The inner person expands and grows to the point where those bodies that we brought with us when we were born no longer serve us.
Robert: Welcome to Inner Sight. Inner sight is simply seeing that which is always present but not yet fully recognized. You have within you the ability to see yourself and the world around you in a new way with new eyes, so stay with us, and together we’ll look at the world and ourselves with inner sight. Our topic for today is life and death. All the work of Lucis Trust emanates from the literature of Alice Bailey, and she is our founder. She wrote twenty-four volumes of literature that can best be described as spiritual philosophy literature, and all of the dialogue that you’ll hear from this show has been really influenced by the works of Alice Bailey, as is this thought: “Our ideas about death have been erroneous; we have looked upon it as the great and ultimate terror, whereas in reality it is the great escape, the entrance into a fuller measure of activity, and the release of the life from the crystallized vehicle and an inadequate form.” Can you imagine if we could lose our fear of death? Well, that’s one of the reasons why we’re doing this show, and perhaps at the end of the show you’ll agree with Edgar Allan Poe who said that death is only the birth of our immortality. I hope he’s right. Could you explain what Alice Bailey meant by the crystallized vehicle and an inadequate form? I don’t know; I hope you do. (laughter)
Sarah: I’m not sure I do either. Crystallization is a reference to the stiffening or hardening and the atrophying of the body. Those of us who suffer from a touch of arthritis know very well what crystallization is. We get stiffer and our joints creak and they’re less fluid and responsive to the brain’s signal for movement. That’s an example of crystallization, but it happens on all levels of the physical form. The fluidity of the young body can transmit energy of all sorts; vitality becomes gradually less and less because the body—the shell through which the spirit expresses itself—becomes more hardened and less responsive and malleable. It’s something that happens to all levels of life that live in a physical form, not just the human. It happens in the natural world and it’s cyclic, it’s periodic. We are entering into the fall now in the northern hemisphere, and the leaves will start to turn red and green and gold and brown, and it’s very beautiful. That’s an example of crystallization because the leaves no longer conduct the chlorophyll process as they did in spring and summer. They are becoming less and less vital in their capacity to create chlorophyll, and so they become dry and eventually will fall off the tree. There’s great beauty to it; it’s part of the cycle. Those leaves will fall onto the ground, decay and feed the earth, and next spring new life will return. This happens in the animal kingdom and the human kingdom too. So, it’s part of the cycle of life in form, and yet when you think about the words, “the crystallized vehicle” and “the inadequate form,” it sounds like you’ve failed and it isn’t a failure to get old and for the body to wear out. We wear out our clothes. We wear out our cars, we wear out our shoes and we don’t say that those garments failed. They just were used up and had their life span and are done. The same thing is true on a more significant level, obviously, but it still applies to the physical body. That’s our garment too. It’s the garment of the soul. We wear it out through use, and death is the discarding of it, but it’s just the garment, the outer shell.
Dale: That’s right, and crystallization doesn’t mean only the physical form, as you mentioned, it also applies to the mind because many of our ideas become crystallized and fixed, and our attitudes become hardened and fixed, and we are not able to change after a certain age. It seems like we’re fixed in our patterns and in the way we think, so that’s a certain kind of crystallization that sets in. But as you imply, this can be a good thing, a stage that every form has to go through. Sometimes crystallization reaches a point where it’s on the verge of breaking up, and that’s why crystallization happens because these forms do have to break up. It’s part of the process. The old forms are inadequate as it says in that quote, an “inadequate form.” It’s inadequate to contain and express something new and fresh and creative.
Sarah: It was probably adequate at the time of its birth.
Dale: It too has gone through that cycle when one’s thinking in the early days was fresh and creative, but eventually that has to all break up.
Sarah: I wish we could think of life in form the way we do a young child’s growth. The child grows, and they outgrow their shoes and their clothes, and that’s considered a sign of progress. Well, in a way, we outgrow our outer garments: our physical body, our emotional nature, our mental nature. We outgrow them, meaning we the soul. The inner person expands and grows to the point where those bodies that we brought with us when we were born no longer serve us. What takes over that you mentioned is what’s called in the Ageless Wisdom the “destroyer aspect,” and it’s actually a beneficent process. We think probably of destruction as something bad, but only if you are so tied into the preservation of some form at any and all costs could destruction seem to be bad. When it comes at the right moment it’s a release, a freeing of something that might be captive.
