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Defining Life
Urusvati realizes that, although on the reality of the physical plane some people at times seem alive, from the viewpoint of a Higher Reality they are quite dead. It might seem puzzling that those defined as dead by a Higher Reality continue to move about on Earth. But why should such determinations be limited by only physical manifestations? When Our apparatuses indicate death, this indication is more correct than earthly evidence. We could mention several such "living corpses," each of whom is afflicted by some physical ailment. But their physical condition is a secondary factor, the primary one being the condition of the subtle body, which is ready to leave and may no longer be fully connected to the physical body. Such automatons can no longer be independently creative, and are easily led by others without realizing it. They are strongly earthbound and dread the idea of death, yet sense that they no longer belong fully to physical existence. Usually they are so-called materialists, and fear even a hint of the continuity of life in the subtle body! They may even fear to think about their own deeds. One should be able to recognize these living corpses and regard them as empty shells. I know that they would be enraged if their names were mentioned, and We shall not do this, for you know whom I have in mind. You also know whom We consider to be vacuums. Let us not calculate' by earthly measures, and let us take the future into consideration. The complexity of relationships is such that neither jinn nor fools should be dismissed immediately, even when they seem insane. We are in the midst of the world's events, and cannot cut karmic knots, for this might cause catastrophe. People often suggest that We put an end to certain circumstances, not realizing that the ends of such threads can turn into snares for them by enmeshing their own karma. I must emphasize this, for some people have strong ideas about Us and think of Us as beautiful angels, dwelling in the clouds and playing harps!

May the true description of Our concerns and labors be given to the people.
Supermundane 1, para..101

Urusvati realizes that, although on the reality of the physical plane some people at times seem alive, from the viewpoint of a Higher Reality they are quite dead. People think they are alive; they are running around making business, gossiping, slandering, or even loving people. They seem alive but something is dead in them. But why should such determinations be limited by only physical manifestations? When Our apparatuses indicate death, this indication is more correct than earthly evidence. I found out that, they have five kinds of apparatuses and these apparatuses indicate those. people who are dead, not physically but emotionally and mentally and spiritually. Immediately when they are dead, They see in the apparatuses that someone is fading out from the life. We could mention several such "living corpses," each of whom is afflicted by some physical ailment. According to my investigations there are many kinds of deaths, but I will start from the beginning. Those people who are dead are those whose mental body or astral body has left them. There are many cases that children and adults leave their astral body and when they leave their astral body their physical body operates as usual with the urges and drives of the physical elemental, but they are missing a link which is the; astral body. When the astral body leaves the man he loses his sensitivity. He loses his feelings, his ecstasy, his aspirations, and be comes insensitive to human pain and suffering. We have these kind of children now. They are growing. They do not have any emotional body and, because they have no emotional body, they are very cruel, very violent because they do not have any sensitivity about the pains and sufferings of other people. The medical profession finds many reasons to say that they are so and so because of these things, but the reality is that their emotional body has left them.

There is a more difficult situation when the mental body leaves the human being. When the mental body leaves the human being, that human being goes into inertia. He loses every interest in life. He never does any discipline and he hates discipline. He does not have that determination or willpower in any way, but his physical body lives because the body is a different being. According to the Ageless Wisdom, we have our physical body and the life of the body is an elemental, a life by itself that eventually, in many millions of years is going to be a human being. That elemental operate the physical body as before, but many characteristics are lost in the human being without a mental body. The third thing is very interesting. It happens many many times that the soul leaves the personality. People have their physical body, their emotional body, their I mental body, but their soul leaves them. When the soul leaves them they are empty. Sometimes you see those people who do not have a spark in their eyes. Some thing is dead in them. There is no higher interest, aspiration, or striving toward a higher world, toward the future. You can see these people in many asylums. When I visited some asylums I saw that they had a physical body, emotional body, etheric body, mental body, but the spark was not pulsating in them. The link with the Universe, with life is the soul. When that soul has departed, there is no link with the Cosmic rhythm, with the Cosmic existence. Something has left them. They live as automatons. They live as animals sometimes if the physical body is strong. Sometimes they are criminals because they respond to the criminal incentives of their astral body. Sometimes they are very crude because they follow their mental calculation that is totally earthly and selfish. These people are those about whom He is talking. They are dead from the inner side but from the worldly, viewpoint they are alive. They walk, they go, they come, but there is something dead in them. The apparatuses do not register life in them. These people turn to crimes, to destruction of life because they feel that something has departed in them and they are empty of life. Because they are empty of life, they want to destroy the life and make it empty as well.

