John Nelson Darby, where are YOU?In a time-independent reality, tomorrow is not necessarily preceded by yesterday!
We are likely a part of the generation that will not taste of death, and we might be the generation that will help to restore life to those individuals who preceded us in death! Eventually, eternal life will be nothing more than an adjunctive technological advancement that came about as a result of research that took place in the heavens (where humans intersected with the inanimate and intangible God, Singularity or God equivalent)!
Rev. C. Solomon
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* But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded? 1 Kings 8:27.
* Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord! 1 Thess. 4:17.
*Man must rise above the Earth-
to the top of the atmosphere and beyond
For only there will he understand the world in which he lives. Socrates!
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Introduction: Forgive my visceral and error laden treatment of this topic for I intend to amend and expand upon it in the future. However, what I believe has been lost on most of us, thanks to imperceptible and inflexible religion and its forbading teachers, is the significant participatory and proactive role that humans were expected to play with regard to 'extending the life cycle' and helping to reinstate eternal life.
Some religious teachings and teachers have also impaired human understanding with respect to the meaning of the meeting (often referred to as the rapture) which had been scheduled to take place (in the heavens, air, clouds or skies), between the abstract and the non-abstract.
The conjunctive meeting or rapture (perhaps the highly ethereal intersection of higher knowledge and perfect understanding with human thought processes), has apparently begun to take place in heaven already. Science appears to have arrived at the meeting place (in heaven) and 'supped first'. I believe that it is time for those who want to advance but have been held back, to consider 'limited retrograde religious dogma' in its proper historical context!
Christians have historically criticized Jews, their religious ancestral prototypes, for their perceived failure to move past the legalistic teachings of 'The Mosaic Law' and into 'the Dispensation of Grace and Truth' (which represented fallacious New Age Teaching to their Jewish brothers and sisters). However, the same Christian dispensationalists are perfect examples of what they criticize - the failure to move beyond the principles of 'Christian Dispensational Theology' and forward into 'all of the Truth'!
Why is it important to move on? The simplest answer is, fulfillment! Jesus said in the often quoted 3rd chapter of John, that his reason for being sent to planet Earth was to restore life back to the human family. Jesus explained that he did not want anyone to perish. Christianity, the same as many other religions have done, has also bogged down in religious practice and tradition. The former was intended to be a means to an end.
Religion(s) have historically found themselves stuck 'in the means', only to forget about the completion of the story! I didn't give my life to God in order to get stuck in any religion, my objective (1 Thessalonians 5:21) was to prove and to hold on to what was and is true. Dogma and unsubstantiated minutiae, I find easy to discard! Besides, we cannot wait around while dispensational theologists debate and at the same time reject science and other disciplines and individuals who are pursuing what is actual and factual. The former have had several millenia to reach consensus!
Once the meaning and the method of procuring eternal life is demystified, as a result of the meeting with the esoteric (God, Singularity or God equivalent) in the skies; proactive and aggressive human involvement in effectuating the next stage in the evolutionary life cycle/metamorphosis will begin to take shape.
Then we will likely witness all of the following: the elimination of death as we know it (for with the end of time comes the end of wearing down and death), cognizant transformation into a perfect and eternal form, a corporate leap in wisdom, cognition and intelligence; personal omniscience our having experienced all of what was intended in our evolution had the process not been interrupted. Can you imagine where you and I would be right now and what we would be doing or not doing if the process had not been interrupted, creating perhaps?
Point I: Meeting the Lord in the air!
The Apostle Paul wrote about a future meeting that was to take place between humans and God in the air, in 1 Thessalonians 4:18. In spite of the fact that the Apostle believed that he would be one of many who would still be awake and caught up when the meeting took place, I suspect that the rest of what he wrote is coming true today, albeit perhaps not in the manner by which he expected it to happen.
And let me say this in fairness to the Apostle Paul (and I am not talking science fiction here), in a non-linear time independent reality Paul might be there already with the rest of us, even though we are apparently still here on Earth!
If you are an 'I Am', everything else that was, is and is to come would be present all at once as if suspended in time! In other words there is no yesterday or tomorrow, everything simply is. Then why does the scripture say that God created the Earth in 6 days? I suspect that explanation was given to explain God's work in terms that humans could understand!
