Soul Rescuers: A 21st century guide to the spirit world. Natalia O’Sullivan

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ afternoon, when I sit down beside her, she cuddles up in my arms. I rock her gently.

      ‘I’m afraid of dying. I don’t know how to die. Help me please.’

      I’m struck dumb. I do not know how to die, either. ‘I think it’s easier than we think. You could say that it happens of its own accord. Maybe there’s something in us that “knows”,’ I say.

      She looks at me with her large eyes sunk in their dark sockets. Suddenly she moves her hand toward my neck and takes hold of the Egyptian cross I wear, the one that’s also called ‘the staff of life’ or ‘the key of Isis’. She wants to know what it represents. I tell her about the bas reliefs in the royal tombs of Egypt, on which one can see the dead journeying through the underworld holding the staff of life until they start climbing again toward the light. ‘Everyone has his or her staff of life, which will help to journey through death. You’ll find yours too.’

      Marie de Hennezel, Intimate Death (Little, Brown & Company, 1998)

      MAPS FOR THE SOUL JOURNEY

      Death itself has always been a focus for a spiritual vision of life. Belief systems in every culture and every time speak of the certain immortality of our soul essence. Whether it is the aboriginal belief that we simply expand into the everlasting Dreamtime, the Buddhist belief in the endless cycles of rebirth or the hope of Christianity to embrace Jesus Christ on death so that the soul may journey with Him to heaven, the key to immortality lies in the belief that death is a gateway into the realms of divine consciousness.

      Ancient cultures were compelled by death and the journey of the soul. The tales of heroic journeys to the underworld, primordial battles between good and evil and the triumph over darkness and death explain humanity’s place in the cosmos and describe the kingdoms of the dead. Mythology rises from the imagination, reflecting the ideals, aspirations and fears of the culture and the age. It is the literature of the spirit which brings vision to the hidden journey of the soul. The stories which reach us from nomadic and pastoral people rest on the simple cosmology of nature, where to enter the otherworld was to be elevated into a paradise, a beautiful, abundant version of the mundane world, while sophisticated civilizations cultivate increasingly complex ideals of the afterlife – concepts of judgement, innumerable deities and various realms of heaven and hell which the soul had to traverse.

      The journey to the realms of the dead is often a perilous one. The soul usually has to negotiate a difficult boundary: a river carried by an unkempt ferryman who demands gifts or payment for his service or a bridge of a single hair, which is crossed by Muslim souls on their way to paradise. The obstacles facing the souls of the dead include tests of judgement and temptation, demons and the hungry souls of the dead who try to prevent the soul reaching its heavenly destination.

      In Christian and Buddhist teachings the dangers are usually that the soul might fall back into earthly desire, attachment or negativity instead of forward into faith. In The Tibetan Book of the Dead there are prayers, mantras and visualizations to guide the soul on the path to liberation as it reaches for the radiant light of awareness which shines brightly on us as we die but which, in our initial confusion, we may ignore, turning instead to lesser glowing lights which represent our habitual human fears and negativity.

      The Egyptian Book of the Dead, a collection of highly illustrated papyrus scrolls found in the great tombs, also reveals magical incantations and formulae which the soul could use to open the gates of the underworld. The popular symbol of the ankh, key to eternal life, which symbolizes the divine union of masculine and feminine, comes from those ancient times.

      Prayers, mantras, sacred texts and symbols are the maps and tools which help the soul to find its way to the divine. They are the ways humanity has created to strengthen the spiritual link between our mortal lives and the invisible and they help us to gather our courage at the edge of the void and fall into infinity.

      CYCLES OF LIFE

      The understanding of life as a cycle of transformation beginning at birth and proceeding through growth into death and back into rebirth reaches back to our most ancient ancestors. They understood that the seasonal cycles of the Earth, the moon and planets were a mirror of the human cycles of experience. Death was accepted as a part of the natural world, simply another transition on the wheel of life and a culmination of life’s journey from birth through childhood, puberty, marriage, parenthood into the menopause and old age.

      The mysteries of paganism and shamanic principles encourage a holistic attitude toward the soul journey through the cycles of life and death. Life changes or transitions are celebrated as gateways of the soul’s transformation. While baptism, marriage and death are still celebrated as spiritual occasions in Western cultures, indigenous peoples still mark the transitions of puberty and menopause (elderhood) with initiation rituals. The word for certain Congo rites, Kombosi, also means ‘resurrection’, and these rites of passage are always concerned with death and rebirth, for they are about letting the old self die to make way for the new. The rituals themselves – which often push the initiates to the brink of death itself – are powerful ways of helping the psyche to accept, and celebrate, the transition from one state to another. For we cannot embrace the new unless we let go of the old.

      Out of life comes death, and out of death, life,

      Out of the young, the old,

      and out of the old, the young,

      Out of waking, sleep

      and out of sleep, waking

      The stream of creation and dissolution never stops.

      Heraclitus

      Birth and death are the most traumatic transitions on the wheel of life for they are the gateways between the physical and non-physical realms, bridges between the known and the unknown. Both are profound experiences which require us to let go into trust at a moment when we feel most vulnerable to forces beyond our control. We have to gather our courage and take a leap of faith. It is during these moments when we come into contact with our own mortality and learn most about the mysteries of the soul.

      In all cultures birth is marked by a rite which places the child in context of family, culture and religion. Baptism welcomes a new soul to the Christian fold, while the Yoruba will call a priest to divine which ancestral soul has returned to the world. Birth is often considered more traumatic for the soul than dying for, after spending time in the beauty and light of the kingdom of the spirit, the soul has to get used to living in the harsh reality of the physical world, whilst the souls of the dead are leaving pain and limitation behind to be softened and comforted by spirit.

      In the past many of the rites of death imitated those of birth and baptism. The body was often buried in a foetal position, as though it were waiting for rebirth, and water was trickled onto the head, as in baptism. Even today among peoples in West Africa the dead are buried upside-down in a womb-like chamber with an opening representing the birth canal.

      Belief in the eternal regeneration of life means that death can more readily be accepted. In the West, where the reality of death is denied and repressed, it is almost always approached with fear and denial. And yet, when acceptance of death can be integrated as a part of our soul’s journey, then we can liberate ourselves from the fears which prevent us from really living our life to the full. Life itself is a series of little deaths. Every time we change, a part of us dies. Every loss we encounter, every love affair which does not work out or project which fails, is a moment of death which causes us to grieve before picking up the pieces and moving on.

СКАЧАТЬ