The secret of eternal life is that there is no secret of eternal life.
Eternal life is not and never has been a secret. People in the afterlife are busily trying to get the message across to us. But we haven’t been the best of listeners.
The truth, however, has been kept a deep, dark secret. Here’s the truth:
Every spark of God, every soul, every Self, Atman, Christ is already immortal, always was, and always will be. It isn’t a state that needs to be achieved.
You don’t have to believe in or follow anyone to have it: you already have it.
You don’t need saving: you’re already saved.
What is really at issue is the cycle of birth and death associated with the Third Dimension. It’s true that we shed our bodies. So something does die. I’m not denying that.
But it isn’t us.
Perhaps let me offer two afterlife sources, from New Maps of Heaven, who look back on death and say this – and they mean what they say literally:
Therold: “Death is merely the casting off of the garment of flesh, which you bury out of sight and which passes into dust. You, the real Ego, with its personality, pass at once into the intermediate world.” (1)
Unnamed Teacher: “Death is [a] transition which every soul who incarnates into a physical body must make. It is nothing more than leaving the physical vehicle (the body) behind in preparation for a higher teaching, which all souls undergo.” (2)
The higher teaching is probably about leaving the Third Dimension and ascending to the Fifth, were there is no birth and death, no hunger or thirst, no poverty or disease. Life on the other side is about steady progress in spiritual evolution – or what we call “ascension.”
Unnamed Teacher: “Your personality, your memory, everything you consider to be you will leave with this energy [upon death] because you are energy.
“Once your work is accomplished there is no longer any need to stay in the physical vehicle which you are using on the earth plane. The body is as dust and will return to dust. It takes the energy force of the etheric body, living within your physical vehicle, to produce a being.
“At death the being leaves, and you could [not] care less about the physical vehicle which is a hindrance, like a prison.” (3)
Very few people, freed from their bodies, seem to miss them.
If we really, really got that our bodies are mortal but that we ourselves were, are and always will be immortal, the fear of death would instantly drop away. But, like everything else, we have to realize the truth of it, not just “get the idea.”
I did realize it in 1977 when the spirit that I am re-entered my body after a lucid dream that turned into an out-of-body experience. I felt like I was re-entering a rubbery tube. I tapped against it and said “What’s this?” And realized it was my body. I was not my body. (4)
The realization deepened by watching my consciousness transfer from inside the body to outside. I really got that I the spirit was operating the body.
As soon as I realized I was not my body, the fear of death disappeared.
A comedian once said: “I don’t mind the idea of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” I don’t think I’ll mind the actual event at all. Just get up or be lifted out by a kind soul and away we go.
So no secret to eternal life. The truth is kept a secret. The truth is: There is no death; there is only eternal life. Let it be proclaimed from the highest steeple.
Footnotes
(1) Therold in John Heslop through F. Heslop, medium, Further Messages Across the Border-Line. A Continuation of “Speaking Across the Border-Line.” London: Charles Taylor, n.d. , 95.
(2) Unnamed spirit teacher through Betty Bethards, medium, There is No Death. Novato, CA: Inner Light Foundation, 1976; c1975, 3. Not everyone will have to make it once we ascend to the Fifth Dimension where death does not exist.
(3) Ibid., 4.
(4) My spirit compared to my body was like the finest down at the base of a feather compared to a golf ball. There was nothing attractive about living in a body once you’d felt the incredible lightness of the spirit.