In addition to the different species of animals which once roamed the Earth, now mostly extinct, both early, pre and post-modern human beings all the way back to and before Imhotep, Aristotle (and unnamed females), each gave more than cursory scrutiny to the skies.
One could argue that everything on Earth had been and is still being affected by what has been and is still going on in the heavens. I dare not presuppose just how limited early human understanding of the skies actually was, as some have done. For there is sufficient anecdotal information to suggest that perhaps early humans had a broader understanding of the significance of the skies than both the pre and post-modern humans that exceeded them.
Given the advances in modern astronomy, and the breakthroughs in astro and quantum physics, post-modern human beings, you and I, have a deeper understanding of what is out there in comparison to our pre-modern predecessors. And, more and more we are beginning to understand its significance in our lives and its bearing on our destiny. Since the beginning of modernity and the period of Enlightenment, we learned that the Earth was not the titular center of the Universe.
We have also learned the age of the Universe and the Earth in terms of dependent linear time, for outside of linear time all of what is and has apparently transpired before might actually be a blip in eternal reality, in other words not even one second of time has passed. Having said that, we understand the rotation cycles of the Earth, stars and other planets. We also know about the billions of galaxies, planets and stars that accompany us in the cosmos.
We understand protostars, quasars, dark matter, elliptical orbits, nebulae, anti-matter, supernovas, pulsars, time and space. We understand the processes that stars undergo in star creation. We know the atomic weights of molecules and how other chemicals like oxygen, hydrogen, carbon-dioxide, helium... play a role in the formation and preservation of the universe. We understand the molecular structures of planets and stars.
We understand the atmosphere, how it works and what its layered composition. We understand quantum mechanics and physics and the importance of radiation and thermodynamics. We have quantifiable evidence to prove that black holes and worm holes exist.
We understand time travel in man made rockets, and how to quantify time (relocation in space) based upon one's location in space. We have invented tools to assist us like the Hubble Telescope, and massive telescopes that are strategically located all over the earth, not to overlook the launch of an even more powerful telescope, The James Webb telescope in the year 2013. The latter will permit scientists to peer even further into space, just as a biologist would examine a microorganism on earth, using a microscope.
We understand that the universe is expanding, and that the Universe is essentially larger today than it was yesterday. We understand how the universe sprang from a cosmic egg, and we have the ability to look backward in time, even closer and closer to the point of creation!
My point: We know a lot more today about not only the heavens, we also understand a lot more about the human body and human engineering (a result of the work that has been done with the Human Genome project and historical biological research). We are already manufacturing replacement human body parts given the advances in polymer technology (go Case-Western and Akron University). We are learning even more about heaven and earth, and that what is in the heavens and inside of us, humans, is interwoven and intertwined.
One of the questions that still remains is how, why and what will we do with what we know, and how long will it take before all of the missing pieces will be put in place? Will we always exist in our present forms and require the perfect oxygen hydrogen balance in an atmosphere in order to exist? The answer to the latter is, apparently not!
I won't spend a lot of time pointing out the role that religion has played, both good and bad, in helping to provide meaning and understand to life. However, I will say that if you will consider the Christian Bible, Jesus once instructed his disciples to ignore the religious oligopy at the Temple of Jerusalem, offerings, priests and all. It was as if Jesus washed his hands of that intractable organization that had substituted its purpose for existing above a more important one.
One important contribution that has been garnered from religion is its prediction of a future meeting that is to take place between God and humans in the air, or in the heavens if you prefer! Many of the writers in the Christian canon often mentioned what they viewed as a peculiar occurrences that took place between the heavenly and the earthly realm. Those occurrences included visitations by beings, flying machines (chariots), clouds descending and ascending, stars appearing, fire descending down from heaven and on and on.
I will get right to the point by saying that I believe that religion has been correct all the time in saying that heaven and earth are extricably tied together. I also agree that there is to be a meeting between heaven and earth, however, with this one added caveat. I believe that the meeting began a long time ago, and more and more, given the research that is taking place within the scientific community, the meeting is still in session right now.
1). In John the 14th chapter, Jesus spoke to his disciples saying, Let not your heart be troubled, if ye believe in GOD (caveat), believe also in me. For in my Father's house there are many mansions, if it were not so I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you that where I am, there may ye be also.
2). In Acts chapter 1, verse 9, the eyewitnesses said, And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight.
