Bless this house, O Lord we pray; make it safe by night and day.
Bless these walls, so firm and stout, keeping want and trouble out.
Bless the roof and chimneys tall, let thy peace lie over all;
Bless this door, that it may prove ever open to joy and love.

Bless these windows shining bright, letting in God’s heav’nly light;
Bless the hearth a’blazing there, with smoke ascending like a prayer;
Bless the folk who dwell within. Keep them pure and free from sin;
Bless us all that we may be fit, O Lord, to dwell with thee.
Bless us all that one day we may dwell, O Lord, with thee!
Helen Taylor (dates unknown), “Bless This House” (1927).

It is difficult for you to conceive of, or in any way to possibly imagine how incredibly different is the greater reality that we enter at death, when we compare it to this sad, pale, and puny material universe that is all that we know. Here, this little matter-based reality is all around us, and we think of it as something real, something that seems to be even grand and amazing. But the greater reality that we enter at death is at least, oh, fifty, or perhaps it is even a hundred times the relative size of this whole material universe. Think of that! And much of the astral reality that we return to at death is dazzling in its beauty, beyond wonderful in all its heart-stopping details, just so far beyond anything that we ever have dreamed of in all our wildest imaginings. So, to begin our tour, please first pause here and re-read last week’s post. We are about to paint for you on a canvas that is so much bigger and grander than anything that you ever before have imagined, and in colors that you cannot conceive of in your wildest dreams. It will be easier for you to stretch enough to put your mind around it if we can begin from where we left off last week.  

So, have you reread last week’s post? All right, then let us here further define what we can know about our greater reality from this earthly viewpoint. We must warn you in advance that what we know now is not nearly as much as we would love to know! Not surprising, of course, given the size of it all, and given our necessarily limited perspective from here. A few astral travelers out of the body have written about the little bits that they have seen, enough so I think that we can be sure about what we know in general terms. But even just the sheer size of it means that all of it is still a great unknown, just as most of the earth was a great unknown when Christopher Columbus first set bravely out in the earth-year 1492. But there is a first time for everything, isn’t there? And here is what we do think we know:

• Travel and Creation in the Astral Realities are Mostly or Entirely by Mind. To enter the astral plane is to enter a universe exclusively of the mind, and the higher we can go in vibration, the more completely and obviously that is true. We merge at death with the sixty percent or more of our minds that we had left behind here when we were born on earth; and with that added consciousness power regained, we soon can travel even unimaginably long distances instantly, or we can materialize at once whatever objects we might miss from our earth-lives to furnish our new astral homes. So, while there are some cities in the astral with grand municipal buildings, most people in the afterlife and in the general astral plane live very widely scattered, since they can be anywhere so easily and right away.
• We Have No Need for Money. My dear mother-in-law lived through the Great Depression on earth, so she really knew how to “pinch a penny twice,” as she used to say. The first thing that she was eager to tell me through a medium after she died at the age of ninety-four was, “You can have whatever you want here, and you don’t need money!” The astral hierarchy, to the extent that there is one, seems to be of our degree of goodness and saintliness on earth, so we find a story in the literature from the nineteenth century of a man who had devoted his earth-life to helping others, and this man rejected the astral mansion of gold that he had been given in the afterlife as too grand and uncomfortable. He preferred to mind-build for himself a cozy thatched cottage to live in instead.
• Levels Three and Above are Lit and Warmed by God’s Love Alone. There seems to be no starlit universe with planets to be seen at any of the fifty to a hundred or more astral sublevels which are perhaps each the size of this whole material universe, but instead there seem to be just endless vistas of unimaginable size and height and depth created by mind, where the only light and warmth is God’s love. So of course, compared to the earth, it all feels vast and beautiful, and up through about collective level five it seems to be amazingly solid and uncrowded! But although clearly it feels very different from that lowest material level, it all does still feel entirely real. Reportedly, none of it feels vague or artificial. You easily move up or down in vibration by mind simply by wanting to be somewhere else, and you are not aware of the change in vibration until you hit your own vibrational ceiling. Let’s say you are vibrating near the top of Level Four, and you try to move higher. Unless you are moving with a Level Five or higher friend who can shield you in his or her energy aura, then once you hit your own vibrational ceiling, you at once become aware of a sense of being terribly battered by that more intense energy. You simply cannot go higher than your own spiritual development allows, unless someone who is vibrating higher will come with you and shield you. But otherwise, you can travel anywhere, and at once! And of course, the higher you go, the brighter it is, when God’s love is the only light.

