© 2014 Horacio Gamboa Verdugo
© 2014 Urantia Association of Spain
| Eugenics: a controversial issue | Luz y Vida — No. 36 — March 2014 — Index | Only the inner life is really creative |
¶ Time of death
Death for me is a very recurring theme since my childhood, because I was surrounded by it at a very young age, so my relationship with it has always been normal, never traumatic or incomprehensible despite some very close tragedies that have touched me. live.
I started like everyone else, or like the vast majority here in Chile, with the Catholic concept, because I was educated in a Catholic school, with priests. Hell, purgatory, heaven, something mysterious and utterly terrifying. The mere idea of a purgatory terrified me, it occurred to me cold, gloomy and humid, that’s what I came to in religion classes, masses and stories from priests. Also, the single word PURGATORY reminded me of the cure for stomach aches, the purge.
The mystery of life, being born, being, developing, questioning and the questions that we have all asked ourselves in life: who am I? What do I do in this life? Because I live? So that? Where will I go? And finally, the big question, the million dollar question: WHAT WILL HAPPEN AFTER DEATH? Little by little, as I grew older, the question became a bigger and deeper mystery for me, since no one, priests, Freemasons, philosophers, psychiatrists, no one could clarify it for me. Everyone’s responses were, and are today, the same: look, I think… I think… blah, blah, blah. The fact of dying does not add up to me, and that for that mere fact I feel at the right hand of the Father turned into a saint, even less the fact that I end up in a box and a hole and that is where everything ended; How to think that the effort of a lifetime, the experience acquired at such an extremely high cost, as is the fact of living this life, ends up in a hole covered with earth in a cemetery. NO! I couldn’t accept it. Then came the transmigration of the soul, reincarnation, so in vogue today. I stayed there for a long time, although it was equally difficult for me to think that the creators could be so ungenerous to have us in a complicated world like this, turning and turning again and again, to finally leave, but to where, and once again I was left without answers. So I kept going, searching and searching, until I came across this magnificent blue book, and here I came full circle, and this is what I will share with you.
First of all, we are going to agree that death is the only certain and certain thing that we have in this life. We can plan what we are going to study, what we will do, what we will try to be, the day to day, etc. But death is not in anyone’s plans and it visits us without warning. Nobody knows how or when, we only know that it will arrive. In our society, and in general throughout Western civilization, death is treated as a taboo, rather than something absolutely normal. In the East they have a very different look at death. For them, who are generally much more religious and philosophical peoples, death is not a problem, although in one way or another they also share the same lack of information. There are many people who do not allow people to talk about it in their presence, out of sheer fear, fear of the unknown, even people who call themselves observant and practicing religious, do not want to talk about death.
We can also agree on the fact that we live inside a material body, that we are reproduced by a male and a female mammal, with a gestation period, with two brains, traversed by millions of electrical cables, millions of chemical processes per minute, hundreds of thousands of neural sensations, calcium, kneecaps with their corresponding lubrication, consumers of carbohydrates, proteins that we process and have digestive waste on the one hand, and we extract everything necessary to convert it into the energy we need to move the body. We have a respiratory system that ventilates and carries oxygen to the sodium chloride that floods us. Our bodies are an electrochemical device that gestates, is born, grows, is a child, adolescent, young, adult, old and finished. Therefore, to put it into vulgar terms: we have an expiration date.
Some before, others after, some children, who always cause us a lot of pain, but all of them, inexorably at some point in time, will have a failure for multiple reasons, physical, accidental, material fatigue, etc. And that will cause us physical death, the death of this electrochemical apparatus that allows us to live and inhabit this planet. It is a magnificent device. We see, hear, feel, get excited, we have happiness and sadness, we know about heat and cold, pain and pleasure, all of this centered on a processor that is our cerebral apparatus separated into two brains united by the same hypothalamus. Why are we going to delve into the endocrine, glandular, electrical, cardiac, etc. systems, which we well know are essential for the proper functioning of our bodies, but it is not what summons us.
Death, which is what summons us, and what we know, is then seeing what is exposed in reference to the body, physical death, death and the end of the existence of these devices that allow us to live here. And we? What or who are we? What we are, our experience, achievements, failures, disappointments, discernment, where does it end?
This revelation confirms wonderful information in this regard: we are Matter (the body), Mind and Spirit. Matter, or the body, we already understood it and we made it clear what it is about. But we also have a mind that is described as a functional unit, and why? Because in it the personality works, the human intellect and the spirit. The mind, they tell us, is: “The mechanism of the human organism that thinks, perceives and feels. The totality of conscious and unconscious experience. Intelligence, associated with the emotional life, which goes upwards, through worship and wisdom, to the level of spirit."
