This realization is possible because we act upon it unconsciously throughout our lives. A way of discerning at least the index of our immortality is to realise how, in every respect, man here below walks daily on the edge of his grave, and it can be only by some instinct of his immortality that he seeks to rise superior to this danger, living as if it did not exist. The refusal to remove our blindness to our real nature threatens to destroy us. We must come to experience the life-affirming energy at the core of our awareness of death, for this will show us that we need consciously to engage in active spiritual regeneration. There is one less illusion between man and truth.
Ordinary men believe that they are afraid of death, but it is life of which they are in dread. . . .
The wise man who is convinced that this world is only a translation of the unseen world must rejoice and not grieve when the time comes to make acquaintance with the original, because it is a general truth that originals are preferable to translations. . . . Death is the target at which all men strike, but the angle of incidence being equal to the angle of reflection, they find themselves after death in their former degree, whether above or below. Our debt to man and nature is paid through self-sacrificing service which is the cultivation of love for all creatures. As a proof that we are regenerated, we must regenerate everything around us. The universe is even as a great temple, the stars are its lights, the earth is its altar, all corporeal beings are its fiery sacrificers, and man, the priest of the Eternal, offers the sacrifices.