Of course, to yet again reinforce what is true, our silver energy cord which connected us to our earthly body has broken well before we entered the afterlife. During our earthly lives, it was easily possible for us to travel from the earth into what we think of as the “public” parts of the astral plane, those parts which are open to astral travelers from the earth-level, wearing astral bodies and with our silver cords still attached; and then to return to the earth again. And when this happens for us during awake out-of-body experiences or near-death-experiences, we will have some amazing and aberrant memories of those experiences! But if those who are astral-traveling during NDEs or OBEs might enter the afterlife area, even for an instant of time, their silver cord which keeps them attached to their material body back on earth will instantly snap, and their body then dies on earth. Death is always a one-way trip.

In fact, it may surprise you to learn that nearly all of us while we are living on earth will travel to the open-to-the-earth-level parts of the astral plane on many nights! And, why not? We might have no conscious awareness of it while we are living an earth-lifetime, but we still subconsciously think of the gigantic astral plane as our true eternal home. And one important fact about our minds is that they almost never need to sleep. About the only time that our minds ever sleep is shortly after our bodies die, when we first return to the afterlife. Then, we will generally have a good, deep sleep that typically lasts for an earth-day and -night, or even two, after which we will not need to sleep again until after we have just completed another earth-lifetime. But for now, during the phase of deep sleep that usually occurs before or around midnight on each earth-night of our lives and can last for a few hours, nearly all of us will leave our bodies for a while. Some of us will just hang around our bedroom, or perhaps around our house. But many of us will astral travel; and we might then meet with our deceased loved ones or with our spirit guides. We might do other things too, take classes and play tourist and so on. We will have no memory of any of these excursions unless our guides allow us to have such memories.

Since it is my beloved guide Thomas’s responsibility to help Jesus to maintain His divine-human balance, Thomas has been taking me along with him on his nightly excursions to visit Jesus in the astral plane ever since I was an infant. But Thomas never has let me remember anything about these experiences until early April of 2022, when for that one summer, he let me remember perhaps a dozen adventures that we took together to meet with Jesus by His astral river on Level Three of the astral plane, where Jesus greets an endless parade of Christians who have only just died. There Jesus personally welcomes home every person who has requested that Jesus welcome him or her home. Of course, Jesus Himself is not, and He never has been a Christian. That is the Roman Emperor Constantine’s religion. But Jesus deeply loves all Christians, just as He loves every one of us! And as the Roman religion dies at last, Jesus has asked Thomas and me to begin to prepare for Him a teaching website on earth. So far, Jesus has approved the name teachingsbyjesus.com, and He has approved His new website’s content, such as it is, but we all know that this is just the beginning. He tells us that He wants us to do something to it now with AI. So we await His further instructions.

When I was spending all that time with Jesus in the astral plane two summers ago, and I was for a change very much aware of being there, I was mostly just raptly listening to Jesus. But I also learned quite a lot about what it is like to be on astral Level Three. For one amazing thing, the astral atmosphere is altogether different from what it is like to be outdoors anywhere on earth! The outside air does not move at all, for one thing. There is no weather, which makes it feel almost as if you are inside a building. And the very air that you breathe smells and feels like love; well, actually, it smells a lot like flowers, and it feels warm and moist and gentle on your astral body’s skin. This is even on the lowly third level, where the light is dimmer than it is on the material level, since there is no sun, and we are so far from Level Seven. It seems to be always perhaps just before sunrise, although when I would look at Jesus, He has a glow about Him so I saw Him clearly. The sky always looks bright, and it is full of those non-earth colors that are indescribable. And Jesus Himself has such a strong personal energy, even when He is remembering to tune it back for His companions by a lot, since if He does not tune it back, it is painful for normals to be anywhere near Him. His personal energy is uniquely just one strong, high, pure and absolutely overwhelming Note. Thomas tells me that after all Jesus’s additional service in healing people who have been damaged by Christianity over the past seventeen hundred years, Jesus now vibrates even higher than Level Seven, so of course He can go anywhere in the astral now that He likes, and even above the Godhead Level of this reality.

