I KNOW THAT EVERY APPARENT DEATH IS RESURRECTION, THEREFORE GLADLY I DIE TO EVERYTHING THAT IS UNLIKE GOOD
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Psalm 23:4
Unhappy is he who mistakes the branch for the tree, the shadow for the substance.
The Talmud
Gain for yourselves, ye sons of Adam, by means of these transitory things which are not yours, that which is your own, and passeth not away. Fragments of a Faith Forgotten
We are told that we must gain a knowledge of that which cannot pass away. The Talmud says that unhappy conditions arise when we mistake shadow for substance. Even the valley of the shadow of death causes no fear when we arrive at the consciousness of the Psalmist who, from the exaltation of his Divine deliverance, proclaimed “… thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” The rod and the staff of truth is the realization of the substantiality and the permanence of that which cannot change. We are ever renewed by the passage of the Divine Light through our consciousness of wholeness into our physical organism and into every objective act, when we give the realization of the Divine Presence free passage through our thought. Emerson tells us that in these moments we are conscious that we as isolated beings are nothing, but that the Light is all. Thus he admonishes us to get our “bloated nothingness” out of the way of the Divine Circuit. How wonderful to realize this possibility to which he refers – nonresistance and nonburden. Let us, then, learn to let the burden slip from the shoulders of personal responsibility and enter into our divine union with enthusiasm.
I know that every apparent death is a resurrection. Therefore, gladly, today, I die to everything that is unlike the good. Joyfully I am resurrected into that which is beautiful, enduring and true. Silently I pass from less to more; from isolation into inclusion; from separation into oneness.
Taken from “ 365 Days of Richer Living ” by Ernest Holmes and Raymond Charles Barker
