Life or Death? You Choose

What if the present time were an examination to see which souls wanted life and which did not? For life read spiritual life for when you come down to it there is no other. Life, being, existence, is a spiritual thing. Matter by itself has no life. It is the form life takes. It is the means through which life expresses itself but it is not life. Today we are being asked to choose. Do we wish to live or not?

If asked outright everyone would presumably say they wished to live but it's not that simple. If your actions, thoughts and feelings indicate a rejection of what life actually is then what have you really chosen? If you do not embrace life with your heart, which means embrace what life is, then it makes no difference what you think you want. You have chosen anti-life. If your inner being in the form of your thoughts, desires and what you love points you away from spiritual life that shows you have, in  a certain sense, chosen death for life is spiritual and to reject the spirit is to reject life.

This might seem unfair. Why are we not given all the information? Then we would make the right choice. But that is the whole point. The test is to see what you choose without being influenced by the idea of reward. It is to test your true self, what you actually are. A person's spirituality is determined by their motivation and the object of their love. If you turn to God because of what you hope to gain from him then you are not concerned with God, only with yourself and not your spiritual self which is naturally oriented to God but your earthly self-centred self. You must be put in a situation where your choice is a real indication of your heart and there are no extraneous factors influencing the choice in a direction it would not have gone left to itself.

This is the advantage of living in an age such as ours in which religion is no longer a significant part of life. Today if we turn to the spiritual life it is not because society obliges us to do so. It is because we ourselves want to do so despite rather than because of the world.  I can foresee a time when to live a spiritual life will require a person to go against the world, against good opinion and maybe even against the law. Some think that time has already arrived but I would say current events are only a fore-echo or preliminary phase of what is to come. Masks, vaccines and lockdowns, which all symbolise loss of freedom and personal integrity in various ways, are probably only the beginning of a gathering movement to refashion human nature and the understanding of what it is to be a person. Will an over-concern to preserve the body lead to an even greater loss of the sense of the soul? How much will we be prepared to give up merely to maintain physical existence? Life is so much more than the body and likewise the concept of death can be extended far beyond the merely physical.

I don't want to be melodramatic about this. It may be that present events are not forerunners of something more severe.  I suspect they are but even if they are not they still serve to remind us of potential possibilities and to reorient us to the spiritual world if we are alive to their deeper significance and don't just pass up the symbolism as irrelevant. Symbolism, you say? Why should we read anything into what are just public health measures? But everything in this world has symbolic significance and if you ignore that you live a surface existence and are little better than a talking monkey.

Jesus came to offer us life. That was his mission. To save us from death and give us life. This is a very simple thing, too simple it seems for most modern human beings. Jesus is life. He sums up in himself what life is. He is the expression of life and to accept him is to choose life. By the same token, to turn away from him is to turn away from life, to turn down life, and this is the test which today entails a more active choice than in the past when Christianity was the default position.

I have a book coming out later this year called Earth is a School. The title comes from something I was told by my teachers and reflects my belief that the present time is a critical point in human history, a time of final exams in which we take the test to see whether we will progress to higher worlds of light, beauty, truth and love or sink back to a heavier, darker, more constricted existence. In a sense we do create our own reality in that if our mind shuts out spirit we will eventually find ourselves in an external environment that reflects that mindset. Conversely, if we open our heart and mind to spirit and live a life in accordance with the inner significance of Christ's teachings  we will rise to eternal life.