But for most people, the fact that we can travel instantly anywhere in the astral plane, but we cannot go higher than our own level of spiritual development will allow us to go, becomes such a great frustration for us! People will ask me why, when our astral lives are so perfect, why on earth do we ever choose to come back here again and be reborn into earth-bodies and suffer over again all this earthly stress and pain? Well, this is why. Until we have attained somewhere near the top of Level Five in spiritual development, at which point we can become spirit guides for people on earth and thereby continue to grow spiritually, until then we keep bumping up against that frustrating ceiling of painful buzzing if we ever try to travel to the higher, more beautiful and interesting places. And we cannot grow much, if at all, spiritually in the lower astral plane because there is nothing much there that is negative, so there is nothing to push against, nothing really in the afterlife or in the lower astral plane but God’s pure love.

So, reluctantly at first perhaps, we begin to get together with old friends and new, we choose our spirit guides for this next lifetime, and we start to meet regularly with sixth-level teachers to plan our next lifetime on earth. (Or even conceivably on a different planet, but I don’t know enough about that process to say much about it.) These planning meetings happen in conference rooms perhaps, or outside under great leafy trees, and they feature whiteboards and diagrams. My own planning for this present lifetime was done in a big paneled conference room that was windowless and lit by skylights. And I was allowed to recall bits of one meeting that Jesus and some formidable sixth-level Beings attended with Thomas and me.

Of course, one problem for anyone wanting another incarnation on earth nowadays is the more limited availability of suitable bodies. Thanks largely to modern elective abortions in Western countries, the available bodies in places where people would most like to live in order to be able to learn whatever it is that they most need to learn spiritually, the demand now much exceeds the supply. We prefer to reincarnate repeatedly into the same general culture, to avoid having to learn whole confusing new cultures each time that we return to earth. So we are competing now for fewer bodies that are about to be conceived and are likely to be taken to term; and we fret over choosing among them as to gender, location, possible defects or illnesses, genetics, and so on.

But, let’s say that you and those planning to be born to share this next lifetime with you make compelling appeals to the Powers for the right set of bodies at the right times and places, and you all get your go-ahead together. Now you all enter the afterlife pre-birth launch area, and you go through the process of being prepared to be born on earth. There are some descriptions in the literature of what this process entails, and apparently it does involve an actual shrinkage, the giving-up of most of your eternal mind into some sort of storage, and the attachment of the limited aspect of your mind that remains to the just-conceived zygote inside your mother-to-be’s material body on earth by its new silver cord. And while we generally do attach to and enter our newly-conceived body at the zygote stage or soon thereafter, we are generally out of our growing new body inside our mother’s uterus most of the time until the second, or even the third trimester.

It is important to understand that this new infant about to be born is a whole new being! It is not the same person who died on earth and entered the afterlife perhaps a hundred years ago, and then eventually decided to reincarnate in order to attempt to grow more spiritually in order to be able to explore higher astral levels. This new being will have a genetically different makeup, has different characteristics to allow for different kinds of learning, will have a different family and different experiences on earth, and might be of a different gender. There is in fact abundant evidence that each new incarnation is a whole new being altogether! Oh. Really? Oh dear. So then, why reincarnate at all? Good question. We will talk about the answer to that next week.

In the fifth and final segment of this series, we will answer your remaining questions.  We’ll talk about many of the glorious and very enjoyable things that there are for you to do in your busy eternal life in the astral plane. And is there anything that might go wrong? If there is, what might you do to fix it? What is likely to surprise you most? And we will try to answer what is really the most important question of all. Why do we get to enjoy our whole glorious eternal lives so much? Just, Why??   

(This is the fourth of five blog posts which together help to explain the death process, how the greater reality works, and what our eternal life is like.)

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high,
There’s a land that I heard of, once in a lullaby.
Somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue,
And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true!

 Someday I’ll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me!
Where troubles melt like lemon drops,
Away above the chimney tops, that’s where you’ll find me.

 Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly.
Birds fly over the rainbow. Why then, oh, why can’t I?
– Harold Arlen (1905-1986) & Yip Harburg (1896-1981), from “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (1938)

My Thomas and I became so distracted last week by our need to debunk the spurious notion that near-death experiences have anything to do with actual death that we ran out of space in which to finish describing what the afterlife is like. And Thomas said afterward that we cannot have that! He pointed out to me vast sets of topics that you will need to understand if you are ever to make any sense at all of this whole gigantic afterlife picture. He insisted that if we hope to be able to claim that we have even halfway discussed the afterlife in a respectable way, then this will have to be a four-part series. So, okay then. A four-part, or even  a five-part series this will be!

