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THE LOST MEANING OF DEATH
Wed, November 1, 2006 - 9:56 PM
"For I have heard from one of the wise that we are now
dead; and that the body is our sepulchre."--PLATO.
"The command that meant life proved death to me."
--ST. PAUL.
"You have the name of being alive, but you are dead."
REVELATION III, 1.
The lost meaning of death
All these fundamental items of Western theology have been perverted out of their correct spiritual translation as the result of a momentous historical denouement about which all too little is generally known. At the precise time at which Christianity was being formulated, powerful currents of economic, social and religious forces had come into play, the operation of which precipitated a swift and drastic shifting of the center of gravity, so to say, in religious values and motivations.
From the days of Pythagoras and Plato, when Greece was guided by the inner enlightenment of the great Orphic Mystery teaching, the profound insight of Grecian philosophy had seen life on earth as the critical sphere of destiny.
Values were thought to be won and permanent character established, by the deeds done in the body. Earth was the arena of conquest in life’s struggle. The thing of chief importance was that which was done here in this world.
Our mundane acts, words and thoughts stamped the marks of destiny on our souls. But with the loss of the spiritual Gnosis, human reason became unable to cope with the apparent hollowness and futility of worldly experience, and a sense of earthly defeatism and hopelessness seized the general mind.
Wed, November 1, 2006 - 9:56 PM -
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Wed, November 1, 2006 - 9:56 PM
This revolutionary alteration of viewpoint was the outer evidence of an inner loss. Humanity had mislaid the chart of its spiritual destiny, and with it the location of its pole-star of truth and wisdom. It had lost its light of guiding understanding. And with it took flight also the last vestige of the true meaning of the religious data. Sweeping clear out of the purview of this life altogether, and over into another domain to which it was never intended to minister in the beginning, fled the message of all the Scriptures. Religion had been instituted in the first instance as instruction and guidance for man’s life on earth. But a false indoctrination following the loss of arcane teaching caused the disastrous shift in the focus of vision and the location of values. So that what had been intended for our perpetual behoof in the life lived here, shot clear over the head of this world and landed in another realm, the astral world of spirits. Religion had become a cult of "otherworldliness," a looking to heaven for fulfilments denied here. Hence arose the cultus of spiritualism, and indirectly that of asceticism. Only in this light can we understand also the allocation of the idea of "heaven" to a strategic or central place in nearly all religions. For human yearnings demanded a region in which earthly failures were crowned with poetic success. |
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Wed, November 1, 2006 - 9:57 PM
A necessary consequence of this change, this loss of knowledge, was the transposition also of the continuity of progress for the soul from this life to the life in spirit. If effort was to be held as absolutely fruitless here, then provision had to be made for continued unfoldment in the life out of body. Not even the roseate heaven could be made rationally satisfactory until this matter of perpetual development was adjusted in line with specious reasoning. But here religion ran into its most egregious error, and originated a chain of untold disaster for human life and effort. It proved the ruin of all sound religious philosophy and closed off the channel of all religious benefit. It defeated the prime purpose of religion altogether, for it left man bereft of just those incentives which would have inspired him to apply himself with courage, steadiness and fortitude to the tasks for the accomplishment of which he came to live on earth. For it postulated the thesis that souls, cut off untimely in their growth on earth, would continue to evolve eternally to infinite glories of godhood, in the spiritual spheres. Here was born a delusion that has stultified the spirit of mankind ever since. For no more can a soul achieve any further cycle of growth out of earthly body than can an acorn become another great oak without being buried in the soil of earth. And this theory that has palsied an infinite amount of human effort came by default of religious knowledge of the hidden sense of the term "death". |
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Wed, November 1, 2006 - 9:57 PM
Thrown under a mental coma by the alluring force of the belief, short-sighted and blinded faith has never seen that if continued spiritual progress were possible in a discarnate existence after only one brief life on earth, there could be found no warrant either in logic or in cosmic counsels for our projection into this life in the body for the one fleeting career. The incarnation can never be justified save by the postulation of reincarnation. One life here, thrown in with an eternity of growth in a spirit realm, is an untenable thesis to explain a rational cosmic procedure. It seems indeed to have escaped discovery universally, and all spiritual teaching everywhere has suffered in consequence. |
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Wed, November 1, 2006 - 9:58 PM
