Death is an inherent phenomenon of life, which cannot be
ignored.
The remarkable teacher Joanna de Angelis, the dear
spiritual mentor of Divaldo Franco, addresses with great
propriety the recurring question of death, its
psychological implications, the despair involved, in
short, shows us that this “(...) biological fatality,
(death) is a common phenomenon of life”. (The Whole
Man, chap. 9)
“In the molecular gear, particles are associated and
disaggregated, transforming themselves through the
imperative that constitutes them, in view of the
specific purpose of each one. Indeed, the same occurs
with the body, resulting in the phenomenon known as
death.
Uninformed about the mechanisms of organic form and
functionality, psychologically unstructured, man fears
death, due to the representative atavism of the end of
life, of the consummation of being.
In various primitive and contemporary cultures, to
escape the reality of this inevitable occurrence,
ceremonials and religious cults were created that aim to
diminish the unfortunate event, hiding it, while
adorning the dead with hope for survival.
In many societies of the past, it was common to place a
gold coin between the teeth of the deceased, to reward
the boatman in charge of taking him to the other side of
the river of Life. In Greece, particularly, this usage
became normal, aiming to compensate for Charon's
avarice, who threatened to let the non-payers wander,
when crossing the River Styx, according to Mythology.
Modernly, repeating the embalming in which the Egyptians
were famous, in the Houses of the Dead,
the aim is to beautify the dead so that they give the
impression of life and well-being, thus freeing the
living from fears and bitter reminiscences. However, no
matter how much the truth is masked, the moment comes
when everyone faces it without escapism, invited to
experience it. Death is an inherent phenomenon
of life, which cannot be disregarded.
Neuroses and severe psychoses are established in the
individual due to the fear of death, paradoxically, in
manic-depressive expressions, leading the patient to
commit suicide in the fear of waiting for it. In a deep
psychological analysis, man fears death, because he
fears life. He unconsciously transfers the dread of
physical existence to that of the destruction or
transformation of the implements that constitute it.
Accustomed to evading responsibilities, through
apologetic mechanisms, the inexorable event of death
becomes a challenge that he would like not to face, out
of conscience, perhaps, of guilt, starting to hate this
confrontation. To escape, he plunges into the
intoxication of the consuming senses and disturbing
emotions, shortening time by wearing down the sustaining
energies of the physical body. Man, believing himself to
be farsighted and ambitious, spends time preparing for
the future and preserving the present. However, he could
and should invest part of himself in the reflection of
the phenomenon of death, in order to consider it natural
and await it with a calm emotional disposition. Neither
desiring it nor even avoiding to dribble it. The
education given to him from an early age, in the face of
the same terrifying atavism of death, is centered on
pleasure, on the delights of the ego, on the advantages
that he can take from the body, without the
corresponding analysis of temporality and fragility that
they cover. Thanks to this inadvertence, conflicts,
phobias and insecurity trigger him.
A daily moment of analysis, around physical life,
predisposes the creature to project thought beyond the
portal of ash and mud in which somatic organization
deteriorates. Everything in the physical world is
impermanent, and such impermanence can be seen in two
ways: the outer or gross, and the inner or subtle.
Nothing is ever the same, although the appearance it
preserves in different time periods. For this very
reason, everything is in incessant alteration in the
field of micro-particles until the moment in which the
form changes - a subtle phase of impermanence. An object
that breaks down and a body, plant, animal and human,
that dies, go through the phase of gross outer
transition to another structure, experiencing death.
Death, however, does not eliminate the continuum of
consciousness after cadaveric disjunction. If, from
an early age, the habit of meditation is created about
the surviving consciousness, independent of the body,
death loses its taboo effect of
annihilating, hateful, destroying the ideal, being,
life. The traditional riddle of what happens after
death must be of relevant interest to the man who, in
meditation, finds the way to decipher it. Letting
oneself be carried away by fear or not giving any
importance to it are alienating behaviors.
Curiosity for the unknown, the tendency to investigate
new phenomena are attractions for the inquiring mind,
which finds skillful resources for commitments. The
intuition of life, the instinct to preserve existence,
the psychic experiences of the past and
parapsychological present attest that death is a vehicle for
the transference of the thinking energetic being, from
one vibratory phase or stage to another, without
expressive structural alteration of its psychology.
Thus, one dies as one lives, with the same psychological
contents that are the foundations (unconsciousness) of
the rational self (consciousness). In this overview of
life (in the body) and death (of the body) a decisive
factor in human behavior stands out: the attachment to
matter, with the consequent disturbing emotions and
contaminated extracts of behavior, lying in the
personality. From one point of view, the manifestation
of the conservation instinct is valuable,
as it limits the blunders of man who, in the face of any
vicissitude, would resort to suicide, as happens with
certain psychopaths. In a way, when restrained,
unconsciously, he faces the problems and overcomes them
with the efficient action of his properly directed
effort.
On the other hand, religious clarifications, despite the
multiplicity of their approaches, demonstrating that
death is a period of transition between two phases of
life, contribute to demythologizing the dread of
annihilation.
Definitively, psychic, parapsychological and
mediumistic experiences, whether provoked or natural,
have brought an important contribution to solving the
problem of death, giving meaning to existence. When
man becomes aware of the continuity of the thinking
being after the transformations of the body through the
death of the form, his concepts about life and his
conduct in the course of organic experience are totally
altered. In any case, reserving mental spaces for
detachment from things, people and positions, analyzing
the inevitability of death, which forces the individual
to leave everything, is a healthy and necessary therapy
for a happy transit through the objective world.”
Leon Denis, the extraordinary French writer, brings us
an encouraging study (The problem of being, destiny
and pain) on death and dying, with very interesting
conclusions that we pass on to you, dear reader: “(...)
death is a simple change of state. The destruction of a
fragile form that no longer provides life with the
necessary conditions for its functioning and evolution.
