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I originally wrote this for a magazine that deals with death, but include it here because questions about death and all its ramifications arise so very often- in conversations, with people who are grappling with the passing of loved ones, in the work of clearing places- which most often entails releasing earthbound spirits from limbo into the afterlife.
I read psychology related posts about death (and other matters) with a sigh. While I don’t discount psychology, it seems that, by and large, psychology- and science in general- discounts anything that isn’t measurable or quantifiable. Yet so much of life (and death) is. Take thoughts, for example. Thought forms, which we all have, are not quantifiable inasmuch as there is no place in us where they reside. Yet they affect humans- more than anything else. What other forms are unquantifiable? Many, but death is relevant here.
Reality Beyond Science
One thing that science does not dispute is that energy is never lost. It merely transmutes. And, measurements are not the be all and end all. The world of audio reproduction presents many examples of this. Equipment that measures well often sounds inferior to equipment that doesn’t. One can extrapolate and include belief in a higher power- scientifically unproven and, even for believers, largely ineffable- but still here and real for most of humankind.
Speaking of real: humans can only see 1% of the visible light spectrum. On a purely biological level we can’t see 99% of what is going on. On a mental, emotional, spiritual level, well, where are we really in terms of grasping what reality is?
Plenty has been written about life after death- or life between lives, before rebirth., from the Tibetan Buddhist Bardo treatises to new age stuff. I haven’t read these. I hardly read books about death, afterlife, paranormal things. Not since I became immersed in several ways in these topics, starting in 1991. That was when I was invited to join a private spiritual group, or circle. The invitation was from a spirit guide (one of many) who spoke through a medium as if we were in a room together, attending a lecture.
Spirit- Beyond Dying
What does this have to do with death? Well, we were talking to beings (ex-humans mostly) that, in one sense, are dead and have been for a very long time. They are, however, certainly alive and very well in the afterlife, and they taught me about life here in this corporeal existence- and beyond this life.
Bear in mind that before you incarnated, you chose the moment of your death. If you are afraid of death, you weren’t before you were born, but I’ll return to this later.
Approaching Death
All living things have an aura. Kirlian photography has been used to photograph this on plants and humans. There are many colours contained in each aura defining emotions, states of mind and disease. When a person has begun to die, no matter how slowly, black gaps of varying thickness appear in the aura until- very near death- the gaps in the aura are almost touching one another, obliterating the colour.
Black gaps in the aura signifies a leaving of life force. After a person has died, it takes a full three days for the life force to leave the body completely. That is why Jesus returned after his death after three days, and why hair and fingernails continue to grow after a person has died.
Reincarnation- The Why
Jesus said “Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” And, because nobody is perfect when they die, we are given opportunities to try to do better.
It follows that, although we are alive at the same times as others, we may be at different stages of our evolvement. To quote Jesus again: “My father’s house has many mansions”. Those are different levels of existence, beyond the physical. There are seven levels, called the seven planes. Each plane has a different vibration and a different degree of light. Vibration gets higher as you go up the planes and when you die nobody tells you what plane you should be on. You just go to the plane where you feel the most comfortable.
After Death
After you die you are met by your loved ones. This has to do with love ties. If your parents have died before you, or your grandparents, they will wait to see you in spirit/ on the planes. Your mother will have spoken to you about your grandparents, even your great grandparents, but probably not your great-great grandparents. This is where a love tie is broken. If your mother has died before you, she will wait in spirit to see your children and perhaps their children who you will have talked to about her. This is how a love tie is built.
Even an old lady who has no relatives and only a parrot during her lifetime will want to be with that parrot when she dies.
You don’t have to reunite with or encounter anyone you do not wish to.
You go to what is called the Rest Home. Here you rest a while and get taught about life on the planes. During this time, you don’t have contact with those in the life you just left, for about six months (human time). This is because you are learning- or relearning- the afterlife ropes, because their grief is counterproductive to your learning and not part of your experience. There is no pain in spirit and no suffering. You are within God’s love and everything works within His laws.
Everything in spirit/astral is telepathy and thought. There are no language barriers and anything you want (if you still require things) you can have- houses, cars, clothing, pets, etc.
There are Halls of Learning, containing the Akashic Records which, according to Wikipedia “are a compendium of all universal events, thoughts, words, emotions and intent ever to have occurred in the past, present, or future in terms of all entities and life forms, not just human. They are believed by theosophists to be encoded in a non-physical plane of existence known as the mental plane. Because it is believed that the records are encoded vibrationally into the inherent fabric of space, some have likened the mechanism as similar to how holograms are created. There is currently no scientific evidence for the existence of the Akashic records” (of course not!). Lots to do and learn, especially if you decide not to reincarnate and train to become a guide instead.
Not until all your love ties are broken can you reincarnate. This takes anything from 100 to 200 years. Of course, there is no time in spirit, so there’s no clockwatching.
Before Birth
When you want to reincarnate (you don’t have to after reaching a certain stage), you go to the Karmic Lords. Because there is no time in spirit you are able to sit down and review your past life moment by moment. You’ll see what you did right and what you did wrong and the Karmic Lord will suggest to you what sort of life you should have the next time around. Because you’re working within God’s love and His laws, you will see life and its hardships very differently from how you likely see them now.
You may want to experience being born black or blind or crippled. You may want a life where your parents divorce or you may want to experience divorce yourself. The conditions of your next incarnation are carefully worked out, so that you do not take on impossible challenges. We are never given- or allowed- too much suffering to bear.
There are three things you choose before you reincarnate.
- Your parents. By this you choose the colour of your skin, wealth or poverty, your religion. This governs your early, character forming years.
