An education which leaves untouched the entire region of transcendental thought is an education which has nothing important to say about the meaning of human life.
Abraham Maslow, The Long Way Home, MANAS, XVI:29, July 17, 1963
Death is generally regarded as the final act in the drama of our embodied lives and existence, however in a spiritual sense, death simply means resurrection into eternal life. In my upcoming book, Consciousness and the Search for Reality: Beyond the Veil, frequent references are made to the fact that our spiritual destiny, our afterlife, is shaped and determined by the efforts we make while living our planetary or embodied life. Higher Life waits for us, but that doesn’t mean when we die we march on into a sublime celestial existence. It’s up to us to create the spiritual future we want for ourselves here and now, and we do that by working on ourselves. Do we understand what we are? Do we understand why we are born? And most importantly, do we understand how precarious our cosmic situation really is? This principle was known in ancient times and can be summed up in the following parable:
And if the tree falls to the south or if to the north, where falls the tree there in the place shall it be.
Ecclesiastes 11:3
The language of correspondences assists us in understanding the parable’s esoteric meaning in the following way. The term ‘tree’ corresponds to our being, specifically what we have made of our being, what we have spiritually become or not become. This is the totality of the lifetime of intentional effort we made when working on ourselves. The term ‘falls’ corresponds to physical death. The words ‘there in the place shall it be’ refer to the fact that what we have made of ourselves up until physical death remains so for eternity. The term ‘there in the place’ corresponds to our spiritual development and growth, which is representative of a particular level and spiritual society in the spiritual universe to which we will belong. ‘Shall it be’ is a warning that what we have or have not become, will remain as such.
The words from Ecclesiastes are a decisive and powerful communication which illustrate the importance of work-on-oneself from a cosmic perspective; we are what we make ourselves to be, and we determine where and how we live in the afterlife; it really is that simple. The Gnostic texts also highlight the importance of working on ourselves now, as they do the sense of immediacy which accompany that task. In The Gospel of Thomas from the Nag Hammadi Library we read the following words purportedly spoken by Jesus to his disciples, “(59) Jesus said, take heed of the living one while you are alive, lest you die and seek to see him and be unable to do so” (Koester & Lambdin, 1978, p. 132). Again, the exhortation is clear; know now, learn now, prepare now.
When we die, we enter the vastness of the spiritual universe, a world largely unexplored by most people. Sometimes our lives intersect with death, as in for example shared-death experiences or near-death experiences. These events teach us that we are more than our material selves and that our existence continues after death, albeit in different form. The Work makes it very clear that a large part of our life should be devoted to active work-on-oneself in preparation for the afterlife. In fact, our early years should be spent in gathering esoteric knowledge which in our later years is digested and absorbed to bring about the required transformations necessary for the evolution of our soul.
Planetary existence provides us with the opportunity to work on ourselves. The intentional efforts made while in our embodied state are crucial to determining what sort of eternal spiritual future we create for ourselves. The rule is this: What we make of ourselves here remains so there, and once we get there, how we live there is reflective of how we lived here. It really is that simple.
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