Dale: Yes, I was thinking the same thing. We’re too focused on the form and if we can focus less on the form and more on what is being released by the breaking up of that form—as you said, we tend to see the breaking up of a form as something destructive and horrible. But if we can learn to look at what’s being released, what is being liberated— whether it be a human form or a species of plant or animal or a planet or a solar system for that matter—we see these great explosions out in space and we think something horrible is happening but really, think about what is being released and liberated at that point—then you’ll have a different perspective.
Robert: When you say we focus too much on our form, are you saying Dale that we identify with our form to the extent that we feel that we are our form? Is that what you’re saying?
Dale: Well, yes, in the early stages there is too close an identity, and that’s why we hold on to the form because there is that close identity.
Robert: In the opening thought I quoted Alice Bailey, and in essence she said that mankind’s ideas about death are erroneous. What is erroneous about our current ideas on death?
Sarah: Well, there are a number of things that are skewed, you could say, in our approach to death. One might be that we think that the death of the body is the end of life, and it’s not. If we think of it as the release of the life within the body, then we can see it as a process of liberation rather than an end. The only thing that comes to an end is the garment, the shell, which is the physical body. This was really made vivid to me recently when Dale and I were walking in a forest in the northwest coastal area of North America. When you walk in a forest out there, you see all kinds of life and death all mixed in together. It was the red cedar trees, which are huge, that most caught my attention because they had fallen down in the forest, as is natural and they were disintegrating into dust; just like the Bible said, “ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” they were disintegrating. But out of this pile of red cedar dust and the carcass of the old tree, new life was already growing and some of the trees that were growing literally out of the decaying corpse of the old cedar were already huge! It was a sign to me of how we don’t understand the process of death as making possible further life. It’s actually not only beneficent; it’s necessary. Those trees have to die to make new life possible, because the new life builds upon and feeds off of the old life.
Dale: Also, I think there’s some erroneous ideas about burial and cremation. We have such an identification with the form and with that person as being the physical body. There is the hope that the person has, for example, gone to heaven and yet our ideas about heaven and hell are erroneous at best and confusing. I think that’s all part of the illusions that we carry around with us.
Sarah: Well, again, it’s focusing on the body and the preservation of the body, embalming it or whatever process one undergoes, as if the spirit still resides in that body. Of course, here we’re on a delicate area because there are religious traditions that do believe the spirit remains connected to the body, and that’s a matter of deep belief and I don’t want to offend them, but it is in a certain extent a mistaken idea, that the body, the physical nature, is the whole sum total of being, when in fact it’s a vehicle similar to a car. The Bhagavad Gita of ancient Hinduism talks of the physical form as a chariot—in those days they didn’t have cars, they had chariots and horses, and the chariot is the body but it’s not the true being. So, it depends on where we put our focus. If we think that the whole sum total of ourselves is tied up in our body, then the death of that body is a terrible thing. If we think that the sum total of our being is in our consciousness, consciousness doesn’t need a physical body. It can work through one, but with limitation actually. From what I’ve read it sounds as if the consciousness is actually freer and more expansive when it doesn’t have to work through a brain and a body.
Dale: Yes, the brain is of great limitation on the sensitivity and the range of the consciousness.
Robert: So, could you also compare the body to an article of clothing such as a coat?
Sarah: Yes.
Robert: When we think of death, really, it’s no more than changing coats or leaving the car or losing a car, which we all go through. And that would probably be a much more logical perception of it, right?
Sarah: Yes. I don’t want to minimize the process of grief, because having lived through that, we all know that that is a tremendous and terrible event. But that’s really something that pertains to the living. What we’re talking about is the passing on of a particular individual; for that person it’s liberation.
Robert: Are life and death really opposites, as so many people think?
Sarah: I don’t think so. I think death and life are equal. There’s an ancient scripture that says, “Life is one and nought can take or touch that life.” Life is one and nought can take or touch that life regardless of whether we’re speaking of life in the body or out of the body. I think what are opposites are life and form, although even those are not eternal opposites. The whole trend of our evolutionary process is to merge life and form into one whole, and that will happen as spirit—pure life—can maintain its awareness while expressing through the physical plane. It’s a matter of merging the consciousness of pure spirit and physical matter. When that happens, then there will be no opposite, even on the level of life and form, but for now, at our present level of consciousness, they are. It’s the fact that we are so tied into our individuality and to our separateness that I think makes us think that the death of our personality and our body are the end of us. That’s where the whole dilemma is centred. That’s what the Buddha tried to teach: that we are not forever separated entities but actually fragments of a whole.
