Revelation 1:18 Meaning And the Living One

There is within you an I Am that was never born and cannot die. For a time it seemed dead, buried beneath the mind's noise and lost in your identification with form. Yet the moment you grow still and present, you feel it: the awareness that has looked out from behind your eyes your whole life, alive and untouched by time.

This deathless presence holds the keys to hell and death. Hell is the suffering the mind creates when it resists what is; death is the fear that grips you while you believe you are only this passing form. Awaken to the I Am within, and both lose their power, because you know yourself as the awareness no ending can touch.

The one speaking is the power in you that entered the body at birth and lay as though dead through all the years you thought yourself only a man. It was never gone. It slept, and now it wakes and says it is alive forevermore, because what awakens in a person is not a new thing arriving but the eternal being he always was, remembering itself.

The keys of hell and death are held by imagination alone. Hell is this contracted world of the senses, the tightest, heaviest state a person can occupy, and death is forgetfulness of who he is. To hold the keys is to have the power to leave both, and that power is the assumed state. A person opens or closes his own conditions by what he dares to feel himself to be. He is not locked in by circumstance. He carries the key, which is his own awareness, and it fits every door.

The voice that lives, was dead, and lives forever is the higher self within a man, the deathless consciousness that seems buried in the flesh and then wakes to its own endlessness. Death and burial are the sleep of that awareness inside the body, and the rising is its recovery of the life it never truly lost.

The keys of hell and of death are the power to open and shut the lower states, the mastery the awakened consciousness holds over the buried and the grave-bound regions of a person. Hell is the pit of the lowest flesh and death the still tomb of the body, and to keep their keys is to command entrance and release from within, the risen self holding the openings of the depths it has already passed through.

Keys: the power to open and shut the inner states, the mastery over what is bound and what is set free Hell: the pit of the lowest flesh in a person, the underworld region of the body Death: the still tomb of the body, the sleep of awareness from which the higher self rises