Fear of Death and the Return to Life

The fear of death is a very pervasive fear. It gives rise to anxiety about the future, about the prospect for future loss. It gives rise to an inordinate emphasis on personal safety and security. It conditions people’s perception, how they view their life and their future and the whole world. It is the great price of consciousness. And with the fear of death is the loss of peace and equanimity.

This is the great price of being conscious of one’s future and to be aware of the process of life and death. The animals certainly have instinctual cautions, and they will take evasive action in the face of immediate threat. But they are not concerned about their future demise or of all the myriad possibilities of what could happen to them.

This is the burden of the awareness of life and death. It is the price one pays for having a greater consciousness in a world of change. It is the difficulty an eternal being must face in living in a temporary reality.

A great deal of what religion emphasizes has to deal with the reality of death, the meaning of one’s afterlife and how one can resolve this fundamental conflict, this fundamental paradox between the reality of one’s inner spiritual life and one’s mortality in the world.

This has been the focal point for religion and philosophy, and for social sciences and for human thinking and human preoccupation. It has been the source of tremendous suffering. It is what has kept people from living in the moment, and being present to the moment, and finding the deeper voice that God has placed within them to guide them and to protect them and to lead them to their greater accomplishments in life.

The part of you that has been born in the world and conditioned by the world and educated by the world is constantly afraid of death, and not only loss of your physical vehicle, your physical body, but the loss of everything you value—the loss of your wealth, the loss of your privileges, the loss of your power, the loss of your self-determination, the loss of your relationships, the loss of your home, the loss of your possessions. So predominating this is that it conditions and determines how people will live, how they will respond to the world and what they will do and not do to prepare for the future.

The emphasis on death is all around you—in your media, in the reporting of terrible events all over the world, in the wealthy people’s preoccupation with their health and their physical survival, and with the great dangers that the ever-growing numbers of poor people in the world must face regarding their own fundamental lack of security and provision of vital resources.

It is true to say that people are more focused on death than on life. They are already more dead than they are alive. That is why their worldly mind is constantly driven by having to have more and more and more—even beyond any reasonable acquisition or provision—more and more, trying to quell the anxiety, the insecurity that is so fundamental to living in a temporary reality. People are so afraid to die because regardless of their religious beliefs and reassurances, they think they are losing everything. They think they are gambling everything as if there either is nothing on the other side or it will be so disappointing, so insignificant compared to what they have now.

The reality of death is so with people, even on an unconscious level, that they really have difficulty experiencing life. They are dying a thousand and ten thousand times over through their concerns and anxieties, through their apprehension, through their terror, through their denial, through their avoidance, through their compulsive consumption. They are dying over and over again, as if life is nothing more than simply trying to mitigate the inevitable death.

But you see, you were sent into the world for a greater purpose, and this greater purpose is what illuminates your life, what gives it value and meaning, purpose and direction. Those who sent you here know that this is like a tour of duty; it is temporary. And it is important that life in the physical is temporary because it is fundamentally difficult.

Even if you acquire so much wealth that you never see the evidence of human suffering and death, which would be quite an absurd existence, even if you condition your mind in thinking in such a way that the anxiety about death and loss has a very minimal impact upon you, you are still living in a very compromised environment—an environment of constant change, constant adaptation, constant problem solving, constant renegotiating what you must do, where you must go, how to be with people, how to be with situations, how to be with yourself.

To the soul, it is like a tour of duty. It is like a mission. It is like going from a wonderful place to a difficult place to make a contribution. That is what being in the world is to your soul. Because you live in your mind, which has been born in the world and conditioned by the world and identified with the world, the specter of change, the specter of loss, all the realities of life that can become so amplified here, now completely dominate you. And sadness and loss and grief are inevitable here.

If you really try to be without fear, how will you be able to love anything—any person, any place, nature, any possession, any experience? They are all temporary, you see. At some point you will not have them anymore, at least not here. And regarding your relationships, certainly you will meet them again but under very different circumstances, and you do not know what they are.

What returns you to life is Knowledge within you, the greater Mind that the Creator has given you and the purpose for which you have come, which is stored safely in Knowledge within you, and which will arise gradually as you begin to move in a true direction in your life.

