Again I feel the need to get out of the Corona corral and canter a bit, forgetting things for an hour. May I?
One might ask: Was the Buddha ascended?
In my opinion, the Buddha revealed the fact that he was an ascended being in and by his distinction between an arahant and a buddha.
Only a buddha would have stepped off the wheel of birth and death, he said; an arahant would not have done so. That distinction identifies the Buddha as having ascended and the arahant as having not.
Why is that? Because, in the higher dimensions, there’s no need to die or be born again. We always have been immortal but we’ve been required to go through innumerable deaths and rebirths to get to here. Once in the higher dimensions the need for death and rebirth disappears.
The Buddha says it has disappeared for him but not so for an arahant.
That for me distinguishes the arahant’s achievement as one step back from higher dimensional, which would be the kundalini’s entry into the crown chakra, Shakti uniting with Shiva, what Hindus call Brahmajnana or jnana, and westerners, “God-Realization.”
And it establishes the Buddha’s attainment as being what the Company of Heaven call Ascension. It’s also known as Sahaja Samadhi to Sri Ramana, Vijnana to Sri Ramakrishna, or Salvation and Redemption to Jesus. He probably went well beyond simple Fifth Dimensionality.
In the Seventies, I was told that Brahmajnana was “full and complete enlightenment.” But the more I read, the more I could not remain with that belief.
There was enlightenment beyond the seven-chakra system at least. Sri Ramana described that further level of enlightenment. Da Free John appears to have described it. The Buddha certainly knew it.
Of course I now see that there’s virtually no end to enlightenment – deeps beyond deeps, grandeur beyond grandeur, as Franklin Merrell-Wolff put it.
But I digress. The arahant, who has had Brahmajnana, is not yet the ascendent Buddha. There is a line between the two, demarcating ascended from not ascended.
The Buddha has had a full and eternal heart opening and is in the Sahaja or natural state. Having dismounted the wheel of birth and death, he has entered a higher realm where birth and death are absent. He’s entered the Gates of Eternity, so to speak.
The Buddha will have lost all trace of itself in an Ocean of Love (1) that washes away all concern, all need, all resistance – in Gautama’s case, forever. (2)
The only thing we want to do in that state is share it.
So the Buddha’s distinction between a Buddha and an arahant reveals, to me, that the Buddha knows the higher dimensions.
Footnotes
(1) Like Sri Ramakrishna’s salt doll. A salt doll wanted to measure the Ocean, but it could not. When it went into the sea, it melted. Now who was there to measure the Ocean?
(2) The heart opening that occurs when the kundalini reaches the fourth chakra is temporary, in my view, a preview of what Sahaja Samadhi must be like. Sahaja is eternal and probably a lot more powerful.