Death and Past Lives

January 2, 2005
[January 15 2025]

These are two things that appear quite differently to Body and Spirit. 

 An eastern teacher taught one day, ‘Death is an Illusion.’  The next day, he taught, ‘Death is Real.’  His students tried to pin him down:  ‘Today you tell us Death is Real, yesterday you told us it is Illusion.  So which one is it?’  He said, ‘Death is a Real Illusion.’ That teacher understood about the difference and the entwinement of Body and Spirit. As human beings, we experience the awareness of death as a real thing, suffer death of loved ones as real loss, real and final separation–though as spirit we may know just as plainly that there is no final loss, and that death is not an end but a passage.

 I experienced the difference between Body and Spirit consciousness when I was listening to something about past-lives, and though in certain circumstances I had no trouble accepting the notion as totally rational and reasonable and real, this time it seemed absurd.  I considered why that might be: How could I so easily believe it one day, and so simply disbelieve it the next?  I ran the concept by myself again, and found it absurd.  Then I made a conscious shift from ‘I am  body’ to ‘I am  spirit’ and all of a sudden the reality of past-lives was simply obvious.

It isn’t hard to make that shift, it only takes accepting the premise that we are comprised of both, and can identify self with either point of view.  Everything in western culture makes it easy to identify Self with the physical.  Yet, it is not so hard to identify Self as Spirit, because we experience Self apart from Body every time we sleep and dream, or wander in our thoughts away from whatever thing our body is doing.  Once it makes sense to us that we are not just one or the other, that shift is a matter of choice. 

[A fuller view of the Great Picture suggests that it’s more a matter of multiple-lives based on the idea that only where we live our lives–here, where physical things are real and physical laws are the rule–does time run in one direction from past through now to future: For spirit, it is all NOW, and all points equally accessible.]