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Esoteric Healing - Chapter V - The Process of Restitution
1. The Nature of Death Excerpts from other Writings A Treatise on the Seven Rays: The whole must be seen as of more vital importance than the part, and this not as a dream, a vision, a theory, a process of wishful thinking, a hypothesis or an urge. It is realized as an innate necessity and as inevitable. It connotes death, but death as beauty, as joy, as spirit in action, as the consummation of all good. - Vol. V. A Treatise on White Magic: Death, if we could but realize it, is one of our most practiced activities. We have died many times and shall die again and again. Death is essentially a matter of consciousness. We are conscious one moment on the physical plane, and a moment later we have withdrawn onto another plane and are actively conscious there. Just as long as our consciousness is identified with the form aspect, death will hold for us its ancient terror. Just as soon as we know ourselves to be souls, and find that we are capable of focusing our consciousness or sense of awareness in any form or on any plane at will, or in any direction within the form of God, we shall no longer know death. - Page 494. [438] A Treatise on the Seven Rays: Ponder, therefore, upon this doctrine of abstraction. It covers all life processes and will convey to you the eternally lovely secret of Death which is entrance into life. - Vol. V. In this Rule, two main ideas are to be found, both of them connected with the first divine aspect: the thought of Death and the nature of the Will. In the coming century, death and the will most inevitably will be seen to have new meanings to humanity and many of the old ideas will vanish. Death to the average thinking man is a point of catastrophic crisis. It is the cessation and the ending of all that has been loved, all that is familiar and to be desired; it is a crashing entrance into the unknown, into uncertainty, and the abrupt conclusion of all plans and projects. No matter how much true faith in the spiritual values may be present, no matter how clear the rationalizing of the mind may be anent immortality, no matter how conclusive the evidence of persistence and eternity, there still remains a questioning, a recognition of the possibility of complete finality and negation, and an end of all activity, of all heart reaction, of all thought, emotion, desire, aspiration and the intentions which focus around the central core of man's being. The longing and the determination to persist and the sense of continuity still rest, even to the most determined believer, upon probability, upon an unstable foundation and upon the testimony of others - who have never in reality returned to tell the truth. The emphasis of all thought on this subject concerns the central "I" or the integrity of Deity. You will note that in this Rule, the emphasis shifts from the "I" to the constituent parts which form the garment of the Self, and this is a point worth noting. The information given to the disciple is to work for the dissipation of this garment and for the return of the lesser lives to the general [439] reservoir of living substance. The ocean of Being is nowhere referred to. Careful thought will here show that this ordered process of detachment, which the group life makes effective in the case of the individual, is one of the strongest arguments for the fact of continuity and for individual, identifiable persistence. Note these words. The focus of activity shifts from the active body to the active entity within that body, the master of his surroundings, the director of his possessions and the one who is the breath itself, dispatching the lives to the reservoir of substance or recalling them at will to resume their relation to him. - Vol. V. First of all that the Eternal Pilgrim, of his own free will and accord, chose "occultly" to die and took a body or series of bodies in order to raise or elevate the lives of the form nature which he embodied; in the process of so doing, he himself "died" in the sense that, for a free soul, death and the taking of a form and the consequent immersion of the life in the form, are synonymous terms. Secondly, that in so doing, the soul is recapitulating on a small scale what the solar Logos and the planetary Logos have likewise done, and are doing. The great Lives come under the rule of these laws of the soul during the period of manifestation, even though They are not governed or controlled by the laws of the natural world, as we call it. Their consciousness remains unidentified with the world of phenomena, though ours is identified with it until such time that we come under the rule of the higher laws. By the occult "death" of these great Lives, all lesser lives can live and are proffered opportunity. - Vol. V.
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