The nature of life, naturally, is to be alive. This must be true, then: life cannot be non-life.

Why, then, do we fear death?

Where do we get the notion that life can suddenly become non-life?

In fact, we believe the innate nature of life can suddenly turn into its opposite: non-life.

But life can only be life.

Everything created can only be what it is.

It cannot be what it is not. Even though on the surface, it may temporarily appear to be otherwise.

It’s only in the dualistic state—the state that prevails on Earth—that we live with opposites inside of us. But this state is quite limited, compared to all of creation.

When we embark on a spiritual path, we discover that all opposites are illusion—they are facets of the same oneness. We learn that on the unitive plane, all contradictions can be reconciled.

If there is oneness, it applies to everything.

That means all opposites can be reconciled.

And that regarding life, there can only be life.

Death, then, must be an illusion.

How life actually works

On this planet we call Earth, we are almost always focused on what is in front of our eyes.

We rarely focus on the level of origin—the source of it all.

The way life works, life radiates outward from the source. We can think of these streams of life as energy currents or rays of life. These rays are outer expressions that gradually bring forth life, from its source.

This is how life and divinity—which are the same thing—gradually fill the void. The void is the yet-unfilled universe, if you will, that has not yet been filled with God’s breath.

As God breaths more deeply, the unfilled void is being filled with divinity—with consciousness, with awareness, with light, with eternal life, with love and with goodness.

Once life has penetrated the void, it can never again be a void.

It’s the void’s destiny to become filled with life.

At the edge where life and the void meet, that energy congeals with consciousness. And this hardens into matter.

We have manifestation.

But it’s one step removed from life.

It is enlivened by life—it is animated by life. But it exists on that outer border where life and nothingness meet.

Consciousness cannot penetrate this void in full force. So a gradual process takes place in which smaller fragments of consciousness reunite with their fuller essence as they are temporarily animated by the life spark.

This happens again and again, as consciousness gradually returns.

We call this process evolution.

That’s the nature of the way life must go in returning to wholeness.  

Such an explanation may be interesting—but it is highly metaphysical. If we can’t do something practical with this for our personal development, what good is it, really?

In fact, to use truths like this as mental constructions—without any self-confrontation or link to our growth—is to use spirituality as an escape from ourselves. And when we avoid personal self-development, we fail in fulfilling the task of our incarnation.

So let’s get to work and do something with this.

The core confusion of life

In this sphere of existence, we confuse manifestation—which is animated by eternal life—with eternal life itself. Over time, this will switch as a byproduct of doing our purification work.

What we will come to realize is that life can temporarily withdraw itself from the matter it created. The matter then dissolves back into its original substance.

Life will then animate a new form. This is how evolution moves forward, as an ever-changing process.

Our fear of death arises from being identified with the wrong thing:

We think we are the manifestation that is animated by the source.

We are actually the source.

Our personality, our thinking and feeling, our being and experiencing, our willing and deciding—all that is source.

Non-life can’t do these things.

In our confusion, we have a fear of not being.

Everything we are right now—even in chaos and confusion—can never not be.

In our being, we can mold the world we manifest. We can expand our consciousness, our creative ability and our sense of who we really are.

Yet somewhere, somehow, in some part of ourselves, we believe that when we withdraw our life from the matter we created, we will cease to be.

It simply is not so.

Not only will our limited personality continue, so will our potential. And they will continue to increase in self-awareness. Eventually, we’ll discover this about our unlimited continuity.

Then matter and source will merge.

Our work is to overcome whatever prevents this from happening.

Fear of death is one of those obstructions.

Another is our approach to the self as we progress on our path of purification. Here, the issue is related to our confusion about accepting the self with its destructive Lower Self ways.

Because these are not easy to look at.

Yet we must see the damaging effects of our Lower Self for what they are.

The problem is that we confuse self-acceptance and self-forgiveness with overlooking the Lower Self—with condoning its negative ways.

We also confuse self-devastating guilt and self-hate with honestly admitting what’s wrong with us, and that needs to be changed. This confusion keeps us stuck.

Either approach makes it hard to do the necessary work of growing and expanding, which is how we become one with God.

Here is the dilemma. We do have to accept and forgive our negative aspects. We do need to see them in context with the rest of ourselves.

But that doesn’t mean we condone them.

By now, this may seem like a common refrain in these teachings.

That’s because it is—and it bears repeating.

For we stumble over this, again and again.

Why we fear change—and death

It is true that we must accept and forgive ourselves, without condoning our negative aspects. This reality becomes entangled with our fear of death—our fear of non-life—in two apparently opposite ways.

First, we believe—either consciously or unconsciously—that one of the worst punishments is threat of extinction.

We don’t want to be snuffed out.

When we don’t forgive ourselves, it triggers this fear. That brings this threat of being extinguished—along with our fear of death—front and center.

Second, our fear of death creates a fear of movement. This goes against what it means to be in reality.

Because life is always on the move.

From our perspective, movement stops when we die.

It seems to us that time is always moving forward. Life, then, appears to be a constant movement in the direction of dying.

Change, it would seem, is what accelerates the process of dying. If that’s the case, being immobile should stop time—right?

This explains why we resist and distrust change—and therefore growth.

This illusion that we can stop time by stopping movement is so primitive, it borders on superstitious. Yet we all harbor such misconceptions within.

They are buried forms of immature reasoning.

We’re almost ferocious in the way we hold onto them, letting them govern our lives.

