1 result for (book:ss AND session:535 AND stemmed:atom)
[... 9 paragraphs ...]
First of all, let us consider the fact just mentioned. There is no separate, indivisible, specific point of death. Life is a state of becoming, and death is a part of this process of becoming. You are alive now, a consciousness knowing itself, sparkling with cognition amid a debris of dead and dying cells; alive while the atoms and molecules of your body die and are reborn. You are alive, therefore, in the midst of small deaths; portions of your own image crumble away moment by moment and are replaced, and you scarcely give the matter a thought. So you are to some extent now alive in the midst of the death of yourself — alive despite, and yet because of, the multitudinous deaths and rebirths that occur within your body in physical terms.
[... 5 paragraphs ...]
Remember this is an analogy, so that the word “instant” should not be taken too literally. There is, then, what we can call an underside of consciousness. Now, in the same way, atoms and molecules exist so that they are “dead,” or inactive within your system, then alive or active, but you cannot perceive the instant in which they do not exist. Since your bodies and your entire physical universe are composed of atoms and molecules, then I am telling you that the entire structure exists in the same manner. It flickers off and on, in other words, and in a certain rhythm, as, say, the rhythm of breath.
[... 2 paragraphs ...]
Consciousness — human consciousness — is not dependent upon the tissues, and yet there is no physical matter that is not brought into being by some portion of consciousness. For example, when your individual consciousness has left the body in a way that I will shortly explain, then the simple consciousnesses of atoms and molecules remain, and are not annihilated.
[... 33 paragraphs ...]