What stops a soul ascending to the heavenly realms after death? It is its weight. A soul is literally held down by its weight or rises because of a lack of weight. In the physical world gravity is the dominant force but in the spiritual world levity takes its place and your spiritual lightness draws you upwards.
What causes this weight? Several things but chief among them are attachment to the material world and sin. Sin is the main deadweight that holds the soul down. Lack of sin, or minimal sin since no one is entirely free of sin, allows the soul to rise. There must also be the positive qualities of aspiration and imagination which is the capacity to respond to the higher worlds, but attachment to sin and to material things are the major weights that pull the soul down and prevent it rising
Thus, you could say that gravity operates in the next world too but it operates in terms of consciousness.
What is the main anti-matter force? It is alignment of the mind with the spirit of Christ. This is something much more than belief in Christ. It is the assimilation of your soul with his.
A post after mine own heart :) Chesterton made a similar point, but you can find this point littered throughout the spiritual writings of saints and ancient theologians and even the Bible. Jesus exhorted us to have a fundamentally unserious attitude about the material world .
ReplyDeleteOne of the surest ways you can recognize an un-Godly person is his seriousness, his heaviness, his gloom. Because if the material world is all there is, why wouldn't you be depressed and serious all the time?
Whereas a Godly person is always cheerful and lighthearted, even though he recognizes the great evils in the world. He knows God cannot be defeated and has already saved us all.
I have found in my personal life also that one of the most absolutely politically and culturally subversive things I can do in our modern materialistic times is to be lighthearted, carefree, and cheerful.
Because if you are a materialist, you cannot be any of those things. The world seems intensely serious to you, and must. So I was telegraphing that I was a heretic to the dominant philosophy - and people reacted as if I was a criminal. Which I was :)
One of the metrics I use to determine if a spiritual writer is offering the real deal is if he's happy, cheerful, lighthearted, or if he's gloomy, angry, and always simply in a bad mood . Of course today everyone is corrupted and a mixed bag, but there are degrees. Thoroughly gloomy, angry, and unhappy writers cannot be offering God's true word.
Of course, there is a sense in which the world and the part we play in it is of ultimate significance, and there is a bad kind of unseriousness that is just nihilism, and it's own kind of gloomy and depression.
But the carefree joy of connecting to an infinite and loving God who has created a beautiful world that he will never let sink into utter evil, and that we must help in this task l, is of a wholly different kind.
The other group of people who I would consider to have a genuine spirituality of a kind and who are reliably gloomy and unhappy are the real Dualists,. But while they have some good insights we can learn from, to the point that mature Christianity found it worthwhile and necessary to incorporate a qualified dualism into a more intelligent overarching Monism, dualism is not a mature or intelligent - or even coherent - spirituality and ultimately devolves into relativism and is quasi-materialistic.
Excellent comment. Thanks Unknown. I think there's room for righteous anger about the state of the world and, especially, the corruption of the innocents (who are not completely innocent or they wouldn't be corruptible but still...), but the chief thing is to realise that the bright sun is always behind the dark clouds.
ReplyDeleteVery much agree - there is room also for anger, very much so, but behind the dark clouds is the sun. Thanks for the post!
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