It is not as if the awareness of death or the anxiety of death disappears entirely here. It is that they are overshadowed by something far more significant, far more important. For without this greater purpose, without this greater Intelligence within you, life then becomes a struggle for survival, a desperate attempt to secure and maintain temporary pleasures, a quest for power, a struggle, a competition.

However you look at it, it is without hope. It is fundamentally miserable. It is fundamentally insecure. It is fundamentally full of anxiety. You can pretend and try to keep all of these things at bay, believing and indulging in what you want and what you have and the prospect of having more and so forth. But within yourself, you are running scared. You are running wild, trying to keep one step ahead of the truth and the reality within yourself.

That is why people cannot be still. That is why people need constant stimulation. That is why people need to be preoccupied every waking moment so they do not have to feel their condition. Unable now to be with themselves, unable now to be with anything really, they must race from thing to thing. They must be constantly engaged in conversation and must have constant stimulation.

This is truly the sign of desperation, whether a person is rich or whether they are poor. They are desperately running away from themselves. And because of this, they are running away from the one thing that could save them and serve them and strengthen them and give them the great antidote to fear.

Knowledge within you, the deeper Mind within you that represents your true and permanent reality, it is not afraid. It has, however, one concern and that is that you will not follow it, that you will not pay attention to it, that you will not take the steps to becoming aware of it, regaining your relationship with it. Its one concern is that it cannot reach you.

This concern is different from fear. It is really about wasting a tremendous opportunity in life. If you do not find and follow Knowledge within yourself in this life, you go home to your Spiritual Family with your gifts ungiven, with your presents unopened, and you return to your learning group, who has been assigned to you, and you realize, “Oh, my God. I didn’t do it. I didn’t give what I wanted to give. I didn’t do what I wanted to do. I forgot. I want to go back. When can I go back?”

Then, well, you have to wait for the right time, for the right opportunity, for the right engagements. And you may not even be assigned to this world. You may have to go to some other world. You may have to wait a long time.

So anxious you are to give what you want to give, to establish your reality, your permanent reality, within your awareness while you are living in a temporary reality. So important this is. You realize it. You see it. It is clear as day. You know it to be true. Free now from all the anxieties and concerns over loss and survival and acquisition and pleasure and wealth and so forth, your true purpose shines like the sun.

But here in this world at this time, the sun is hidden by many clouds. These clouds create great confusion, great anxiety, great suffering and great misapplication of your time and energy, a misunderstanding of the purpose of your relationships, wasteful expenditure of your resources.

God has given you an antidote to fear. It is an antidote to everything that preoccupies you and keeps you frightened, keeps you desperate, keeps you running, keeps you trying to escape, keeps you addicted and a slave to other forces. But to find it, you must return to yourself. You must stop your desperate attempts. You must slow yourself down. You must create an opening in your life and must continue to do this to re-establish over time your fundamental relationship with Knowledge, which is your fundamental relationship with yourself and through this, your relationship with God.

You cannot come to God as a desperate, frantic person overwhelmed with fear and anxiety or rage, indignation and prejudice. You will go to some other god with these attitudes, with these conditions. You cannot go to God like this because you will not be able to experience the Presence of God in your life, which will provide you all the reassurance you need and the reminder that you are only here temporarily and that your life in the world, regardless of your circumstances, is really a tremendous sacrifice to be here. It cannot compare with your Ancient Home.

But when you experience the Presence of God, when you experience the reality of Knowledge within yourself, then you have these reminders. You have these experiences. You have this sense that “Well, my life is really about something else, and I must find out what that is, and I must follow what is given me to follow to find out what that is, over time.” For a simple definition will not answer it. An explanation will not answer it. A nametag will not answer it. Declaring yourself to be this or to be that will not answer it. This is the return to life. This is coming back to what is really life within you and really life within the world.

