Life really does go on forever and ever, doesn’t it
It most certainly does.
There is no end to it.
No end.
Reincarnation is a fact.
It is. You may return to mortal form—that is, a physi-cal form which can “die”—whenever and however you wish.
Do we decide when we want to come back
If” and “when”—yes.
Do we also decide when we want to leave? Do we choose when we want to die
No experience is visited upon any soul against the soul’s will. That is, by definition, not possible, since the soul is creating every experience.
The soul wants nothing. The soul has everything. All wisdom, all knowing, all power, all glory. The soul is the part of You which never sleeps; never forgets.
Does the soul desire that the body dies? No. It is the soul’s desire that you never die. Yet the soul will leave the body—change its bodily form, leaving most of the material body behind—at the drop of a hat when it sees no purpose in remaining in that form.
If it is the soul’s desire that we never die, why do we
You do not. You merely change form.
If it is the soul’s desire that we never do that, why do we
That is not the soul’s desire
You are a “shape-shifter
When there is no further usefulness in staying in a particular form, the soul changes form—willfully, vol-untarily, joyfully—and moves on, on the Cosmic Wheel.
Joyfully
With great joy.
No soul dies regretfully
No soul dies—ever.
I mean, no soul has regrets that the current physical form is changing; is about to “die
The body never “dies,” but merely changes form with the soul. Yet I understand your meaning, so for now I use the vocabulary you have established.
If you have a clear understanding of what you wish to create with regard to what you have chosen to call the afterlife, or if you have a clear set of beliefs that sup-port an after-death experience of reuniting with God, then, no, the soul never, ever has regrets over what you call death.
Death in that instance is a glorious moment; a won-derful experience. Now the soul can return to its natural form; its normal state. There is an incredible lightness; a sense of total freedom; a limitlessness. And an aware-ness of Oneness that is at once blissful and sublime.
It is not possible for the soul to regret such a shift.
You’re saying, then, that death is a happy experience
For the soul that wishes it to be, yes, always.
Well, if the soul wants out of the body so bad, why doesn’t it just leave it? Why is it hanging around
I did not say the soul “wants out of the body,” I said the soul is joyful when it is out. Those are two different
things.
You can be happy doing one thing, and happy then doing another. The fact that you are joyful doing the second does not mean you were unhappy doing the first.
The soul is not unhappy being with the body. Quite to the contrary, the soul is pleased to be you in your present form. That does not preclude the possibility that the soul might be equally pleased to be discon-nected from it.
There is obviously much about death I do not understand.
Yes, and that is because you do not like to think about it. Yet you must contemplate death and loss the instant you perceive any moment of life, or you will not have perceived life at all, but know only the half of it.
Each moment ends the instant it begins. If you do not see this, you will not see what is exquisite in it, and you will call the moment ordinary.
Each interaction “begins to end” the instant it “be-gins to begin.” Only when this is truly contemplated and deeply understood does the full treasure of every moment—and of life itself—open to you.
Life cannot give itself to you if you do not under-stand death. You must do more than understand it. You must love it, even as you love life.
Your time with each person would be glorified if you thought it was your last time with that person. Your ex-perience of each moment would be enhanced beyond measure if you thought it was the last such moment. Your refusal to contemplate your own death leads to your refusal to contemplate your own life.
You do not see it for what it is. You miss the moment, and all it holds for you. You look right past it instead of right through it.
When you look deeply at something, you see right through it. To contemplate a thing deeply is to see right through it. Then the illusion ceases to exist. Then you see a thing for what it really is. Only then can you truly enjoy it—that is, place joy into it. (To “en-joy” is to ren-der something joyful.
Even the illusion you can then enjoy. For you will know it is an illusion, and that is half the enjoyment! It is the fact that you think it is real that causes you all the pain.
Nothing is painful which you understand is not real. Let Me repeat that.
Nothing is painful which you understand is not real.
It is like a movie, a drama, played out on the stage of your mind. You are creating the situation and the char-acters. You are writing the lines.
Nothing is painful the moment you understand that nothing is real.
This is as true of death as it is of life.
When you understand that death, too, is an illusion, then you can say, “0 death, where is thy sting
You can even enjoy death! You can even enjoy someone else’s death.
Does that seem strange? Does that seem a strange thing to say
Only if you do not understand death—and life.
Death is never an end, but always a beginning. A death is a door opening, not a door closing.