And while they looked steadfastly toward heaven as he went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel.
Which also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.
3). Witnesses from the school of the Prophets witnessed the Prophet Elijah, apparently, being taken up into heaven in a space machine which they referred to simply as a chariot of fire. The prophet Ezekiel, arguably, witnessed the descent and ascent of a flying vehicle that was apparently engulfed in a cloud of smoke and amber (similar to a 747 or 767 apparently), when he was living among the exiles at the river of Chebar in Babylon [see Ezekiel 1:4).
4). Jacob saw angels ascending up and down a ladder from heaven. Folks, were these individuals, including Daniel and many others experiencing auditory and visual hallucinations. Or, did some of the writers in the canon embellish or fabricate what has been written down and passed on to us? I don't think so!
For the record, in case you haven't figured it out yet, I believe that the Heavens are significant, and that they have deep significance and meaning in our lives. The more we learn about the heavens, the more we learn about eternity, eternal life and ourselves! Whether heavenly flying beings exist or not as they have been written about in scripture, or whether they represent what exists, but had to be expressed in allegorical terms - I suspect that the latter is true.
Do I believe that God is sitting somewhere in heaven on a throne with cherubs and angels flying around anxiously chomping at the bit to zap fallen human beings? I doubt it. I suspect that the metaphors and visions all had meaning. And it would appear that full disclosure of the meanings of the symbols and metaphors was too far advanced for early man to comprehend - I could be wrong about the latter.
However, today, we aren't seeing 'through a glass darkly'. And more and more we are making empirical observations of what is in the heavens, testing the hypotheses and extrapolating what it all means beyond empiricism or myth; we have sent both humans and probes into space to examine, test and quantify our research.
I will revisit this point shortly, with regards to the meeting in heaven and what I believe it means. However and having said that, it won't be long before eternal life will be considered anything more than a adjunctive technological advancement that man will have achieved. And where will the knowledge or missing puzzle pieces be garnered likely, I believe in the heavens where the God entity will reveal it?
Point II: Is God Animate, Inanimate, Subjective or Conjectured.
Getting right to the point, let me go on record saying that I believe that what we refer to as God is likely an inanimate something. The word of faith people and a few others will accuse me of apostasy, however, in the words of one of the late prelates of one of America's premiere religious organizations, 'I suppose that my opinion is just as good as anybody elses happens to be'.
When most of us were children, at the same time that we were taught about the illusive and avoidant Santa Claus, we were also taught that there was also an illusive and avoidant God. Both characters had a lot in common. Upon further inquiry, we were told by our parents that God is everywhere, however, you simply cannot see him.
So, not only was God illusive and avoidant like Santa, God was invisible. To children in the prepubescent and pubescent periods of life, what they had been taught by their parents had some holes in it. So let me get this right mom and dad, there is a God who created the whole world and everything in it for that matter, however, we can neither see, hear, touch smell nor taste this God? And our parents answer would always be a resounding yes!
Now if your parents said it, God lived in Heaven and no one has ever seen God, and Santa lives at the North Pole, and no one has seen him either - then it must be true, right. Folks, I suspect that even though there is a whole lot of truth to what our parents told us with respect to the qualities of the entity that we refer to as God (much of what had been taught them by their parents) was simply what they understood at the time.
Knowledge has increased folks, it continues to increase, our understanding has become more enlightened than that of our predecessors - it is time to move forward, it is time for us to advance even further than we have gone before, Dr. Spocks! it is time to leave the principles behind, and to move on to perfection!
And by doing so, it does not diminish our parents or our ancestors in any way, shape or form. The scriptures also contain an interesting phrase in the Old King James, Hosea 6:3 Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the LORD: his going forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth. version of the bible. It reads, 'we follow on to know"!
I suspect that this text has both a local and a universal context to it! Information is typically garnered proportionately, a portion at a time; Or as the old King James version read, 'here a little and there a little". Knowledge appears to be scattered around like eggs at an Easter egg hunt - you simply have to keep gathering the pieces. However, increased understanding, the presence of knowledge and the ability to comprehend have all been increased exponentially.
Given the recent advances in nanotechnology, in less than two decades I understand that the ability to download information directly into our brains will expedite learning to an even more substantial degree. Why? In the same time that it takes to download information on a CD, or to burn information using a CD burner, it will take just about the same length of time to download 4 years of reading, learning and training at an institution of higher learning directly into your brain.
