Something Finer is Slowly Dawning

As we watch the passing of much in the world that has been familiar, safe and reliable, we are both witness to and participant in the birth of a new human consciousness and sense of identity. Amidst the death throes of an old worldview, something finer is slowly dawning through the awakening human heart. The wave of suffering of growing multitudes of people, from war and natural catastrophe, is crashing on the shores of the heart and bringing us face-to-face with the infinite flow of the One Life we share in all its breathtaking vastness and universal power. In that greater context we can come to realise that what we call “death” is in reality a process of growth into a newer, subtler, and more expansive sense of being.

As barriers and borders around the world are challenged, broached and dissolved, our sense of who we are is being released from the confines of material limitations and we are urged to realise a new expanded identity. In the end we are not only this or that nationality but are essentially human, and are all intimately part of God’s creation, part of His planetary embodiment and manifestation. As identity expands, our sense of being passes beyond previous limitations stage after stage in the unfolding evolutionary process. The Tibetan Master explains:

There have been many deaths within the aeonial life cycle of the initiate:

1.  The familiar and constantly recurring death of the physical body, incarnation after incarnation.
2.  The deaths of the astral and the mental vehicles, as the undying soul discards them life after life—only to create new ones until mastery is attained.
3.  Then—as a result of the incarnating process and its evolutionary effects—there comes the death of desire and its replacing by a growing spiritual aspiration.
4.  Then, through right use of the mind, comes the “death” of the personality or, rather, its repudiation and renouncing of all that is material.
5.  This is followed by the death or destruction of the causal or soul body at the great Initiation of Renunciation.

This process of death and resurrection goes on ceaselessly in all the kingdoms of nature; each death prepares the way for a greater loveliness and livingness, and each death (if you analyse it with care) prefaces resurrection in some form or another until we come to this final resurrection and into the position of final attainment.
… this process of constant death followed by constant resurrection … is the evolutionary keynote and the evolutionary technique, and only because men love unduly that which is material and hate to lose contact with the form aspect of nature do they fear death. It is wise to remember that immortality is an aspect of the living spiritual being, and is not an end in itself, as men seek to make it.
To the Knowers of Life such a phrase as ‘I am an immortal Soul’ is not even true. To say ‘I am Life Itself and, therefore, am immortal’ approaches closer to the truth, but even that sentence is …only a part of a larger truth. Symbolically, nature is ever portraying to us the essential facts in the annual progress of the four seasons, in the cycles of light and dark and in the wonder of the emergence of beauty or colour or useful function out of a seed which has struggled—because of its inherent life—into the light of the sun.” The Rays and the Initiations, page 731

Whether experienced at an individual, group, national or global level, as a whole we are experiencing the death of the old and the resurrection of the new. The signs of a new human being and a new world can be known – not necessarily through the traditional modes of broadcast so much as in what lies behind and is less obvious but is becoming increasingly more pervasive. It can be experienced in the heart response of ordinary human beings caring for one another and rebelling against a worldview that no longer fits our larger sense of shared being. In this way we are carrying forward our evolutionary progress under the divine Plan for our world. We are essentially souls creating our destiny no matter the challenges we have to face in the learning experienced through worldly existence. The poet Robert Frost expressed this powerfully in his poem, Trial by Existence, as in this excerpt:

“…And from a cliff-top is proclaimed
The gathering of the souls for birth,
The trial by existence named,
The obscuration upon earth.
And the slant spirits trooping by
In streams and cross- and counter-streams
Can but give ear to that sweet cry
For its suggestion of what dreams!

And the more loitering are turned
To view once more the sacrifice
Of those who for some good discerned
Will gladly give up paradise.
And a white shimmering concourse rolls
Toward the throne to witness there
The speeding of devoted souls
Which God makes his especial care.

And none are taken but who will,
Having first heard the life read out
That opens earthward, good and ill,
Beyond the shadow of a doubt;
And very beautifully God limns,
And tenderly, life’s little dream,
But naught extenuates or dims,
Setting the thing that is supreme…”

Trial by Existence ~ Robert Frost

We are not the victims of our souls’ decision, but the warriors who freely undertake the trial of incarnation which from a truer perspective is an entry into a period of death. At the time of that heavenly decision, we know each battle will end and we will return to our true home victoriously marking the progress of each incarnation on the way of return. Let us take the Kingdom of Souls as our guiding compass point from whence we come and to which we return. As Rumi reminds us:

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