52 Is Death a Reverse Miracle?

 

 

ANGEL AND CROW

“God said: And so I suggest that you trust in yourself and in Me. Accept My benevolence. Accept that death is not real. Fears are not real. Even on a practical level, you know that most of your fears are mythical. You may fear a hundred possibilities, and they don’t’ come true.  As for fear of the death of the body, that will be realized with your approval or not, so why fear death so many moments in your life? Beloveds, when you do leave your body, you will embrace its loss and know you have lost nothing but your fears.” HL 4768 

“No one can die unless he chooses death. What seems to be the fear of death is really its attraction. Guilt, too, is feared and fearful. Yet it could have no hold at all except on those who are attracted to it and seek it out. And so it is with death. Made by the ego, its dark shadow falls across all living things, because the ego is the ‘enemy’ of life.” A Course in Miracles 19-4

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    We all agree that the birth of a child is a miracle. It is an image, a soul of Infinity and Eternity made visible, finite, temporal, an image of God that took a form through a body. But we don’t see the death of a loved one or even our own death as a miracle, a return of the individualized soul to generality, Infinity and Eternity where it comes from but rather as a calamity.  Yet, we see death every day through different sources of information. Why do we make such a fuss of a daily occurrence? It should not surprise us, yet it always does. From our point of vantage, the body appears with the incoming of a soul, and it disappears with its outgoing. It is simply a state of life on earth. It is like an apartment or house we rent or buy. Eventually, we have to leave it. We leave without it. It is also like entering a theater. There is always an end to a movie or a stage show. We have to get out of the theater at some point. But we don’t take it that way. Our emotions seem stronger than our mind.

   But from another point of vantage, a reverse one, death could be seen as the process by which the soul rediscovers that it does not have to go anywhere (ingoing or outgoing in or out of a body) since it is everywhere, so it is the body that has to cease to be somewhere, hence it must disappear the reverse way it appeared. For the soul, it is the reverse shift from location to non-location. It is a renaissance, a remembering, a miraculous return from somewhere to everywhere or nowhere after a short cinematographic or theatrical intermezzo. So all is a matter of perspective and depends upon our looking at death from a body or a soul perspective. But is the body perspective a good point of vantage? That is the crux of the drama.

 

   Intermezzo: How far can we extend the lifespan of the human body?

   Between the years 1600 and 2000, the human lifespan has increased considerably from 30 years to 76 years. Progress in sewers, sanitation, vaccines, and other medical advances, better diets, and health care have mainly contributed to that increase of our lifespan. Scientific speculation goes as far as saying that when we will be able to eliminate all the processes of aging and the damages caused by oxidation, people could live 1,000 years.

   Geneticists have discovered that, at the end of the chromosomes (located on the twisted, double-stranded molecules of DNA), there are segments of DNA called telomeres which, like the plastic tips we find on shoelaces, protect the strands and prevent them from becoming ragged and from sticking to each other. At the same time, telomeres contribute to cell division and seem to contain information on the mechanism of aging and cancer.

   Each time a cell division occurs, the telomeres get shorter. Since telomeres allow cells to divide without losing genes through the “loose ends”, then, when they get too short, cells can no longer divide and eventually die. The shortening of the telomeres would explain not only the process of aging but also the process of cancer and death.

   Geneticists have mapped an enzyme, telomerase,  which has a rejuvenating effect on the aging of normal cells. It can re-elongate the shortening chromosomes. It is called the new ‘Fountain of Youth’. And it is already a big business.

   Some people are probably ready to live until they reach 1000 years old. But some don’t. It is as normal to cry out for death, to be willing to be done with the body, as it can be to fantasize about being immortal in always the same body. But who really wants to keep and drive his old Chevrolet Impala 1957 for another thousand years? Replacing parts is not changing the car.

   Of course, there always will be new things to explore in a physical body but the body remains a temporary vehicle to experience the world of illusion. What about experiencing Reality or Truth? Is the body the appropriate vehicle to experience (unconditional) love and truth? Can we experience more than “special” relationships when we identify with the body? The answer is yes to the extent that the body is a device that allows us to rediscover who we really are by experiencing what we are not.  The body acts like the moon during a total eclipse of the sun. We celebrate more the return of the sun than its obliteration.  And as God says: “As for fear of the death of the body, that will be realized with your approval or not, so why fear death so many moments in your life?” Time might be extensible to a certain “extent” with telomerase, but infinite extension of time does not yield eternity nor infinite extension of space yields infinity.

 

   What happens is always the result of a belief

   Experiencing illusion through the body (which is also an illusion) is projecting the belief that something is “really” happening or has to happen out there and to happen as well to the body. We expect things to happen. And things do happen because we believe in their happening. The belief in happening is based on the belief in the past. Without the memory of the past, how could we perceive an event? The perception of an event is based on its comparison with the past; hence an event is just the expression of a judgment. This is the general mechanism of illusion. It is indeed a mechanism because belief itself is also a mechanism, a trick of the mind. Events can happen only through a dualistic vision because they seem to be outside and separate from ourself. But what can really happen when there is only One? Can One be surprised by an event? The answer could be that we are happening to ourself through events.

