End of Days by Sylvia Browne

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 9th, 2022 in Prophecy, Stories

Prince Siddhartha lived in palatial luxury until he was twenty-six, happily married to Princess Yasodhara for half of those years. But he felt that something about his life was missing and incomplete, and he became consumed with curiosity about what the world was like beyond those high palace walls. And so, with the help of his charioteer Channa, he began a series of secret excursions beyond the walls into the streets of northern Indian villages.

For the first time in his life Prince Siddhartha saw the sick, the dying, the dead, and the starving, and he was shattered by them. He was told about the belief that birth and death were simply part of an eternal cycle that could only be stopped by somehow escaping the trap of continual rebirth, and he became consumed by the tragic inevitability of that cycle when it included the profound deprivation and illness that surrounded him in the poverty-stricken villages.

It was during what would become the prince’s final excursion that Siddhartha’s life was transformed forever. He came across what he first thought to be yet another beggar, a small, barefoot, seemingly starving man with a shaved head, draped in a yellow robe, and holding a bowl to receive any kindness a stranger might be moved to extend. But when Prince Siddhartha looked more closely, he saw that the man’s face was almost radiant with peace and dignity. Deeply moved, the prince commented to his charioteer about the amazingly transcendent little man, and Channa explained that the man was a monk, one of the quietly devout who found great spiritual happiness in a life of simplicity, purity, discipline, and meditation on his journey to be delivered from suffering.

Irrevocably moved by this experience, Prince Siddhartha, in a decision that would come to be known as the Great Renunciation, left behind his beloved family, his heritage, and his life of unlimited wealth and, at the age of twenty-nine, began a solitary search for a way to end the constant cycle of suffering and rebirth and then, somehow, be of real help to the sad afflicted world around him.

After six brutal years of pain, self-mortification, punishing discipline, and deprivation, Siddhartha came to the conclusion that an exhausted, neglected, malnourished body was hardly a welcoming environment for a healthy, enlightened mind and spirit. He began to nourish himself, and to rebuild his strength and vitality. His companions abandoned him, scornful of his inability to maintain his disciplines of sacrifice, and he found himself as alone as he’d been on the day he’d walked away from the palace.

On his thirty-fifth birthday, Siddhartha was wandering in a beautiful forest when a woman appeared and presented him with a bowl of milk rice.

“Venerable sir,” she said, “whoever you may be, god or human, please accept this offering. May you attain the good which you seek.”

Later that day he met a groundskeeper who offered him a cushion of fresh-cut grass beneath a magnificent spreading fig tree, which came to be known as the Bodhi Tree, or Tree of Enlightenment. As he rested beneath that tree he began contemplating his life and his near-death through the futility of his abusively extreme self-discipline.

In the shade of the Bodhi Tree he vowed, “Though my skin, my nerves and my lifeblood go dry, I will not abandon this seat until I have realized Supreme Enlightenment.” And he remembered a similar moment from his childhood, when, while resting beneath a tree, he discovered that by sitting cross-legged, with his eyes closed and his mind focused on nothing but breathing in and out, he could reach a state of mental bliss. The peace of that simple, private exercise came flooding back to him that day beneath the Bodhi Tree, and he crossed his legs, closed his eyes, and cleared his mind of everything but his silent, rhythmic breathing.