In other words, humans will be able to choose any subject and simply have the complete repository of stored information downloaded into the brain, eventually in a nanosecond! The information highway in heaven has been opened to human access. It would appear that nothing will be hidden from this point on. And if we go too far, similar to the Tower of Babel story, the repository will be shut down.
And who opened the repository? It was and is being opened by what we refer to as God! What took so long? I suspect that it is was due to the corrupt nature of man, and the fact that some humans weren't ready to receive the knowledge. Again, if we accept what has been written already about some of the Bible characters, several of them made the leap before their contemporaries did.
Enoch, Elijah and a few others garnered the knowledge and were apparently able to traverse the multiple planes.I suspect that if religion had done its job, there wouldn't be a secularist on the planet. I also believe that once we teach God, as God really is - there won't be any secularists left!
Is God... everywhere, invisible and undetectable to our five senses? I believe that is customarily true. Does some old man figure who is similar in form and age to a patronly Santa Claus live somewhere near the north pole or beyond? I don't believe that is true!
Where our ancestors likely did us a disservice was by anthropomorphizing God, in other words by describing God as a super omniscient and omnipresent human or Santa Claus like figure, one whose only interest is in who has been naughty or nice!
I have gone into more detail in some of my previous writings. However, let me emphasize that what I believe that the ontological God... really is - happens to be more of a non-human, inanimate being or non-being. And instead, the God..., I believe is something that is everywhere and that exists in likely every thing, or almost everything. In Genesis chapter 3, the body of Adam became a living thing following 'theos pneustos', when the breath was put into his carbon body.
In John chapter 9, we witness the creative work of the Holy Spirit, when the same material that was used to create man was extracted from the ground, and was used to correct this man's congenital visual (organic) problem, probably an injured or undeveloped organ, iris, retina or cornea!
I believe that all things were made with God's composition being the basic ingredient. This would support what the Apostle Paul wrote about in Acts chapter 17, that in it, we live, move and have our being (essence). I have argued before that I believe that what we refer to God is the evolutionary life-giving principle, and that the next stage in our evolution is eternal life or existence, which represents going back to the future! Which brings me to my next point.
Point III. Eternal Life: Body obliteration or replacement?
In previous writings, I have gone into detail about what happened when Adam apparently ate of a particular fruit (quince or not)that apparently introduced an enzyme or poison into his system that forever altered his human DNA. If we accept what has been written in the canon, clearly, at the time of his birth up until the time that he consumed the fruit, he never experienced any sicknesses and he was on his way to living forevermore, not just 930 years!
With our vast and growing understanding of biology, genetics, biogenics, nanotechnology and other related branches of science, we are coming closer and closer to understanding what is required in order for life to exist eternally, or uninterrupted. And I suspect that the reason for the meeting in heaven with the God... is for man to understand what it is that is needed to regain and to sustain an eternal life.
Why? In every example in the canon, all eternal creatures and beings that visited the earth eventually returned to the other worldly plane! Am I saying that we have to literally go into heaven, the fact is that we already have gone into heaven by machine, telescope and inquiry!
Does it mean that each one of us will have to individually ascend into heaven? Possibly, unless what is needed will eventually be brought to earth by those who enter into heaven either through research, the use of probes, or actual travel into the heavens. Keep in mind that once NASA has perfected space travel, humans will travel into the heavens as frequently as they take their summer vacations.
Humans have developed new medicines, and extended science as a result of discoveries that have been made in the weightless environment of the heavens. And here on earth, humans have already increased the life cycle given the use of improved healthcare, vitamins, additives, and medications - some developed in the heavens. As I wrote before, had Adam not partaken of the killer poison or enzyme, you and I could go over and meet him and ask a few questions!
Well, there is a little more to it. According to scripture there was a 'tree of life' also in the garden, proverbial garden or not. Whatever its meaning, we understand that 'the tree of life' was removed to the heavens! This life giving tree is mentioned more than twice in the canon. Where do many of our medicines derive from today? They come from plants, or trees if you prefer! Which one contains the elixir or cure that humans require to reverse the damage and to provide us with eternal life.
However, one other thing, if you follow the story in Genesis chapter 4, God did not want Adam to have access to the 'tree of life', which apparently would not have cancelled out the corruption that was in Adam, even though it would have extended the life cycle! I will let you figure that out!
