Home with God – Part 9
from Jan 2008

“You’re afraid to die, and you’re afraid to live.
What a way to exist.”

Remembrance 5 (page 42)
“Death is never a tragedy. It is always a gift”

We’ve talked before about death being a “gift”, and I’m sure that many people will not believe this, even if they mentally accept such an idea. In Part 1 on the Blog, I wrote about death and our ideas about it.

“Home with God” focuses quite a lot on death and what happens afterwards. The reason is because so many people don’t really think about death very much. In western societies it is kept “hidden” and not talked about, except in movies and cartoons, where it is turned into something un-real, like a video game. Most people rarely, if ever, see a real dead body. Children are kept away from funerals and we don’t leave dead relatives in the front room any more.

Our culture makes a big thing about doing all we can to avoid the coming day. Even worse, it creates thousands of products to sell us to slow down or stop the aging process – no, actually reverse the aging process. They want to tell us that we don’t have to die and medical science will soon have a “cure” for it. Well, may be we don’t have to die and it’s quite likely that within our Body, Mind and Soul, we have the ability to continually regenerate a new, all of our cells, organs and other systems. May be we should take some time to consider what “dying” really is, and what difference a better understanding of death might make to how we live our lives.

Living in fear of death causes us to distort our natural way of living. How we think about death leads us to react to it in a certain way. It can also lead others, who hear about the death, to react a certain way. If we treat our own pending death as something dreadful, something being forced upon us by some outside “entity”, or “bad luck” or “punishment”, coming much earlier than one would have liked or expected, we might get angry and agitated and start to blame people for our situation. People around us would see and feel our frustration and then have their own trauma to deal with.

If we accepted our situation as just part of the natural unfolding of life, presenting us with situations to experience and grow from, all created and brought to us by our own higher self, we could be at peace with this situation and this would also be felt by those around us, allowing them to cope with their own pending loss in a more positive way.

In Chapter 8, Neale reprints a message, from a friend, that illustrates this point very well.

For death to be seen as a gift, we need to have a special way of looking at both life and death. We need to expand our view of who we are and our relationship to everything else. You could say that taking this strange view of death is just deluding ourselves. We are just looking for a “more comfortable” story. Religions tell us that we will be judged and damned for all eternity. Biologists tell us that we just decay into our base elements, back to the earth. Suicide bombers believe they will be provided with multiple ideal sexual partners. What we believe about a topic, determines how we see that topic and therefore how we experience it. For most of us, what we believe about almost everything, has been given to us by someone else. We have been conditioned by our society, whichever society that happens to be.

And so, as we have said many times, don’t believe anything that anyone else tells you, including this author, and especially not your Politicians, Religious leaders, Doctors, Scientists, Police, the Army, any Corporation, the Media and anyone that is trying to “sell” you something.

What kind of life would we lead if we didn’t believe any of these groups of people? If we live as though everyone was lying to us or distorting the truth, or at least trying to persuade us that their idea is the right idea. Wouldn’t it be terrible to live like that?

If I had my political hat on, I might answer that the world would be a much better place if we didn’t let our “leaders” get away with blatantly lying to us about just about everything. However, this is a spiritual blog and I’m not saying that we should not listen to and pay attention to what other people are saying and doing. On the contrary. Everyone has part of the “truth” and the part that they present to you is coming your way for a reason, you attracted it. They will make it sound “logical”, otherwise no-one would believe them, but how does it “feel”. Don’t accept it as your truth unless it feels right in your heart. Not in your head – don’t forget, your mind was conditioned by the same people, so if you use your mind as the measure of truth, you are more likely to accept what is presented to you.

So, everyone has their part of the truth and if you want to understand the widest version of the truth that you can, you better consider as many of these “other” positions as possible. The ultimate truth has to explain all the strange ideas that people have come up with over the centuries. Do you think that your model of the world does that? With an infinite number of “stories” overflowing with complexity, dead-ends, errors and oppression, the real truth has to be so simple. The laws of the universe are simple. The lowest levels of functionality and processes lead to extremely complex outcomes. There doesn’t need to be complex principals to create complex outcomes.

If you consider the number of complex functions you can carry out on your computer, you would believe that a computer would be unbelievably complicated. Actually, at its base level, it is extremely simple. It uses just a few small switches (may be 16 or 64), that can be either on or off and a small circuit that can add two of these together (mathematically or logically) and a shift-circuit that can move the sequence left or right. With just these few simple items we can create a virtual world inside your computer. You can play realistic games using characters with all the attributes of real people.

The marvel is that we can make the switches and circuits so small that we can store millions of words on a chip the size of your thumb nail and can turn the switches on and off millions of times each second. Having millions of these tiny systems and allowing them to become specialised and work together, allows for the vast array of behaviours presented by even simple computers.

This is exactly the same as “life”, where undifferentiated stems cells decide to become specialised and continue to communicate with those other cells around them. Our bodies are not one body. They are not even a single coherent organism. The cells are not even connected together. We are a mass of swirling elements held together by electromagnetic and gravitational forces. Something is keeping them in place, holding them together in a way that creates the illusion of a body, a recognisable person, a changing individual. If all the cells in our bodies are replaced about every 7 years, where are “we”? When we “die”, those elements simply decide to move away and become part of some other experience.

All physical things are made up of the same “stuff”. There is no real difference between a star, an ocean and a person. There is nothing that exists that is not alive. Life is the basic process of existence in the physical. The smallest element that we can obverse still contains infinity within it. These elements all have a spark of consciousness and an infinite source of creative power. As they combine together in ever increasing complexity, the more complex becomes the consciousness of the resulting being. Even rocks are conscious and have a “life-cycle”.

Which came first, the complex organism or the complex consciousness? Were we created or did we evolve? This has always seemed a strange question to me and I never understood that there should be an argument about “which” is true and which should be taught in schools. There are clearly both forces at work all the time. Nothing comes into existence unless it is created. Nothing becomes complex without evolving from something less complex. You won’t create any new thoughts without thinking a whole bunch of old ones firsts.

The modern flat-panel LCD television isn’t the first ever design of a television or the first use of LCD panels. Everything that “man” creates uses a long history of evolution and certainly couldn’t come into existence without creative power, based in thought. Thought creates everything. Consciousness is where thoughts reside and the physical manifestation of consciousness is our universe.

Take care of your thoughts – they are real things and contain creative power. Everyone gets to have “access” to them, just like radio waves can be picked up by anyone with a radio receiver.

P.S. You might want to consider whether or not your computer is “alive”.

John.