Fourth, dead people are those people who live only for the material life and do not have any sensitivity to the spiritual life nor any aspiration for spiritual living. The material life blocks their soul and, because they five only for matter, their soul departs from them. You can find such people in the stock market. 'They have every kind of enthusiasm, effort, motion, movement, but something is lacking in them. They are united with the matter. The soul in the human being in a certain degree unites with the material life to make it move, to operate, but when the degree is passed the soul can no longer stay in the material thinking, material feeling, material operations. This is how their soul leaves them when they have dedicated all their life to matter. There is nothing for them except the matter, except the body, except the furniture, except the jewels, except the properties. Beyond that nothing exists for them. Fifth, dead people are those who live in pleasures or personality and are totally involved in personality pleasures without thinking about the future. An indication that we are alive is having emotions, actions, feelings, and thoughts that are directed to the future. If you do not think about the future, your soul slowly leaves you because your soul stands for the future. If you check yourself to see whether you are going to be more alive or more dead, you can tell by seeing if you are interested about the future or you are not interested about the future. M.M. says that all true disciples and Initiates think of the future, but after that they live in the future. It is very interesting to know what the difference is between thinking about the future and living in the future. Think what it means to live in the future, to be future oriented. In your actions you are future, in your conversations you are future, in your thoughts there is future, in your dreams and planning there is future, and all your relationships are charged with futuristic thinking. People relate to each other on the basis of the present, on the basis of body, on the basis of mind or emotions. It is a level, but there; is no future in it. These three bodies which we call personality must eventually gear themselves to the future vision. If the future vision is not

touching the personality, is not contacting it, it is slowly, slowly losing the life and becoming parts of the dead corpses. What is a dead personality like? When the personality has lost the soul he loses himself in automatic physical activity. Emotionally he loses the sensations, the love, the aspirations, the joy. Mentally he loses any interest in life and becomes totally indifferent. Indifference is one of the indications of death. When you become physically, emotionally, and mentally indifferent, you are already entering into the sphere of death. Sixth is that dead people are those people who live only for themselves. Everything for them is the nourishment of their selfinterest. We can say that self-centered people, selfish people, selfinterested people who use everybody, everything for the purpose of their existence of self are already dead. That kind of activity separates them from the life that is One. There is the-All-Self, the Universal Self that is in everything, every where. Selfishness is building a tumor on that ever-existing Reality and Oneness. You separate yourself from life and, when you separate yourself from life, you be-come selfish. In other words you become dead. We have dead people and dead groups who are, only interested in themselves. Even we have dead nations that are like corpses that activate and distribute germs, ailments, and mental, emotional, and physical diseases because they are dead. Dead people are not isolated people. They are germ radiating people, disturbing people. They cause tension and trouble by their presence because they are all selfish. Seventh is that dead people are those who do not strive for self-perfection. Once you start forgetting your daily meditation, your daily study, your, daily prayer, your daily benevolent activities, your daily work for the Common Good, you have already lost the life. Think that when you have missed your daily meditation you have missed a link with life. You think, for example, "Today I did not do meditation so what? Tomorrow I will do it!" You missed a link

with the life because you are not striving toward perfection. In whatever level, in whatever field you are, in that field you must try self-exertion and surpass yourself day after day, even little by little, But if you are not striving for self-perfection you are in danger of losing your life, as understood in higher reality. You can live for ninety years, but you can be a living corpse. The eighth kind of dead people are those who do not have any contact with the higher worlds. Who are those people who are alive? We know now those who are dead. Christ said something that is very interesting, "Let the dead bury their own dead." It was very interesting for me because I asked, "How can dead people bury their dead?" When I understood it as a metaphor, it was a very scientific explanation. Those people who are interested in death and dead things, dead materials, dead pleasure are dead people. They must bury their own dead. Who are their own dead? It is they, themselves. They must bury themselves. Now I have found out throughout my studies and experiences that living people who have a spark in their heart, who have a spark in their eyes, and are enthusiastic are those people who live for beauty and with beauty. This is the first indication that that person is alive and in the ocean of life. That person is not degenerating and going toward matter and death. Imagine if any time you love beauty, you think about beauty, you act beautifully, you speak beautifully, you think beautifully, you are alive. This is what art is. Actually, art is created for only one thing to increase your livingness. I do not know whether you have this experience or not. When you listen to great music or watch great paintings and ballet and dance, something beautiful, the life starts to bubble in you. If you continue living in the beauty, you will see that your life has meaning, has merit, has power because beauty is life. Second, alive people are those people who distribute the goodness with their actions, with their words, with their feelings,

