"Giving up the Belief in Birth and Death" by Rev. Mark Stuefloten 3/28/2021
Today is Palm Sunday, a day that encourages us to open up to life’s many opportunities for God’s goodness. And as spiritual beings we should take time to contemplate what that means for us. As eternal beings our life path is wide open, with unlimited possibilities of planned and unplanned good fortune. We have only cause to rejoice, dance, and praise our Lord God.
Rev. Roy Davis recommended that we just decide each day to be happy. I find something each day to be thankful for. I am sometimes not feeling thankful or happy, but its not about how I am feeling, but how I should feel, in light of the gift of life God has given me.
I use the word consciousness, some use spirit or soul, to indicate a person’s true self. You are consciousness, your whole body is. We all have a light body. People who have had out of the body experience have experienced the light body. It looks like your physical body, and there a good reason for that; your state of consciousness formed your body.
Let’s begin with this false belief about death. It has been said that everyone knows two years in advance that they are going to die. Sometimes people have premonitions about their future passing. As people move closer to their time of departure, death bed visitors may come to comfort them. This could be family members, angels or spiritual beings. The veil between this world and the next becomes more and more transparent and the dying person spends more and more time communicating with both worlds. Time and space no longer exist to the dying person.
There is a new transmission theory, according to Lanza, about time and space and our relationship with it. According to this theory “we carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Meaning that when the shell comes off, space and time, we still exist. The theory implies that death of consciousness simply does not exist. It only exists as a thought because people identify themselves with their body.”
In the medical studies on consciousness there are two opposing theories. One theory is from the material view that the brain produces consciousness and that when the brain dies so does the consciousness. The other school of thought is that, though consciousness works through the brain to express, is not brain produced; it is independent of the brain and it survives the brain death.
Divine Science teaches that we are independent of our bodies. We are individual units of pure consciousness, whole, complete eternal Beings. We are having a human experience.
Dr Peter Fenwick is a neuropsychiatrist who became a believer in near death experience after one of his own patients had a cardiac arrest and experienced a near death experience.
Dr Fenwick said that, except for minor cultural differences, the near death experiences are pretty much the same. People go through a dark tunnel, with a bright, warm, loving, inviting light at the end of the tunnel.
The light may be God, a spiritual being, family members or angels, all there to greet you and help you. Many people find themselves in a beautiful garden paradise during the experience. You are aware at some point that if you go farther you will not be able to go back. You may be directed to go back, or feel yourself drawn back into the body.
In some cases, while the near death experience is happening, the body is lying on the operating table clinically dead, while doctors, nurses and staff are working hard attempting to revive the body. When the person does come back and is revived, many can describe details of the goings on in the operating room, and other experiences. Contrary to what we see on television medical shows, more resuscitation attempts fail than succeed. Stress can cause a near death experience, and there are people who have a near death experience without any physical trauma at all.
Jesus’ ministry was one of preaching and demonstrating our oneness in God. Jesus could heal people because he saw only the truth of who they were and declared it. He saw everyone as whole, complete, eternal Being, each an expression of God. Jesus demonstrated the power God has given us to heal and raise the dead.
H.B Jeffery, in his book The Principles of Healing, tells us that Jesus knew the non-reality of the material world and he knew that the essential nature of man is God. Jesus knew that he did nothing; he knew that healing was from God, and the healing was between the person and God.
Jesus demonstrated the power of the sprit over death in the story of the widow who had lost her only son. Jesus saw the funeral procession passing by and had compassion on the woman. He walked up to the coffin and touched it and the son came back to this life. But let me be clear here. The son was alive, fully aware, and willing to return to this realm to help in demonstrating the resurrection power God has given us.
The story of the resurrection of Lazarus is more intentional. Jesus’ demonstration of raising Lazarus was to be such that no one could claim he was not dead, in a coma or playing a trick.
This was because there were, in those days, other people traveling around doing healing and raising the dead, claiming the power to be their own.
Jesus always gave the glory to God, never himself. Jesus waited three days after Lazarus had died and was buried before coming to raise him from the dead. Jesus wept because Lazarus was his friend, and then told the men around him to roll away the stone blocking Lazarus tomb entrance. Everyone could smell the stench of decaying flesh and could see the decomposing body of Lazarus. But again, in truth Lazarus was alive and well, waiting to participate in demonstrating God’s gift of resurrection.