The first hints in the direction of the discovery were picked up when in the study of the great system of Greek thought known as Neo-Platonism, with its interpretations of Greek mythology and religion, one became aware of a peculiar handling of the idea of death. "They believed that human souls were confined in the body as in a prison, a condition which they denominated genesis or generation, from which Dionysus would liberate them. This generation, which linked the soul to body, was supposed to be a kind of death to the higher form of life. Evil is inherent to this condition, the soul dwelling in the body as in a prison or a grave. . . . The earthly life is a dream rather than a reality . . . the soul is purified and separated from the evils of this condition by knowledge"--or what they called "philosophy". The great Plato is himself found saying that "men are placed in the body as in a prison" and that he considered "the body as the sepulchre of the soul". Taylor in discussing an opinion of Macrobius ascribed to him the conception that "the soul in the present life may be said to die, as far as it is possible for a soul to die; occultly intimating that the death of the soul was nothing more than a profound union with the ruinous bonds of the body." One noted that the incarnation or entry of the soul into the body was often alluded to as a burial! Then Pythagoras had written that "whatever we see when awake is death". Likewise the great Plotinus had given hints such as the following: "Death to the soul is to descend into matter and be entirely subjected to it. This is what is meant by falling asleep in Hades." And the renowned Virgil, the Roman poet, had shown that he was imbued with this same Greek philosophy when he wrote: "Souls are deadened by earthly forms and members subject to death." Plato had compared our tenure of bodily forms to the situation of an oyster in its shell. And Socrates had soliloquized in a long passage on the subject of death, asking Cebes if it might not after all be true that we had come hither from a far more radiant life elsewhere, and that we should properly regard the present life as in reality a death. "May it not be true that we are really dead?" he asks, intimating, like Wordsworth, that we seem at times to have faint glimpses of a more vivid existence from which we have fallen into this dullness of mortal life. It had been a matter of some surprise, also, to note Milton’s expression of Adam’s astonishment in the Paradise Lost, when on being driven from the garden under condemnation of death, our first father found his sentence taking the form of a lingering existence, not a destruction of his life, as he had expected. He discovered that his "death" meant not his extinction, but a less vivid type of life. He found himself condemned to a "living" death. He was made to live and "suffer death", not to be annihilated. "For the soul, coming hither, as she imparts life to the body, so she partakes through this of a certain privation of life; but this is an evil. When separated, therefore, from the body, she lives in reality; for she dies here, through participating of privation of life, because the body becomes the source of evils. And hence it is necessary to subdue the body." |
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Wed, November 1, 2006 - 9:59 PM
The idea here hinted at is one of the basic theses of the Greek philosophy. For the Greek mind, with conceptions derived from the Orphic wisdom, considered that all life resulted from streams of vivific energy flowing forth from God, or the One, the infinite fount of all things, sweeping on, as they express it in Thomas Taylor’s quaint language, "from on high as far as to the last of things". These streams of force sprang outward from the heights of spiritual energy and suffered diminution of their power as they preceeded farther and farther from the primal source, until at last they came to a pause in the inert arms of matter. Their living quality was countered and finally stifled in the meshes of matter, where motion came to a "dead" halt or suffered "death". The "dying away" of a voice or other sound, or of the ripple made by casting a stone in the pond, is allegorical of the type of "death" here signified. Life comes out from its first Cause and meets its death in the bosom of matter. But again we are required to distinguish between the "death"of a power and its absolute annihilation or extinction. Life was merely held quiescent in the grip of an element able to silence its activities. It had not ceased to be. Its powers had only gone into latency. They would emerge again. |
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Wed, November 1, 2006 - 9:59 PM
But in spite of scores of such texts and many similar hints before one’s eyes, the force of fixed habitudes of thought proved as yet too strong for the full realization of the meaning wrapped up in the term to come clear to consciousness. The mind was still held fast by the delusion that the old philosophers were only speaking fancifully, or in poetic figures, of the dreary character of moral life. As life is often called a "hell on earth", one might easily extend the metaphor and make of it a veritable "death". One thought the idea was poetry, not conceiving that in a deeper sense it was also theology. Doubtless many a scholar in the face of this material has formed the same opinion and rested at that point. But the discovery had not yet been made. One was to go farther. |
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Wed, November 1, 2006 - 9:59 PM
