The Road to Paradise
Chapter 22
Death is the gateway to paradise
As this divine creation is not only the creation of organisms but at the same time constitutes the creation of mentality or consciousness, indeed, constitutes the breathing of the breath of life into the being, it cannot be a creation that affects only unconscious or dead things. Here it is a matter of the transformation of a living being that can gradually and increaseingly feel and sense the difference between pleasantness and unpleasantness. And it is precisely during this transformation that we to a marked extent become witnesses to the Creator's or Godhead's all-embracing love, wisdom and omnipotence. As the creation of the "human being in God's image" spans millions upon millions of years, and as the being from this perspective gains the ability to experience, feel and sense at an early stage, and thereby gains the ability to begin working on an uncertain and faltering creation, it is an extraordinarily great blessing for it that this creation, which, because of its lack of perfection or faltering logic, gives rise to much suffering or dark fate for itself, does not go on perpetually as an uninterrupted continuum. It is, however, divided into a system with pauses. Every time a being here on the physical plane encounters the process we call "death", whether it occurs normally through old age or through illness or an accident, it constitutes the being's entry into such a pause in its transformation from primitivity to intellectuality, from brutality to humaneness. Since this pause becomes, as we will see later, an experience of paradise for the being, "death" is thus in reality the gateway to paradise.