It is important to clarify that we do not have to take worship as something submissive towards an angry and grumpy god who punishes us for not offering him our worship. No, the adoration of the Deity, from our cosmic position far from the Center of all things, is the simple admiration, for example, for the beauty of a sunset, for thinking for an instant how we rotate in this sphere, in space. , subjects of the invisible and inexplicable. That is true worship.
There is no one even here on earth who can tell us what the mind is like, where the mind is, how it contacts the body, how it commands the brains. Nobody knows for sure. We always speak of the mind with great ease, but where is it? How is? How does it work? But we’ll see in the development of the topic.
I am going to go back a bit, to death, to what we are, where we are going to end up. We said that we are Matter, Mind and Spirit. Well then, the mind, as a functional unit, is given to us approximately 9 months before we are born and the personality, intellect and the first 7 circuits or assistants of the mind arrive at it, which are: Intuition, Understanding, Courage, Knowledge, Advice and here is one of the great differences we have with animals: Adoration and Wisdom.
In other words, before we are born we are already persons because we have personality. They describe personality as PERMANENCE IN THE PRESENCE OF CHANGE. It is fantastic, it is what makes us unique, it is the diversity in the infinite cosmos. We’ll talk more about this later.
We are born to life for the first time, and on this spinning planet in space, subject to time and space itself. From that moment until physical death, we have a space of time, in a place in space itself, to live out our lives. Between 5 and 6 years old, in the generation of the year 20 of the last century, they tell us that at approximately 5 years, 10 months and 4 days. In other words, around the day 2134, when through our personality we make our will act and we make our first moral decisions, the spirit of the Father reaches us, and from that moment and as a result of that event it begins to create, to weave our soul , which will be in it where everything that has transcendent value will be registered and stored, contact with other personalities, compliance with loyalty to our friends, in general the correct behavior, everything that is spiritual discernment, or things that have value for our next lives, less and less material. This soul will be our mind in the next life, because this one that we have now only serves us here, it dies, it ends. They tell us: “The stoppage of life destroys the physical brain patterns for mind endowment, and the disruption of mind terminates mortal consciousness.” (UB 112:5.14)
Therefore, we can see that what happens to us in life we perceive in the mind. Although it is true that we move, see, recognize each other, breathe, etc., with the body, and feel it in the body, but we analyze it and decide in the mind, it is through its mediation that the personality makes the body itself act through the will. Therefore, when the human being wants to change physical reality, be it himself or his environment, he succeeds to the point where he has discovered the ways and ways to control matter and direct energy, and these are decisions and situations that we settle in our minds. We are not going to stay in the mind, since it is not what summons us either, but to clarify HOW things happen, I put together this sequence.
Good. We said then that we are born into this world for the first time, and that in doing so we have a space of time to live our lives and time is essential for us to do so. About time, they tell us: “Time is the universal endowment of all will creatures”; (we can say that the will is our faculty of choice) is THE TALENT entrusted to all intelligent beings.
All of us have time to ensure our survival; time is fatally wasted only when it is buried in negligence, when we do not use it to ensure the survival of our souls. Failure to improve one’s timing to the highest degree possible does not impose fatal penalties; it merely delays the pilgrim of time on his journey of ascension. If survival is won, all other losses can be found again. At this point they clarify what time is and what it is for, so the best thing we can do with it is to make the best possible use of it and, as we also know that we have the will, which is the faculty of choice, we must always think about make the best decision, choose the right path, the most ethical, if we are going to do something, whoever our decision may affect, that the effects of that decision do not do to anyone what we would not want them to do to us. They tell us: “_ Mortal life is like an unbroken chain of many links. Your short sojourn in this world, in this sphere of mortal childhood, is but a link, the first in the long chain that is to extend through the universes and through the eternal ages. It is not so much what you learn in this first life; it is the experience of living this life that is important. Even the work in this world, although very important, is not as important as the way in which you do that work. There is no material reward for righteous living, but there is deep satisfaction (achievement consciousness) and this transcends all conceivable material reward._” (UB 39:4.13)
There are no words then for us to explain what is right, what is well done. We all know perfectly well what is right and what is not, all of us here are self-aware of ourselves and aware of our actions. Then we see that it is our acts in the tabernacle of the flesh, our decisions, that will take us from chaos to glory.