The next step was taken when in reading Myths and Legends of Egypt, the Egyptian form of the title of the so-called Book of the Dead was for the first time encountered. It was given as Peri-em-heru, and was translated as meaning "The Day of Manifestation," or, "The Coming Forth by Day," or "Into the Daylight." It presumably was in reference to the end of a long period of life in darkness. This translation at once provoked the reflection that there was a mysterious incongruity between the Egyptian title and the English one (given to it by the German scholar Lepsius.) How could a book whose title read The Coming Forth By Day be fitly named the Book of the Dead? Something was amiss here. Some one had blundered. Yet the book dealt mainly with the great trial of the soul of the deceased in the Hall of Judgment, the Hall of Osiris; and Osiris was the Lord of Amenta, the realm of the dead, the dark underworld. He was the king of "those in their graves". It was apparently the book of the typical Christian (Western) judgment, enacted in the world of souls following the demise of the body. Yet its original title was The Day of Manifestation. Here was mystification and a thrilling enigma. One knew that the Greeks had derived most of their profoundest conceptions from the Egyptians. Was their figurative use of the word "death" based on some hidden meaning in the Book of the Dead? Could it be possible, one conjectured, that all mediaeval and modern scholarship had missed fundamental meaning by failure to catch some legerdemain of ancient symbolism? Could it be that some mighty truth lurked undiscovered under the metaphor? The mind caught the flash of a possibility; it seemed too arrant a supposition for serious acceptance. We had caught the truth by the tail, but the mind was not yet able to hold it fast. It struggled loose. |
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Wed, November 1, 2006 - 10:00 PM
Plato, flashed at last the full truth as to what the ancients meant to be understood by "death". The whole body of ancient sacred writing was at one stroke redeemed from dark meaninglessness to pertinent reference. Light, understanding, lucid meaning darted with the speed of thought across the whole field of religious interpretation. The ultimate principle of explanation and synthesis had been found. The background and reference of all religious myth and allegory and symbol had come to light. The experience of the moment was one never to be forgotten. The stupendous implications of the new datum began to flood the mind until they threatened to overwhelm it by their sheer magnitude. The first realization brought a sense of the incredible magnificence of the structure of the ancient wisdom. As the revelation sent the rays of a new discernment of meaning in every direction through the old theological material, the mental sense reeled in presence of a veritable epiphany of Cosmic Mind in sublime manifestation. The mind was thrilled and then awed by gleam on gleam of new comprehension. |
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Wed, November 1, 2006 - 10:00 PM
It was the lost meaning of "death". With overwhelming certitude had come the perception that when the ancient writers of sacred books of religion spoke of "death" they referred to our present life on earth in these bodies of flesh! And when they spoke of "the dead", they again referred to us, here and now, alive as we seem to be! And by the terms grave, tomb, coffin, sepulchre, mummy-case, out of which we would be resurrected they meant these living bodies of ours! In their theology, to die was to incarnate in bodies on earth. It was found that the two words "womb" and "tomb" are from the same stem and convey the same connotation. He who enters life by way of the womb has entered the tomb of living death. In their eyes, death was to live the kind of life we are living here. In reality, as calm reflection then for the first time clearly indicated, for the soul there is no such thing as death, in the sense of total destruction, for the soul is indestructible. |
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Wed, November 1, 2006 - 10:01 PM
Religion had been designed as instruction and guidance for "those in their graves" of earth-life, and its sacred books were meant to be a light for us, "the dead", in the dark underworld of Hades, Sheol, Amenta! But long ago was lost the knowledge that such instruction was for us, that we were "the dead" for whom all religious systems were devised, and for whose resurrection out of the tomb of the physical body the whole end and aim of religion was envisaged. The whole framework, therefore, of the religious temple was seen to be constructed of spiritual, not of historical elements. The Gospel narrative was, then, a series of spiritual allegories, designed to depict the nature of our own personal soul-life, the history of Everyman’s experience in the world of flesh and matter, or in the "realm of the dead". To "go down into Egypt" is a certain cryptogram for the "descent into incarnation", or being born on earth. It is therefore equivalent to life in the body. And indeed the name does often connote directly the body itself. And here we have an interesting sidelight on the meaning of a term often used, and of course used erroneously,--"the flesh-pots of Egypt". In our ignorance of ancient symbolism we have taken it to mean cooking pots full of edible flesh, on which we feed more or less gluttonously. It was supposed to be a reference to our addiction to the gastronomical pleasures of consuming a lot of beef, pork and mutton. But in the light of the corrected view, it is at once seen to denote nothing more than these physical bodies of ours. For they are indeed the vessels (pots) of flesh in which our souls have taken lodgement for the period of their life-cycles on earth. The "flesh-pots of Egypt" are only our bodies. .And if Egypt is the type of our incarnational bondage, or our becoming subject to "the law of the flesh", then the "Exodus" from it must be in all respects equivalent to "the resurrection" it is indeed the same allegorism. For after a sojourn in the land of "Egypt" we are released in the fulfilment of the cycle. And always the "Exodus" |
