Entering the Afterlife – The Stage Immediately After Death
“After the spirit leaves the body, many variations can occur, each the result of individual background, knowledge and habit.
The surroundings in which the dead find themselves will often vary.
Vivid hallucinations may form experience quite as real as any in mortal life.
Thoughts and emotions form physical reality, and they form after-death experience.
Those who had faith in life after death will find it much easier to accustom yourself to the new conditions.
A belief in hellfires can cause you to hallucinate Hades’ conditions.
A belief in a stereotyped heaven can result in a hallucination of heavenly conditions.
You always form your own reality according to your ideas and expectations. This is the nature of consciousness in whatever reality it finds itself. Such hallucinations, I assure you, are temporary.
If you believe in heaven, hell, purgatory, reckoning…at death another ceremony is enacted and guides take on the guises of those beloved figures of Christian saints and heroes.
Within this framework, in terms they can understand, such individuals are told the true situation and the guides, after gaining an individual’s trust, will help them out of the hallucinations.
For some there will be little disorientation and for others, specifically those who completely denied life after death, there may be much disorientation.
Such an individual may find himself in ten different environments with the flicker of an eyelash, for example, with no idea of the reason behind the situation. He will see no continuity at all, and feel himself flung without rhyme or reason from one experience to another, never realizing that his own thoughts are propelling him quite literally.
All of the hallucinatory activities take place usually some short time immediately following death.
Some do not hallucinate, but are fully aware of their circumstances due to previous training and development; after a rest these people are ready to progress to other stages if they desire.
Generally the afterlife is not a somber endeavor, but is far more intense and joyful than the reality you now know.
You will be learning to operate in a new environment in which different laws apply, and the laws are far less limiting than the physical ones with which you now operate. In other words, you must learn to understand and use new freedoms.
For those of you who are lazy I can offer no hope: Death will not bring you an eternal resting place. You may rest, if this is your wish, for a while.
Not only must you use your abilities after death, however, but you must face up to yourself for those that you did not use during your previous existence.”1
Greeting loved ones after Death
“You may or may not be greeted by friends and relatives immediately following death.
This is a personal matter, as always.
Since the emotions are so important, it is of great benefit if friends are waiting for you.
You may be far more interested in people you have known in past lives.
Your true feelings toward relatives who are dead will be known to you and to them.
There is no hypocrisy.
You do not pretend to love a parent who did little to earn your respect or love.
Telepathy operates without distortion in the afterlife.
You must deal with the true relationships that exist between yourself and all relatives and friends who await you.
You may find that someone you considered merely an enemy actually deserved your love and respect, for example, and you will then treat him or her accordingly.
Your own motives will be crystal clear.
You will not automatically be wise if you were not so before, but neither will there be a way to hide from your own feelings, emotions, or motives.
You examine the fabric of the existence you have left and you learn to understand how your experiences were the result of your own thoughts and emotions and how these affected others.
Until this examination is through, you are not yet aware of the larger portions of your own identity. When you realize the significance and meaning of the life you have just left, then you are ready for conscious knowledge of your other existences.”2
Teachers in the Afterlife
“There are guides and teachers in this time of choosing and decision, to point out alternatives and to explain the nature of existence.
All personalities are not at the same level of development. There are therefore advanced teachers and teachers at “lower” levels.
There are teachers to explain the conditions and circumstances. You are not left alone, lost in mazes of hallucination.
These teachers are an order of personalities, an “honorary guard” that are ready and willing to lend assistance and aid.
These teachers are both living and dead.
Those living perform these activities in an “out-of-body” experience during sleep.
They are familiar with projections of consciousness and help orient those not returning to a physical body.
They are helpful because they are still involved with physical reality and have a more immediate understanding of the emotions involved.
They may or may not remember these activities when they wake.
Experiences with projections of consciousness are therefore very helpful as preparations for death.
You can experience the after-death environment beforehand, so to speak, and learn the conditions that will be encountered.”3
Self-Examination
“Before the time of choosing what to do next, there is a period of self-examination, and your full “history” becomes available to you.
You understand the nature of the entity, and you are advised by other portions of that entity, more “advanced” than yourself.