   We are attracted to happenings, events,  may they be wonderful or awful. From a body point of view, life is opposed to death. Where there are opposites there is fear. Fear transforms human beings into survivors. From the soul point of view, life is, and it is without interruption. Life is not bound to time and space. There is no end to life, but there is an end to the forms life takes. It is the seemingly changing aspect of life.

   We consider birth and death as “events”. The body is there to give us a certain sense of space, time, hence location and duration. How could things happen without space and time? How could they happen if there were no beginning and no end? Where could we go if there were no space and no time coordinates? So everything that has a beginning from the body perspective must have an end. But body, matter, mass, time, and space are beliefs, not facts. Eternity, Infinity, boundlessness are the real facts of Life. The facts of life are that nothing is really ever happening. As a mirror makes us believe in the reality of an image it reflects, death is a belief that mirrors our fear of separation through the belief in the discontinuity or interruption of life. It is also the belief that we are limited by the body. With death comes the fear of losing our boundaries.

  

What happens is always the result of a belief

   If events or happenings are not real, they must be symbols that stand for something other than themselves. In the relative world, everything in our life is perceived as fragmented events: our birth, putting the alarm clock, brushing our teeth, going to work, winning the lottery, catching a disease, getting married, dying. Life perceived as a succession of events is also perceived, consequently, as a succession of absences or even losses which are only intervals between any two successive events. From the body point of view, life is discontinuous and consists of a series of interruptions.

  Since the body is the perfect example of the discontinuity of life, it is inevitable that as long as we identify with the body, death will appear fearful even as we know it is inevitable. But anything that seems a source of fear is a perception of the ego. Ego generally perceives events as symbols of fear, attack, sin, guilt, aggression, retaliation, anger, separation, and death. Ego easily confuses illusion and reality because it does not have any existence by itself. Only our belief in it gives it existence.

   The image of a tornado reveals a lot about our perception of death as well as about the link between the soul and the body.

    A tornado is an energetic, vibratory phenomenon. As a vibration, it is combining two directional movements of energetic particles into two complementary waves: a descending centripetal wave (wind) and an ascending centrifugal wave. The combination of the two opposite waves creates the form of a funnel. Doesn’t a tornado symbolize the power of life or God as well as the fear of death at the same time?

   Furthermore, even if a vibration like a tornado is composed of two directionally opposite movements, we have to remember that everything in the reality of Oneness is one-sided, not two-sided, as exemplified by the Moebius band. This means that life and death only appear to be opposite whilst they are one in the perfect continuity of Life.

   Once more, if we take a look at the picture of the tornado, we see a close association between the long funnel of the tornado and what is called, in the esoteric works, the silver cord that is supposed to keep the soul attached to the body. Representations of out-of-the-body experiences usually show this silver cord — which is not really made of silver of molecular weight 47 in Mendeleev’s Periodic Table of Element — that keeps the soul from prematurely leaving the body before its assigned time of death.

   Death would be seen as the breaking of this silver cord, liberating the soul from its bound to earth and leaving the body behind to disintegrate through corruption, returning all its constituent energetic particles to the chaotic soup of potential new forms.

   But since there is no break, no discontinuity in oneness, the soul does not have to go anywhere. Instead of seeing a real break in the silver cord, could we not see, through the image of the tornado, that the funnel or cord is only a mirror that our split mind goes through to open its eyes and rediscover its memory of infinity, eternity and boundlessness? Love and truth were separated by the mind, and their separation was experienced by the projection of the body. But love and truth were never separated in Reality. Hence…

 

   Death must be a choice!

   Since there is no interruption in life, death must be a belief we choose. There is no way out of life. The core of death is the attraction to the symbol it represents for the ego. Conditional love, fear of loss, fear of abandonment, attachment to special relationships are what constitute our attraction to death. We unconsciously have an irresistible attraction to the death of the ego while, consciously, we fear its death as if it were our own death. Fearing death sums up to be attracted to death.  Fearing fear sums up to be attracted to fear. Guilt is also fearful. Who is the aggressor, who is the victim?

    Fears are only shadows; hence they cannot kill by themselves. The only way to die is to choose death. And still, we choose an illusion.

 

   Experiencing immortality while in our body

   Immortality is a fact, a reality of Oneness, not a belief. If we really recognize and accept what we really are, we can meet our immortality while we are still in our human body. We don’t believe it because we believe in suffering. We also have an attraction to suffering. Ego uses the symbol of suffering to justify its existence which is separation. Yet, separation never really happened as any other event.

   If there is no death then the seeming death of the body must be an event, and as such, it can only be dreamed of.

   Birth is a miracle, and death is too.

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 P.S. I invite the reader to read the following splendid Heavenletter™.

Be the Splendor

Written by Normand Bourque on Nov 08, 2013