment in one word, righteousness. The path of righteousness is the path of one commitment after another commitment. In between the commitments is fulfilment of the commitment, which is another word for duty.

We are here to realise God within our self. We are here to resolve all the after effects we put in motion in past lives. We are here to manage our affairs so properly that eventually we do not have to come back into a physical body anymore. This takes tremendous commitment, and our great Hindu religion gives us the knowledge of how to be committed.

If your religion is not manifesting daily in your life, then basically you don't have a religion. You just have some sort of Indian culture which will eventually go away and be replaced with another kind of a culture, because it doesn't really matter to you. Someone asked me recently, "How do I know what to be committed to?" The answer: "What do you believe in?" Belief is a magical thing. It's like a vitamin; it permeates your whole system.

A belief can be taken away and another belief can replace it, or the belief can be strengthened through commitment. Be committed to your beliefs, or find beliefs that you can be committed to, then build on them. Then you will leave your footprints on the San Marga of time. Otherwise, you are just sitting in one place, making no progress. Nothing is happening in your life. The karmas aren't working right, and you are not able to face life.

If you feel, day after day, that you are in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing, then I would say you are a being who is fully committed to the spiritual path. If, day after day, you feel you don't know whether you are in the right place or not, and things are always "happening to you," that you are like a little boat on the great ocean of life being tossed around, here and there, then you should look within yourself and find out where you stand on the scale of life itself. What are your basic beliefs? What are your basic commitments? Ask yourself.

There are many things to be committed to. Youths should be committed to an education that prepares them for what they plan to do in the future. Mothers should be committed to raising their children, making them good citizens, though some mothers don't care whether their children are good citizens or not. They just don't care. They are not even committed to raising their own children. They give them over to somebody else to raise: "Here, you do it." Day-care centers are opening up all across the nation, though statistics show that children educated in day-care centers are terrible students when they get into school--discouraged, undisciplined, unruly students. Husbands should be committed to raising up their family, taking care of their wife and children. That is a commitment that they have to fulfil. If they don't fulfil it, they are making an unworthy karma. But many husbands are not even committed to that.

Commitment and righteousness are just about the same. Righteousness brings law and order into life, gives us rules to follow and guides us along. Where does commitment come from? Commitment comes from the soul. The intellectual mind is going this way and that way all the time, controlled or antagonised by other people's opinions most of the time and by how society is thinking. Commitment comes from the soul. It is a quality of the soul which you can teach to the next generation. Another quality of the soul is observation. Still another intuitive quality of the soul is creativity, which should be encouraged in every child. Through commitment, the soul dominates the intellect and the intellect dominates the instinctive mind. This is religion in action. This is living with God.

Main Source K.H.M (abridged-JK)

PS:Only for reading and not for any comments please.

"Blown to smithereens."

Meaning

Disintegrated into small fragments, by a sudden impact or explosion.

Origin

Smithereens is an Irish word. It derives from, or is possibly the
source of, the modern Irish 'smidirín', which means 'small fragments'.
There is a town near Baltimore, close to the south-west coast of
Ireland, called Skibbereen. The name means 'little boat harbour' and
it is tempting to imagine sailing ships arriving there from the wild
Atlantic by being 'blown to Skibbereen'. The more recent 'Troubles'
also bring up images of property/people being dynamited and 'blown to
Skibbereen' from all over Ireland. There's no record of any such
phrase however, and the similarity between the words Skibbereen and
smithereens seems to be no more than co-incidence.

Another enticing notion as to the source of smithereens is that it
refers to the shards of metal formed when iron is forged and hammered
in a smithy. Again, there's nothing but wishful thinking to support
that idea. The actual origin is more prosaic. 'Smiodar' means
fragments in Irish. 'Een' is a commonplace diminutive ending, as in
colleen (girl), i.e. Caile (country woman) + een. Similarly, smiodar +
een lead us to smithereen. As with many words that are inherited from
other languages, it took some time for the English spelling to become
stable. Both 'smiddereens' and 'shivereens' are recorded in the mid
19th century.

The notion of things being 'broken/smashed/blown to smithereens' dates
from at least the turn of the 19th century. Francis Plowden, in The
History of Ireland, 1801, records a threat made against a Mr. Pounden
by a group of Orangemen:


"If you don't be off directly, by the ghost of William, our deliverer,
and by the orange we wear, we will break your carriage in smithereens,
and hough your cattle and burn your house."

['Hough' is a variant of 'hock' - to disable by cutting the tendons]

Smithereens is one of those unusual nouns that, like suds and
secateurs, never venture out by themselves - the word is always
plural.

My message for this TAMIL NEW YEAR.

The Greatest& Divine Saint of Manthralaya.

SRI SRI RAGHAVENDRA (THE GREAT SAINT OF MANTHRALAYA).

"POOJYAYA RAGHAVENDRAYA SATHYA DHARMA RATHAYACHA
BHAJATHAM KAALPAVRIKSHAYA NAMATHAM KAMADHENAVE"

The theme Sri Sri Raghavendra Swamigal stands for satahya and dharma (Truth & Righteousness) and has infinite compassion for his sincere devotees and bless them like Kalpavriksha and Kamadhenu. AUM SRI RAGHAVENDRAYA NAMAHA! SRI KRISHNARPANAMASTHU.

Be an ardent and sincere devotee of this GREAT SAINT to fulfil your aims & goals.

With divine LOVE and FRIENDSHIP

J.K