When you understand that life is eternal, you un-derstand that death is your illusion, keeping you very concerned with, and therefore helping you believe that you are, your body. Yet you are not your body, and so the destruction of your body is of no concern to you.
Death should teach you that what is real is life. And life teaches you that what is unavoidable is not death, but impermanence.
Impermanence is the only truth.
Nothing is permanent. All is changing. In every in-stant. In every moment.
Were anything permanent, it could not be. For even the very concept of permanence depends upon imper-manence to have any meaning. Therefore, even perma-nence is impermanent. Look at this deeply. Contem-plate this truth. Comprehend it, and you comprehend God.
This is the Dharma, and this is the Buddha. This is the Buddha Dharma. This is the teaching and the teacher. This is the lesson and the master. This is the ob-ject and the observer, rolled into one.
They never have been other than One. It is you who have unrolled them, so that your life may unroll before you.
Yet as you watch your own life roll out before you, do not yourself become unraveled. Keep your Self to-gether! See the illusion! Enjoy it! But do not become it
You are not the illusion, but the creator of it.
You are in this world, but not of it.
So use your illusion of death. Use it! Allow it to be the key that opens you to more of life.
See the flower as dying and you will see the flower sadly. Yet see the flower as part of a whole tree that is changing, and will soon bear fruit, and you see the flower’s true beauty. When you understand that the blossoming and the falling away of the flower is a sign that the tree is ready to bear fruit, then you understand life.
Look at this carefully and you will see that life is its own metaphor.
Always remember, you are not the flower, nor are you even the fruit. You are the tree. And your roots are deep, embedded in Me. I am the soil from which you have sprung, and both your blossoms and your fruit will return to Me, creating more rich soil. Thus, life begets life, and cannot know death, ever.
That is so beautiful. That is so, so beautiful. Thank You. Will You speak to me now of something that is troubling me ? I need to talk about suicide. Why is there such a taboo against the ending of one’s life
Indeed, why is there
You mean it’s not wrong to kill yourself
The question cannot be answered to your satisfac-tion, because the question itself contains two false con-cepts; it is based on two false ~5Sumptions; it contains two errors.
The first false assumption is that there is such a thing as “right” and “wrong.” The second false assumption is that killing is possible. Your question itself, therefore, disintegrates the moment it is dissected.
Right” and “wrong” are philosophical polarities in a human value system which have nothing to do with ultimate reality—a point Which I have made repeatedly throughout this dialogue. They are, furthermore, not even constant constructs within your own system, but rather, values which keen shifting from time to time.
You are doing the shifting, changing your mind about these values as it suits you (which rightly you should, as evolving beings) yet insisting at each step along the way that you haven’t done this, and that it is your unchanging values Which form the core of your society’s integrity. You have ~ built your society on a paradox. You keep changing your values, all the while proclaiming that it is unchanging values which you ... well, value
The answer to the problems presented by this para-dox is not to throw cold water 0n the sand in an attempt to make it concrete, but to celebrate the shifting of the sand. Celebrate its beauty while it holds itself in the shape of your castle, but then also celebrate the new form and shape it takes as the tide comes in.
Celebrate the shifting sands as they form the new mountains you would climb, and atop which—and with which—you will build your new castles. Yet un-derstand that these mountains and these castles are monuments to change, not to permanence.
Glorify what you are today, yet do not condemn what you were yesterday, nor preclude what you could become tomorrow.
Understand that “right” and “wrong” are figments of your imagination, and that “okay” and “not okay” are merely announcements of your latest preferences and imaginings.
For example, on the question of ending one’s life, it is the current imagining of the majority of people on your planet that it is “not okay” to do that.
Similarly, many of you still insist that it is not okay to assist another who wishes to end his or her life.
In both cases you say this should be “against the law.” You have come to this conclusion, presumably, because the ending of the life occurs relatively quickly. Actions which end a life over a somewhat longer period of time are not against the law, even though they achieve the same result.
Thus, if a person in your society kills himself with a gun, his family members lose insurance benefits. If he does so with cigarettes, they do not.
If a doctor assists you in your suicide, it is called manslaughter, while if a tobacco company does, it is called commerce.
With you, it seems to be merely a question of time. The legality of self-destruction—the “rightness” or “wrongness” of it—seems to have much to do with how quickly the deed is done, as well as who is doing it. The faster the death, the more “wrong” it seems to be. The slower the death, the more it slips into “okayness.
