Death's Sleep to New Life

Neville's Inner Vision

Consider that 'man' in this scripture is a state of consciousness—not a person you are limited to, but a quality you have identified as yourself. When Job speaks of dying and not waking until the heavens are no more, he describes the habitual habit of consciousness clinging to a belief in separation and time. The 'sleep' is the ordinary dream of life as a succession of births and endings; the 'waters' that fail and the flood that dries up mirror the drying of concept and the closing of old identifications. Yet the I AM within you never dies, it only rests in a belief that life ends. The verse invites you to notice the lapse of awareness and to revise the state into one of constancy—the awareness that you are always the I AM, unresulting in change. To awaken is to realize that the man who dies is the mistaken identification, and the real self is the eternal life that neither sleeps nor doubts. By imagining and feeling from the end already present, you release from the sleep and rise.