In fact, the aspects of life in the afterlife that have been bumped now into an extra week or two are some of the most enjoyable parts to talk about. After you have left your earthly body and been escorted home by your deathbed visitors; after your life-review and your need to forgive everyone who ever harmed you on earth, and your need to forgive yourself for harming everyone that you yourself have ever harmed; and after your big welcome-home party, where John Lennon sang “Imagine”, or Early Elvis sang “All Shook Up”, or perhaps most of the Beatles together sang that they would be happy just to “Hold Your Hand”; and then your spouse from this most recent earth-lifetime took you home to show you that he or she had constructed here a copy of your house from this lifetime just ended, and with the lanai overlooking the ocean included that you both had wanted to add to your earth-house, but that you never could have afforded on earth… So then, what happens next?

When you have an enjoyable eternity ahead in which to have an infinity of whatever is your own idea of fun, then you know that you really are in heaven, for sure! But, what kinds of fun are possible for us there? Back in the Seventies, I was mostly taking care of babies and doing afterlife research, and I was particularly fascinated then by this question. And fortunately, in the dusty old used-book stores in Boston and in Worcester, Massachusetts, there were still to be found some of the books that had been written maybe sixty or more years earlier about the work of the great physical mediums who had been esspecially active  in Boston and London around the turn of the twentieth century, and who had received precisely the kinds of information that I was most eager to find. And oh, how eagerly I devoured those books!

We will talk next week or in the following week about all the things that there will be for you to do for fun, for education, and even as part of your efforts to better understand earth-history in depth. For now, though, you will need first of all to be able to envision what we are coming to understand about the gigantic astral realities themselves, just the whole environment in which our eternal lives continue to unfold forevermore. Of course, we can indeed venture beyond this nearby environment, and in a reality in which travel seems to be instantaneous, it is likely that many of us do undertake some extremely far away travel on occasion! But for the most part, we seem to remain largely around our more familiar eternal places. Let’s talk now, though, about what this unimaginably enormous astral reality truly seems to be like!

Of course, all of reality exists within and is composed of Consciousness. By now, this fundamental truth feel comfortably certain to most of us, although the very concept of consciousness is still something that materialist scientists are having a hard time wrestling with, so it is difficult for them to make sense of the notion that there really is nothing else but consciousness. As we have said here in various posts, this is a problem for old-style  materialists that is somewhat akin to a fish’s efforts to get a handle on the difference between water and not-water from his fully-submerged-in-water perspective. But consciousness in one form or another actually is all that there is. In fact, nothing else exists.

We understand that consciousness is energy, so it vibrates. And the easiest way to envision our astral reality as we experience it is as hundreds of layers of energy vibrations of graduated strength within consciousness, each of which is a separate reality. These different realities really are very much like the ascending numerical channels on a television set, with your mind as that TV itself. But, my dear friends, the greater reality to which we return after we die really is gigantic! As best we can determine from here, that greater reality may be more than a hundred times greater in relative size than is this entire universe. Think of this material-seeming universe as vibrating the lowest and slowest, with the non-material astral aspects of reality all graduated in strength and vibrating higher and higher. For convenience, afterlife researchers group all the many layers above this material reality into seven collective levels. Level One is what Jesus calls “the Outer Darkness, where there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth” (MT 8:12). Level Two is the recovery level just above; and Level Three is the Entry Level, where nearly all the family compounds are located, and where most of us return home. Levels Three through Five are what the Vikings called the Summerland, very earth-like, and increasingly beautiful the higher you go. Level Six is the Causal or Mental Level, with universities but mostly not very earth-like; and Level Seven is the Source Level, or the Godhead Level. Until recently, we believed that once you entered the Seventh Level, you would merge with the Godhead Collectives and your individuality would disappear, but we have lately come to understand that this happily is not true.

As best we can determine, each of those hundred or so vibratory layers is divided from the others only by its rate of energy vibration, and the layers are all of about the same size, to the extent that “size” means anything. In other words, each of the astral realities in the collection of realities to which we return after we die on earth is probably independently as large as is this entire material universe. It is hard for us even to conceive of so much astral space, so very many material-universe-sized slices layered one above another in vibration and separated from one another only by their different rates of vibration. But still, of course, all inside your TV/mind, and all in the same place! Because remember that even solid matter is just empty space. And, yes, a murmured “Wow” would be appropriate here. The spiritual progress that we are called to make is for each of us to gradually raise our own spiritual vibration as high as to the Fifth, the Sixth, and finally even to the Seventh consciousness vibratory level. So then eventually we, too, can merge with the Godhead.

