"Have you seen the gates of the shadow of death?"
- Job 38:17
The picture that emerges from the BSD suggests that, as surprising as it sounds today, death wasn't always a problem for human beings. The BSD indicates that there actually was a time, thousands upon thousands of years ago, when we didn't fracture at death. From one incarnation to the next, we would retain full possession of all our faculties, and remembered everything about all our past lives and histories.
But then something changed, something that affected our whole species more or less all at the same time, and that was when this dark curse fell upon us. That watershed moment has come down to us in our myths as the "Fall from Grace in the Garden of Eden", but it might be better understood today as the arrival of a great disease that corrupted our souls, a disorder that persisted within us even beyond death's door. That watershed moment has even been rediscovered by modern science, delineated in Princeton professor Julian Jaynes' seminal work "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind".
For the last five or six thousand years, then, our minds have basically been getting ripped to shreds every time we die. The conscious portion of the mind has been disengaging from its unconscious half, and each crippled portion has then gone on separately into the "next world". What actually happens is that the conscious loses its memory and eventually reincarnates, while the unconscious becomes trapped in its memories and feelings from the past, and unwittingly creates an imaginary heaven or hell dreamworld for itself out of those feelings and memories, a perpetual dream (or nightmare) it can never awaken from on its own. In the next world, these two cursed, crippled disembodied fragments of what was once a whole human being each experience a cruelly distorted reality, and they seem to be responsible for most of the reports we hear about ghosts and poltergeists, and maybe mankind's legends of zombies and vampires as well. In recent years, reports of near-death experiences and past-life regressions have documented numerous cases in which subjects reported experiencing their minds dividing in two during the death transition. Numerous modern psychics and mystics like Edgar Cayce, Immanuel Swedenborg, and Rudolf Steiner have reported this soul-division, and dozens of ancient religions all around the world once based their entire theological systems around this same premise.
For millennia, mankind essentially seemed trapped, doomed to remain stuck in this repeating cycle of self-destruction with no practical way out. Lifetime after lifetime, most of us would divide again and again, repeatedly losing everything we work so hard for in each life. While most new generations contained a rare few individuals who pursued a life of enough authenticity, integrity, and psychological health to enable them to "keep it together" during the death transition, the vast majority of humanity's masses were just going through the same futile motions lifetime after lifetime, never making any progress towards resolving our dilemma. In effect, we were trapped, and needed a hero to rescue us.
Dozens of recently unearthed lost early Christian scriptures (such as the Gospel of Thomas) suggest that this may have been the true problem Jesus Christ came to address and resolve. But if so, His solution won't be fully effected until the arrival of the prophesied Judgment Day events.
In the meantime, this disease has made us divided beings, and our world a divided world. Our division has come to completely rule the world. We human beings rule the world, yes, but our division rules us. It has made us collectively and individually insane, possessed of two alienated minds that seldom agree with one another. One side of our mind rules the day, the other the night. One side predominates among artists, mystics, women, and Democrats, the other among scientists, businesspeople, men, and Republicans. This war within our souls is reflected in our endless history of political warfare, and it is clear that mankind will never know peace on this planet until our inner conflict is finally and fully resolved, for the one is father to the other.
To complicate matters more, we each apparently also have numerous past-life selves hiding inside us, busily but silently dreaming away their own fantasies of heaven or hell within the darkest recesses of our own minds. Each time we divide at death, we add to their numbers, but we may not keep adding to their numbers forever. The day will come, according to the BSD, when they are all shocked into reawakening inside us again. And just as our whole species started suffering this soul-division at the same time, so too will we all be restored to wholeness simultaneously as well. This inevitable, horrific moment of restoration has been anticipated for millennia, and we know it as the ancient prophecy of the Universal Resurrection of the Dead on Judgment Day.
THIS, then, is the "Great and Terrible Day of the Lord". "Great" because our dead will rise and we will regain everything we thought we'd lost forever, including full knowledge of all our past identities, memories, histories, talents, skills, and wisdom. "Terrible" for the very same reason : because our dead will rise, and we will finally have to confront and acknowledge the fruit of our own actions. We will recall with our own minds, and feel with our own hearts, the karma that played continually and torturously out from one life to the next over thousands of years, inflicting payment of each life's sins on the incarnations that followed. "Terrible" too because many of our reawakened dead will be re-awakening from (their dreams of) hell, and will not be unaffected by the experience. And as the separate minds of all our past-life incarnations slowly integrate together, their experience in hell will become our own.