Around the Year With Emmet Fox - 20 June 2011
THROUGH DEATH TO LIFE
"Into the hand that made the rose,
shall I with trembling fall?
-- George Meredith
There is absolutely no reason to fear death. The same God is on the other side of the grave as on this side. However, most people do fear death, partly as fear of the unknown, and partly as the result of false teaching. Actually there is no death in the sense of extinction.
To understand death, you have to realize that you really possess not one body but two. You have not only the physical body, but also a second body made of a form of energy too fine to be seen. This etheric body interpenetrates the physical body as air fills a sponge. There are people who can see the etheric body because they have the power of contacting much finer vibrations than can be perceived by the ordinary physical senses.
It is this body that is the repository of all your thoughts and feelings. It is the "psyche" of the psychologist. That is why personality survives death; because it resided in the etheric that passes over intact, and not in the physical that breaks up in to decomposition.
During sleep, trance, and under anesthesia, when the etheric may leave the physical body, it remains attached to it by an etheric ligament called in the Bible the Silver Cord. The cord is so elastic that the etheric body can go very long distances and still remain attached to the physical corpus.
Death is the severing of the Silver Cord. When the Silver Cord is severed, and individual falls into a state of unconsciousness that may last for minutes, days, or even weeks. Then he wakens as from sleep, and his new life has begun.
The next world is actually all around us here. The so-called dead are carrying on their lives here where we are now, but in their own world and in their own way. The reason we do not see them around us or collide with them is the same reason that one radio program does not interfere with another - they are on different wavelengths.
...though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me ... (Psalm 23).