Dale: Right, and I don’t know that you could say that life and death are actually opposites. I see it, and maybe I’m completely wrong here, but I see death as part of the process of life. It’s one of the processes that makes life go on because death is not really the end of life, life continues to exist. Life does not arise out of our physical body and brain. It does not begin at conception and end at birth. Life is that vital essence that animates all forms, a human form or an animal or a vegetable, or even a planet for that matter. All these forms are animated by the one life of God, and death is just the process that disintegrates the form, but the living being within the form continues on. At least, that’s my way of viewing it.
Sarah: I think, too often we think of death as something that’s almost an accident that is kind of a personal offence or a failure rather than something that’s not only normal, but actually the soul’s choice. If we could view death as an interlude, not a finality, and as a matter of the soul’s choice at the right time, I think it would really transform this sense of disaster that surrounds the whole issue of death. Someone dies and our response immediately is: “Oh, that’s too bad.” Well, it might be if it’s a premature death, yes, it is a tragedy. But for many people it comes at the right moment for the soul. The soul has completed its intended purpose for that particular cycle and it’s the right time. I think people do sense this because they will say, “it was his time,” and I think that’s an indication that on an intuitive level we do understand that death is governed by law. Another thing that we need to remember is that everything that lives on Earth must die, everything, absolutely everything will die. Alice Bailey said that this interplay of the principle of death with the principle of life produces the basic activity of creation—it’s all part of the creative process, life and death. All is governed by the mind of God, she said, and she said it is literally true nevertheless, that “not a sparrow falleth without its fall being noticed” by those who watch and guide our planet’s life. I think that’s something you either believe or don’t believe. I believe it and I find great comfort in it.
Robert: Is there any way we can prepare for death while still living fully, joyfully and positively? We tend to go into denial about death so then we never really prepare for it. How can we prepare?
Sarah: Well, one way that occurs to me is by developing a practice of meditation, because in that you are developing the subjective aspect of life, you’re learning to focus your consciousness on a more abstract inner level rather than being focused on the outer plane of activity all the time. Meditation abstracts the mind and that’s preparation for the final abstraction when the soul withdraws from the body.
Dale: You mention abstraction when we abstract from the body. It’s written very clearly in the Bailey books that we do this every night when we go to sleep.
Sarah: Eek! (laughter) But we come back.
Dale: But we come back. What departs from the body is the consciousness part of us. The life part of us is still retained and contained by the body and it’s still attached to the body. The consciousness leaves and then when we wake up, it returns. If you’re aware of this, when you go to sleep at night, then that’s one way to begin to think about and prepare perhaps for the great transition when it does come.
Sarah: Yes, to develop that alert consciousness as you slip into sleep is something that takes a lot of effort, but that’s a major way of preparing for the final severing of the cord that links the soul to the body. I came across an interesting statement in a book called the Tibetan Book of The Dead that touched on what you’re saying about sleep. It said that the content of the nightly dream state is to quite a large extent, the product of the daytime waking state. So, what we dream about at night is pretty much a picture of what was going on in our minds when we were awake and that the reverse is also true, that the product of our waking state—our consciousness as we go through our daily life—is a reflection of where our consciousness was in our dream state. They’re more merged and reflecting of each other than we realize.
Robert: Very interesting.
Sarah: It should give us pause in how we preoccupy ourselves during the day.
Dale: I think also a good practice is just trying to live a good life of goodwill and love, because these are the great energies that pull us through on the other side when we do make that transition.
Sarah: The old saw that “you can’t take it with you” isn’t true. You do take it with you in the sense of what you have just said: the quality of your life you definitely take with you.
Dale: That affects what you encounter on the other side of the veil too, which we can go into some other time, but these are all interesting things to keep in mind.
Robert: That’s about all the time we have for our discussion today. You’ve been listening to Inner Sight. Now we would like to close with a world prayer called the Great Invocation. It’s a call for light and love and goodwill to flow into the world and into our hearts. Let’s listen for a moment to these powerful words.
Sarah: Closes the program by reciting the adapted version of the Great Invocation.
(This is an edited transcript of a recorded radio program called “Inner Sight.” This conversation was recorded between the host, Robert Anderson, and the then President and Vice-President of Lucis Trust, Sarah and Dale McKechnie.)
(Transcribed and edited by Carla McLeod)
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