- You choose the main things that will occur during your life- whether you will be hit by a bus and crippled for life, at what stage your parents will die, etc.
- You choose the moment of your death.
If you die young you will go into spirit and grow up there. Old people who die grow backwards until the ideal age of 33- the age that Jesus died on the earth.
When your relatives meet you in spirit after you die, they will look exactly as they did on the earth when you last saw them. When you have been in spirit a short time you will see that they are actually much younger- and much more than just your relatives. They are the sum total of all they have experienced through many lives.
Suicide
When a person commits suicide, it is at a time in their lives when they feel there is too much suffering and they cannot cope. This is not so. God never gives too much suffering. When you sit with the Karmic Lord, the amount of suffering you can deal with will be carefully considered.
All human beings have an inner knowledge that suicide is wrong. In Afrikaans the word is selfmoord- self murder. The penalty for committing suicide is that you do not pass over to experience love ties, but reincarnate immediately on the earth to experience more or less the same kind of life that you did before, until you are able to live through the stage of that suffering and experience and grow from it.
That said, there are mitigating circumstances, in the case of mental illnesses for example. In such cases, I believe, the lessons learned are very much for the family and associates of the person who dies- those left behind to deal with the aftermath.
Souls
We don’t have a soul. We are a soul. We have human experiences, then return to spirit. Rinse and repeat, by and large. It’s all part of each soul’s evolvement- here and on other worlds that support other life forms. In the bigger picture, there is no death, just transformation- and our incarnations accelerate our progress. The limitations of being in a human form, the challenges we face- including our death and the death of others- is the friction that sparks evolvement. Life in the Bardo- much like meditating in a serene setting- is lovely and all that, but we grow faster when faced with incarnated life.
Animals
Whereas humans each have, or are, an individual soul, that is not the case for animals- much to the chagrin of people I know that believe otherwise. What your cat, dog, horse etc. experiences upon dying I’m not sure although, as already mentioned, you can be reunited with beloved animals when you pass on. What I do know is this: Imagine a shoebox labelled Experience. One human soul results from one full shoebox of animal experiences (not necessarily the experiences of just one animal).
Lingering (Ghosts etc.)
At one stage- for about five years- I was part of a small group that cleared places and people of negativity on a fulltime basis. You could call it ghostbusting. We encountered countless dead people- ghosts or, more accurately, earthbound spirits. As the name suggests, such spirits are bound to the earth plane, usually by a lack of understanding of anything beyond this plane of existence. Often, they do not comprehend that they are dead. This is problematic, for the living and the deceased, because it’s an incorrect situation. Dead people are not meant to hang about. There is somewhere better for them to be than in limbo. Among other things, it causes a buildup of negative energy. This can lead to spirit possession. It certainly impacts on people’s lives and the longer earthbound spirits hang about, the worse it tends to get. Clearing these situations gives the living relief and rescues the deceased.
If you choose to remain in spirit (not reincarnate) and learn to become a guide, rescuing earthbound spirits is often part of the job. Rescue parties attempt to take such trapped souls out of their limbo, out of darkness and on to the planes.
Grief, Acceptance, Understanding
Understanding has had a profound impact on my experiences of death- siblings, suicides and parents for example. We all experience grief when we lose loved ones. We are all appalled (I hope) at the atrocities of murder/ war. But, knowing that death is only a temporary parting lessens grief. What is grief but our longing for what/who we have lost- our inability to release and fill the holes left in our lives by the passing of those dear to us? Lean into your grief. You will not find it bottomless. Don’t avoid it or suppress it. It will only resurface in other ways.
Understanding the processes has provided perspectives that have helped me with grieving, with release and closure. It may sound strange, but it’s led to mostly grieving before (provided it’s not sudden) someone close has passed. This gives me the opportunity to say the kind of things that people often regret not having expressed while someone was alive.
Rest, Connect, Remember
When you sleep, you go into astral, into spirit. While in spirit you can talk to our guides who, as the word suggests, guide you and help you with your earthly problems and prepare you for your days ahead on the earth. This is why sometimes when you go to sleep with a problem you may wake up with the answer, thinking “Why didn’t I think of that before?”
And, when somebody close to you has passed over, you wake up much stronger than you are when you go to bed at night. Because astral is what the guides call a spiritual injection. To this end, do not rely on sleeping pills to get you through times of grief and distress. Drugs, drink and exhaustion can result in you not getting that spiritual injection, not being in touch with your higher, or deeper, self. That can prolong or exacerbate distress.
Bear in mind the deceased’s happiness. Don’t compare it to your loss and longing for what was. As famous teacher Eckhart Tolle states, there is only now. He also talks of the is-ness of things. Wishing what is to be different than what is puts us at odds with reality and causes suffering. Eckhart and many other teachers and systems urge us to quieten our minds and to practice equanimity. Thoughts and emotions will arise. If we can merely observe them and let them pass without attaching a narrative, our suffering will greatly diminish and more quickly dissipate.
Then, good things may arise. Your fond memories are no longer tainted by sadness. I think that the six-month period of separation I spoke of can be lessened by acceptance- and that can lead to contact in astral with loved ones, dreams with them, and visits from them. These often come in the form of a scent, such as my dad’s cologne or a flower. Grief is supplanted by joy, closeness and love. Balance is achieved, positive momentum gained.
Fear Not
People fear death in many different ways, for many reasons. Death is our final test on this plane of existence, so passing to the next grade with some inkling of where you came from, where you are headed, how it all works, will hopefully lessen any fears about your own passing and alleviate your grief when loved ones depart.