Any stage of the afterlife can be side-stepped or purposefully experienced, except one: the self-examination.
A period of self-examination is a rendering of accounts, so to speak, in which they are able to view their entire performance, their abilities and weak points and to decide whether or not they will return to physical existence.
‘Life-symbolization’ may be adopted by those who gave little thought to self-examination during their lifetime.
It is a part of the self-thought to self-examination process in which an individual forms his life into an image and then deals with it.
An individual may visualize his life as an animal with which he must come to terms, and such a battle or encounter has far-reaching consequences, for the human must come to terms with all portions of himself.
In this case, whether the hallucination ends with him riding the animal, making friends with it, domesticating it, killing it or being killed by it, each alternative is carefully weighed, and the results will have much to do with his future developments.
Such a method is not used by all.
Sometimes a series of such episodes are necessary.
All necessary explanations are given to those who are disoriented. Those who do not realize that they are dead are here told of their true condition, and all efforts are made to refresh the energies and spirits.
It is a time of study and comprehension.
It is a place of commerce between systems, so to speak. Conditions and development are important, rather than the length an individual stays in this area.
It is an intermediary step, but an important one. In your dreams you have been here.”4
“The character or pure distillation of emotions and biases or distortions and wisdoms become obvious for the first time after death; these pure emotions and wisdoms and bias/distortions being, for the most part, either ignored or underestimated during physical life experience.
There will be helpers which assist in the healing and self-examination process after death.
The process involves seeing in full the experience, seeing it against the backdrop of the mind/body/spirit complex total experience, forgiving the self for all missteps as regards the missed guideposts during the incarnation and, finally, the careful assessment of the next necessities for learning.
This is done entirely by the higher self until an entity has become conscious in space/time of the process and means of spiritual evolution at which time the entity will consciously take part in all decisions.
The nature of time/space is such that a lifetime may be seen whole as a book or record, the pages studied, riffled through, and re-read. However, the value of review is that of the testing as opposed to the studying. At the testing, when the test is true, the distillations of all study are made clear.
During the process of study, which you may call the incarnation, regardless of an entity’s awareness of the process taking place, the material is diffused and over-attention is almost inevitably placed upon detail.
The testing upon the cessation of the incarnative state is not that testing which involves the correct memorization of many details. This testing is, rather, the observing of self by self.
In this observation one sees the sum of all the detailed study; that being an attitude or complex of attitudes which bias the consciousness of the mind/body/spirit.”5
Further Stages of the Afterlife
“There is no one after-death reality, but each experience is different.
Generally speaking, there are dimensions into which these individual experiences will fall:
‘Mid-plane’ – There is an in-between state of relative indecision, a mid-plane of existence; a rest area, comparatively speaking, and it is from this area that most communication from relatives occurs.
‘Hospital Stage’ – There is an initial stage for those who are still focused strongly in physical reality, and for those who need a period of recuperation and rest. On this level there will be hospitals and rest homes. The patients do not yet realize that there is nothing wrong with them at all.
Many individuals do not need to pass through this particular period.
Training Centers – The nature of reality is explained in accordance with an individual’s ability to understand and perceive it.
There are certain classes in which instruction is given for the benefit of those who chose to return to the physical environment.
They are taught the methods that allow them to translate emotion and thought into physical actuality.
Some individuals do not undergo any such periods, but because of development and progress during their past lives, they are ready to begin more ambitious programs.”6
The “Time of Choosing” – Further stages of Afterlife
“There are unlimited varieties of experience open to you after death, all possible, but some less probable than others, according to your development.
There are guides and teachers in this time of choosing and decision, to point out alternatives and to explain the nature of existence.
This is not a time of confusion, but of great illumination, and unbelievable challenge.
In this time of choosing all of these matters are considered, and suitable preparations made, but the planning itself is all a part of experience and of development.
Very generally now, there are three main areas, though exceptions and extraordinary cases can take other roads.
- Reincarnation:
Some individuals, some personalities, prefer a life organization bound about past, present, and future in a seemingly logical structure, and these persons usually choose reincarnation.
