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Concepts and misconceptions

By Abdu Rafiu
27 February 2020   |   3:06 am
There are statements we have grown to hear or to make ourselves. From childhood to adulthood, from adulthood to the twilight of our lives, we have heard them made.

There are statements we have grown to hear or to make ourselves. From childhood to adulthood, from adulthood to the twilight of our lives, we have heard them made. The older generations have heard them; they have spread them themselves. We have lived with the pronouncements they have become the gospel truth, no one hardly steps back to reflect on them. We hardly bother any longer and say, wait a minute, can this be true?

We say, for example: “The voice of the people is the Voice of God.” We wish our dead eternal rest. The clergy is wont to say: “Eternal rest grant him Oh Lord.” Relations, well-wishers and the congregation in general going around the casket during awake or at what we call a farewell service, pray that the departed may be granted eternal rest in the bosom of the Lord. It is not unusual to read in the newspaper obituary announcement: “Sleep on in the Vineyard of the Lord.” There is a surfeit of these loving and prayerful wishes on tombstones in cemeteries all over the land. At gatherings, there is an invitation to observe a two-minute silence for the departed which is wrapped up in the payer, May his soul rest in perfect peace to which there is the chorus: “Amen.”

Sleep is generally regarded as being in a state of unconsciousness. It is when we lose hold of our outer world. The body vital functions—heartbeat, respiration, and body temperature—are reduced. Even though there is rapid eye movement behind closed eyes, during dreams, nothing can be seen through closed eyelids. It is a state of diminished brain-current. Scientists who occupy themselves with the study of sleep describe brain-current as micro-electric processes constantly running through our brain. While we are awake the brain currently runs 30 cycles per second. During sleep, however, this drops to as low as half a cycle per second! Death is the cessation of the brain-current and the vibration between body and soul is no longer measurable. The body and the soul are held together by radiations mediated by both parties. When there is an imbalance in the degree and consistency of supply, a person feels unwell and we say he is ill. When the radiation consistency can no longer hold the parties together, the soul steps out of its body. Doctors then find that the vibration between the body and the soul is not measurable anymore and they announce to the anxious relatives: “We have lost him!” Because no one stands sleeping, and we sleep lying horizontally on the bed, the mistaken concept may have arisen from that fact of lying down and this time motionless.

We have gone this far to describe what sleep is so that we can ask ourselves whether when our relations depart we would wish them a weakening in the function of their vital organs in the Beyond. Paradise is the longed-for destination of everyone who believes in the life hereafter. Paradise is inconceivable without beauty. It defines the Luminous Kingdom of our Lord and Creator. It is a Realm of peace, harmony, joy, and happiness. We are told it is a land with streets paved with gold, a land of gurgling brooks and crystal clear rivers, meadows, a land of indescribable splendor; a place where everything works! If sleep is a state of unconsciousness, how does a person who sleeps enjoy the beauty, the splendor and joyful activities around him?

A person who rests all day is no better than one who sleeps. It is generally known that without activities, the body weakens. This should demonstrate to us that apart from getting bored a person who rests without work loses strength. When a person does not move on his hospital bed, he loses the ability to use his limbs. At the end of the day, he will have to re-learn like a baby the art of walking. It cannot be for anything that we are admonished to read books, read and read to exercise our brains. We are similarly told that practice makes perfect. Skilled men sharpen their skills through the constant deployment of the skills and the exercise of their faculties. How does a person who sleeps on forever or who rests in the bosom of his Lord unfold his talents and abilities and bring them up to speed for beneficial use?

The question about who the man becomes germane. Who is man? Man is a spirit. He has wrapped around himself finer substances as he traverses intervening realms and planes down to the boundary of the earth to become a soul. He enters the earth which is called birth after wrapping itself with materials of the earth in the womb of its mother called incarnation, materials woven by a certain species of elemental beings who build the physical body from the radiations of what its mother eats—legumes, fruits, all that an expectant mother consumes as food. He thus becomes an earthman.

In other words, a man is a spirit in an ethereal vessel and finally in earthly vessel generally called the physical body. This body has been pointed out to consist of neutrons, protons, electrons, found in sub-atomic particles, which are products of spirit motes from the highest heights. Wrapped in material substance, they are recognised to form elementary particles. Our physical body, therefore, consists of elementary particles. At death the journey is in the reversed order, first dropping being the earthly garment, later as he makes progress in the Beyond the finer coverings that make him be regarded as a soul. He enters paradise in the spiritual garment as a fully mature and self-conscious spirit who has acquired experience, knowledge of and familiarization with the Will of the Creator that manifests in lawfulness. Is it the soul we wish should sleep on or the spirit which if freed from the encasement of wrongdoing is light and soars in flight towards home in paradise? Many believe that a dead person remains in the grave awaiting resurrection morning, yet we all know that once life goes out of a man, the body goes cold and begins to decay, going back to dust the recognition of which makes the officiating priest said during the last rites at the graveside: “Dust thou art, and to dust thou shall return.”

