Time to Eternity/Death to Life

Heaven’s Song Has Not Missed A Beat Because You Sleep

In this world, there appears to be a state that is life’s opposite.
You call it death.

It is the one sure thing an inhabitant of this world can count on. All of your apparent successes and failures, your loves, your hates, your losses, your gains, depend on this one inevitable fact. In a world of uncertainty and chaos, it is the one guarantee you have — the barometer for your life; the clock that ticks away in the back of your mind.

At this time, and all over this world, there is increasing documentation of encounters with death. Filling our bookstores and television programs are reports from hundreds of people, from all walks of life, describing virtually the same occurrence:

A sense of being dead, of peace and painlessness,
looking down upon yourself and traveling through a tunnel
to a light so bright and beautiful.

“Freedom from the chains of the physical body, seeing your life flash before your eyes. A sense of oneness and complete understanding. Meeting loved ones that had passed away long ago. A feeling of being taken care of and loved simply as you are, without question or judgment. Finally, a reluctance to return from this light, from this experience of indescribable love.”

Near-death? Beautiful light, love, oneness, understanding, peace and joy!

Does this speak to you of death, the great unknown, the one thing feared by all humans? The one experience you spend your whole life warding off. The aim of all medical and scientific research, to extend the human existence as long as possible to avoid this moment. This moment of what? This moment when you experience “an entrance into a splendorous light-filled realm in which time and space no longer exist.” Only if life is considered to be sickness, pain and loneliness could death be described as something so incredible, so desirable. Perhaps life is not the condition in which you currently find yourself. Perhaps life is not a condition at all, and these delightful descriptions of “near– death” are moments of recognition of the reality of eternal life.

Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging,
losing vitality and dying in the end?

At the moment of your supposed birth into this world, you are only dying. From day one you begin the process of getting old.

“You thread your timid way through constant dangers, alone and frightened, hoping at most that death will wait a little longer before it overtakes you and you disappear.”

Death, a moment you can approach but never reach,
simply because it is impossible.

It is time for you to take a look at what you call life and what you call death and see that you have been completely mistaken about both. That the world in which you find yourself at this moment is what the idea of death is, and that life is real, beautiful, whole and eternal. That death is not the opposite of life but simply the denial of it, and these near–death experiences are moments when you release this idea of death and enter into the reality of your eternal life.

You can be assured that what you fear is not death, which is your own unreachable escape from yourself. What you fear is your own salvation! Life is what you fear! When the pressure of your self–identity gets too much for you, you collapse under the gravity of your own resistance. You find yourself soaring through a tunnel toward a beautiful light, warm and familiar, that calls you. So much like coming home, where you know you belong, only to return again to this chaotic world of loneliness and death. Death, an instant of relief from the pain of self–identity. A momentary distraction from the unbearable guilt of self–construction. A moment that you keep reliving again and again and again. A single moment between which appears to you a lifetime. Sometimes you stretch it to seem as if it’s thirty years or one hundred years or just minutes. It does not matter, it is still only a single instant. A transient moment in which you stopped by to deny who you are.

Each day, and every minute of each day, and every instant that each minute holds, you but relive the single instant when the time of terror took the place of love.

And so you die each day to live again, until you cross the gap between the past and present, which is not a gap at all. Such is each life; a seeming interval from birth to death and on to life again, a repetition of an instant gone by long ago that cannot be relived. And all of time is but the mad belief that what is over is still here and now.

Now, if you look again at the human description of near–death you can begin to see that your self–identity, which is what the world is, is what death is, and that these near–death experiences are near–life remembrances. You can begin to see that the release of your self–identity, which you currently view as death, is your release to life.

Life which is eternal and does not cease, and is not affected by your denial of it. Only you are affected by your denial of reality and your only effect is your own suffering. An effect that has no cause because you did not create yourself.

So being only an effect of an effect, you can only create a reflection of life, a reflection of life as death, a continual suffering interrupted by a moment you call death which gives you relief from yourself. A moment when you release your limited self–identity, glimpse reality, only to relive again an idea that was over the moment you had it. Death, a moment you can approach but never reach, simply because it is impossible.

M. Mitch

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