Focusing on your most recent past life – using it as the stuff of new experience; creating variations of events as you know them, making corrections as you choose.
- Entering another system of probability entirely – leaving all thoughts of a continuity of time behind you.
Some naively prefer to experience events in an extraordinarily intuitive manner, with the organization being provided by the associative process. These will choose a system of probabilities for their next main endeavor.
- Completed Reincarnational Cycles
“Those who chose to leave this system, whose reincarnational cycles are finished, have many more decisions to make.
Some find the physical system not to their liking, and in such a way take leave of it. This cannot be done, however, until the reincarnational cycle, once chosen, is completed.
Some, finished with reincarnation, may choose to reenter the cycle acting as teacher, and in such cases some recognition of higher identity is always present.”7
Where Does All This Happen?
“The after-death environments do not take up space.
There is no one place therefore, no specific location.
These environments exist unperceived by you amid the physical world that you know. Your perceptive mechanisms simply do not allow you to tune in to their ranges. You react to a highly specific but limited field.
After death it does not take time to go through space. Space does not exist in terms of distance. This is illusion. There are barriers, but they are mental or psychic barriers.
Instead of countries of physical divisions, you have psychological states.”8
The Sleep State and the Death State
“In sleep and dream states you are involved in the same dimension of existence in which you will have your after-death experiences.
In the sleep state, each of you have undergone – to some degree – the same kind of absence of consciousness from physical reality that you experience during death.
You have passed over the threshold into these other existences many many times, so it will not be as unfamiliar to you as you suppose.
In the dream state you operate under the same conditions, more or less, that are native to a consciousness not focused in physical reality. Many of your experiences, therefore, are precisely those you may meet after death.
You may speak with dead friends or relatives, revisit the past, greet old classmates, walk down streets that existed fifty years earlier in physical time, travel through space without taking any physical time to do so, be met by guides, be instructed, teach others, perform meaningful work, solve problems, hallucinate.
It is only because most people believe that you cannot leave your body that you do not consciously have out-of-body experiences with any frequency in your lifetimes. Such experiences would acquaint you far better than words with some understanding of the conditions that will be encountered.
In physical life there is a lag between the conception of an idea and its physical construction. In dream reality, this is not so. Therefore, the best way to become acquainted with after-death reality ahead of time is to explore and understand the nature of your own dreaming self. Not very many people take the time or energy.
In other words, the environment, conditions, and methods of perception will not be alien. You are not suddenly thrust into an unknown; that unknown is a part of you now. It was a part of you before this physical birth, and will be after physical death.
The main point is that you are already familiar with all conditions you will meet after death, and you can become consciously aware of these to some extent.”9
Ghosts
“There are as many kinds of ghosts and apparitions as there are people.
They are as alert or as un-alert to their situation as you are to your own.
They are not fully focused in physical reality, however, either in personality or in form, and this is their main distinction.
Some apparitions are thought-forms sent by survival personalities out of lingering deep anxiety. They portray the same compulsive-type behavior that can be seen in many instances in your ordinary experience.
For various reasons, such a personality has not learned to assimilate its own experience.
The characteristics of such apparitions follow those of a disturbed personality – with some exceptions, however.
The personality itself seems to be having a nightmare, or a series of recurring dreams, during which it returns to the physical environment. Their personality itself is “safe and sound,” but certain portions of it work out unresolved problems, and discharge energy in such a fashion.
They are in themselves quite harmless. Only your interpretation of their actions can cause difficulties.”10
“The stimulus for [earthbound spirits or ghosts] is the faculty of the will…If the will is concentrated enough upon the previous experience, the entity’s shell of yellow ray, though no longer activated, cannot either be completely deactivated and, until the will is released, the mind/body/spirit complex is caught. This often occurs…in the case of sudden death as well as in the case of extreme concern for a thing or an other-self.”11
- Roberts, Jane, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1972
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Elkins, Rueckert, McCarty, The Law of One, Session 83.7, http://www.lawofone.info/results.php?s=83
- Roberts, Jane, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1972
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Elkins, Rueckert, McCarty, The Law of One, Session 47.13, http://www.lawofone.info/results.php?s=47
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