It will shock some to hear this, but perhaps what the God... was telling us all a;pmg was that we we would be participating as I mentioned before in the restoration of eternal life , as a consequence we are learning currently given our introduction to the heavens! Imagine if our researchers and phamacologists today could get a hold of that 'tree of life', and create medicines for humans!
I quoted a scripture from 1 King the 8th chapter above, where King Solomon realized that in spite of the great Temple that he had constructed in Jerusalem, that it could not contain this thing that we call God.
In the book of Acts, chapter 7 beginning at verse 48, it reads: But the Most High God does not live in houses made by human hands. As God says through the prophet. Heaven is my throne. The earth is under my control. What kind of house will you build for me says the Lord? Where will my resting place be?We often quote other scriptures like, Forever Oh Lord, thy word is settled in heaven. God must not be human or animate folks, why? Can you imagine having existed for eternity without shelter if God had been human or animate?
One of my pet peeves is as follows: In what we refer to as the Lord's prayer, modern recitations of the prayer include the phrase, thy will be done 'on Earth' as it is in heaven. Does anyone recall before when in the King James Bible, the scripture read, thy will be done 'in Earth', as it is 'in Heaven'. I believe that subtle modification is far-reaching! Not only was the text changed then, the context was also changed.
In other words, would it make sense if we were to say that God's word was settled 'on heaven' instead of 'in heaven'? Things in heaven are composed of things that are 'in heaven, and what is on earth including humans are composed of things, mostly, that are 'in earth'. We are Earth creatures, composed mostly of ingredients from the Earth (not all of our substance)?
Are we the earth that Jesus was referring to, instead of the planet body that we cling to. Then just as God's word is settled 'in heaven', God's word must be settled in us, for we are 'the earth' that he was referring to in this context. For that matter is God an ingredient, or something more like an atom, molecule, quark, neutron, proton, principle ...or all of the above and more combined?
Getting back on point, we have also been told by religion that in order to see God, one must experience transformation. I upset some when I wrote before that if you take religion out of it, it all makes perfect sense. For whether you happen to be religious or not, not many would argue that there isn't such a thing as death. And perhaps what an inorganic, non microbial entity with intelligence has been telling us is that death is reversible!
And, what the entity is relaying to us subliminally is that we have the option of participating in the reversal of the trend of death. Will it take a restorative enzyme, an implant, genetic engineering? Could it occur through the use of body and mind modification or augmentation? Will it require simply getting out of our current space-time continuum? Whenever I mention this concept, just as I was discussing it with a student in Sproul Plaza on the campus of UC Berkeley just a few days, I always receive these blank stares.
What is eternal life? In our solar system, we measure time in fragments based upon the length of time that it takes for the earth to rotate around the sun; we call that the time that it takes make complete rotation around the sun, 365.2 days, a solar year. On the other hand we measure lunar time based upon the time that it takes for the moon to complete its rotation around the Earth, a lunar year. From this dichotomy, one should be able to see that time measurements are variable.
So what happens when you get away from the Sun and moon in our solar system? How do you measure time then? Is these two measurements of time, the only measure of time that matters? Of course not, for once you get outside of the solar system and away from the rotation of the Earth and gravity, everything changes. Why is God eternal? First of all because God is time-independent! Once you get outside of time, the effects of time no longer have any bearing upon you.
If fact, if you consider the Hubble Space Telescope which was placed into space by humans, it has already looking back through what we refer to as time. This manmade telescope is not just looking out into space, given that it is in space, it is looking back into the past, get it? In our present, it is peering back into the past. The past still exists and the future already exists, what matters is where you are, it will determine by and large whether or not you can witness past, present and future all at once.
In a truly time-independent void, I would expect that one would witness infinite (seeing both beginning and end all at the same time) from one location.
We have been conditioned to believe in and operate by what I will refer to as linear time. However, outside of a 3-dimensional solar or lunar-based time world, everything changes. In a world void of time you wouldn't wear down or die, you would simply 'be', or exist! And instead of moving in space, more likely space would move through you. Now where have you heard this before?
You have heard and read this before about the entity that we refer to as God. And if we are to be with this Entity, and to be like this Entity, we will also be omniscient, omnipresent and time-independent! Believers fail to extrapolate the meanings that have been provided by the symbols in their own holy books! Some Christians for example still expect to see Dragons and Beasts walking the earth someday, or coming up out of the seas. Perhaps they are right and I am wrong, however, I don't believe it.