Jesus looked up and thanked God for what was next to come, then cried out in a loud voice, “Lazarus rise up,” and Lazarus came back to the human realm.
Life is eternal. Birth and death, if they are anything, they are just pathways in and out of this realm. A baby in it’s mother’s womb is content, happily living life. By the time the birth journey is about to begin the baby is familiar and happy with his or her home inside mom.
The baby may now have few, if any, memories of past lives or life on the other side. Then the journey begins, moving through a dark tunnel, seeing a bright inviting light at the end. Once the baby comes into the light he or she is welcomed by a being that may be a doctor or midwife, family members, and finds itself in a garden paradise of good people and nourishment.
Sound familiar?
There is only Consciousness, and consciousness is unchanging and eternal. Jesus only saw health and wholeness. He only saw God in everyone. When we see only God in ourselves and everyone else, we will be changed, resurrected, and awakened.
Let’s use an example: when you look into a mirror you can see that you have aged through the years, but you, inside, still feel the same as you have alway felt, and that is because the true you is changeless, ageless and untouched by the ups and downs of the years. You are an independent unit of pure consciousness. Take time to contemplate this. You are a unit of pure consciousness that may have had a birth and death experience in a past life.
-Think about this for a moment. - When the birth journey begins, the baby’s time to be born, the baby is moved to leave the comfort of the only home the baby knows and moves down a dark tunnel with a welcoming light at the end of the tunnel. When the baby arrives on the other side there are loved ones and helpers there to care for them.
Sounds like a near death experience. The person begins the journey from a place they are familiar with, moves down a dark tunnel that has a warm inviting light at the end of it, and at the end spirit beings, and family are there to greet us in some beautiful place. Birth and death are the way Consciousness is transferred to the human experience and back.
You are alive in the human body, and you are alive without the body. You don’t have to die to be out of the body. Consciousness is boundless, not limited to time and space.
Life and death are the pathways to transfer individual units of consciousness into the human experience and back.
We have life in abundance only.
When King David died, 1 Kings 2:10 tells us that David slept with his fathers. In Matthew 17:2 Moses and Elijah appear to Jesus. They were alive and they are not the exceptions.
After Jesus demonstrated his death and resurrection he appeared to several people.
My favorite story is in John 21:1-14, when the disciples saw from their boat Jesus preparing a barbecued fish and bread breakfast for them on the lake shore. They could not believe their eyes at first.
Personally, I believe that the only true death is a life lived on the sidelines, never getting involved, never helping other people, never taking a chance on a dream. That I believe is the true death
In Romans 6:23, it reads “The gift of God is eternal life.” Then what is death? What is referred to as death is nothing more than a transition from one state of consciousness to another. To think of life as merely in the physical body is a very limited thought of life. The body is the clothing of the soul.
In the body or out of the body, its all God. We are always existing, moving, having our life, our being, in the all-ness of God. You are Consciousness, unchanging, eternal, and forever existing in the all-ness of God
H.B Jeffery said “More then ever before, people are seeking for that vital and essential knowledge of the truth which shall free them from the sorrow, sickness and death they have so mistakenly believed in as an unavoidable part of life.”
We have that knowledge; we have the truth within us, for we are one in God, living, moving, having eternal life in the all-ness of God’s goodness, Just look around you; your good is here and now waiting for your recognition. Amen.
In Genesis, God said, “Let there be life.” God didn’t say anything about death. God does not even know of death, for God is life. Then what is this thing we call death? Nona Brooks wrote in Mysteries, in the chapter The Mystery of Death, “The so called dead are those who conceive themselves apart from life - God in Action.”
Next Nona says, and I really like this, “Natural science tells us that death is an acquired habit of the race, and that since men have taken it on, men must throw it off. We believe that the race is able to rise out of the misconception that men must die.... It will take consecrated effort to root it out.... Thinking true to principle of God and God in action.”
Birth is also not as we know it. Science tells us that we are from our parents. I remember that Jesus said to call no man on earth your Father, for there is but one Father - God. From this I understand that God is truly our only so-called parent, our source, and is within us. Our soul then forms this body out of its consciousness to experience in this plane of life.
The events we have been calling birth and death, then have no true reality. They are simply transitions from one expression of life to another. According to Jesus in John 14:2, we are told there are many mansions in our Father’s house. To me this says that there are countless places for our soul to experience, and earth is just one of them.
Let us affirm: “God is Eternal Life, and I am this.
Comments