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| Esoteric Healing - Chapter IV - The Basic Requirements for Healing |
| We are therefore considering, in this second section, the
problem of death or the art of dying. This is something which all seriously ill people
must inevitably face, and for which those in good health should prepare themselves through
correct thinking and sane anticipation. The morbid attitude of the majority of men to the
subject of death, and their refusal to consider it when in good health, is something which
must be altered and deliberately changed. Christ demonstrated to His disciples the correct
attitude when referring to His coming and immediate decease at the hand [392] of His
enemies; He chided them when they evidenced sorrow, reminding them that He was going to
His Father. Being an initiate of high degree, He meant that He was, occultly speaking,
"making restitution to the Monad"; ordinary people and those below the grade of
an initiate of the third degree make "restitution to the soul." The fear and the
morbidness which the subject of death usually evokes, and the unwillingness to face it
with understanding are due to the emphasis which people lay upon the fact of the physical
body and the facility with which they identify themselves with it; it is based also upon
an innate fear of loneliness and the loss of the familiar. Yet the loneliness which
eventuates after death, when the man finds himself without a physical vehicle, is as
nothing compared to the loneliness of birth. At birth, the soul finds itself in new
surroundings and immersed in a body which is at first totally incompetent to take care of
itself or to establish intelligent contact with surrounding conditions for a long period
of time. The man comes into incarnation with no recollection as to the identity or the
significance to him of the group of souls in bodies with which he finds himself in
relationship; this loneliness only disappears gradually as he makes his own personality
contacts, discovers those who are congenial to him and eventually gathers around him those
whom he calls his friends. After death this is not so, for the man finds on the other side
of the veil those whom he knows and who have been connected with him in physical plane
life, and he is never alone as human beings understand loneliness; he is also conscious of
those still in physical bodies; he can see them, he can tune in on their emotions, and
also upon their thinking, for the physical brain, being non-existent, no longer acts as a
deterrent. If people but knew more, birth would be the experience which they would dread,
and not [393] death, for birth establishes the soul in the true prison, and physical death
is only the first step towards liberation. Another fear which induces mankind to regard death as a calamity is one which theological religion has inculcated, particularly the Protestant fundamentalists and the Roman Catholic Church - the fear of hell, the imposition of penalties, usually out of all proportion to the errors of a lifetime, and the terrors imposed by an angry God. To these man is told he will have to submit, and from them there is no escape, except through the vicarious at-one-ment. There is, as you well know, no angry God, no hell, and no vicarious at-one-ment. There is only a great principle of love animating the entire universe; there is the Presence of the Christ, indicating to humanity the fact of the soul and that we are saved by the livingness of that soul, and the only hell is the earth itself, where we learn to work out our own salvation, actuated by the principle of love and light, and incited thereto by the example of the Christ and the inner urge of our own souls. This teaching anent hell is a remainder of the sadistic turn which was given to the thinking of the Christian Church in the Middle Ages and to the erroneous teaching to be found in the Old Testament anent Jehovah, the tribal God of the Jews. Jehovah is not God, the planetary Logos, the Eternal Heart of Love Whom Christ revealed. As these erroneous ideas die out, the concept of hell will fade from man's recollection and its place will be taken by an understanding of the law which makes each man work out his own salvation upon the physical plane, which leads him to right the wrongs which he may have perpetrated in his lives on Earth, and which enables him eventually to "clean his own slate." I seek not here to impose upon you a theological discussion. I seek only to point out that the present fear of death must give place to an intelligent comprehension of the reality [394] and to the substitution of a concept of continuity which will negate disturbance, and emphasize the idea of one life and one conscious Entity in many experiencing bodies. It might be stated, in order to sum up my general proposition, that the fear and horror of death is founded upon the love of form - our own form, the forms of those we love and the form of our familiar surroundings and environment. Yet this type of love runs counter to all our teaching anent the spiritual realities. The hope of the future, and the hope of our release from this ill-founded fear, lie in the shifting of our emphasis to the fact of the eternal soul and to the necessity for that soul to live spiritually, constructively and divinely within the material vehicles. Into this concept again enters the thought of restitution. Wrong concepts are therefore forgotten; the idea of elimination also enters in so that right focus is attained. Integration demands consideration, so that absorption in the life of the soul will take the place of absorption in the life of the body. Sorrow, loneliness, unhappiness, decay, loss - all these are ideas which must disappear as the common reaction to the fact of death also vanishes. As men learn to live consciously as souls, as they also learn to focus themselves on soul levels and begin to regard the form or forms as simply modes of expression, all the old sorrowful ideas anent death will gradually disappear, and a new and more joyful approach to that great experience will take their place. |
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