I realized that I (and so many others) have
been operating from a false assumption. Briefly, the false assumption is that
one is “freed” from the “prison” of the body upon death, which has had the
effect of “biding my time” until I do die and can then exist much more freely.
This notion is patently false; one is freed from the physical body, yes, but
the rest of the “bodies (or realms) of limitation,” including the soul itself
remain thus “imprisoning” the spirit. Gnosticism holds that the spirit is held
within the soul, and that, thus the soul too must become aware enough of the
spirit within it, before the spirit can be freed. The framework of these
different “enclosures” of the spirit, from a theosophical and gnostic view
(with a few variations here and there) consist of the personality, which
encompasses the mental apparatus (referred to as the “lower mental”), emotion (astral),
and physical (body). There is also the “higher mind” which is in relationship
with the individual soul, which becomes aware of the indwelling spirit, which
is “divine,” “a spark of the Light of God,” as it were. But the soul itself has
been affected by the material world even to the point of being damaged and with
little memory of its indwelling spirit, which is “imprisoned” until the soul
becomes aware and engages in its own purification and those of the personality.
Just because one dies and seemingly is freed of the body, one is not freed of
the bodies of the emotions, the mind, nor the soul (which still holds the
spirit). Thus, one is “stuck” in the series of reincarnations until the soul
evolves and frees the spirit. Then one returns as a Bodhisattva, to use the Buddhist
term, or as some kind of Savior of Humanity, until the time when all humans are
able to free the spirit within them, and thus have a “perfect world with
perfect beings.”
If the above is true, there is only this
moment in which to work and be on all the levels of being; the death of the
body is not that “freeing moment” in which we “see God.” You either have that
moment in this moment or you don’t. It’s all right now and not after you die. “Waiting
until you die to be freed” is one horrendously false assumption.
