Additional Note on the Passing of my Father

Regarding my father's death bed discourse that used the language of recurrence, I've now remembered that I introduced him to the ideas of recurrence sometime in the mid-nineties. It's interesting that he never mentioned it after that, but it nevertheless seemed to have become something he adopted in his thinking about life and death in the last twelve years or so. It is evidence that a short talk or small remark can stay inside a person. One evening where I discourse on time in the language of recurrence to my dad and it comes out in a dramatic lucid discourse from him just before he dies. It is also evidence that evangelising the faith to a person may have more impact in them than you can know. Even just a remark.

I also realized I was the one "by the fireplace." This was a mysterious thing my father was saying in his last days. The person "by the fireplace."

When I was deeply into my initial Work stage (which is the main stage for all practical purposes when you connect with the Work in a real way) I would come in from long walks, filled with higher energy, and I'd stand on the bricks of the fireplace (sometimes; enough times to remember it) and talk to my mother and father whose chairs sort of faced the fireplace. (I was conscious at the time of feeling - and looking - like a prophet.) I remember, in a way geared for their understanding, talking about religion and time and death. This was when my father heard of the ideas he was repeating on his death bed. But that it came out of him then, is rather remarkable. It may be just that the ideas are universal truth, he'd come into contact with them, and so he could express them because he had a language to express them.

The Bible has room for recurrence since the Bible doesn't say what happens to people who are not believers at death. They don't go to hell (that is reserved for people who are judged to go there at the Last Judgment at the end of the world). People of faith go to be with God in heaven. People who die and who currently have no faith in their Creator and Saviour...the Bible is silent on them. Where they go at death, anyway. It says they go to Hades. Plato's Myth of Er describes a kind of recurrence in and out of Hades (it though seems, though only seems, to describe reincarnation, but not really, if you know what recurrence is). There is room for recurrence in an orthodox biblical belief.

I regret greatly now I didn't evangelize the Gospel, such as I would do it, to him at any time. I admit I am still "ashamed" of the name Christ and the Gospel (embarassed might be a more accurate word, but that would correlate with being ashamed some too). Actually, too, I am a bit impatient with all the explanation required and people mechanically assuming you're something that you're not, some common stereotype associated with Christianity and so on. Yet for the Spirit to do its work you just have to say Jesus saves. Or give some actual Scriptural truth, bold and directly. Don't worry about explaining yourself. It does the work. In time. I failed my father in this area. Though my father did see me with a Bible always, which is a kind of evangelizing. He did start to use language of faith some as well. "I'll see your mother in heaven." He said that several times. He also began to use the phrase "the good Lord." This from a man who my brother says told him long ago that when you die there is nothing afterwards.

ps: Thank you, missionaha, for your note on Parthenon_Agora.

pps: And thank you, Paul, for your note as well...