When our mature mind becomes aware of this, we can hardly comprehend that thoughts like this exist inside us.

In fact, such thoughts are currently running our lives.

The final tragedy is this: stagnation invites decay. It encourages the will of the life force—that animating consciousness—to withdraw and start over.

Why opposites are not opposites

It is our commitment to changing and bringing forward our divine potential that leads us out of duality. For only when two opposites fuse into a unity, can we become charitable with ourselves.

Then we can face our Lower Self with mercy and love.

And we can do so openly—without condoning or explaining away our remaining destructiveness. We won’t need to shift blame onto others, yet we won’t get buried in self-hate.

Not only is this a possibility, but we’ll also come to see that it is a necessity. For on the unitive plane, opposites don’t just tolerate each other—they need each other.

One side is unthinkable without the other.

Once we realize this, we will aspire to bringing out both sides, so we can live in balance.

Through our commitment to moving and changing, we will experience ourselves as beings who must continue to be. No matter how much we change and grow, we ultimately remain who we are.

Ultimately, we are God.

And we become more of this as we bring out more of our potential.

This is not blasphemy.

Everything that exists—everything that lives and breathes—is a manifestation of God. Because God is life and life force.

God is that which enlivens us, which makes us eternal beings. When we stumble once again over self-hate in ourselves, this is a sign that we don’t yet fully realize this.

Or maybe we stumble over our defenses. These are what we use to keep ourselves from feeling the pain of our self-hate.

This happens because we secretly believe our self-hate is justified. And that makes this pain even more unbearable.

We fear the way we are so unforgiving towards ourselves. So we try to counter this with self-coddling and self-indulgence.

In other words, we deny our Lower Self even exists.

All this is a distortion of the unitive qualities of self-respect and self-honesty.

What’s the way out of this maze?

We need to make room for our own divinity. We must realize that our Lower Self is a creation—formed where life meets non-life.

When that life stream met nothingness, at the edge of the void, energy turned into matter. Then consciousness split off into a series of fragments.

Truth and reality just got confused because of the limited perspective of those fragments.

It’s like taking the truth and breaking it up into pieces.

That’s what duality is: limited aspects that have lost track of their relationship to each other.

Now, when our mind looks at two things and sees them as opposites, it becomes confused. And this way we perceive life—as being split—is what creates suffering.

But the mind can become aware of all this.

It can grope with split concepts until it sees how they can be unified.

Doing this takes some courage and a commitment to knowing divine truth. Then we can experience that great unitive reality: truth is love and love is truth.

If we’re not feeling the love, we’re not yet in truth.

A new approach to ourselves

If we commit ourselves to knowing divine truth, we will increasingly experience life as being the all-important thing that it is. And we won’t keep confusing this with the body—the manifestation—that houses the spark.

Our consciousness, which is all we know ourselves to be, is not bound to our body. And yet, particles of our consciousness will remain in every cell—in every molecule and in every atom—of the matter that our consciousness created.

Our bodies, then, are reflections and expressions of our consciousness. But when our consciousness withdraws from this body, it will continue to exist, unaffected and unchanged from the way we know it now.

The body will seem to then disintegrate.

But it too goes through an immense process in which every cell goes on to find new cells and create new forms, making room for new vehicles.

Every cell that is left behind harbors within it a spark—a tiny spark—of that life. Those tiny sparks travel through channels that follow laws of attraction and repulsion. These laws are impossible for human consciousness to understand.

Since every particle of matter contains aspects of consciousness, there can be no cells in a dead body that aren’t expressions of the total personality that enlivened and animated it.

This is what determines the future journey of these cells as they disintegrate and reintegrate.

When cells reunite and form new combinations, they create genes. These genes within the human structure change as consciousness changes. They aren’t the same today as they will be tomorrow and a few years from now, provided the person is growing and moving.

We may be wondering: how does this relate to learning self-forgiveness, on the one hand, and self-confrontation on the other?

This is an important question.

There is a deep but extremely relevant connection between these elements: self-hate, fear of punishment, fear of death and the disintegration of the cell structure that falls into a channel and then is attracted into a new form.

Here is the explanation. Our thoughts are creations. And they have their own cell structure and their own matter. But the density of thought is invisible to us.

Now consider that if we are living in a split-off reality, we are going to need to hate ourselves if we want to face the truth about our Lower Self. Either that, or we are going to have to deny the truth about our Lower Selves in order to not hate ourselves and fear our dying—our not existing.

This locks us into a pattern—creating the same thought forms again and again: confusion and suffering.

But what if we take an entirely new approach to ourselves? Although, to be fair, this is both entirely new and yet not so new.

What if we allowed the God within us—the part we can access the moment we choose—to be in the state of self-love, in the most divine and healthy way? With no trace of self-indulgence or denial of what is currently true in our Lower Self.

Just compassion for our struggle.

Just respect for our wonderful honesty—even if what we’re looking at is our dishonesty.

What if we choose other thoughts than the current patterns we take for granted?

Our habitual peace-robbing thoughts are our worst enemy.

Yet we let them stay.

What if we got a little distance from them and stopped animating them with self-hate, distrust and hopelessness?

Facing our Lower Self means we deserve some mercy when we die —some forgiveness. And how about some of that love we have been praying for, for a long time?

We’ve been asking a God who lives outside us to give us this. To please be kind and merciful and loving to us.

What if we just stopped withholding this from ourselves?

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Read Original Pathwork^® Lecture: #226 Approach to Self – Self-Forgiveness Without Condoning the Lower Self