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Wed, November 1, 2006 - 10:01 PM
No phase or development in connection with the discovery was more revealing and illuminating than the perception of how the world’s most eminent scholars had wrestled with the necessity of finding the proper location for this shadowy Tartaric abode of the dead, driven on by their failure to identify it with the life here on earth. "I know your doings, you have the name of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up, rally what is still left to you, though it is on the very point of death; for I find nothing you have done is complete in the eyes of Spirit. . . . If you will not wake up, I shall come like a thief. . . . Still you have a few souls that have not soiled their raiment." We have the name of being alive, but we are dead! "Ye are dead in your trespasses of the flesh ", "The wages of ignorance is death", he repeats, adding, "To be carnally minded is death". And under what other anthropological conditions is man likely to become tempted to carnal mindedness than those which go with his linkage to the body of flesh? "We live in darkness like the dead". The chief point in the citation of these texts is to make evident beyond cavil that the term "death" as used thus in the Bible can not possibly refer to the act of physical demise, the common connotation of the word. How can one die daily, if the word "die" has its common acceptation? To be born again, to be quickened, as the Bible asserts so often, is to awake out of this lethargic state of spirit subjected to the inhibitions and inertia of matter and body, and to come into a new status where an access of spiritual energy revitalizes every faculty of being into vibrant activity. "Awake, thou that sleepest", "and arise from the dead, and Love will shine upon you." |
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Wed, November 1, 2006 - 10:02 PM
an allegory depicting our spiritual awakening from lethal stupor in the body. The whole story is found in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, complete in every detail, written as early probably as 6000 years B.C. It was an allegory then, and we may be sure it was an allegory still, when transcribed centuries later into Hebrew literature. All the Old Testament, and much of the New, traces to earlier Egyptian or Persian books. The interests of the flesh meant death. . . ." Here are words of unmistakable meaning: the command that meant life to us proved to be, theologically, our death. Our entry into the sphere of material existence is in effect our burial. Says Massey: " The buried Osiris represented the god in matter." This is ourselves, if the meaning be localized on the human plane. Cosmically it means the presence of life in matter, as the fire in the flint. Osiris is not any "historical" personage. The Book of the Dead calls us the "mummies in their graves", and again "the sleepers in their coffins", as well as "the prisoners in their cells". Horus (Jesus) came to earth to open our prison doors and release us. But our prison walls are the swathing bands called our physical bodies. "The wilderness of the nether earth, being a land of graves, where the dead awaited the coming of Horus . . . to wake them in their coffins and lead them from this land of darkness to the land of day." This is the coming forth by day, of which the Egyptian title of the Book of the Dead is a reminder. The "wilderness of the nether earth" is our own good earth; the dead in their coffins are ourselves; our awakening to the high consciousness of the realm from which we descended here is the purpose of all earthly religion; and our being led out of this land of darkness to the land of bright day is the end and victorious outcome of any practice of personal religion. It is "the resurrection from the dead". Strangely the Book of the Dead and other arcane Scriptures aver that there is a "second death", more to be dreaded than "death" itself. The Manes or souls flitting about in this dark underworld, veiled in flesh, dread its incidence and rejoice at having escaped its clutches. "I have not died the second death", exults the triumphant soul at the conclusion of its earthly trials. |
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Wed, November 1, 2006 - 10:02 PM
In Revelation one of the rewards given to those who overcome is to escape the second death. What is this second death? As the first death is merely the advent of the soul on earth, its lodgement in body, the second death is the falling so in love with body and its sensual life that instead of lifting it up to union with its own higher capacities, the soul is itself torn away from its upper connections and goes off a captive to the sin which is in the members. The first death is merely the coming to dwell in body; the second is to fail to effect an escape from it. Proclus warns us that we may undertake the transformation of the lower nature on condition that we do it "without merging ourselves in the darkness of body". Plotinus enforces this with a statement that the soul need not regret her contact with matter and body "if she flee promptly from here below". That is to say -- and it is a matter of the most vital import for humanity -- that it is in the order of nature for us to come to dwell in mortal bodies, but it is in contravention of the normal flow of evolutionary currents for us to become so involved in body as to go down to dissolution with it. By natural analogy it is no ill hap for the seed to fall into the ground and even die If the soul goes down into death and