We are talking about personality, well, that is what we really are, our little I am, and that is the greatest distinction and the greatest dignity, what makes us children of God and not servants of God. What should make us feel that we are at home, in the creation of God our Father, and it is that personality, what we really are, what comes looking for that spirit of the Father that I told you about, that comes to our minds between 5 and 6 years old, because they, those spirits have no personality, that wonder that each one of us is, absolutely unique beings, is what they come looking for, diverse, full of free will, so that we can decide freely within the edges of the possible. That is what we are in this life, living it to gain experience, the experience of living this life. This experience is unique and each one of us is acquiring it. And it is in our souls, the place where these life experiences are kept, and the one who jealously guards and cares for the best of us, is that spirit, which guides us now and will guide us always and for all eternity. They tell us about the soul: “The human personality is identified with mind and spirit held together in functional relationship by life in a material body. This functioning relationship of such mind and spirit does not result in some combination of the qualities or attributes of mind and spirit but rather in an entirely new, original, and unique universe value of potentially eternal endurance, the soul.” (UB 111:2.3)
They tell us of this spirit: “Mind is your ship, the Adjuster is your pilot, the human will is captain. The master of the mortal vessel should have the wisdom to trust the divine pilot to guide the ascending soul into the morontia harbors of eternal survival. Only by selfishness, slothfulness, and sinfulness can the will of man reject the guidance of such a loving pilot and eventually wreck the mortal career upon the evil shoals of rejected mercy and upon the rocks of embraced sin. With your consent, this faithful pilot will safely carry you across the barriers of time and the handicaps of space to the very source of the divine mind and on beyond, even to the Paradise Father of Adjusters.” (UB 111:1.9)
I mentioned at the beginning that it does not seem to me that, by the mere fact of dying, one can become a saint or that one can sit, as most evolutionary religions offer us, the next day at the right hand of God the Father. Because just by dying, if I’m not a good person, I can’t become a good person! Because if I don’t speak German at the time of death, can I? Those things have never made me feel and, before I came across this book, my doubts increased, but here I found coherent answers about it and, as I said, they closed my circles.
There is a gigantic gulf between us and spirituality. In fact here, on this planet, there is nothing spiritual or sacred, therefore we have to bridge this abyss, and how? if we are almost 100% matter, except for that spiritual core of our Father that dwells in our material minds, how do I go on?
What will the next state of things and matter be like then, how we will be, what we will consume to energize ourselves, we will have digestive waste, we will age again, we will feel pain, we will have sex, we will reproduce, what will happen to our families, our children, fathers, mothers, mothers-in-law , hahaha. They reveal to us that there is a state, a different matter, a different form of expression of reality, and they call it morontia material. And there is this other matter different from this and from the spiritual, because you have to go through other experiences before being spiritual beings. Therefore it will be in this matter, lighter than this, where we will be again, where our personality will arrive, our soul with experiential memory, and we will be reassembled in that matter, we will have a new body much lighter than this, where we will start again. , but with the experience and knowledge acquired here and up to the moment of the end of life of our current material bodies, which has allowed us to live life as human beings. We are not going to have a single more knowledge, not a single experience other than those obtained here, in addition to the last experience as human beings, the inescapable passage through the threshold of death.
But I want to come back here, to how important this life is, to the enormous importance of living it, feeling it, smelling it, listening, feeling it, enjoying it, putting aside what oppresses us and stops our growth, what makes us go back to the animal that we all are, and that we must shake off. We must learn to remove fear, envy, jealousy, anguish, ego, anger, suspicion, etc. from our backpacks. By managing to master these defects that almost all humans have, we can begin to yield the fruits of the spirit that are: love, joy, peace, resignation, sweetness, kindness, faith, humility and temperance. If we can truly surrender these qualities, internalize them in our DNA, in our daily living of these fruits, we will be truly taking certain and firm steps in pursuit of a much better life, the remaining portion of time for each one, and in turn we will be giving opportunity for the spirit of the Father and for our souls to prepare us to leave these bodies freely, with complete peace of mind and with dignity.
For all this I humbly invite you, but with a tremendous passion, to look straight ahead at the future, calmly, with intelligent resignation, and live each moment, each hour, each event, each instant that you have here, in this revolving sphere. of space, as if it were the last. Remember that when our time to be here, in this material state, runs out and the failures that will inexorably lead us to the cessation of our lives of flesh and blood begin, to achieve in those moments, which will surely be of a sublime uncertainty, looking at death, face to face, with grace, with peace, calm and confident, and what will give us that stillness will be our correct behavior. We must understand that we will begin the endless journey towards the infinite and eternal, concepts that our little minds in this state cannot translate for us.
