A good counterpoint to the usual view, from my friend Gordon Phinn’s website http://anotherwordofgord.wordpress.com/
March 21, 2010
In our modern times it is considered a move of great maturity and bravery to confront your mortality.
This is based on a number of assumptions, the first being that many of us avoid confronting our mortality for decades while we engage in the various challenges on offer: education, religion, career, relationship and marriage, care and nurture of offspring, and one’s general contribution to the smooth and productive running of society. A second assumption is fear of death, that terrifying tumble into non-existence or religious heaven. A third is more of an observation: that many of us preoccupy ourselves with some or all of the above while avoiding, to the best of our abilities, a sustained encounter with the shadow of mortality. In this we are cast as children, merely playing at the games of life. Usually by those who have so confronted and see themselves as the grown-ups, the serious, funeral-going citizens who really know what’s in store.
Of course, the religious amongst us, of which, despite materialism, skepticism and atheism, there are still many millions, espouse beliefs in an eternal life of the righteous, although it is apparent from their behavior that fear of mortality makes many taxing demands on their psychic equilibrium.
One result of my obe research into the worlds of spirit and the repeated appearances on the planet that we call past lives is the understanding that confronting your immortality is actually the major step of true adulthood. Death is actually a powerful illusion which prevents us from making this ultimate confrontation. I say ultimate as once we have made the step, there is actually no other to follow. As Dylan Thomas once wrote, in A Refusal To Mourn, The Death By Fire, Of A Child In London, “After the first death there is no other”.
We are, actually, deathless beings with no beginning and no end. We change form and appearance but our inner self, our divine spark stays ever the same. We are repeatedly clothed in personalities and cultures, developing characteristics which appear to construct our destinies, but underneath the elaborate trappings we are immortal essences, cleverly shapeshifting through the various streams of evolution. That is evolution of adaptable form, more or less as Darwin saw it, and evolution of spirit, as the various doctrines of reincarnation describe it.
Confronting one’s immortality leads to a number of interesting results, one of which is that nothing seems to matter much anymore, mainly because it’s just another turn on the endless highway, the endless highway which has plenty of rest stops but no actual destination. Other than expansion of consciousness.
Planets and galaxies come and go, just as humans, cultures and epochs. When we finally graduate from Earth we can move on to other adventures and challenges, one of which may be acting as custodians of a new wave of evolving sentient species in another galaxy, just as we arrived almost fully formed as monads from other evolutionary exercises on Sirius, Andromeda and elsewhere, to plunge to the pre-planned depths of ignorance and density, challenging ourselves to rise back up to a radiant divinity from which every previous stupidity could be accessed and understood for its contribution to the big and oft-times baffling puzzle.
I daresay the notion of Confronting One’s Immortality could be parlayed into a set of suggestive instructions for the putatively perplexed and perhaps further into a book sized disquisition, but for now I leave you with this challenge: Leap over that death hurdle with the eagerness of a stallion and charge towards the inevitable unveiling of your immortality. As Jim Morrison sang so often, Break on through to the other side.