Beyond the Physical Form

MAAsterG

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Am I the form that will die, after which everything will be over and there will be no more "I"? Or will "I" still be there? If I am still there, where will I be? If my physical body is burned and reduced to ashes, where will I be? To understand this, you first have to ask the question within yourself: What are you today, and if you die today, where will you be tomorrow?

The body will be burned. The face will be burned. The brain - the source of your ego today - will also be burned. Go to a graveyard or a cremation ground and see. There, you will find the graves or remains of people from every section of society. When an officer dies, a minister dies, a famous star dies, or an ordinary person dies, everyone reaches the same place. There is no separate cremation ground for a minister or a star. Nobody says, "Do not cremate this minister" or "Do not cremate this star." How many people have been cremated there? How many intellectual and egoistic people have been cremated there? At that point, everything is over. The body is reduced to ashes and the world moves on. Why? Because the brain through which you created your ego is ultimately going back to the same earth.

That is what Lord Krishna explains in the Gita and what Sage Ashtavakra explains in the Ashtavakra Gita. These are powerful spiritual epics that tell you about the life force within you, revealing that the physical form you consider yourself to be is merely an illusionary puppet - and showing you who you truly are beyond it. If you go deeper, the Garuda Purana also speaks of what happens after the physical form is gone and what life means beyond death.

The Garuda Purana is one of the eighteen Puranas, while the four Vedas are among the oldest sacred texts of India. They preserve the teachings heard by the ancient Rishis, whose names are remembered through different Gotras such as Kashyap and Bharadwaj. Rishi Ved Vyasa recorded the conversations and teachings that explain the deeper questions of life and what lies beyond the physical form. You cannot simply ignore these questions. You have to ask: Who am I beyond this body? You are only a small dot on this earth, while God, who created the entire creation is beyond the limitations of this physical form.

The Godly figures whom we remember - Ibrahim, Buddha, Mahavira, Jesus, Guru Nanak Dev, Muhammad, Farid, Kabir, Meera, Sahajo, Lalla, Socrates, Lao Tzu, and Ashtavakra - all spoke about this deeper reality. They tried to explain what life truly is and what exists beyond the physical form. Take Ashtavakra as an example., The name Ashtavakra refers to the condition of his physical body, which was said to be bent or deformed in eight places.

Ashtavakra, who was physically completely handicapped, bestowed the divine knowledge (gyan) of the formless and the form to Raja Janaka and Janaka realised it within five minutes. You could say Janaka had reached the boiling point, and Ashtavakra arrived only to evaporate that boiling water. That is all. So, it is your personal journey. How much progress you make, how much thirst you develop, and how deeply you go is your responsibility. God is the formless One, and when that One wants to meet someone, the seeker reaches such a boiling point that the arrival of a True Master is enough to make everything unwanted evaporate.