Everything in the world is here playing its part, but human beings are having a real difficult time in playing their parts. Aware of their death, aware of their temporary existence and all of the mental and physical illness that arises out of this; all of the compulsion, all of the rage, all of the indignation have given rise to a world where humanity is not playing its part, where individuals are not playing their part, where you are not yet playing your part. It is like a shift from living in a state of darkness and self-avoidance to living in a state of purpose and self-engagement. It creates a total revolution, as if you have gone 360 degrees. You have completely shifted.

During this shift, things begin to change for you—your values, your priorities, what you seek in your relationships, the qualities you want to experience within yourself. And as you [under]take this shift, as you go through this transition, you see, you begin to regain a sense of power and purpose and competence.

The fear of this and all that is associated with it is still there, but it is becoming weaker, not so predominating now. You become less concerned about what is happening in the world, which is ultimately just a concern about one’s survival and the loss of one’s privileges and entitlements and the loss of the things that one loves and values. There is a shift away from this overarching anxiety to a sense of purpose: “Regardless of what happens, I’m here to do certain things, and I must find my way to do those things. I must follow the voice that tells me where to go and what to do and what not to do. And I must watch the signs, and I must feel the impulses within myself and learn to distinguish them from my own compulsions or ideas.”

People have a very incorrect notion of what redemption is. They think redemption is behaving well and then going to have a reward in Heaven. This is ridiculous. You are not ready for Heaven. Even if your behavior is very commendable, you are still full of rage and anxiety and condemnation and judgment and conflict. You still cannot even be with yourself, so how are you going to be with God? You cannot be still for a moment. How are you going to enter a realm of eternal stillness? You cannot really give yourself to another very effectively. How are you going to give yourself to all of Creation?

People think that Heaven is like a reward for being a good boy or a good girl or following the religious edicts or believing what you are told to believe. You cannot return to your Ancient Home if that is your emphasis. What are you going to do, wait at the gates forever?

You have to come into the world to fulfill a purpose. It is that purpose that redeems you. It is that service that restores to you the memory and the sense of your Ancient Home. It is this purpose and this awareness that dispels and weakens the weight of the world on you.

Then if you are a success, death is looked at very differently. It is still an anxiety-provoking event, certainly. “Oh, my God what will happen? Oh, my God, I’m not going to be here any more. Oh, my God, what will remain? What will happen? What will be next?” But in your heart there is a sense of completion and relief. “It is ok. I’m ready to move on. I have done what I came here to do to the best of my ability. I’m not sure what I did, but I did something and it feels right and I think I’m ready to go on to the next thing.”

It is a natural progression, you see. But if your work has [not been done] here, that produces another kind of anxiety and represents a deeper need within you. It does make a difference, you see, whether you achieve your goals here or not. It makes a fundamental difference in the quality and the meaning of your life and how you will view death at the end. Will death then be a natural and anticipated transition? Or will it carry with it a great sense of failure and discouragement?

The return to life is the return to Knowledge and the return to the purpose that has brought you into the world. This happens gradually through many stages because to go through such a great transition from being a person who is a product of the world to being a person who has been sent into the world by God, that is not a cosmetic makeover of oneself. You do not rearrange your wardrobe, simply.

You have to go through a great transition in yourself. You have to bring to bear the power of Knowledge in your relationships, in your decisions, in your work, regarding your health, where you are, what you are doing, who you are with, everything. The application goes everywhere. You cannot simply be a foolish person and have a few subtle thoughts or great ideas.

For Knowledge brings with it responsibility and a sense of commitment. Here the real anxiety is whether you can accomplish what you came to accomplish, for if you do not, you will be disappointed. You will go Home to your Spiritual Family, and you will be disappointed. You will feel that your journey in the world was unsuccessful, that you were seduced and overwhelmed and persuaded and lost. At that point, you will see clearly what happened to you and the great lost opportunity that your life was.

Now it is very important to realize that your intellect cannot manufacture your purpose. It cannot even comprehend your purpose in its entirety. It can only see the evidence of purpose. It can only see the signs. You cannot sit down and figure this out. If you try to create an explanation or a philosophy, you are still up at the surface. You have not gone deep enough. You are trying to create your reality instead of finding the reality that created you, that is directing you, and that is taking you somewhere, as it has a plan for you.