Interestingly, this is the exact opposite of what a truly humane society would conclude. By any reasonable definition of what you would call “humane,” the shorter the death, the better. Yet your society punishes those who would seek to do the humane thing, and re-wards those who would do the insane.
It is insane to think that endless suffering is what God requires, and that a quick, humane end to the suf-fering is “wrong.
Punish the humane, reward the insane.
This is a motto which only a society of beings with limited understanding could embrace.
So you poison your system by inhaling carcinogens, you poison your system by eating food treated with chemicals that over the long run kill you, and you poi-son your system by breathing air which you have con-tinually polluted. You poison your system in a hundred different ways over a thousand different moments, and you do this knowing these substances are no good for you. But because it takes a longer time for them to kill you, you commit suicide with impunity.
If you poison yourself with something that works faster, you are said to have done something against moral law.
Now I tell you this: It is no more immoral to kill your-self quickly than it is to kill yourself slowly.
So a person who ends his own life is not punished by God
I do not punish. I love.
What of the often-heard statement that those who think they are going to “escape” their predicament, or end their con-dition, with suicide only find that they are facing the same pre-dicament or condition in the afterlife, and therefore escaped and ended nothing
Your experience in what you call the afterlife is a re-flection of your consciousness at the time you enter it. Yet you are always a being of free will, and may alter your experience whenever you choose.
So loved ones who have ended their physical life are okay
Yes. They are very okay.
There is a wonderful book on this subject called Stephen Lives, by Anne Puryear. It is about her son, who ended his life when he was a teenager. So many people have found it helpful.
Anne Puryear is a wonderful messenger. As is her son.
So You can recommend this book
It is an important book. It says more on this subject than we are saying here, and those who have deep hurts or lingering issues surrounding the experience of a loved one ending their life will be opened to healing through this book.
It is sad that we even have such deep hurts or issues, but much of that, I think, is a result of what our society has “laid on ~ about suicide.
In your society, you often do not see the contradic-tions of your own moral constructions. The contradic-tion between doing things that you know full well are going to shorten your life, but doing them slowly, and doing things that will shorten your life quickly is one of the most glaring in the human experience.
Yet it seems so obvious when You spell them out like this. Why can’t we see such obvious truths on our own
Because if you saw these truths, you would have to do something about them. This you do not wish to do. So you have no choice but to look right at something and not see it.
But why would we not want to do something about these truths if we saw them
Because you believe that in order to do something about them, you would have to end your pleasures. And ending pleasures is something you have no desire to do.
Most of the things which cause your slow deaths are things which bring you pleasure, or result from those things. And most of the things which bring you pleasure are things which satisfy the body. Indeed, this is what marks yours as a primitive society. Your lives are struc-tured largely around seeking and experiencing pleasures of the body.
Of course, all beings everywhere seek to experi-ence pleasures. There is nothing primitive in that. In fact, it is the natural order of things. What differenti-ates societies, and beings within societies, is what they define as pleasurable. If a society is structured largely around pleasures of the body, it is operating at a differ-ent level from a society structured around pleasures of the soul.
And understand, too, that this does not mean that your Puritans were right, and that all pleasures of the body should be denied. It means that in elevated socie-ties, pleasures of the physical body do not make up the largest number of pleasures which are enjoyed. They are not the prime focus.
The more elevated a society or being, the more ele-vated are its pleasures.
Wait a minute! That sounds like such a value judgment. I thought You—God—didn’t make value judgments.
Is it a value judgment to say that Mt. Everest is higher than Mt. McKinley
Is it a value judgment to say that Aunt Sarah is older than her nephew Tommy
Are these value judgments or observations
I have not said it is “better” to be elevated in one’s consciousness. In fact, it is not. Any more than it is “bet-ter” to be in fourth grade than in first.
I am simply observing what fourth grade is.
And we are not in fourth grade in this planet. We are in first. Is that it
My child, you are not yet even in kindergarten. You are in nursery school.
How can I not hear that as an insult? Why does it sound to as if You’re putting the human race down
Because you are deeply ego invested in being so me-thing you are not—and in not being what you are.
Most people hear insults when only an observation has been made, if what is being observed is something they don’t want to own.
Yet until you hold a thing, you cannot let it go. And you cannot disown that which you have never owned.
You cannot change that which you do not accept.
Precisely.
Enlightenment begins with acceptance, without judgment of “what is.
This is known as moving into the Isness. It is in the Isness where freedom will be found.
