Course XXII - Teaching 2: Transition

Things die in this world, and this is a judgment emerged in the understanding of man by means of quite simple observation.
What lacks Beginning, what Is, what is Immortal, is intuition, an irrational glimpse of divine character, achieved by those beings who were able and knew how to promote their inner and essential values.
An ordinary man can just easily see that all those things, which are born and have a beginning in this world, contain the germ of their own destruction. So, one knows that all those things that are born have to die.
But this terrible certainty given by reason to the man, leads the Old Man, who refuses to die or be aware of the death of those things necessary and dear to him, to invent lies and build on them a method of life to defend his own conquests. And since all these conquests perish, because eternity is not his attribute, again he is wrong in his quest for perdurability in quantity. Many loves, knowledge, much money and much power.
Some lies of the Old Man can be very subtle, like those given by a false eternity, i.e., through “survival in my children” or “survival in my work”; in both cases, even on the most idealistic plane, these are extensions of his own personality and, as such, superficial extensions.
But a man who wants to stop being the Old Man, who wants to be New Man, is not wrong.
When the higher part of his soul illuminates internally his being with Divine and Eternal Light, and points him the Path by means of a glimpse, and even when this effulgence dissipates and the lower part of his soul attacks again with its arsenal of lies, the New Man that is Being Born, sustained by the Divine Mother’s Love, sharps his inner look and peeps in expectancy at the transient darkness and meditates on the values of those lies.
Among other things, he reflects about “his death”. And because now he observes from his essential part, the individual sees death as something transcendental and solemn, but does not fear it any more. He “knows” that death is like a gate through which this Path glimpsed by him extends toward another world of chances. And he gets ready for his time to cross it. To get ready for death: this means not to lose a second by fostering attachments to transient things and to one’s mortal “ego”; on the contrary, we should exercise the contemplation of Divine Things, being assisted by new habits which, like that of Meditation, can transmute his human and personal values into divine and unitive values which may convert his life into a loving fulfillment of the plan for the Divine Work.
When it is time for the end pf his present possibilities, he can die as a saint who, after having lived according to the Divine Mother’s Will, willingly enters death to participate continuously in the Great Work.