What is also not put into consideration when the prayerful wishes are stated in the Law of Motion. In the enlightenment shed by higher knowledge available on earth today, we have come to know that impelled motion exists and governs in all spheres, planes, and Realms of existence, in all of Creation and all living. Fruits, for example, drop from the mother tree without anyone, animal or reptile shaking the tree. It may not be necessary to go into the origin of the concept of Rest in Peace. It suffices to state that it is a distortion of the phrase taught to describe the knowledge of the Realm of Peace. In other words, it is the Realm of peace that has been twisted to read and mean Rest in Peace. It may well be that when we wish our departed loved ones to Rest in Peace, or to sleep in the Bosom of the Lord, they are being cursed without the relations realizing it. It is a monumental error!

Another common pronouncement we make, and this time arrogantly is: “The voice of the people is the voice of God.” This is stated when a collective wish of a group of people comes to fruition. It could be the longing of a community or an association. An election result is believed to represent the Will of God and it is called the voice of God. The victorious party faithful exclaims in triumphal jubilation: “The voice of the people is the Voice of God.” But is it really? Even when the election result emerges from crucibles and orgy of violence! We do not shrink to associate the holiness of the Name of the Creator with it, the Creator who is Author of Peace, love, and harmony.

The magnitude of the blasphemy can only be recognized from even a faint idea of Who the Almighty Creator is, what characterize His Nature and His Activities. The Creator is the Source of all, of the visible and the invisible worlds. In the material world alone, there are seven universes as those familiar with the scriptures know, although they are called Churches. They are universes. These are Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea. Ours is Ephesus of which the earth is no more than a tip of a fountain pen. It is a planet in the solar system which is built around the sun. As I have mentioned in this column before, the sun is only one of the billions of the stars in our galaxy which scientists call the Milky Way. Our galaxy is itself one of the billions of galaxies in our Universe. The universe is so vast that it is beyond the comprehension of any human being. Come to think of it, the moon that the world has explored is 400,000 miles away from the earth. The speed at which the universe move is terrific. And it is such that one Age is 2,160 years. In other words, the distance between the coming of the Lord Christ and that of the Holy Spirit, the End-Time is 2,160 years. The knowledge has also been mediated that one day in the Light Realm is as 1,000 years on earth.

Ours is even Subsequent Creation, not Creation proper which terminates with the Spiritual Realm from whence we descended to this earth that is to serve as a school for our development. The Spiritual realm is abutted by the animistic Realm the point of origin of animals. With the understanding of the structure of Creation, we begin to recognise that it is the Divine Wisdom of God that governs Creation, with the Holy Spirit described as that wisdom in the scriptures. He is the Will, the Power and Justice of the Almighty. He is the Law, the lawfulness that spans and governs the entire Creation. His Abode is in the Castle at the Summit of Creation while Jesus Christ governs in the Divine Realm, a Realm which is separated from the Throne of God the Father by an ocean of Fire. It is His natural radiations and is incapable of cooling. The cooled part formed the Divine Realm for the abode of Ach-Angels. Only the Holy Spirit and the Lord Jesus can traverse the said ocean of fire being Parts of Almighty God and their radiations are of the Father. From where is that Voice of God to come such that it becomes the voice of the people?

It needs to be stated that God is Perfection. It is His Nature and we cannot conceive of Him without Perfection. Being imperfect, the voice of the people cannot be the Voice of God. It is stated in the revelation of higher knowledge that the direction of the fate of mankind is shaped and determined by their volition and wishes alone, brought to fruition in the outworking of His immutable, self-acting, consistent and incorruptible Laws, the eternal lawfulness anchored in His Creation. When the longing produces the desired result, it is no more than the outworking of the Lord’s mechanisms. If the volition is pure it produces enheartening results that may be thought to have come directly from the Creator, and if borne out wickedness or impure volition, thoughts or action, rotten fruits are the return for harvesting. The voice of the imperfect puny human beings can therefore not be tantamount to the Voice of the Perfect Almighty Creator.

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