The type of matter that exists in all these astral realities is of a different, finer nature than is the matter that we are used to here on earth. I recall that when I was devouring everything that I could find to read about the afterlife, one thing that frustrated me was that no one who was interviewing these people who all had died decades before had ever thought to ask them what the matter of their bodies was like! Wouldn’t you have thought that would have been the first question their interviewers would have thought to ask? Good grief. For years, I could not be sure that they even had solid bodies at all, and they were not just wraiths, like shimmery ghosts. But then one day, and even fifty years later I still recall it vividly, someone asked a woman who had lately transitioned what her new astral body was like. Was it solid? And she said something like, “Oh yes. But it’s finer than your body. It’s smoother. Nicer. You can almost a little bit see through it in some lights.” Bingo. That seemed to open some sort of floodgate, and soon I was finding other descriptions as well. By now, of course, I have spent the summer of 2022 often visiting Jesus in the astral Third Level, so I have trailed a silver cord while I wore an astral body myself. I know what she was talking about. Compared to these material bodies, an astral body is something like warm and soft alabaster that is infused with color. It lacks internal organs, so if you eat or drink, whatever you ingest simply disappears.

Astral water is not actually wet. It flows and kind of splashes like water, and you can walk into it as if it were water, but you will come out of it with your skin and clothing dry but feeling charged with energy by having been touched by the energy of that astral water. Jesus even called it “living water” (JN 4:10-11). Not only that, but the astral water gives off a subtle radiance, and a faint sort of hum of music that you can barely hear. Water is everywhere in the astral plane, but most of the bodies of water are not very large. Sometimes you will see someone in the yacht that he had always wanted in life, but in a pond that isn’t a whole lot bigger than the yacht is itself.

Foliage and the sky in each of those astral realities will come in all colors, except for the standard earth-related colors that we might expect. This fact seems to be playful, freaky, and kind of wonderful to people who have just arrived back home and had forgotten this little detail. Most of us enjoy it, actually, and we especially like the fact that not a leaf ever fades, and not a petal ever drops. Those big and often elegant-looking astral trees seem to be aware of us, and they will casually caress us with a branch as we pass. Flowers will turn to us as well. Many astral flowers are gigantic, even as tall as a man, and we can put our face into a blossom and inhale and receive not only the flower’s lovely smell, but also its life-giving energy. The energy that we receive from the plants and from the water fully nourishes us, which is why we never need to eat.

Colors in general will amaze you at first. In this material reality, our colors are limited to the narrow visible light spectrum. In the astral plane, however, many of the most common colors are beyond the visible light spectrum, so they are colors that are never seen on earth. This is especially true of flowers, and of rippling shades in the sky. There, the gorgeous random colors can make you gasp with delight.

The afterlife at its entrance level is very culturally specific. For example, the North American afterlife entrance is mostly lovely formal gardens with flowers and trees, pathways, benches, splashing fountains, and the snow-capped Rocky Mountains in the distance. The British afterlife entrance is similar but more formal, with no mountains and instead a more Victorian look. There is a story in the literature about an American man who died accidentally in China at the turn of the previous century, and when he turned up at the Chinese arrival gardens, what he saw around him was beautiful pagodas with fancy turned-up roofs and everybody looking Chinese! He right away did what I guess that we all should do in such a situation: he called out for help, in English! And at once, his guides came running. They took him home to the North American arrival gardens, where his family welcomed him home. These cultural differences gradually disappear the higher you go in vibration in the afterlife, and they are largely gone by the top of Level Five.

Many insects and wild animals are forever, just as we and our beloved pets are forever. There are butterflies and dragonflies in the astral realities, but there is nary a mosquito to be found. There are cute squirrels, and birds galore who can be coaxed to come and perch on your finger; and there are great wild plains full of bison beside the teepees of plains Indians who no longer need to hunt them. And of course, I have fed Jesus’s iridescent pet fish with Him, and patted His herd of tame pet deer. The deer and bison still graze because their instinct to graze remains, and the fish still eat their grain; but I assume, as is true of people in the afterlife and in the greater reality, that these animals all lack digestive organs.