with their thoughts, with all their planning. They have something which you can see. They are goodness. They distribute goodness. If anytime you see that you are not distributing goodness and you are distributing evil, gossip, slander, hatred, malice, you are linking yourself with the element of death. That is so beautiful. Your heart pours out elements of goodness in every moment. Third is that with all your actions and conversations and your thoughts and writings and music and relationships you spread righteousness. You are a righteous person. You do not let your actions lie. You do not let your emotions lie and disturb the facts. You live in righteousness. If that man did something, you do not judge him from the outer evidence. You' can go inside and find out the real cause of it. You are righteous. Now if you go home today, tomorrow, next day, see if you are righteous in your conversations. For example, when you start criticizing some people, see if you are righteous. When you are thinking about some people, think if your thoughts are righteous. When you are writing a letter about somebody, see if it is a righteous letter because only by living in righteousness can we strengthen this life so it will not go crooked. Wherever there is no righteousness there are problems and difficulties and hindrances. Wherever there is a lack of righteousness you are disturbing your inner equilibrium, your relationships, and building causes that in the future will expose themselves as disturbances because you were unrighteous in judging people. The next one is that alive people are joyful people. They are fantastic resources of joy. They are joyful people. Even in front of calamities, difficulties, they have some kind of deeper joy. This comes from the faith that everything is okay because they are in the hands of that higher Compassion. They know this because they have contact with Higher Beings. When you are losing your joy, you are losing your vitamins from your body.

If you have joy, you digest and assimilate vitamins. There is something here that tells me this is true. You enjoy the life. You are alive. But if you are dead, you do not have joy and, because you do not have joy you are not alive. The next one is freedom. Alive people are those who are free, and they work in every way to make their friends and neighbors free. "Free" does not mean stupidity, madness, craziness. Sometimes people think that if they are free they can do any obnoxious thing and say any obnoxious thing that indicates that they are free. We had a neighbor lady who was the president of a Women's Liberation group. One day I asked her, "Why are you coming home at eleven o'clock at night and your three children are laying around like cats?" "I am the Women's Lib president." Women's Lib president does not mean that she must drink until one o'clock and come home and put a blanket around her children and enjoy herself in the bed snoring. Then one day I asked her why she felt she was so free? "You are your own slave," I said. "You are the slave of your hatred, of your vanity, of your ego." I talked so much, but eventually she came to the stage that she asked, "What is freedom?" I said, "I will tell you if you will think about it. Freedom is cooperation, nothing else, higher and higher and advancing cooperation. If you are cooperating, you are going toward freedom. If you are not cooperating, you are going toward slavery. Try to be free, free from your prejudices, superstitions, especially free from your ego and vanity, especially free from your greed, especially free from your hatred, your jealousy, your revenge. These are the free people." You see in all our films that there is revenge. Revenge is the prison of freedom. You are not free because you are revengeful, you are slanderous, you are lost in your vanities. Free means a free mind that thinks in different viewpoints, in different angles. He is so free he can turn like a UFO in every direction. I was watching a film about UFOs. They moved in many directions. A free person can change direction any time, any moment; That is freedom, but he changes his direction because of a plan, not because he is crazy.

The sixth one is that alive people demonstrate striving, discipline, and progressiveness. They are disciplined in the home. They are disciplined in their daily aerobics, daily exercises of their body. That is so beautiful. They exercise to make their body beautiful, healthy. That is a sign that something is living in them because livingness is indicated by progress. If you are not progressing, you are not alive. They try to make their emotional nature, heart nature mote beautiful. Mentally they educate themselves every moment. They look at themselves. They think, they meditate, and they plan greater things. They have visions and they want to reach these visions. These people are alive people. The last sign of alive people is service. They try to serve people; they like to serve people. Dead people want to go in the coffin and sleep there. But there is one thing that is very different. Alive people serve without expectation. That is the sign of supreme aliveness. If you think of the indication of that phrase, it is so heavy that really sacrificial service is a service which is donated, which is offered for the benefit of all humanity. Then there is no expectation. Any moment that you expect, you have already become selfish. You lost that universality. You did big things, you did great things in the world, and then you expect something in return. That expectation brings you from that universal consciousness to your old self and you lose that contact with everything that is alive.

