We crave Life, but Death is not only part of life, but necessary to it. Death is the Poetry of life: Life’s Glorifier. How poor Life would be were it not for the dead who have pre-deceased us, leaving us, in our memory of them, a page of life indispensable and blessed. The “noble dead,” Tennyson said. The sacred past.

Life leads to Death, we know. But Death leads to more Life. Every death in Nature leads to a new Resurrection. Trees would perish if they did not shed their leaves every autumn. With every leaf that falls the way is made for the reappearance of new life in another spring.

So among humanity. Suppose no one died, and humans even in their bodies achieved deathlessness. How quickly the earth would be over-populated, and life would be unbearable. Death redeems life … indeed, makes it possible.

 Dylan Thomas wrote: “Do not go gently into that Good-Night. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”

No, not rage. Acceptance. Socrates is the exemplar for humanity when he accepted the cup of hemlock, not Dylan Thomas. Thomas’ view of death reflected his limited vision of life. He died as an alcoholic at the age of 39 in New York City.

From Life to Death—to Life again. And so on until the day of Attainment. Opposites breed each other, and if we move with the flow of their interplay and tidal recurrence we ascend on ever-higher rungs of growth, development, evolution, and Self-knowledge.

If we are failing to achieve our spiritual goal, or failing even to understand why we are living, take that as the natural condition of man at a certain stage, accept that—the anxiety, the depression, the addiction, the cravings, the weakness, the bad temper, or whatever we are coping with—take that as the cross to be borne. Precisely that!

It’s a process until the day of Realization of the Unity of Life when Perfection transcends the Process, having fulfilled it.

As far down as we have gone, so far will we go up. All is purposeful in this world. Not only the planets, the stars, the seasons, the courses of Nature, but the courses of the soul’s development were also designed for maximum effectiveness.

Satan is the potentiality in us for self-will carried to its ultimate end—that is all. Christ precisely the opposite.

The effort to dislodge the satanic element in the personality will produce the Christ consciousness. If the effort is strong, sustained, determined and desperate enough, saintliness will result.

The wildness and violence of the ego become, in this mysterious but fated process, converted into tremendous power of spiritual willing and discriminative knowledge, which make a person invincible, a hero.

No rose without a thorn ... but no thorn without a rose.

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* From "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"

See also Words of Wisdom: Truth, Spiritual Life