Who can I quote or cite in this matter? Frankly, I cannot think of anyone, human, that I can quote, because. I really don't believe that many humans, except perhaps those in scientific fields, and a few in and outside of religious circles, understand what I am talking about. Religion will not permit its followers to think outside of the prescribed religious box! Jesus once explained to the Pharisees, you have shut up heaven, you are not going in and you are preventing others from going in. Isn't that what religion is doing today, keeping people from going in to heaveN?
Having said that, arguably more is being discovered outside of religion of late, than has been the case inside in religion (as an institution)! Religion is dead in its tracks, there is no forward movement, in fact there seems to be a steady decline, well except in those cases when religion is being used for manmade purposes. I've said it before, God's debunking of ostentatious worship, sacrifice and obligatory prayers ought to tell us that religious worship was never the primary thing.
God does not want to be worshipped, God wants to be be understood and then internalized - remember, he rejected the majority of vain religious worship and sacrifices throughout the canon!
The very fact of salvation, its emphasis has always been placed on the preservation and restoration of life, regardless of whether you jump, dance, sing, swing from the rafters, chant, offer human sacrifices, smoke peyote or whatever you believe that you are doing to appease or please God. Cain, son of Adam brought a sacrifice apparently to God and he was summarily told, dude, this is unacceptable! So what is acceptable!
I repeat: God is not interested in empty and vain worship, God wants to be understood and internalized!
All of us ought to work together, in order to permanently eliminate sickness and death (that last enemy)! And it appears that the answer is above us, in the skies! Some theoreticians hold that we were made from the ingredients of stardust! Has star dust reached the earth, scientists have confirmed that the Earth's composition is due by and large to what ascended from the skies, the earth was created from ingredients that preceded it - that were in the cosmos. In fact asteroids, comets... brought the materials to Earth, that weren't here already.
Religion would have you to believe that a Super Man is going to appear in the sky and say some magic words and that everyone in graves or those who are still living on the Earth at the time will suddenly fly off into deep space 9! I understand why they teach that, I simply believe that they failed to interpret the symbols in order to understand the meaning of the symbols.
I believe that further technological advances in nanotechnology for example, and other scientific discoveries will help us to complete the journey, not religion as we know it. The former is an extention of the latter. I also believe that our scientific guide, as well as our technological leader will be what we refer to as the God entity! I believe that where religion stalled, God has found fertile and arid ground where he can posit more truth, and that is among the scientific community.
I am happily balancing the two disciplines, and rarely do I find any major contradictions, either discipline seems to be taking different routes, however, they keep ending up at a similar place. Religion requires a teacher that can take extend its understanding and guide it into the truth that it often pontificates.
Point IV: Our Contribution and Making it Happen.
Why is it that we fear death, when most of us do not fear sleep? Most humans fear death because of what they have heard about death. The very thought of leaving our present bodies, if that is what death happens to be, and being absent from our loved ones, and resting in a cold ground or ending up in a hellfire is both frightening and disheartening.
When I was a young, I would often hear people say that the nearest thing to death is sleep. Even Jesus when teachings the disciples about his friend Lazarus' death, see John chapter 11, confused his disciples when he said that Lazarus is asleep.
The Apostles like most of us who believe that rest or sleep is good for you when you are sick, felt, that Lazarus was doing well by resting, when Jesus told them that he was sleeping. They supposed, understandbly, that rest would help to facilitate his reovery. Jesus then added, no, he's dead! Two worlds came together in terms of what Jesus was saying, and what the Apostles understood. In other words from a Jesus perspective, one who had the ability to restore life to someone who is apparently dead, death is nothing more in a highly ethereal sense than sleep.
To individuals today, who are as limited in understanding as the Apostles were at the time in both ability and understanding, a person who is dead is not asleep, their life functions have terminated permanently. Science teaches that all energy goes somewhere, energy does not dissipate. Some branches of philosophy teach that consciusness does not dissipate either, it simply goes somewhee else. We mentioned before, transmigration of the soul or spirit!
