An insight, Christ and death

I recently had an insight I think is worth something. Awhile back on Plain Path Puritan I wrote a post about how when Paul the apostle says all I want to know is Jesus Christ crucified what he is saying is that is a way to remember *all*, the history and mechanics of redemption as summed up in the name Jesus Christ. It's shorthand and assumes knowledge of what is behind it, the whole.

Then I was thinking that for the Work a similar summing up would be: death.

Because death is the ultimate testing ground for development of being. And the two conscious shocks are eschatological in the moment. With the first you enter the fifth dimension of time, and with the second you enter the sixth. Vertically you break planes. And each is a real *dying* in the moment. Especially the second conscious shock (but the two conscious shocks are two sides of the same coin).

Remember those exercises I called 'death tests' where you would decide at a certain time or event or sound or what have you you would try to be awake right in that moment (I think that was the exercise, it may have been even better than that, but I don't recall at the moment). But the point is *that* really is what all the effort points to: being awake at the point of death.

Also I was thinking: it is really a powerful thing to imagine our own physical death. Try to sense and visualize what it is and will be like. Get that sense of entering eternity, so to speak. The more you do that the more use you get to the fact of it. Intellectually you can get beyond fears by seeing things like your body being a cosmos, and how you will have a spiritual body that will still be a complete cosmos. You won't dissipate like smoke at death.

Of course that spiritual body is what we try to develop with Work efforts. The more consciousness, understanding, and real will we have the better the 'seed' we sow at death.

So, with Christianity and salvation and faith we think: Jesus Christ.

With Work ideas, practices, and goals we think: death.

They contain the core of each and go beyond mere intellectual memory into a deeper emotional memory and understanding.

Interesting extract from A. W. Pink on body, soul, and spirit

What is below is from Pink's Gleanings In Genesis, 1. Creation and Restoration. (I've bolded some parts.)

5. "And God divided the light from the darkness." Hebrews 4:12 tells us, the Word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." This is not a figurative expression but, we believe, a statement of literal fact. Man is a tripartite being, made up of "spirit and soul and body" (1 Thess. 5:23). The late Dr. Pierson distinguished between them thus: "The spirit is capable of God-consciousness; the soul is the seat of self-consciousness; the body of sense-consciousness.’’ In the day that Adam sinned, he died spiritually. Physical death is the separation of the spirit from the body; spiritual death is the separation of the spirit from God. When Adam died, his spirit was not annihilated, but it was "alienated" from God. There was a fall. The spirit, the highest part of Adam’s complex being, no longer dominated; instead, it was degraded, it fell to the level of the soul, and ceased to function separately. Hence, today, the unregenerate man is dominated by his soul, which is the seat of lust, passion, emotion. But in the work of regeneration, the Word of God "pierces even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit," and the spirit is rescued from the lower level to which it has fallen, being brought back again into communion with God. The "spirit" being that part of man which is capable of communion with God, is light; the "soul" when it is not dominated and regulated by the spirit is in darkness, hence, in that part of the six days’ work of restoration which adumbrated the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, we read, "And God divided the light from the darkness."

2 Corinthians 4

Read 2 Corinthians chapter 4. This chapter is about living in the flesh after regeneration. The already/not yet state that can perplex or tempt one to whine. Read the whole chapter with this verse in mind:

2Co 4:7 But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.

This is a constant theme. Being constantly humbled and not being allowed to think we are the cause of what God does. Regeneration is an act of God in us, nothing we do. Justification is by faith (something itself worked in us by the Holy Spirit) and not works so that we cannot boast. And here we are in earthen bodies even though regenerated and justified and in God's Kingdom. In the Old Testament the theme emerges whenever Israel - or even a gentile nation - thinks that when it wins a battle or war it is they that do it and not God. They usually get sent a message of the truth of that in some way.

A note on biographies

Biographies are interesting as a category of books because they can be phantasmagorical in this way: when you have some higher energy in you, and you already know the basics of history and philosophy and arts and sciences and music and the human nature and ways of the world you can get from literature in general then a biography, really about anybody, will give you all sorts of impressions and bits of information that you can put together and see so much more between the lines and from a higher perspective and so on. A vision of the times the person lived in. All the human nature of the relationships and so on. You know, the sense that everything falls into patterns and types, and that there is nothing new under the sun; also the sense that you can see the universe in a grain of sand. A mere detail, or event in the life of the person can give a window onto so much more. History books do this as well. Maybe biography more because the focus on a single life makes the impressions stronger for seeing the universal in a detail.