There was a time, when I first poked my head into spirituality, when it was considered that a person had to be “saved” or “resurrected” – by which they meant what we mean by “ascended” – to achieve immortality.
God knows what happened if you died before you achieved salvation.
It put a terrific premium on accepting Jesus as your savior. Otherwise you might lie mouldering in the ground…. etc.
But the truth of the matter is we always were eternal. There’s no place to “get to” on that one. We’re already there. We only live once, forever.
Mortality as the end of life is one of the many myths (another is no reincarnation) that we’re now starting to withdraw from.
Krishna said:
“There never was a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor any of these kings. Nor is there any future in which we shall cease to be.
“Just as the dweller in this body passes through childhood, youth and old age, so at death he merely passes into another kind of body. The wise are not deceived by that.” (1)
What salvation, or resurrection, or ascension brings to an end is the need to be reborn into … you could say, Third Dimensionality … you could say, the physical plane …. you could say a world of birth and death, whatever you wish to call it.
Hindus call ascension mukti or liberation from birth and rebirth. Certainly on the Fifth Dimension, we’ll never have to die again. We simply change the features of our body. We’re freed at last from the need to go through the death of the body to allow us to take on a new one.
Having said that, I also hear that all has changed. We’re not leaving things behind. We’re taking the best of it all with us. And the rest we can easily replace or duplicate in the Fifth Dimension. It’s add on, add on, add on.
There’s so much in the old-time religion that needs to be refined, to match the truth or describe the new reality.
Footnotes
(1) Sri Krishna in Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, trans., Bhagavad-Gita. The Song of God. New York and Scarborough: New American Library, 1972; c1944, 36.