What you resist, persists. What you look at disap-pears. That is, it ceases to have its illusory form. You see it for what it Is. And what Is can always be changed. It is only what Is Not that cannot be changed. Therefore, to change the Isness, move into it. Do not resist it. Do not deny it.
What you deny you declare. What you declare you create.
Denial of something is re-creation of it, for the very act of denying something places it there.
Acceptance of something places you in control of it. That which you deny you cannot control, for you have said it is not there. Therefore what you deny controls you.
The majority of your race does not want to accept that you have not yet evolved to kindergarten. It does not want to accept that the human race is still in nursery school. Yet this lack of acceptance is exactly what keeps it there.
You are so deeply ego invested in being what you are not (highly evolved) that you are not being what you are (evolving). You are thus working against yourself, fighting yourself. And hence, evolving very slowly.
The fast track of evolution begins with admitting and accepting what is, not what is not.
And I will know I have accepted “what is” when I no longer feel insulted as I hear it described.
Exactly. Are you insulted if I say you have blue eyes
So now I tell you this: The more elevated a society or being, the more elevated are its pleasures.
What you call “pleasure” is what declares your level of evolution.
Help me with this term “elevated.” What do You mean by that
Your being is the universe in microcosm. You, and your whole physical body, are composed of raw en-ergy, clustered around seven centers, or chakras. Study the chakra centers and what they mean. There are hun-dreds of books written about this. This is wisdom I have given the human race before.
What is pleasurable, or stimulates, your lower chak-ras is not the same as what is pleasurable to your higher chakras.
The higher you raise the energy of life through your physical being, the more elevated will be your con-sciousness.
Well, here we go again. That seems to argue for celibacy. That seems to be the whole argument against expression of sexual passion. People who are “elevated” in their conscious-ness don’t “come from” their root chakra—their first, or low-est, chakra—in their interactions with other humans.
That is true.
But I thought You’ve said throughout this dialogue that hu-man sexuality was to be celebrated, not repressed.
That is correct.
Well, help me out here, because we seem to have a contra-diction.
The world is full of contradictions, My son. lack of contradictions is not a necessary ingredient in truth.
Sometimes greater truth lies within the contradiction.
What we have here is Divine Dichotomy.
Then help me understand the dichotomy. Because all my life I’ve heard about how desirable it was, how “elevated” it was, to “raise the kundalini energy” out of the root chakra. This has been the chief justification for mystics living lives of sexless ecstasy.
I realize we’ve gotten way off the subject of death here; and I apologize for dragging us into this unrelated territory
What are you apologizing for? A conversation goes where a conversation goes. The “topic” we are on in this whole dialogue is what it means to be fully human, and what life is about in this universe. That is the only topic, and this falls within that.
Wanting to know about death is wanting to know about life—a point I made earlier. And if our exchanges lead to an expansion of our inquiry to include the very act which creates life, and celebrates it magnificently, so be it.
Now let’s get clear again about one thing. It is not a requirement of the “highly evolved” that all sexual expression be muted, and all sexual energy be elevated. If that were true, then there would be no “highly evolved” beings anywhere, because all evolution would have stopped.
A rather obvious point.
Yes. And so anyone who says that the very holiest people never have sex, and that this is a sign of their ho-liness, does not understand how life was meant to work.
Let Me put this in very clear terms. If you want a yardstick with which to judge whether a thing is good for the human race or not, ask yourself a simple ques-tion
What would happen if everyone did it
This is a very easy measure, and a very accurate one. If everyone did a thing, and the result was of ultimate benefit to the human race, then that is “evolved.” If everyone did it and it brought disaster to the human race, then that is not a very “elevated” thing to recom-mend. Do you agree
Of course.
Then you’ve just agreed that no real master will ever say that sexual celibacy is the path to mastery. Yet it is this idea that sexual abstinence is somehow the “higher way,” and that sexual expression is a “lower desire,” that has shamed the sexual experience, and caused all manner of guilt and dysfunction to develop around it.
Yet if the reasoning against sexual abstinence is that it would prohibit procreation, couldn’t it be argued that once sex has served this function, there is no more need for it
One does not engage in sex because one realizes one’s responsibility to the human race to procreate. One engages in sex because it is the natural thing to do. It is built into the genes. You obey a biological imperative.