Clearly Lazarus, Moses, Elijah and others who made reappearances after death, proved that the conscienceness of the person does not dissipate! In short: people who were dead or sleep simply need to be reawakened. Ezekiel saw a vision where in a valley that contained the remains (bones) of humans that were deceased, were reconstituted into fully living fighting warriors! We are about to learn how that process works given the meeting in heaven!
Most of us look forward everyday to 'getting some sleep'. We consider sleep to be necessary pleasant, restorative exercise. We are not disturbed about the prospect of going to sleep given our expectation of waking up again in this world. Now on the other hand those who are in despair, guilt-laden, suicidal, in chronic pain or with little or any hope of recovery from pain, these individuals often look forward to death. The last group is willing to take the gamble that death, an escape, has to be preferable to their existence in this world or plane.
This group would prefer living either in another world, or to have their conscieness and therefore their pain to be put permanently at rest. A photographer recently came to the Bay area and set up his time-lapsed photography equipment on the world-renown Golden Gate Bridge. The cameras were strategically situated in order to capture the expressions on the faces of those individuals who lept from the bridge to their death below.
Until the project was terminated shortly after, some felt that what the photographer was doing was unethical, he captured, however, the forlorn and empty expressions on the faces of several individuals who lept from the bridge to their deaths below - only a few have survived the fall.
Eternal life could be nothing more than changing out of worn out bodies from time to time, or as I pointed out before, or it could represent extraction from the body as we know it altogether - in either representation, the transitioning of our conscieness. Which is it? I don't know for sure.
I have augured before that NASA could likely save itself some money and trouble, if it would experiment with others means of exploring space than by building aircraft that can carry on average 6 foot human bodies, life-support systems..., into space. Like what for example? Learning to project human intelligence and conscienceness into space, to be used for space exploration.
In time when we become like the God entity, we wll apparently inhabit all things without human limbs and other human body parts, for according to scripture we will be like the God entity, whatever it is - perhaps pure energy. And perhaps, we will learn to bring the whole cosmos to us instead. I understand that outside of time, tomorrow is not necessarily preceded by yesterday!
Point V: Our Contribution: Making it Happen and Other Implications?
First of all does the God entity exist within the, or does the cosmos exist within or separate from God. This is important, and it has serious implications. For as some have written already, the Universe was born and therefore without some intervention it will eventually die.
So as eternal beings that may or may not require food, sleep, or rest, perhaps an eternal existence within the bubble is inconsequential, or perhaps on the other hand it has significance. Whether or not it does or does not matter (no pun intended), will have a lot to do with the form in which we will ultimately exist or not exist! Will we be organisms? Apparently not! Will consciousness require an organic brain in order to exist? Maybe not!
Jesus in speaking with the disciples explained that sexual reproduction will come to an end, ergo, gender will cease to exist, marriage will cease to exist (The Mormons won't like that attack on the principle tenets of their theology), marriage and polygamy. Perhaps, there will no longer be a need for arms and legs as forementioned, or for the other customary human pleasure and reproductive organs. In Genesis, it was written that God rested.
Mormon and other males will have to give up the pleasure of looking at women's bodies, and enjoying sex! And as the Cable Guy would say, forgive me Lord, for I shouldn't have said that!
Whether the rest, which was referred to in Genesis was literal or figurative in the sense that God took a respite from its work, will speak to whether or not we will need to rest. For if sleep is a form of death, remember, death will have been eliminated! Perhaps the rest 'of time', that is what it is apparently - in an eternal sense can be defined as one day, minute or second or none of the above. Instead, like the eternal God "I Exist", and everything is common all at once!
Did I just contradict the scriptures again, or was I simply trying to explain a biblical metaphor. The canon is full of them after all!
Heaven has been opened up it would appear. From the time that humans began trying to make sense of their lives by studying the skies, adapting to times and seasons, creating and studying astrology and astronomy, clearly, it would appear that the God entity, equivalent or inanimate - is already meeting us, particularly those in the scientific community, in the (metaphorical or actual sky)?
Wasn't it always intended to be a meeting of knowledge and wisdom, and our taking that knowledge to transpose ourselves in order to continue that meeting with all of its possibilities and ramifiations in a permanent heavenly plane? And in that heavenly plane we will understand the lifelong mystery, minus all of the mysticism and the facade of religious worship that has accompanied it.
