Course XXI - Teaching 14: Other Stimulating Affective Meditations

The “RESURRECTION OF HES.” Those who think of death, perhaps refuse to form an idea about it, or conceal it with the idea of a more venturous hereafter, as if it were impossible to sustain the thought about death itself.
In fact, a supernatural life may exist, but this does not impede death to have its own meaning, being heavens or hells unnecessary. Those who justify death as a transition to another world are the same beings that justify life as a proof to conquer heaven.
One should be against this ways of thinking. Perhaps do not some atheists –who do not believe in the hereafter– live or certainly live well? To talk about death is to talk about life. One should consider death in terms of life, and on the same level of birth. Sometimes one suspects that those who believe that death is a transition to the hereafter are the same beings that deny life and found all their hopes on a paradise where their wishes shall be satisfied.
To think of death as a passage to another better life is not to die; for an atheist, true death is certain death where everything finishes. Those who are tired, as after a laborious day wish to sleep, also truly wish to die so that their worn-out, completed and finished lives disappear.
There is no better rapture than the contemplation of death; not a contemplation of the paradise, since only a deep conviction about a total annihilation can produce in life the elimination of material uses. Truly to die, to disappear till the last atom, is a thought that can entirely calm down all passions in our beings. To think of a paradise is to revitalize all human potentials, because such a paradise is nothing more than justification, sublimation and increase of human desires. But a total annihilation that is gradually entering every cell of our system, is slowly putting its seal of death and transmutation on every cell.
Physical death produces automatically the transmutation of human potentials into a higher stage, but we should emphasize that a real death is not death of the spirit –which is immortal– but death of personal uses and their disappearance from the individual being.
Rapture is something different from what we imagine; it is as if we mistake the smell of an embalmed body or mummy with that of a carnation.
Generally speaking, rapture comes from increasing the potentiality of the human life, and not from our conviction about death; this is why it produces an effect opposite to our wishes. A feeling of resurrection is not pleasant at all, it is rather painful, the most painful feeling because is like a childbirth, but also is quite touching for the soul. If a soul is in search for God, and finds Him closer in the rapture, however painful this rapture is, that soul will ever be in the quest there. You cannot smile after the rapture because it rather produces intense sadness. In this sadness, we feel our soul gradually diluted on wider and wider spaces, and we feel all life in it.