Precisely! It is a genetic signal that drives to the question of species survival. But once the survival of the species is assured, isn’t it the “elevated” thing to do to “ignore the signal
You misinterpret the signal. The biological impera-tive is not to guarantee the survival of the species, but to experience the Oneness which is the true nature of your being. Creating new life is what happens when Oneness is achieved, but it is not the reason Oneness is sought.
If procreation were the only reason for sexual ex-pression—if it were nothing more than a “delivery sys-tem”—you would no longer need to engage in it with one another. You can unite the chemical elements of life in a petri dish.
Yet this would not satisfy the most basic urges of the soul, which it turns out, are much larger than mere pro-creation, but have to do with re-creation of Who and What You Really Are.
The biological imperative is not to create more life, but to experience more life—and to experience that life as it really is: a manifestation of Oneness.
That is why You will never stop people from having sex, even though they have long ago stopped having children.
Of course.
Yet some say that sex should stop when people stop having children, and that those couples who continue with this activity are just caving in to base physical urges.
Yes.
And that this is not “elevated,” but merely animalistic be-havior, beneath the more noble nature of man.
This gets us back to the subject of chakras, or energy centers.
I said earlier that “the higher you raise the energy of life through your physical being, the more elevated will be your consciousness.
Yes! And that seems to say “no sex.
No, it does not. Not when you understand it.
Let Me go back to your previous comment and make something clear: There is nothing ignoble, or un-holy, about having sex. You have got to get that idea out of your mind, and out of your culture.
There is nothing base, or gross, or “less than digni-fied” (much less sanctified), about a passionate, desire-filled sexual experience. Physical urges are not manifes-tations of “animalistic behavior.” Those physical urges were built into the system—by Me.
Who do you suppose created it that way
Yet physical urges are but one ingredient in a com-plex mixture of responses that you all have to each other. Remember, you are a three-part being, with seven chakra centers. When you respond to one an-other from all three parts, and all seven centers, at the same time, then you have the peak experience you are looking for—that you have been created for
And there is nothing unholy about any of these en-ergies—yet if you choose just one of them, that is “unwhole-y.” It is not being whole
When you are not being whole, you are being less than yourself. That is what is meant by “unholy.
Wow! I get it. I get it
The admonition against sex for those who choose to be “elevated” was never an admonition from Me. It was an invitation. An invitation is not an admonition, yet you have made it so.
And the invitation was not to stop having sex, but to stop being un-whole.
Whatever you are doing—having sex or having breakfast, going to work or walking the beach, jump-ing rope or reading a good book—whatever you are doing, do it as a whole being; as the whole being you are.
If you are having sex from only your lower chakra center, you are operating from the root chakra alone, and missing by far the most glorious part of the experi-ence. Yet if you are being loving with another person and coming from all seven energy centers while you are being that, now you are having a peak experience. How can this not be holy
It can’t. I’m unable to imagine such an experience not being holy.
And so the invitation to raise the life energy through your physical being to the top chakra was never meant to be a suggestion or a demand that you disconnect from the bottom.
If you have raised the energy to your heart chakra, or even to your crown chakra, that doesn’t mean it can-not be in your root chakra as well.
Indeed, if it is not, you are disconnected.
When you have raised the life energy to your higher centers, you may or may not choose to have what you would call a sexual experience with another. But if you do not, itwill not be because to do so would be to violate some cosmic law on holiness. Nor will it make you somehow more “elevated.” And if you do choose to be sexual with another, it will not “lower” you to a root-chakra-only level—unless you do the op-posite of disconnecting at the bottom, and disconnect from the top.
So here is the invitation—not an admonition, but an invitation
Raise your energy, your life force, to the highest level possible in every moment, and you will be elevated. This has nothing to do with having sex or not having sex. It has to do with raising your consciousness no matter what you are doing.
I get it! I understand. Although I don’t know how to raise my consciousness. I don’t think I know how to raise the life en-ergy through my chakra centers. And I’m not sure most people even know what these centers are.
Anyone who earnestly wishes to know more about the “physiology of spirituality” can find out easily enough. I have sourced this information before, in very clear terms.
You mean in other books, through other writers.
Yes. Read the writings of Deepak Chopra. He is one of the clearest enunciators right now on your planet. He understands the mystery of spirituality, and the science of it.
And there are other wonderful messengers as well. Their books describe not only how to raise your life force up through your body, but also how to leave your physical body.
You can remember through these additional read-ings how joyous it is letting the body go. Then you will understand how it could be that you might never again fear death. You will understand the dichotomy: how it is a joy to be with the body, and a joy to be free of it.