When we are born into this world, alone and defenceless, most of us are welcomed with love and cared for until we are able to look after ourselves. Our adjustment to the world is facilitated by older, wiser beings until we have developed the ability to negotiate its demands and challenges on our own.
It is a truism that the same patterns repeat themselves throughout the universe and at all levels of being. Thus, there is every reason to hope that when we die in this world and are born into the next we will be welcomed by souls who love us and who will look after us until we are able to make our own way in this new environment. Forget heaven and hell for the moment. That is too simplistic a framework for the immediate post-mortem experience. To be sure, there will be some sort of judgement and some sort of purification further down the line, but for the majority, saving the very saintly and very wicked, before this there will be loving help in adapting to our new world just as there is in this world before we must face the next stages.
At least, that will be the case for those souls, whatever their spiritual status, who are open to the experience of the new world and who have not darkened their mind by closing off the possibility of rebirth in the spiritual. In the next world it is your own mind that determines your outer situation. Not your intelligence but your spiritual openness and ability to accept light. By no means everyone can accept light and the cleverer person sometimes least of all. That is why faith is so important and why the innocent faith of a child may be a better guarantee of moving on in the spiritual world than all the wit and wisdom (earthly wisdom) of the philosopher. In the previous post I spoke of people being stripped of their worldly pride and arrogance through the processes of old age and, nowadays, dementia. This is to prise open the barriers they have erected in life and reduce their resistance. This is not done for any other reason than to help these souls make a better transition to the next world. Otherwise they might find themselves in a darkness that is an exteriorisation of their own mental state where they will remain until they start to wake up.
The best way to approach death is through faith, hope and an inner calm that rests on the confident (confident means with faith) belief that it is an integral part of life arranged by a loving God. Death is not a light matter nor can one deny the aspect of pain and suffering that may be involved or leaving people behind, for the time being, whom you love. We cannot escape the fact that death in a fallen world has its dark side. But it is also a release into a higher world and a more expansive state of being, and if we can see it in those terms then its sting will be blunted and we might even regard it as in some respects a blessing. After all, dying might be bad but not being able to die would be much worse.
The physical world is a world of entropy as it must be since only spirit endures forever. Rather than taking this material decay as a sign of ultimate nothingness as the atheist does we should see it as a vindication of belief in the reality of spirit. Viewed in this manner death is the proof of God not the denial.
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