Everything in the astral plane is made by Sixth-Level Beings. We call Level Six the Causal Level for a reason! There are stories in the literature of how people who have achieved the exalted Sixth Level are now learning how to become a part of the Godhead. One woman told her family through a physical medium about her many frustrations in learning how to craft a perfect flower. And while living in a house is not essential in the greater reality because there is no weather unless you want weather, and we never need to sleep; but many people there still prefer to have a house. I recall reading about a man who was having a house built for his daughter, who was about to die on earth. He drew up the plans, and then he called in four Sixth-Level Beings, who first studied his plans. Then they concentrated their minds together, and as they did, the house began to shimmer into being until there it stood, solid and ready for occupancy! It is possible to stick-build buildings in the astral, of course, but why would you bother with doing that?

What we call “the afterlife” is a kind of foyer between this lowest material level and most of reality. We already think of the whole greater reality as a stack that is a hundred, and maybe even more than a hundred astral layers tall, with each layer vibrating just a bit higher, and with this material reality at the bottom, and with the Godhead – Level Seven – at the top. Right? So now let’s cut a tall sliver like a tall slice of cake right through it, from bottom to top, and call it the afterlife, since that is how things seem to work. That whole stack itself is our greater reality. It is where we live our eternal lives; and insofar as we know, it is all that exists. But, maybe not. We will talk more about that question next week.

Next week and then the following week, we will talk briefly about the process of preparing to enter a lifetime on earth, and the process of later on coming home again and consolidating what we have just learned on earth. We also will talk about all the far beyond glorious things that there are to do in your beyond-wonderful eternal life! And, we will try to answer what may be the most important question of all, and the most difficult question of all for us to answer: Why?? 

We understand now that the earth, and probably the whole material universe, all seem to exist just as a place for us to have the spiritual hard knocks that enable us to raise our personal spiritual vibrations. Because while we are at home in the greater reality, our eternal lives are much too perfect for us to grow very much spiritually at all. We have come to understand that by now. But, why then does the Greater Reality exist? And, why even do we exist? Why??

Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly.
Birds fly over the rainbow. Why then, oh, why can’t I?
If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow,
Why, oh why can’t I?
– Harold Arlen (1905-1986) & Yip Harburg (1896-1981), from “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (1938)

 (This is the third of five blog posts which together help to explain the death process, how the greater reality works, and what our eternal life is like.)

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Most people live on a lonely island, lost in the middle of a foggy sea.
Most people long for another island,
One where they know they would like to be.
Bali Ha’i may call you, any night, any day.
In your heart you’ll hear it call you. Come away, come away.
Bali Ha’i will whisper on the wind of the sea.
Here am I, your special island! Come to me, come to me.
Your own special hopes, your own special dreams
Loom on the hillside and shine in the Streams!
If you try, you will find me where the sky meets the sea.
Here am I, your special island! Come to me, come to me.
Bali Ha’i, Bali Ha’i, Bali Ha’i!
– Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) & Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960), from “Bali Ha’i” (1949)

The quirkily lavish, oddly earthlike, and entirely solid-seeming reality that we enter at death, having just left a bland, familiar, and also solid-seeming earth-reality that is right in the very same place can be easily explained. As you and the few loved ones that you had thought were dead, but who are still quite alive after all and look to be amazingly less than thirty years old, step together into a patch of gray fog that invites you to leave the scene of your earthly death, you all are still giggling a little with the joy of being together again. You are stepping, but mostly it feels as if that fog is moving you right along. You look back, and you see that the room in which you have just died and all the people in it are growing vague and vapory; and then it all disappears.  And very soon, right ahead of you the fog begins to lift; and as it does, there appears all around you a scene of the most confounding beauty. At first, you think, Huh? How is this even possible? How can two solid realities exist in pretty much exactly the same place? But then you remember what Roberta and her spirit guide, Thomas, used to say about matter all the time. Earth-matter is somehow 99.9999999% just empty space!

And now, in this amazingly beautiful, new but somehow strangely familiar place where everything seems to be erroneously colored – perhaps red grass and a yellow river beneath a brilliant green-and-orange sky – you and your mom sit down together on a solid stone bench, while your childhood cat leaps into your lap. Now your new body is young and lovely, too! In the distance, you can see people playing with odd sorts of toy vehicles that never have been seen on earth, small one-seater planes and helicopters and an in-line two-seater car, none of which vehicles makes a sound or gives off exhaust because they all are powered by mind. There are advanced Beings nearby as well, very tall and wearing long dresses and various hats and insignias of rank, but none of them approaches you. They know that you have just died on earth and arrived with your loved ones in this arrival garden, and you need a little time to re-acclimate yourself. Yes, you are breathing, but that seems to be optional. The very air feels and tastes like flowers, like love, like everything beautiful. And wow, there even are snow-capped mountains in the distance!

