Читать книгу Soul Rescuers: A 21st century guide to the spirit world - Natalia O’Sullivan - Страница 20

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.