the tomb, to be quickened into a new birth of her latent faculties and capacities, and rises again bearing with her the fruits of victory over the flesh and the grave, then may the arches of heaven ring with jubilee at her return to the Father. For the powers of darkness are no malignant devils, but the inertia of matter and the still unevolved capabilities of the divine nature of all being. Darkness is just the absence of light, and is itself potential light. When the Bible speaks of turning our darkness into light, it is stating at once the physical and the spiritual processes which primal life-force undergoes in its manvantaric period or cycle of manifestation. Life immerses itself in matter, soul in body, for the purpose of transforming latent capacity for endless perfection into conscious realization or actualization of its self and its powers. The soul, says Plotinus, would never know her powers, indeed she would never really exist, if she did not manifest her potentialities and actualize her nature by progression into matter and form. But this requires that she subject herself to the same inexorable necessity as that which confronts the acorn if it is to engender the new oak. She must bury herself in the dark soil of the kingdom just below her, and seize upon and transform by her fiery energy the elements of that kingdom into the likeness of her own divine essence, and so lift it up. This is the logic of the incarnation, this is the ground-fact in all religion. And this was the deftly hidden meaning carried in the minds of the initiates in the Mysteries of old by the use of the term "death" in all the grand schools of the arcane teaching. |
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Wed, November 1, 2006 - 10:02 PM
Says an Egyptian text: "Lo, I come that I may purify this soul of mine in the most high degree." It was a sad day for the world when Christian intelligence lost the knowledge that the soul comes on earth to work out the purgation of elements in its constitution that still require such a processing.
A doctrine of purely evolutionary significance was ignorantly misapprehended and became transformed into a bogie to frighten the unlearned and credulous populace. Likewise the Judgment. If the trial of the soul against the feather of Maat, or Truth, took place in the Hall of Osiris, the Hall of the Two Truths, (of life and death, or spirit and matter), the Hall (or Pool) of the Double Fire, and finally in the great Hall of Seb (or Keb), there is an end to debate as to its localization. For Osiris was Khent-Amenti, Lord of Amenta, King of the Underworld, ruler of the "dead" on earth. The Hall of the Two Truths again is our earth, because it is only on this plane of life that truth becomes dual in sense and application. A thing is true here both physically and spiritually, because man (on earth) is himself physical and spiritual, or god-man, and every truth is discernible and applicable by him, alone of all creatures, on two levels of cognition. For every spiritual truth has its material counterpart or reflection. This explanation covers at the same time the other name, Hall (or Pool) of the Double Fire. And if these items do not prove conclusively that earth is the locality indicated by these titles, the last designation, the great Hall of Seb (or Keb), settles the point beyond dispute. For Seb is the "god of earth"! Another vital text from the Egyptian Ritual (Book of the Dead) affirms that "through Seb thou dost become a spirit". The meaning is unfolded and established forever. Earth, under the title of Tattu, is called "the place of establishing forever". And all ancient wisdom teaches just this fact. The pathway to heaven leads ever through the lanes of earth. Death is indeed the last enemy to be overthrown by the incarnating Ego, but the "death" alluded to is just the necessary for continued reincarnation. When life’s objects in this sphere have been attained, all lessons learned, all powers unfolded, the twelve gates unlocked, then the cycle of "deaths" or incarnations is ended. Then at last is "death" overcome, for life on earth is ended. The soul is welcomed to its empyrean home, to occupy the mansions of the Father and "go no more out". Then truly shall man "die no more". The Book of the Dead has this vivid declaration from the lips of the Manes (the soul in the body): "He hath given me the beautiful Amenta, through which the living pass from death to life." Now let us place beside this the stirring verse from the Apocalypse: "I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore." Life, death, and life again. Here are two ancient graphs, outlining our descent from a former place of life to a "death" in order to win life still more abundant. |
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Wed, November 1, 2006 - 10:03 PM
O death, where is thy sting?
O grave, where is thy victory? For the basis of all wisdom in life is this ray of truth that was darkened under a cloud of human ignorance in the direful third century, and is only now discerned again in the full power of its shining. It is the knowledge that man is a soul (Latin sol, the sun!) of ineffable and indestructible light, a portion of the one glowing reality in the universe, but implanted as a seed of divinity for a cycle of growth in the dark underworld of "death" in the animal kingdom. No single sentence is more trenchant for human enlightenment than the statement of Heraclitus: "Man is a portion of cosmic fire buried in a body of water and earth." The soul in man has entered the kingdom of mortality that it may live again and live forever. THE END ...Or is it just a begining ;) THE LOST MEANING OF DEATH by Alvin Boyd Kuhn, www.theosophical.ca/LostMean...eath.html |