I do not get the sense that God unlike man, is sitting somewhere on a throne hoping to be worshipped. I suspect that the God entity whatever it happens to be [Higher than the hevens above the earth, and in thought above our thoughts], has been in its existence simply interested in providing us with knowledge and truth so that we can rejoin it, having spent years teaching us to love, worship, honor and to look for truth or what is actual.
The third time: I suspect that the God entity is more interested in being understood and incorporated, than in being worshipped!
As more of the mystery, in the absence of mysticism is being unconvered in various disciplines outside of the mystical, a continued unveiling and our acceptance of truth and what is actual, will provide us with the requisite knowledge and understanding that we have been seeking. For example, how and why we are here - and where we are going! Adam lived for 930 years, for those of us whose life expectation is less than 100 year today, that would have appeared to be an eternity. However, in a time-independent world Adam at best would have simply lived!
And just as each us began in family or guardian institution, one day we grew up. And once we grew up, some of us, moved away from the family home that we had become so accustomed. And we did so in order to move out into life where we could experience more than the limited view of the world that was provided us by our parents or guardians. My first move was 2500 miles from where I was born.
Now having said all of the above, some individuals have never left home. They are very comfortable there where everything is provided for them. These individuals are comfortable in stasis, and they disapprove of their siblings, neighbors and friends who have moved on. We represent a threat to them!
It is time for those individuals who are stunted and living at home and living in their (natural and religious) parents comfort zones to grow up. It is time for each of you to move out and to learn more about what it out there and beyond (even when home represents arudimentary religious comfort zone). Some religous group-families containing millions of children, happen to be stuck in 2 to 4000 year old paradigms!
In some religious orders, sects and organizations, the Pastor and his are considered to be mom and dad. When your parents move on, where will you be at the time - living their lives all over again for them? Would that explain the scriptural injunction to never refer to another as Father, or why we must 'grow up in him'? There is more beyond the piece of the puzzle that our parents provided us with - each generation garners, it would seem, a better understanding of the puzzle!
In Conclusion: Again, I believe that the meeting in the air has already begun. The knowledge that some pre-modern humans could not discern, that encircled them all the time is here for us to see, taste and understand today. We have both the means, if not the desire to partake of what is actual, and there for us to imbibe. And, we can live in it, move in it and have our being within it.
It represents our next stage in the evolutionary cycle, our journey is not complete yet, being human only represented a developmental stage in terms of what we are ultimately meant to become! And if you were to pass on temporarily (fall asleep), before we gain full understanding of the knowledge which contains the answers that are required to unlock the mystery of death, don't be surprised one day to hear a familiar voice awakening you from sleep.
We will help you to enter into your new body or form, if you haven't done so already. And why is our assistance required? We are his body, feet, legs and hands - HEAVEN APPARENTLY CANNOT WAIT ANY LONGER!
Peace & Grace
Rev. C. Solomon
www.sealofabrahm.blogspot.com
Postscript: It is possible, if not a certainty
that the part that humans would play in terms of
meeting the Lord in the sky, and rein-
stituting the process of eternal
life, has been downplayed! We
were apparently taught
against being as
proactive as
we should
have been!
more passive than we
should have been!
you and me have been taught to be too passive.
And what is my role in this? I am a minister who I believe
has been called to be a facilitator between two
disciplines that have been at war. I have
spent years studying theology, and
theology is not without its flaws.
I am studying science, and
science is not without
its flaws.
The two disciplines together, however, compose a
powerful juggernaut. Many of the world's
earliest scienctific researchers were
also religious individuals. Many
of their ideas and extrapolations
became a source of study, and
birthed the need to verify
was can be proven and
what remains unproven.
I believe personally that science is kinder to
religion than religion is to science. How
can religion be objective when the
fulcrum of religion forces
its followers into a box
from which they are
not allowed to
escape?
With the best of intentions both institutions
and individuals make mistakes. When it
comes down to it, each one of us is
responsbile for or own destiny.
And to outsource that
responsibility to
another is
rediculous!
I have gone on record to say that based upon my personal
research and study that 'the canon' is not a perfect
book. Should it be tossed out of the windows
given its imperfections? No, I don't
believe that, however, we should
examine it closer for its
voracity, and at the
same time we ought
to consider and
evaluate other
resources!
Well that is, if we are actually seeking after 'The Truth'. Otherwise
why should the two of them lie down together in the streets for
all of the world to witness?
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