Heavenly Realms Angels and Encounters with Departed Loved Ones Are they Real

Over the years, for a long time now, I've had encounters with skeptics like Richard Dawkins, who's not only a skeptic but a cynic. He calls himself a militant atheist. I've had encounters with other people like Michael Shermer, who actually has a magazine called Skeptic, and all of them ridicule things like heavenly realms, angels, near-death experiences, communication with departed ones, and of course, emphasize the rational mind and everyday experiences as real and the others as unreal. But if you unpack this, a deeper mystery emerges. Everything I've said, heavenly realms, angels, NDEs, departed loved ones, your own body, your relationships, and the so-called external world, are nothing but virtues, patterned modifications in consciousness, appearing as experience. None of them is ontologically more real or less real than others. They differ only in subtlety, intensity, and the beliefs and sanskaras that shape them. So if you go deep into yoga and advaita, britis are movements or whirlpools in mind stuff that present as thoughts, perceptions, entire worlds of experience. The same basic structure of briti can appear as a memory, a sense perception, an astral vision, or the feeling of me in a body in a world. From the standpoint of pure awareness, Sakshin, every cognition is just a mental modification illumined by the same changeless light of consciousness. Experiences of higher lokas, deities, angels, guides, and near-death states are refinements of briti taking subtler objects, mythic imagery, luminous beings, other planes of space-time. They may carry powerful transformative impact, but structurally they are still cognitions, intentional mental modes shaped by prior belief, culture, and deep karmic impressions. Encounters with the dead are likewise appearances in awareness in which the object of the briti is a loved one no longer perceivable through the physical senses. This sense of this is my body, these are my relationships today, my father, my mother, my brothers, my sisters, and the physical world today that you are encountering also arises in britis, only more stabilized and inter-subjectively reinforced. What we call material is simply a very coherent, collectively conditioned pattern of perception, shared britis that we take as solid external reality. Your current relationships are moving constellations of memory, expectation, projection, and feeling, all of which are recognized in yoga as mind fluctuations rather than independent entities. Now here's an interesting belief shaped britis, what you believe will shape the britis, but belief itself is a combination of britis. Beliefs themselves are britis, stable thought forms that filter and organize what can appear. A belief in angels or certain lokas makes that symbolic language available for subtle experiences. A materialist belief system like the belief system of Richard Dawkins or Michael Shermer channels similar energies into neurological or psychological narratives. In both cases consciousness takes a particular shape, mental mode, and that shape determines the world you will encounter as real at that moment. So from a non-dual standpoint there's equal radiance, there is only pure consciousness, self-luminous and without second. Britis arrive and dissolve within it like ripples on an unmoving ocean, because every experience gross or subtle, sacred or mundane, is only a modification of this one field. No experience is ultimately more real than another or more illusory than another. With deep practice this is revealed, that one is not a better briti than the other, but your identity as awareness is the source of all britis, including your belief in a separate self and a solid world. They all arise and subside as britis. So what is real? Only the you, the field in which the britis are generated. As Lord Krishna says, I am the field and I am the knower of the field.