Right about now, or even before now, your more limited earth-mind will re-merge back into the sixty to seventy percent of your vast, eternal mind that was left behind when you took that last incarnation, just completed. Suddenly you are incredibly brilliant again and you remember very many things, including old friends that you realize you had missed very much, and prominent past lifetimes. This moment oddly seems to be no particular time, and there is no sun, and while the sky is streaked with colors, there don’t seem to be clouds. At some point, whether it is a minute or days later in earth-terms is immaterial, an advanced Being or a few advanced Beings approach and sit down beside you, and you know that these are spirit guides of this lifetime that you have just completed. If you are vibrating at a higher level than the Level Three entrance level, now is when they will invite you to join them at that higher level. Truly, you have at last come home!

This has been a typical description of the sort of post-death trip to an arrival garden as it has happened from a normal North American death on earth at any time during the past century and a half. If you had died instead in England, or in China or Japan, or in Serbia or Australia, your post-death surroundings would have looked culturally different, but the process afterward that we are soon to describe would have been about the same. Sadly, though, it is much harder in recent years for those who are nearing death to know beforehand what is going to happen to them after they die. And one of the reasons for that, I am sorry to say, is all the people who have had near-death experiences (NDEs) over the past fifty years, and who are now convinced that they have been briefly stone-cold dead and been to the genuine afterlife and then miraculously come back to life, and that now they have big news to reveal to the world. It is too bad, really. NDEs are interesting phenomena, although they are of limited educational value. And actual death, or even near-death, NDEs certainly ARE NOT.

There are a few genuine scholars, of whom I am one, who have spent decades studying more than two hundred years of abundant and consistent true afterlife evidence. The best of this evidence was produced in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries via deep-trance mediumship, which is a very advanced and much more accurate form of mediumship than is mental mediumship. For reasons that we needn’t pause to mention now, it barely still exists today. Here are three fundamental facts which are true beyond question:

• Death is always a one-way trip. What maintains the life of your material body during the frequent out-of-body experiences that all or nearly all of us enjoy during our lives on earth is an amazingly stretchy energy cord which was first named in the Bible “the silver cord” (Ecclesiastes 12:6), which connects our material body with our energy body. Near-death experiences are a type of out-of-body experience that generally happen in the astral plane, of which what we call the afterlife is a tiny part: we will be talking about the whole greater reality next week. But the silver cord cannot be reattached, so once yours breaks, then your material death must occur. Many of the more extensive near-death experiences will come to a place where the NDE-er will be warned that he or she must turn back because the afterlife area is just ahead, and if they continue forward, then their silver cord will break and they will die. No one who is alive on earth now and able to tell the story has ever actually died.
• Normal deaths are in large part remarkably consistent experiences. The afterlife is surprisingly, although quirkily, earthlike, having been created by minds that have interacted with the earth. And soon after we first return to the afterlife, we are loved and supported through a very consistent love-based welcoming and decompression process that is designed to help us to make the most of what we have leaned during our time on earth. I will briefly describe that usual process just below. NDEs often contain some of these usual post-death elements, especially versions of the life review, but generally in NDEs these are mixed with odd dreamlike events.
• “God”, “Satan,” and strange mythic creatures don’t appear in the genuine afterlife. For example, I have never seen any credible report of God appearing anywhere in physical form, and both Thomas and Jesus have told me that God never takes a physical form. Jesus does appear, but in His own places and for His own teaching purposes. There is no hell, yet it has been reported that as many as one in seven NDEs is in some way hellish. And our minds are unfortunately very powerful! People who trust that some famous NDE-er’s story is a real report of what they themselves can expect to experience when they die risk letting their adherence to that story lead their own actual death process far astray.

What is alarming to me is that many people who leave their bodies at death will nowadays go off-track for a time. For many, it will be just a few earth-days or earth-weeks of confusion; but for some, it will be much longer than that. Mikey Morgan and my Thomas both tell us that the percentage of people who today do not smoothly transition to the afterlife may be close to twenty-five percent of those who die on earth! Think about that! Almost one in four! Just between the exit from their body that we reported on last week, and the arrival in the afterlife that we have described this week, almost one-quarter of those who die on earth will now go off-track for days, or even for years. And some of them will go so far off-track that one-by-one they will have to be sought and found and rescued before they can be taken to that reception garden.

