The Way of Immortality

Here is another piece by Ian Fearn, this time taken from his book “The Way of Immortality.”

The joys of life are the right of us all. The troubles we suffer from are mostly due to our mistaking existence for Life and so condemning ourselves to the dreary role of mere toiling tenants of mortality.

Man is in truth a traveller, passing through time, with the worthwhile object of realising Life that is supra mortal and does not end with death of the body. But it seems that the acquiring of a physical form tends to make him forget why he wanted it and its possible usefulness.

He comes from afar, from a world he cannot see, that his five senses cannot contact; a realm of substance, that stands under the realm of appearances; that is not mortal like the temporary vesture he acquires on being born. That invisible substance is the origin of all he is and indeed the essence of all he can hope for. But when he first arrives in a physical world all his senses compel him towards solids. Launched in a world of matter, his instinct from birth is to boost his bulk to gain at least the consolations of solid incarnation. So the minute material bundle of mystery and appetites called a baby is almost entirely occupied with its material surround that seems to provide the obvious means to gratify its wants and to make its miniature self regarded as a person of importance. A world of materialised objects challenges on every hand and as the inexperienced neophyte bounces and bangs amongst its boulders, he assumes that here is the very real world and that the material ménage is the place where his interests have to be sought and served….
The way of immortality is won by the child of the Spirit, who has learned to pass lightly through the things of time and struggles not to lift all the heavy luggage of existence into the realm of Life.

Existence is laborious and those who spend their days contending for material gains become weary and heavy laden but when the Spirit is allowed to break free from the obsession of weight and bulk, the burdens of its merely temporal equipage, then the body and soul are quickened with the motif of Livingness and the sense of freedom and fulfilment emancipates the whole being from strain and care.

But this does not mean that we attempt to bypass the experiences of time, to slip through the solids as the criminal would dodge the cordon of the law. Our education in immortality must inevitably begin in the kindergarten school of solids, for we can only master the rudiments of reality by coming up against and contending with the surface world of five sense man. All the accessories of time and space are means to teach the neophyte those introductory secrets of Life which must be learned in the school of earth.

The material forms that appeal to the senses are but stepping stones which the traveller employs to enable him to tread firmly, confidently, through the scenes of time into the realm of substance, which by means of the tempering of material experience, he learns to know and value as the Kingdom of Life that is eternal.

All the surface things will inevitably be swept away from the temporal table, as the crumbs from the breakfast cloth. They are but the remnants from the feast and Life, kindly but strongly, is ever urging us to move on from the husks and shells of our surface meals. Every different experience can be a means of making new values and discarding old patterns in the progress that Life invites us to share. To pass through things temporal means that there are no regrets about the past, however much we may have suffered, to have been misused or even to have lost. No resentments can be woven into the way of release.

The new child of Life’s immortal lineage is content to travel light. The solids he encounters on his Life-borne way are held only so long as they serve the Living inspiration of his untiring quest to temper the body and tutor the soul to fit him consciously to share in Life’s vital continuity.

It is through our mortal experience that we travellers through time develop conscious sympathy with Life that is supra normal and only waits for us to attune ourselves to synchronize with its higher frequencies, that time-tutored, matter-matured, we may, even here and now, taste our immortality.