"The whole of humanity is finishing its cocoon stage. It is not yet aware of this, just as the caterpillar is unaware of the butterfly's body forming within it and has no knowledge of its future wings. Even the wings themselves don't understand their meaning until their first flight. The people in your reality stream have steadily been forming the solid body of a new organism, and now the time is coming for it to emerge and integrate its state of development with other branches of humanity. |
It may seem like the end of the world. In many ways it will be, for much of the old world will indeed be replaced by a new manner of existence. The psychological structure of each person will be transformed, because people's old model of reality will no longer be sufficient. Your people will experience and learn to understand another part of their being. This will happen differently for each person. For some it will be easy and almost instantaneous. Others will need to struggle through stress and pain. There will even be some people so deeply grounded in your old laws of reality that they won't notice anything at all."
"I remembered one morning when I discovered a cocoon in the bark of the tree, just as the butterfly was making a hole in the case and preparing to come out. I waited a while, but it was too long appearing and I was impatient. I bent over it and breathed on it to warm it. I warmed it as quickly as I could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes, faster than life. |
Human spiritual death and rebirth must be genuinely and eagerly desired by the person seeking transformation. If the individual doesn't quest for this experience of dying and transmutation,1 he will never even hear of it, work to understand it intellectually, or pursue it experientially. The desiring and the questing of a human for transformation are analogous to the caterpillar's natural evolution to the point of metamorphosis, except that the caterpillar's evolutionary preparedness does not involve its will but is an automatically occurring, instinctual effect.2A person's working to arrive at the stage of desiring spiritual death and rebirth is an absolutely essential prerequisite for transformation. Unless the individual pushes himself to that stage of aspiration and pursuance he is not developed--in his essence--to the point of being able to meet a teacher or come into contact with a genuine teaching.
Until that time, he is like an unevolved caterpillar and his transformation cannot be "forced" by anyone. Counterfeit, unscrupulous, ignorant gurus may try to "blow their breath" on him to hurry up his development, but it will have the same effect that Zorba experienced: a "dead" organism.
The desire for death and transmutation must be genuine, not "forced" by the individual in the sense of pretending that he is eager for the experience of metamorphosis when in fact he is only idly curious. True aspiration and pursuance are essential prerequisites. The psychic experience of transmutation is perilous, potentially injurious to the unevolved pretender.
Physical death is merely one of those natural experiences of moving beyond an old state of existence to a new form of being. On the spiritual path, the quest for death and rebirth is continuous, with old "forms" being left behind as new understandings, new "aspects" are sought and attained ceaselessly.
"Leave the senses of the body idle, and the birth of divinity will begin." |
"I hold that the true votary of philosophy is likely to be misunderstood by other men; they do not perceive that his whole practice is of death and dying. . . . When the soul exists in herself, and is released from the body and the body is released from the soul--death, surely, is nothing else than this. . . . In matters of this sort philosophers, above all other men, may be observed in every sort of way to dissever the soul from its communion with the body. . . . |
Notes:
"The case opened, the butterfly started slowly crawling out and I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were folded back and crumpled; the wretched butterfly tried with its whole trembling body to unfold them. Bending over it, I tried to help it with my breath. In vain. It needed to be hatched out patiently and the unfolding of the wings should be a gradual process in the sun. Now it was too late. My breath had forced the butterfly to appear, all crumpled, before its time. It struggled desperately and, a few seconds later, died in the palm of my hand.
contemplation, if at all? . . . And contemplation is best when the mind is gathered into herself and none of these things trouble her--neither sounds nor sights nor pain nor any pleasure--when she takes leave of the body, and has as little as possible to do with it, when she has no bodily sense or desire, but is aspiring after true being. . . . 