Beyond the grave, a new phase of existence opens. The
Spirit, under its imponderable fluidic form, prepares
itself for new incarnations; he finds in his state of
mind the fruits of the existence that has ended.
Life is found everywhere. The whole of Nature shows us,
in its marvelous panorama, the perpetual renewal of all
things. Nowhere is there death as it is generally
considered among us, nowhere is there annihilation; no
being can perish in its life principle, in its conscious
unity. The Universe overflows with physical and psychic
life. Everywhere the immense tingling of beings, the
elaboration of souls that, when they escape the lengthy
and obscure preparations of matter, are to continue, in
the stages of light, their magnificent ascent.
The life of man is like the Sun of the polar regions
during the dry season. It goes down slowly, it goes
down, it weakens, it seems to disappear for an instant
below the horizon. It is the end, in appearance; but,
soon after, it rises again, to again describe its
immense orbit in the sky.
Death is only a momentary eclipse in the great
revolution of our existences; but that moment is enough
to reveal to us the serious and profound meaning of
life. Death itself can also have its nobility, its
grandeur. We must not fear it, but rather strive to
beautify it, each one constantly preparing for it, by
researching and conquering moral beauty, the beauty of
the Spirit that shapes the body and adorns it with an
august reflection at the time of supreme separations.
The way in which each one of us knows how to die is
already, in itself, an indication of what life in Space
will be like for each of us. There is something like a
cold, pure light around the pillow of certain deathbeds.
Faces, hitherto insignificant, seem to be haloed by
glare from the beyond. An imposing silence surrounds
those who have left Earth. The living, witnesses of
death, feel great and austere thoughts detach themselves
from the banal background of their habitual impressions,
giving some beauty to their interior life. Hatred and
evil passions cannot resist this spectacle. Before the
body of an enemy, all animosity subsides, all desire for
revenge vanishes. With a coffin, forgiveness seems
easier, duty more imperative. Every death is a birth, a
rebirth; it is the manifestation of a life until then
latent in us, the invisible life of Earth, which will
join the invisible life of Space. After a certain period
of trouble, we find ourselves, beyond the grave, in the
fullness of our faculties and our conscience, together
with loved ones who shared the sad or happy hours of our
earthly existence. The tomb only contains dust. Let us
raise our thoughts and our memories higher, if we want
to find again the trace of the souls that were dear to
us... Don't ask the stones of the tomb for the secret of
life. Know that the bones and ashes that lie there are
nothing. The souls that animated them left these places,
they revive in subtler, more refined forms. From the
bosom of the invisible, where your prayers reach them
and move them, they follow you with their eyes, answer
you and smile at you... The Spiritist Revelation will
teach you to communicate with them, to unite your
feelings in the same love, in an ineffable hope. Often,
the beings that you cry for and that you are going to
look for in the cemetery are by your side. Those who
were the support of your youth, who cradled you in their
arms, the friends, companions of your joys and your
pains, as well as all the forms, all the gentle ghosts
of the beings you meet, come to watch over you. on your
path, who participated in your existence and took with
them something of yourself, your soul and your heart.
Around you floats the multitude of men who were lost in
death, a confused multitude, which revives, calls you
and shows you the path you have to travel. O’ death, O’
serene majesty! you, of whom they make a scarecrow, are
for the thinker simply a moment of rest, the transition
between two acts of fate, one of which ends and the
other prepares. When my poor soul, wandering for so many
centuries through the worlds, after many struggles,
vicissitudes and disappointments, after many shattered
illusions and postponed hopes, will rest again in your
bosom, it will be with joy that it will greet the dawn
of fluidic life; it will be with ebriousness that it
will rise from the Earth's dust, through the fathomless
spaces, towards those whom it trembled in this world and
who await it. For most men, death remains the great
mystery, the dark problem, which no one dares to look in
the face. For us, it is the blessed hour when the tired
body returns to the great Nature to leave the Psyche,
its prisoner, free passage to the Eternal Homeland.
This homeland is radiant Immensity, full of suns and
spheres. Next to them, how stunted our poor Earth must
look! The Infinite surrounds her on all sides. Infinite
in extension and infinity in duration, this is what we
are faced with, whether we are dealing with the soul or
the Universe. Just as each of our existences has its
term and must disappear, to make way for another life,
so each of the “worlds” sown in Space must die, to make
room for other, more perfect worlds. The day will come
when human life will be extinguished on the cold globe.
The Earth, vast necropolis, will roll, gloomy, in the
silent vastness. Imposing ruins will rise in the places
where Rome, Paris, Constantinople once existed, corpses
of capitals, the last vestiges of extinct races,
gigantic stone books that no carnal eye will ever read
again. But Humanity will have disappeared from Earth
only to continue, in more gifted spheres, the career of
its ascension. The wave of progress will have driven all
terrestrial souls to planets better prepared for life.
It is likely that prodigious civilizations flourish at
this time on Saturn and Jupiter; there, humanities
reborn in incomparable glory will expand. There is the
future place of human beings, their new field of action,
the blessed places where they will be given to continue
to love and work for their betterment. In the midst of
their work, the sad memory of Earth will perhaps still
haunt these spirits; but, from the heights reached, the
memory of the pains suffered, of the trials endured,
will only be a stimulant to rise to greater heights. In
vain the evocation of the past will bring to their sight
the specters of flesh, the sad remains that lie in
earthly graves. The voice of wisdom will say to them:
“What matter the shadows that are gone! Nothing
perishes. Every being is transformed on the steps that
lead from sphere to sphere, from sun to sun, to God.
Eternal spirit,
remember this: death does not exist!"
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