It is also very important to talk a little about the evolution that the concept of death has undergone through the passage of time. For the savage of the first times of the human being, approximately 1,000,000 years ago, violent death was common among them due to the terrible dangers to which they were exposed, the hunting of wild animals, ice ages, earthquakes, floods, etc. . They were not clear that death was natural and that it would happen to everyone, no, in the beginning of the species they associated it only with accidents. Then they began to see that aging existed and that people died, ceased to exist for no apparent reason or motivation, and this brought them many doubts and uncertainties. This fact cost the human being ages. From there the primitive concept of ghosts was born, dreaming of the dead was interpreted in many good and bad ways. They interpreted the vapor that we exhale with the cold as life escaping from them, the same thing happened with sneezing and then little by little, slow as evolution is, they began with the subject of spirits and began thinking that these became beings. very powerful, who had to be kept very happy since they feared their fury with horror, which they appeased with all kinds of offerings. Those poor people were terrified by bad ghosts, bad spirits, bad luck, etc. You can imagine what a series of sneezes 4 or 6 was like, due to an allergy or a cold, they were terrified “My life is gone.” This evolved into the primitive concept that we are one body and one spirit.
“The ghost dream was one of the earliest appearing differences between the animal and human types of mind. Animals do not visualize survival after death.” (UB 68:3.2)
Misfortune or bad luck was a very important factor in the lives of men and women who constantly lived under the razor’s edge of a precarious and difficult existence. The idea of chance and luck strongly colored the philosophy of all ancient peoples and even in recent times in the wisdom of Solomon it is written: “I returned and saw that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill; but fate and chance befall them all. For man knows not his fate; as fishes are taken in an evil net, and as birds are caught in a snare, so are the sons of men snared in an evil time when it falls suddenly upon them.” UB 86:1.6
Therefore, the savage among luck, bad or good, ghosts, etc., began to visualize a new concept of future life. From there we can reach the Greeks who believed, for example, that weak men must have weak souls; and thus they invented Hades as the proper place for such anemic souls. The Chinese and ancient Egyptians believed that the soul and the body stayed together, and this led the Egyptians to build the pyramids and efforts to preserve bodies.
All this evolved into fetishes, amulets, magic, totemism and the practice of all kinds of rites, secret societies, etc. Then they started with the sins, the taboo, the renunciation, the humiliation and the sacrifices, the human sacrifice and the cannibalism, the redemption and the pacts, the sacraments and the remission of the sins and all this handled skilfully by shamans, healers, sorcerers. and all kinds of priests. Let’s not forget the phallic cults, as reproductive organs and sexual rites of all kinds were thought to be liked by ghosts and spirits.
In India, about 1900 years A. d J.C. the Brahmanical, Vedic, Aryan priesthoods and all kinds of influences from the Dravidian Dekan had for thousands of years and even today we see the theory of reincarnation present. All these theologies can be found in the most recent scriptures of the Hindu faith, the Brahmanas and the Upanishad. It was during the times of the Upanishad writing that Buddhism appeared in India. It spent 1,000 years fighting but failed against Hinduism, and Buddhism in northern India ended up being overwhelmed by the onslaught of militant Islam, with a clear and monotheistic concept of Allah as the supreme god of the universe.
On the other hand, in China, about 600 years A. d. J.C., Lao-Tse and Confucius appeared, and almost in parallel in India another teacher of truth appeared, Gautama Siddhartha. All of them promoted the truth of the soul, the spirit of the Father, death as one more step, one more experience in the evolutionary race towards God. They fought tenaciously against priesthoods, human sacrifices and of all kinds, worship of false idols, etc. And 2000 years ago, the most powerful of all the revelations that this local universe has received, with the incarnation of Jesus Christ on our planet, and the very clear message of the paternity of God our Father and the brotherhood of men. If we would only meditate for a minute on the enormous significance of this, the world would begin to change.
And finally, to close I want to end with a quote from The Urantia Book regarding death: “Love of adventure, curiosity, and dread of monotony—these traits inherent in evolving human nature—were not put there just to aggravate and annoy you during your short sojourn on earth, but rather to suggest to you that death is only the beginning of an endless career of adventure, an everlasting life of anticipation, an eternal voyage of discovery.” ( UB 14:5.10)
Horacio Gamboa Verdugo.
¶ References
- Light and Life Magazine (all old issues): https://aue.urantia-association.org/numeros-antiguos-del-lyv/
| Eugenics: a controversial issue | Luz y Vida — No. 36 — March 2014 — Index | Only the inner life is really creative |