Some people think this leads to a kind of passivity where they just sit around and God tells them what to do. But this is not correct at all. You have to be the captain of your ship. God will tell you where to sail and what your cargo is, but you have to manage your mind. You have to manage your behavior. You have to manage your affairs. You have to make important decisions. You have to rise to the occasion of your life. You have to regain your strength, your composure and your focus.

People think you just be like a little child, and God just moves your life around. That is just a desire to be irresponsible. “I’ll give it all to God to do it. I’ll just hang out somewhere.” There is no welfare here. There is no spiritual welfare. You do not simply go and collect every week your paycheck from Heaven. You were sent here to achieve certain things with certain people. You cannot be fooling around. You cannot drop the ball and go sit down somewhere for the rest of your life. You cannot be idiotic.

You have to get serious about what you are doing, where your energy is going, where you are losing energy, the relationships that are taking energy away from you even right now, the journeys you are taking that lead nowhere, the misuse of your time, the misuse of your resources, the misuse and application of your love and attention.

People love all kinds of things that have nothing to do with who they are and why they are here. This is not preparing them for the Great Waves of change that are coming in the future. People love knick-knacks. They love things that are so inconsequential, and then they feel inconsequential. They devote themselves to things that have no inherent meaning; therefore, they feel they have no inherent meaning.

In time, the experience of Knowledge and the experience of resonance with others and shared purpose with others will be the things that you value the most. Everything else will fall in line after that. And nothing else will be really that important, unless it represents something you are here specifically to do for the well-being of the world and the well-being of humanity, or the well-being of whoever you are assigned to serve or whatever you are here to do, which is waiting for you to discover.

What was meaningful before is not so meaningful now. What was significant before is not so significant now, for that significance has been given to something greater and more fundamental and more authentic and genuine within you.

God saves you while you are here by giving you something important to do. It has already been given to you. People pray to God for all kinds of things, but they are neglecting the real endowment from God, the real gift from God, which is something beyond their ideas and their beliefs, something fundamental to their nature and reality of their Being.

Everyone who comes into the world gets lost in the world. Your first job is to find your way back, to get out of the state of being lost, being groundless, like a rudderless ship that is simply being blown all over the place. You have to get your bearings. You have to come back and listen to your deeper experience.

That is why in taking the Steps to Knowledge, one of the first things you learn is to become still and observant so you can begin to experience your deeper experience. Otherwise, it is all overlaid with your frantic thinking and your frantic behavior, your loves, your passions, your hobbies, your obsessions, your conflicts, your grievances, your campaigns. There is no time to experience the deeper current of your life here.

The New Message from God has provided a way to regain your relationship with your ancient Knowledge, and with it the purpose that has brought you here, and the direction that you really need to follow. For the promise of redemption would mean nothing if the means for its accomplishment were not provided. And they have been provided. They have been provided through religions through the centuries too, but people do not seem to understand the deeper meaning here.

Religion has become a kind of consolation, kind of a shelter. It is not seen as a requirement. It is not seen as a responsibility. It is not taken seriously by many people. It is just part of what they consume in the world. So they use it for consolation, for reassurance, but they do not see that it really carries with it a greater responsibility. And here the responsibility is to Knowledge fundamentally, not to laws and edicts and rules that do not represent Knowledge.

People try to please God. They pray to God. They worship God. They fall down on their knees. They flagellate themselves. And they think that this appeases a judgmental, angry God, or this pleases a God that needs to be pleased, a God that needs to be worshiped. This is the God that they have invented.

The real God is acknowledged when you begin to respond to what God has put within you, and when you carry out what God has given for you to carry out in this life. That is the real meaning of religion. That is real spirituality. That is how you become close to God. That is how you please God. All this clanging and banging and worshipping—if that regenerates the memory of God and the sense of responsibility to God, then it is very good. But for many people, it is just a lot of noise and moving around.

Your fundamental engagement with God is by returning to Knowledge; by finding your way back from being in a lost state in the world; by learning to be still and observant; by learning to yield, to be humble; by learning to set aside, even for a few moments, your ambitions, your goals, your driving needs, your obligations—to listen more deeply.

