A Quote by Goswami Kriyananda
The "kingdom of heaven" to which he referred was the state of God-consciousness, not the beautiful astral heavens that most people visualize, where virtuous souls go after death.
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At physical death man loses his consciousness of the flesh and becomes conscious of his astral body in the astral world. Thus physical death is astral birth. Later, he passes from the consciousness of luminous astral birth to the consciousness of dark astral death and awakens in a new physical body. Thus astral death is physical birth. These recurrent cycles of physical and astral encasements are the ineluctable destiny of all unenlightened men.
If souls survive death for all eternity, how can the heavens hold them all? Or for that matter, how can the earth hold all the bodies that have been buried in it? The answers are the same. Just as on earth, with the passage of time, decaying and transmogrified corpses make way for the newly dead, so souls released into the heavens, after a season of flight, begin to break up, burn, and be absorbed back into the womb of reason, leaving room for souls just beginning to fly. This is the answer for those who believe that souls survive death.
After death we live for some time in the astral world in the astral body used during our life on earth, and the more we learn to control and use it wisely now the better for us after death.
Jesus' death was seen by Jesus himself ... as the ultimate means by which God's kingdom was established. The crucifixion was the shocking answer to the prayer that God's kingdom would come on earth as in heaven.
Beings with un-redeemed earthly karma are not permitted after astral death to go to the high causal sphere of cosmic ideas , but must shuttle to and fro from the physical and astral worlds.
The resurrection is not an isolated supernatural oddity proving how powerful, if apparently arbitrary, God can be when he wants to. Nor is it at all a way of showing that there is indeed a heaven awaiting us after death. It is the decisive event demonstrating that God’s kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven.
Jesus' kingdom was not like the popular expectation. He used the phrase 'kingdom of God' with a different meaning. His kingdom was not of this world (John 18:36). It was not like the kingdoms of this world. It was the kingdom of God, a supernatural kingdom. It was invisible to most people (John 3:3)-it could not be understood or experienced without the Holy Spirit (v. 6). God is Spirit, and the kingdom of God is a spiritual kingdom.
What comes to mind when you think of heaven? Heaven is referred to in fifty-four of the Bible's sixty-six books, and the final two chapters of the Bible are a virtual travelogue of our heavenly home. To visualize heaven accurately, study the Bible continually.
If the kingdom of God is within us and that is a kingdom of justice, of peace, and of joy then whoever remains with these virtues is certainly in the kingdom of God. By contrast, all who deal in unrighteousness, in discord, and in death-bearing gloom have taken their stand in the kingdom of the devil, in hell and in lifelessness. It is by these tokens that the kingdom of God or of the devil is recognized.
After death the soul possesses self-consciousness, otherwise, it would be the subject of spiritual death, which has already been disproved. With this self-consciousness necessarily remains personality and the consciousness of personal identity.
You should be a person who can establish the Heavenly Kingdom rather than just the one who can go there. Those who can go to heaven are those who wish to be dependent on God, but those capable of building the Kingdom are those who can let God depend on them.
The sphere ... which is located beyond our physical world is called the earth zone. It is also known as the zone girdling the earth. This zone has varying degrees of density, the so-called sub-planes, into which human beings enter after they leave their physical bodies. This is the astral world that individuals enter into with their astral bodies after their physical death.
The plan was for Jesus to come to Earth two thousand years ago with a pocketful of miracles and souls for the people who were then alive. After his return to heaven from Earth he is going to build those mansions, come back before his generation dies out, finally put an end to the world which has been such a rotten disappointment, and deposit most of these souls in hell. No wonder heaven is only 12,000 furlongs wide, long, and high.
The 'kingdom of Heaven' is a condition of the heart - not something that comes 'upon the earth' or 'after death.'
Baptism is a sign to God, to angels, and to heaven that we do the will of God, and there is no other way beneath the heavens whereby God hath ordained for man to come to Him to be saved, and enter into the kingdom of God, except faith in Jesus Christ, repentance, and baptism for the remission of sins, and any other course is in vain; then you have the promise of the gift of the Holy Ghost.
From a Buddhist point of view, the actual experience of death is very important. Although how or where we will be reborn is generally dependent on karmic forces, our state of mind at the time of death can influence the quality of our next rebirth. So at the moment of death, in spite of the great variety of karmas we have accumulated, if we make a special effort to generate a virtuous state of mind, we may strengthen and activate a virtuous karma, and so bring about a happy rebirth.
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