QA232 QUESTION: I’m asking this question for a friend who is not here and who is suffering and facing cancer. Why, karmically, has he chosen to take on this burden, and what would the best emotional and spiritual approach be to aid him in meeting this challenge?

ANSWER: There are different answers on different levels to this question. On one level, I would like to say that you human beings always like to forget that death is not a punishment; it is not an end. It is but a new beginning, and therefore, as long as this fearful attitude exists, the answer would then make no sense that would be given from another vantage point.

Dying and being reborn is a constant process in everyone’s daily life, whether in the body or not in the body. The dying and being reborn knows different degrees and stages according to the awareness of the consciousness. In other words, you can die and be reborn in full consciousness and that would be when you are very much connected with the inner truth, the inner reality.

When this connection does not yet exist, the process of dying and of being reborn and redying – of course, you die many, many times, just as you are born many, many times – is, on the ego level, not conscious. On the level of the higher self, it is conscious. So here it depends entirely on the level.

On the level of the higher self, it is merely a change. On the ego level, your everyday little dyings and rebirths that you go through from one change into another can be conscious if you choose to make them so. When you leave one situation behind and go into the next, it is a redying and a rebirth, a redeath and a rebirth. And tomorrow there may be another redeath and a rebirth.

From an overall cosmic point of view, it is exactly the same. A lifetime is but a day from a different measurement system. It is but a dream you have during a night in a different measurement system.

As you human beings become more aware of the processes of your redeath and rebirth, you will discover every time you are on a low point, in a point of contraction, in a point of blindness and groping, in a point of pain, in a point of fear and anxiety, you are in a death process. And every time you unfold in joy and light and confidence, a new birth is taking place in your psychic system.

That birth process happens simultaneously as the death process occurs, but your consciousness cannot immediately connect with the simultaneity of it, and so connects perhaps what you may call “at a later period” with it. But the more you unfold, the more you can literally perceive the rebirth behind the dying process.

This is a general answer, but as far as your friend is concerned, this could be made clear to him, that he try to tune in on the life and the rebirth that is already taking place now on another level, while he’s in the dying process on this level. The important thing is that he be fully aware of the process and have no illusions in order to nurture false fears.

The important thing is that he be helped to go through the fear of it, through the pain of it, through the protest of it, in a hopeful spirit to find the eternal life process already there, and to connect with his truer consciousness. That is the most important answer.

I could give other answers in this life, but it would serve no purpose at this time. Inner decisions have been made that go beyond the good and the bad, and the right and the wrong that you human beings are so used to think of about things. Ego consciousness has indeed found certain problems apparently too difficult to deal with and was resistant to deal with them in this life, and therefore contracted back from life. The real higher self has therefore decided “yes, let us try again in another situation that may indeed be more propitious.” That is all.

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