New Renascence Trust

Thoughts for Remembrance

There is no death. Never was there a worse delusion than to say someone is dead when they cease to exist in a body. Matter is merely the temporary clothing that Spirit assumes because we must have material resistance and experience in order to awaken us to the needs of our Spirit.

There should be no mourning, nothing to regret about the passing of a loved one. Remember, all sorrow and regrets actually hurt the one we are anxious to help. They drag him or her back into the condition of our misery, and impose upon them the weight of our grief. As we grown in sensitiveness and sympathy, we recognise that metaphorically to wrap ourselves in sackcloth and ashes is nothing more than a morbid form of self-gratification.

This is because we regard death as a foe which comes as a thief to rob us of those whose presence makes Life for us, and so we mourn our loss. We have not really lost the one we love. To lose something generally implies that it has gone for ever, that it is irretrievable. When we say that something is lost, we are assuming that for practical purposes, it has ceased to exist. When we mourn the loss of a loved one, it is not that they have ceased to be, but that we have ceased to be conscious of their presence because they have left their bodily tenement and are no longer materially with us.

If we have loved their essential self, their Spirit (although it is natural that we should also love its expression in the body), then death cannot rob us of that love or destroy that union. If we merely love that which is terrestrial and superficial, then there must come a day when the one who inhabits that ephemeral physical form will withdraw from the earthly scene, and if our love has risen no higher than the case which enshrines the Spirit, then with the disintegration of the form, will come the death of our love.

So, the question we have to ask ourselves is this: Were we ever in touch with the Reality of the one whose loss we mourn? Did we love their inner being, or was our love merely for the physical vehicle that partially enclosed them for a few years?

This is a searching question, difficult for most of us to answer, for the average person is so confused as to what it is they love in their dear ones, that when the physical form with which they have become familiar is removed, they feel like strangers to the Reality that persists; it is beyond their perception, so they experience a sense of separation, a break in connection and continuity.

It is a natural inclination for most of us, therefore, to long to have some message from those who have passed beyond our sight, some reassurance that all is well with them, and to resort to one of the various methods of attempting to make psychic contact. We must not condemn any effort to find consolation in this way, but it is good to remember that to find profitable consolation, unusual purity of purpose, self-transcension and absence of superstition and sentimentality is required.

Sensitives intervening on our behalf must be reaching out to the highest forms of love and light to enable their communication to be true. The lower ethers are peopled with innumerable souls and there are a host of influences vibrations, even deceptions circulating often aimlessly as on earth, in the immediate surround of our planet and all intentions have to be very clear and potent to act as a line of Light to penetrate these vapours.

A quiet Spirit and a restful body help us to overcome the sense of separation from those we love. We owe it to them to keep ourselves strong and confident that we may be worthy of their love.

There is no death, except for those who incarcerate themselves in the prison of materialism. For death only happens in matter, through matter. When we quicken and intensify our vibrations to transmute matter, so that it does not become a clog, a weight that depresses us with the gloom of gravitation, we rise to where the spirit lives.

The people who are afraid to die are those who have not learned to Live. Death in fact becomes a friend who takes their hand to lead them into a higher realm, where they will find more and better fulfilment that they have been able to discover here. We who love their Spirit should not seek to hold them to the confines of earth. Death is a progress, we should be more than willing that they should go on. But this does not mean they go from us, if we take their passing from the plane of earth as an incentive for us to grow in understanding of that which is invisible, intangible to our mortal senses.

Then the words that David uttered in his grief become the expression of a principle, charged with vital meaning: “I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me”.

“Spirit with Spirit shall blend” where the motive is clear and the perception sensitive and strong.

This communion, this communing with Spirit, is not reserved for those who have attained a state of perfection. None of us is capable of reaching such a condition at any stage in the journey of our Spirit through matter. For those who through the impulse of love, choose the path that liberates the Spirit, this communion will become a progressive realisation, and they will actually be helping those who have passed from the earthly scene in their upward climb to the realms of Light.

Unconscious, the Spirit began its pilgrimage through matter, and through the educative processes of incarnation, it earns its fulfilment in consciousness. As we grow in that consciousness, we shall know that our loved ones have not gone; that there are not two worlds, the ‘here’ and the ‘hereafter’, but that all that is of the quality of Life is here and now, deathless and indivisible.

From the Book ‘Think Again’ by Rev Ian Fearn