The way I have made sense of the issue raised herein is by ‘seeing’ things through the ‘lens’ of ‘reincarnation.’ (I can point to a passage in The New Testament which quite clearly indicates that Jesus himself believed in the phenomenon of ‘reincarnation’ by the way, if you wish.) My understanding in summarized in the following excerpt from the writing I am now doing:
“The short version of ‘the full story’ is that, with the benefit of having both (‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’) kinds of experiences, souls may incrementally become aware of the ins and outs of the multivarious kinds of liabilities which stem from short-sighted self ishness and (so) in due course choose to transcend any and all self ish-‘i’dentity associated inclinations such that they eventually become completely devoted to optimizing and augmenting the Entity of Life’s Love and Joy process above and beyond their own and (so) from that point on live in a state of ‘at oneness’ or conjunction with said Ever-Ongoing Process, hence one might say ‘forever’ or ‘eternally’, thereafter. The alternative possibility in this regard, of course, being their completely (capital letter ‘F’!) ‘Failing’ to do and be so.
The latter possibility derives from the fact that, if and as a soul reacts, as all self ish-ego bound (hence ‘immature’ in incarnational terms) souls inevitably sometimes do, to the frustration(s) and disappointment(s) of personal wishes, hopes, and expectations in an unduly self ish-gratification oriented (hence) other-forsaking manner – the idea that Life presents us with a series of ‘tests’ which we may either ‘pass’ or not in this regard pertains here – and if such all too human directional liability isn’t somehow neutralized and reversed – note, if your experience is presently hellish: in retrospect, horrible-to-go-through experiences variously labeled ‘dark nights of the soul’, ‘hitting bottom’ and ‘ego-death’ will be seen to have actually having been boons in this regard! – a soul may become so mentally and emotionally ‘i’solated that its capacity and inclination to experience and express Love and Joy psychospiritually shrinks and shrivels (i.e. devolves) to the point where it becomes un loving and un joyful in relation to Life and others that are a part of It. What happens then, since the Essence of Life is Love and Joy and that is what our Entity is actually the living expression of, what ‘happens’ then of course is that such soul just ‘blinks out’, i.e. it ‘vanishes’ from the ‘field’ of Life, as a psychospiritual ‘unit’. Such a soul completely ‘loses’ the possibility of ever incarnating again as an nodal entity. There is no ‘kernel’ of Love and Joy left which can then possibly incarnate and thereby evolve and develop to the point where it consciously integrates with and thereafter coherently lives on as a vital ‘member’ of The ‘Body’ of Life.
This final, because then and thereafter absolutely irremediable, ‘loss’ is what is referenced as the ‘second death’ in The Book of Revelation which, notwithstanding the fact that said book distorts the truth by conflating the personage of Jesus with The Entity of Life (a/k/a Christ), as well as by projecting all anti-Christ ‘wrongdoing’ to be the work of a singularly evil, mythological Satan (alas, ‘channeled’ visions and sayings cannot help but be ‘shaped’ and ‘colored’ by the belief-lens of the ‘channeler’!), nevertheless appropriately in my opinion puts such and related phenomena in reincarnation-referencing perspective, to wit: “I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast [the ‘beast’, of course, just being gross self ishness], neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years. And when the thousand years are expired, Satan [i.e. the spirit of unmitigated _self_ ishness] shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth … to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they [i.e. the unduly self ish people you see running rampant all over the globe today!] went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city.” (Revelation 20:4-9)
While I’m at it, in relation to the eschatological vision presented in said Book of Revelation, let me also say that, given the horribleness of the horrors and and miserableness of the miseries such ‘deceived’ (by the ‘dictates’ of self ishness) folks spawn, it is more than understandable why many would wish and project that perpetrators in said regards will experience and suffer the most hellish kinds of torments imaginable in retribution before their souls are annihilated by way of the above referenced ‘second death’ (following their bodies’ physical one), as grotesquely fantasized, for instance, in: “And fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever. … And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.” (Revelation 20:9-15) An equally grotesque, retributional-wish fulfilling fantasy that self ish ‘sinners’ suffer the worst imaginable fate – albeit in this case, leaving the issue of what ultimately ‘happens’ to such souls schematically unresolved, one which continues to spiral downward without end! – appears in Ch.16 of The Bhagavad Gita: “Puffed up by power and inordinate conceit, swayed by lust and wrath, these wicked people hate Me Who am within them, as I am within all. Those who thus hate Me, who are cruel, the dregs of mankind, I condemn them to a continuous, miserable and godless rebirth. So reborn, they spend life after life, enveloped in delusion. And they never reach Me, … but degenerate into still lower forms of life.” Both this and the fore-referenced ‘final judgment’ scenarios are clearly negative-emotion ‘loaded’ and (so) thematically punitive. Such negativity and punitiveness don’t make sense in the context of Jesus’ vision and teaching (presented and discussed in the preceding chapter) that Love and Joy constitute Life’s programmatic Source ‘code’, to wit that ‘God’ is a beneficently-inclined ‘Father’ from which all Life springs, however.
This is not to say that the Flow of Life’s Love and Joy experience and expression doesn’t fork negatively (relatively speaking) in the case of folks who attitudes, intentions and behaviors in relation to other aspects of Life or Life Itself are value-negate-ing. Universally operative psychospiritual dyamics ensure that “God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap!” (Galatians 6:7) The point I am making is that the disintegration and existential cessation of a gestalt of Love and Joy as a nodal soul is really no more than just that: an ‘i’dentity-dissipating ‘happening’ wherein and whereby the elements that constitute the pattern of personal psychospiritual being are dispersed and recombinantly recycled, such that a soul’s components get ‘dissolved’ and ‘absorbed’ into and so, albeit no longer coherently, live on ‘in’ the beingnesses of other aspects of Life in the context of the absolutely positive Being (i.e. Entity) of our Life-Matrix wherein everyone and everything in existence derives from the same Source and so partakes of the same original ‘blessing’: “Ye [are] the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” (Matthew 5:45) There is no zero point in this regard, let alone something negative relative to that, in other words. Analogous to what physicists believe to be the case with physical matter-n-energy, soulful beingness can never really be ‘lost’ (albeit, as just stated, ‘i’dentity configurations can get reshuffled to the point where continuities in this regard may become unrecognizable, so thinking and speaking, as Jesus did, about the possibility of ‘losing’ one’s soul, in this case meaning the coherency of one’s psychospiritual gestalt, may nevertheless to be a functional way of considering and evaluating choices in face of the recycling dynamic which is continues to be operative in the process of ‘higher’ psychospiritual evolution, i.e. of soul-‘ascension’, as spoken of in this chapter)."
