These words that Jesus said to Martha at the tomb of Lazarus are of paramount importance to humanity and the life of every man. It states that "dying" or "being dead" is not something definitive, but a provisional state, a transition or a metamorphosis to other states. And this is not a poetic or a speech figure of Jesus - it is the purest reality, which he himself proved with his life, death and resurrection.
Here on earth, the man knows only two scientifically certain things:
The present life;
And future death.
Beyond these two, however, there is a third certain and proven fact, although not all know it from immediate experience: the survival of the individual after physical death. The fact that man's survival to his material death is as old reality as humanity itself, confirmed both by the sacred books and by the multimillennial experience of human history in general.
What cannot be demonstrated scientifically, is immortality, an eternal afterlife; for survival is not immortality.
It is known that the living die and that the dead survive - but it is not known yet whether the survivors live forever, since in the world of survival death also prevails, as the survivors themselves confess. The survivors are also mortal.
The dead can survive centuries, and perhaps millennia, in their astral, ethereal, causal, mental bodies, or whatever name it may have; and this temporary survival has been experimentally proven in thousands of cases. But no laboratory experiment, nor the spontaneous appearance of an entity in immaterial body, has ever proved immortality. This, by its very nature, cannot be the object of scientific proof but is the exclusive subject of an intimate spiritual experience within the subject itself. Those who have not lived and live their immortality, either before or after physical death, are unsure of eternal life, even though they know survival. The certainty of eternal life is not a cradle or grave gift, it is not given by life or death - but it is a supreme achievement of living, of life experiences. Neither the living nor the dead know it, but only the immortal, who exist, though few, among the living and the immortals, but they do not identify with either these or those.
To every human being, birth has already "happened", and soon death "will happen", followed by survival - but neither being born, nor dying, nor surviving confer immortality. Potential immortality, it is true, exists in each, it is a cradle gift, offered to every human being - but dynamic immortality does not exist automatically, must be conquered freely; it is not something that "happens" from the outside, but it is something that must be "produced" from the inside. This is the "new birth by the spirit", this is the "entrance into the kingdom of heaven."
Only the immortals know what God is, because they know what they themselves are.
Jesus, the greatest immortal known to history, makes this mysterious realization of eternal life dependent on "faith". "He who has faith in me shall live forever", is to say that he who has faith in his inner Christ shall live forever!
This "having faith" must be something immensely powerful as it creates eternal life beyond all lives, deaths and temporary survivor.
“To have faith” in the language of Jesus is not to believe, it is to have vital experience of God; it is to know and comprehend God through an attitude of intuition or intimate experience, divine. Whoever had this experience knows what it is; those who have not had it do not know what it is, because no external definition can give an accurate idea of the internal experience. This is "be to know". "Eternal life," says the Master, is this: that men know you, the Father, as the only true God, and Christ whom he has sent."
To live forever, to be immortal is, therefore, a permanent attitude of intuitive knowledge, spiritual, a direct vision of the Supreme Reality.
Since God is immortal by its very essence, man will have individual immortality only if he is intimately united with the Universal Immortality of God.
"To unite" means to make one, to have a vital awareness that the inner self coincides with the Self of Divinity - "I and the Father are one" - though the outer existence is different from God - "but the Father is greater than I".
This is "having faith in Christ" - knowing that "it is no longer I who live, but the Christ lives in me".
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