Q&A
Question: What is an example of how to live in the future? Answer: Living in the future means that whatever you are doing, whatever you are feeling, whatever you are thinking, you see if there is future in them, if there is something alive in them. Or are

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they dead? Or are they just for the present? In all your actions you look for the results. You ask, "What will happen if I speak these things?" "Nothing will happen. Everything is all right." That is not living in the future. If you are living in the future you will say, "What must I speak, think, and do so that in the future I do not create obstacles on the way of my perfection? On the contrary, my words, my actions, my thoughts will become leaders, door openers, vanguards on my path toward the future." Question: If one of the bodies of the children has left, what can be done in education? Answer: That is a very great subject and if people are interested one day on a professional level we can talk about it because in a few minutes what will I say? To say something fundamental, it is very important that the condition is right to bring the baby to earth. When the condition is wrong, you have every kind of problem: condition of the health of mommy, daddy, condition of the pregnancy; all these things must be considered. If these are not in good condition, you are working with a trouble and you do not know why this trouble occurred and you waste your time to heal the trouble. The best thing to heal is the origination. Question: What is the difference between -a person who has been indoctrinated or brainwashed or hypnotized and a person whose mental and emotional bodies have left? Answer: It is only temporary. You can de-hypnotize him, you can un-brainwash him, but if your emotional body has left, you cannot bring it back. Especially the mental body when it has left, you have Down' Syndrome. Why are people born with Down' Syndrome? The medical profession says this and this. It is not so. He does not have a mental body. How did he lose it? Maybe it is because of his past deeds, karma. Maybe father and mother did something very obnoxious. Maybe they put certain chemicals in the body of the child that resisted the presence of the soul.

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There are many fields of investigation and unfortunately our medical profession is not investigating these fields yet. They are busy with chemical injections, radiation therapies, and so on. Find the emotional and mental causes. In ten, twenty years' time people will say, "Karma." Already some physicians have started to think about karma. Why did this happen? How to heal is something different. Healing [is not even important. What are you healing? The house is falling. Make it fall. Finish. Now that is compassion. Emotionally we must heal these people. Of course we must try to heal, but the most important thing is to see from the causes where such a situation originated. Question: I heard you say that if one is not following good, one is following evil. Between those two poles can 'there be a temporary third stage between the two? Answer: Yes. For example, when we are seeing that the emotional body or subtle body leaves the man, it is very gradient. First you feel that something is departing. Then you feel that twenty percent you are not together emotionally. Then fifty percent you periodically flip out. Then eventually you do not have sensation, ecstasy, aspiration. You do not care about the feelings: of other people. It has departed. It is gradual. If you find out that you gradually are losing one of your bodies, there are ways it can be healed. Physically planned discipline is very good for the mental body. People ask. "What, is the relation of the mental body and physical exercises, movements that we learn?" Mental and physical have a close relationship because physical exercises attract the mental body to the nervous system until it totally assimilates it. In some cases in the monasteries when people came who were nearly going to lose their mental body, the Teachers gave them extra labor, digging day and night eighteen hours, swimming for hours until these people attracted the mental body because the motor of the body is the mind. You cannot do that here. You can make him be put in a bed to snore and every day give one injection for one hundred dollars. When you finish the hospital, it is ten thousand dollars for threes days. You are going to correct these situations in your mind

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first. Then in other lives you will come directly with such vision and planning to do something great for humanity. Question: When a person loses the emotional body, does it not have an effect on the mental and physical bodies? Answer: Yes, of course. There are lots of effects but sometimes they cover each other. The physical body acts as an emotional body, or the mental body acts as the emotional body. Then you cannot see it directly. You must have an observing eye to see why this lady is acting that way in this situation, in that situation, and then immediately take action if it is necessary. Question: You said there is a relationship between the mental body and physical exercise. Is there exercise for the emotional body? Answer: The emotional body exercise is joy, is enjoyment of Iife, is beauty, is music is love toward each other. That is how the emotional body takes its nourishment. When you love somebody and hug her and kiss her, your emotional body is nourished. When you become a robot, you lose your emotional body. In our schools they teach everything except these things. Yesterday I was thinking that some people must have a school only for teenagers, teaching them how to be present. Simple, but there are five hundred volumes of knowledge on how to teach them, what to teach them. You are tax paying machines. You are not taught how to live life and your children are being raised in the same way.
Lecture given on April 9, 1995