Only One Life

For more than 160 years non-Spiritualists condemned Spiritualists for their knowledge that life continues after the change called death. They were also condemned for believing that mediums could contact the "dead" and communicate with them. Mediums have been communicating with spirit people for thousands of years and were able to document the information that spirits, the dead, provided.

One of the main things that mediums were able to show is that all people when they die go to the spirit world, heaven. The Bible says in John 14:2 "In my Father's house there are many places to live in; otherwise I would have told you..." (New Jerusalem Bible) Spiritualists believe that all humans when they die go to a place in the spirit world where there are people who are just like them. That is, a place for the average good person and a place for criminals, but all humans go there no matter who or what they were like when physically alive. The Christian church tells us that only those who have accepted Christ as saviour go directly to heaven and all others sleep in the grave until the great day of judgement.

In this world there are people who believe that this is the only life that they will ever have, when they die, that's it, life for them ends. Many more people believe that this will not be their only life and that life does continues after the change called death. But where does our belief in an afterlife come from?

In the Encyclopedia of the unusual and unexplained How the Major Religions View the Afterlife. "With all their diversity of beliefs, the major religions are in accord in one great teaching: Human beings are immortal and their spirit comes from a divine world and may eventually return there. Since the earliest forms of spiritual expression, this is the great promise and hope that religions have offered to their followers".

Anthropologists who study ancient man found proof that those early people had a belief in an afterlife. The Book of the Dead, the Enuma Elish, the I Ching, and the Avesta, they are among the most ancient religious texts still in existence and all of them have references to an afterlife. (Www.sacred-text.com) "Until recently, it was believed that the “primitive” cave paintings were merely depictions of hunting animals, but new research show that the cave paintings are evidence of travels to the spirit world these travels could be of a similar nature as the near-death experience, and therefore, it is possible that experiences of the ultimate reality are as old as humanity". (www.awakeningafterlifethebook.com/index.php?option=com_content&id=artice&id=67&Itemid=65)

As shown above, belief that life continues after the change called death, has existed for tens of thousands of years. The Bible even has many references indicating that even in the time of Noah man believed in an after life. In the Bible's New Testament 1 Peter 3:18 it says "For Christ ... was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit". If Christ continued to live as a spirit after his body was put to death, it means that every human, past, present and future, when their body dies will continue to live as spirit beings.

Christianity teaches that man is "body", "soul" and "spirit" and that when the body dies, the soul and spirit live on, believing that the soul is the body of the spirit. Other than the findings of scientists that there is an afterlife, Christianity is the source of our belief today that we, man, are created in the image of God. In the Bible, Gen. 1:26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness..." It says in John 4:24 "God is spirit...” this Bible verse tells us that we were created in the likeness of God as spirit beings long before we were born of woman. We don't know exactly when God created us (spirits). It could have been when God made mankind or untold millennia before that time, we just don't know. However, some people even believe that life only begins at the moment the male sperm unites with the egg of a woman and not before that moment.

Allen Kardec in his "The Spirit Book" asked his spirit guide Zefiro in question #78. "Have spirits had a beginning, or have they existed, like God, from all eternity?" "Zefiro replied
if spirits had not had a beginning, they would be equal with God; whereas they are His creation, and subject to His will. That God has existed from all eternity is incontestable; but as to when and how He created us, we know nothing. You may say that we have had no beginning in this sense, that, God being eternal, He must have incessantly created as to when and how each of us was made, this, I repeat, is known to no one. It is the great mystery."

An afterlife as mentioned above is a controversial subject in many respects but by the same token something that has been known for countless centuries. For us living in this physical world at this time the thought of an afterlife is a question. The church tells us that the bad person sleeps in the grave until judgement day, but do we. According to what is written above life continues after the change called death for all

Another question that comes up quite often is "do humans reincarnate"? The debate over reincarnation has been going on for hundreds of years. In the Far East, their is a strong belief in reincarnation. In the West, man believe that he has only one life to live. Whether you accept reincarnation as a fact or not makes no difference as to whether you go to heaven when you die, you will. I know that there are thousands of people who read this will say the reincarnation doesn't exist so, therefor, why debate the issue, if it is an issue.

One life to live, or many. You are the one who has to make up you own mind. For me, I'll wait and see what happens.

Time

Time may be an invention of man but it allows man to know when certain happenings in history and his life took place. Time is something we all know about but do we really?

Since the beginning of human history, man has used nature in order to tell time. He devised methods of recording the passage of the constellations throughout the sky, the phases of the moons in order to know when it was time to plant and a time to harvest. Later on man devised the sun dial and other devices to help him tell time, determining the number hours in a day and even the number of days in a year. In China and India and other parts of the world, water clocks were being used as early as 4000 BC. Water clocks advanced in sophistication for countless years until the development of the mechanical and electronic clocks of the type we use today.

When I was a young man, I read several articles by prominent scientists on the subject of time. Each man had a different interpretation on exactly what time is. However, each man conceded that he just didn't know what time really was.

"Time exists as an expression of change. Our human reality is a three dimensional material universe that includes movement and, therefore, a passage of time with the aging of all things physical. However, in the spirit world Souls exist in a NOW moment which is not on any kind of timeline and is not absolute". (The Newton Institute: The Spirit World and The Soul)

In the spirit world, time has no meaning for those who are there. Life consists of a multitude of "now" moments strung together so that they blend together without any kind of division. The spirit world consists of perpetual daylight with a constant warm temperature making it impossible for a person to know the passages of time, something that becomes irrelevant and of little or no importance the longer an individual is there.

At certain times of the year, those who live in the most northern countries on earth require a clock to tell time due to the fact that they experience night for weeks at a time. The only way they can tell time without a clock is by the requirements of their physical body. Those in the spirit world have no physical body, but a spirit body that has no physical require-ments. The passage of time is indeed a human invention and is extremely important to him. However, time is really irrelevant because life is continuous without a beginning or end.

For a person in the spirit world, life is filled with pure happiness. On earth life is quite different in that it is often filled with chaos, stress and despair, to put it mildly. But all is not lost, for life in the physical provides an individual with experiences that cannot be experienced in the spirit world. It is for this reason that spirit people come into this physical world.

The physical world provides the spirit person an opportunity to grow spiritually through the multitude of challenges that the physical has to offer. As a physical being, the individual then has an opportunity to once again find and live a spiritual life needed for true spiritual advancement.

Like so many of my human friends, I find it difficult to understand why anyone would choose to live in a place where there is war, famine, sickness and upheaval all the time. I can only hope that it is the kind of life that those individuals require as a way in which they can develop a greater faith and knowledge of God.

We all need to experience physical life, maybe many times, in order to truly be able to grow spiritually. Time spent in a physical body is a means, however short, to grow.

At the internet site: library.thinkquest.org/16665/afterlifeframe.htm is I listing of the beliefs of the numerous religions of the world concerning heaven titled (The Great Unknown - Some Views of the Afterlife).