God does not need worship, but God does need for you to carry out what you came here to do, and to learn how to do this over time; and to not invent the journey for yourself; and to not pretend that you understand when you do not understand; and not to be irresponsible or passive but to undergo this preparation, this return to your Source and your strength, your purpose and your direction. This is the return to life.

If you cannot return to life here in this world, you have not advanced; you have not progressed. You could go home to your Spiritual Family, but you will want to come back. You will see the need. It will be evident to you. You will not be deluded by the world. You will not be consumed by the world. You will not be terrified by the world. You will just see what has to happen, and you will want to get back in the game, you see. You want to get back to do what you came here to do, to re-experience your Ancient Home while you are in the world, to stay close to the truth that lives within you, the greater reality of Knowledge.

The presence of Knowledge lives within you. It is behind the stillness that you experience when you finally calm down. It is ten paces back from the darkness that lives within your mind, the darkness that is just emptiness beneath the level of your frantic thinking and your firm beliefs. Knowledge is just there, a powerful Presence, a Presence that is not corrupted by the world, that is not fooled by the world, that is not afraid of the world, a Presence that knows who it is, why it is here, that will focus on setting a direction and fulfilling certain needs.

You live life at two levels, the life at which you think and the life at which you know. It is to return to the life that you know that represents redemption, and the return to God, and to wholeness and to integrity within yourself. If you can move in this direction, then death, well, it is just a transition. It will still make you nervous. You might still avoid it, but it does not carry such a weight now. It is not governing your life. It is not overwhelming you at every moment. It is not like a dark cloud that hangs over you in everything that you do.

In the world, people are depressed because they are not connected to Knowledge. They have seen the shallowness and the temporary nature of human acquisition and human success, but they have nothing to take its place, and so they feel empty. They feel the lack of real direction in their lives. They are empty.

If you are fully engaged truly in your life, you just will not have time for certain kinds of personal indulgences. You will not have time to be constantly worried about yourself, worried about your happiness, worried about your thoughts, worried about all these things. There just will not be time. You will be engaged somewhere else.

God has given you something more important to do, and you are doing that, and it takes up a lot of your time and a lot of your energy, you see. You just do not have time to fall back into those old dark places. You do not have time to go into the house and be in a rut, for your life is moving. You are moving.

So whatever circumstance you are in, ask within yourself, “How can I find Knowledge within myself? What do I need to do now to find Knowledge within myself? How can I return to the real certainty that lives within me, certainty born of God? What is it I need to do in my life right now that will free me to do this, to find out these things?” Ask yourself, “Where am I losing energy to other people or to other activities?” Ask yourself, “Who am I obliged to and is that obligation correct and really appropriate?”

Find a place where you can be still. Learn the Steps to Knowledge that God has provided. Use them. Apply them. Follow them patiently. Your life will not change in a day, a week, or a month, but it will change profoundly if you proceed.

The experience of Knowledge is not simply having a whole new set of ideas, a different theory of life. It is more like having openings in the mind, through which greater messages can come to you, through which you can interpret and see the signs of the world, through which you can listen to your own experience.

If the mind is like a windowless room, then nothing can come in. You are sealed inside of it, trapped, a prisoner, a slave to your own ideas and beliefs. But experiencing Knowledge, it is like the mind with many open windows, through which life can pass through, through which the signs of life outside yourself can speak to you and re-engage you and refresh you. You can open and close those windows when you need to, but they are there, and they let you see out. They let you see life and the world beyond yourself.

For all suffering results from self-obsession. This suffering is escaped by serving something greater than your worldly mind, and being a part of something greater than your little tiny personal reality, and finding greater relationships with other people beyond the desperate attempts at pleasure and romance that you see all around you.

It is time to return to life. The world needs you. God needs you. You need to find your bearings and your true foundation and to build your life upon this true foundation and to take the Steps to Knowledge, which will prepare you for a future that will be unlike the past and which will weaken the hold of the world on you—on your mind, your experience, your emotions and your circumstances.

This is the journey back. This is what will restore you to who you were before you came into the world, to what you will be after you leave the world and to who and what you must be here now