Shri Mataji: “But you know that you have eternal life. You can never die.

[Guest guest]

" Birth, play, marriage, children, old age — life is finished. That is

not living! Life is much deeper and more wonderful... When you know

God there is no more sorrow. All those you loved and lost in death

are with you again in Eternal Life. The souls of those loved ones who

departed before will come to welcome: fathers, mothers, wives,

children, friends. Hundreds and thousands and millions of them! From

hundreds and thousands and millions of past lives and rebirths! From

hundreds and thousands and millions of millenniums ago! How many

wives we must have had in previous lives and how many husbands God

alone knows. "

 

Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi

London, U.K. — June 21, 1981

 

 

" But you know that you have eternal life. You can never die. Death is

not this body disappearing. Death is where you are absolutely without

any control of your soul. Once you are a Realized soul you have all

the control, all the Powers to take your soul wherever you feel like —

to be born if you like, if you don't want you will not be born. To

be born with the people, in the families, in the communities,

wherever you like. "

 

Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi

To Achieve Complete Freedom, Cabella, Italy — May 7, 1995

 

 

" An astral person meets a multitude of relatives, fathers, mothers,

wives, husbands, children, and friends, acquired during different

incarnations on earth, as they appear from time to time in various

parts of the astral cosmos. He is therefore at a loss to understand

whom to love especially; he learns in this way to give divine love

and equal love to all beings, as children and individualized

expressions of God. "

 

Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi,

Self-Realization Fellowship, 1974, p. 415.

 

 

" The resurrection of the body. Just as clear, however, is the real,

indeed materialistic, significance that lies in the Christian

understanding of the resurrection. A dualistic understanding of what

is to be human, which assumes an essential difference between the

spiritual and the material-bodily sides of human existence,

necessarily leads to the idea of the immortality of the soul.

According to this view, imperishableness belongs to spiritual nature

alone. The Christian hope, however, does not aim at the immortality

of the soul but at the resurrection of the body... This hope was

expressed by Vladimir Solovyov: What help would the highest and

greatest moral victory be for man, if the enemy, " death, " which lurks

in the ultimate depth of man's physical, somatic, material sphere,

were not overcome?

 

The goal of redemption is not separation of the spirit from the body;

it is rather the new human in the entirety of the body, soul, and

mind...

 

Although it is not an uncontroversial point, there is in the New

Testament, in the observation of many, a progression of salvation in

history. Indeed, there is a progress of both the individual human

being and of mankind as a whole, what might be thought of under some

terms and conditions as a potential for the progressive perfection of

the human being. This characteristic stands out already in the

proclamation of Jesus. He promises his disciples: " Then the righteous

will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has

ears let him hear. " (Matthew 14:12)... In connection with the

breakthrough of the idea of evolution through Darwin in the areas of

biology, zoology, and anthropology, the tendency asserted itself —

above all in 19th century American theology — of interpreting the

Christian history of salvation in terms of the evolution and

expectation of future human perfection in the form of reaching even

higher charismatic levels and even higher means of spiritual

knowledge and communication. "

 

The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (1992)