Fwd: Re: GRGR (2) "great bright hand"

[Doug Millison]

Re this discussion of elect/preterite, salvation or no, and statistical
probabilities, it may be worth recalling that GR is not TRP's last word on
religion and eschatology. In his later novels he continually returns to
themes and issues raised in the earlier novels, often with specific
intertextual links, so we see that in VL on p. 218, he specifically
mentions the bardo states as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Alongside GR's Christian end times imagery that calls to mind the Lord
separating sheep from goats and grain from chaff (and feeding the goats and
chaff to the fire) we can set a rather more hopeful image of the pilgrim
soul (of the recently dead person) *choosing* how to be reborn or, in some
cases, how to avoid rebirth and proceed directly to a rather more luminous
realm of liberation.  Sogyal Rinpoche, a present-day Tibetan Buddhist
teacher and interpreter of the Tibetan Book of the Dead that TRP mentions
in VL (not to be confused with the Egyptian Book of the Dead that TRP
mentions in COL49), discusses this in some detail (instructions on how to
achieve it, in fact) in his 1993 book _The Tibetan Book of Living and
Dying_, in which he also describes a phenomenon known as the "rainbow body":

"Through these advanced practices of Dzogchen, accomplished practitioners
can bring their lives to an extraordinary and triumphant end. As they die,
they enable their body to be reabsorbed back into the light essence of the
elements that created it, and consequently their material body dissolves
into light and then disappears completely. This process is known as the
'rainbow body' or 'body of light', because the dissolution is often
accompanied by spontaneous manifestations of light and rainbows. The
ancient Tantras of Dzogchen, and the writings of the great masters,
distinguish different categories of this amazing, otherworldly phenomenon,
for at one time, if at least not normal, it was reasonably frequent."
--pp.168-169


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