Is the recent broad fascination with NDEs to blame for this problem? Not for all of it, but I think that it likely contributes to some of it. I hear from people about NDEs all the time, and the people that I hear from assume without exception that NDEs depict actual deaths! That fact absolutely horrifies me. If you have fixed in your own mind the NDE dream that was experienced by Eben Alexander, or by another famous NDE-er, as if those people really had died and then come back to life, and if you let your expectation that his dream-experience during his NDE will be your actual post-death experience, and if that expectation then leads you astray at your death, you are going to have a really big problem. But if everyone who is going to die one day were simply programmed to stick with the deathbed visitors who are going to come to take them home, then many more people will likely make that simple journey home unscathed.

But let’s assume here that you have made your afterlife journey home with the help of your treasured loved ones. You have arrived! What generally happens after your brief rest with your loved ones in a reception garden is that, depending upon your mental state, you might spend some further time simply unwinding with your close family and friends, in a family compound perhaps. Or if you have arrived home mentally or physically damaged, you might spend as much as three or four earth-months in what are called the healing gardens, being nursed back to full spiritual health. It is this possibility, that you might have been judged to be in need of healing, which is the reason why we recommend that your loved ones still on earth generally wait for a few months after your death before trying to reach you through a mental medium.

Okay, so now you have been welcomed home by your spirit guide or guides, and by those closest to you from this most recent lifetime. You also have been healed, if necessary. Next will come two big events which can happen in either order, although the order given here seems to be the most usual one. You will have your Life Review, and you will Party Hearty!

• Your Life Review can happen in many different ways and locations, from privately in a mimic of your earthly home, right through very publicly in a gothic stone castle before a three- to five-person council of elders. I have seen the review described as appearing instantly within a holographic orb, and running either forward or backward, with key people from your lifetime just ended right there beside you, or else with no one there other than your spirit guides. In any event, your guides seem always to be there. And in one way or another, almost right away, every significant event of your life just completed seems to be somehow reviewed again in what seems to be little more than an instant; although, as we have learned by now, in the afterlife there is no real time. And what is important is that we are experiencing every event of our lives from the perspective of the people that we most affected. We are then asked to forgive each one of those people. And then – hardest of all! – we are asked to forgive ourselves. And we must do that! Your guides and others will give you lots of help and support, but if you find that you really cannot forgive yourself for something that you did in this life, then your vibration will slow until you wind up in what Jesus called “the Outer Darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth” (see e.g. MT 8:12). So please learn prevenient forgiveness right now, for heaven’s sake, while it is very easy to learn and, yes, you can take it with you!
• Your Welcome Home Party will be for you the time of your afterlife! And mostly because of all the people who might well show up. After all, remember that many of the greats are also in the afterlife, as are people you loved and still resonate with from as far back as your childhood of this past lifetime, and even loved ones from some of your most important previous lifetimes. These bodies lack internal organs and we don’t need to eat or drink in the afterlife, but since you are used to eating and drinking whenever things get festive, of course food and drink are going to be served. Whatever you consume will simply disappear. The joyous call is put out by mind that your welcome home party is going on now and all your special people will be invited, so for what might feel like forever in an eternal heavenly afternoon, they will keep on showing up! Even enemies of this lifetime, who will hug you as you realize that this enemy is a great eternal friend from two lifetimes back. And my goodness, your first girlfriend, a high school teacher, and now here comes John Lennon with his guitar, since you were a big John Lennon fan in life. He speaks quietly with your friends, and then he sits down by the fireplace and he sings Imagine. Of course, everyone knows that there is a laugh line coming, so even before John Lennon sings “Imagine there’s no Heaven,” everyone’s joyous laughter fills the room!

But might Jesus show up at your party, too? We recognize people in the afterlife by their personal spiritual energies, and not so much by the way they look. And our vastly treasured, so very precious Friend Jesus has personal energies so powerful that for the rest of us who are not nearly so spiritually advanced as He is, even to be very close to Him can be uncomfortable. So instead, before our party began, perhaps we  went with a few friends to visit Jesus on His riverbank, to receive His blessing. And wonderfully, He invited us to stay for a while to feed His fish with him, to pat his deer, and to tell Him how we are enjoying our having lately come home. And wow, then we did truly feel blessed indeed!

Someday you’ll see me floating in the sunshine,
My head sticking out from a low flying Cloud.
You’ll hear me call you,
Singing through the sunshine, sweet and near as can be.
Come to me, here am I, Come to me!
If you try, you’ll find me where the sky meets the sea.
Hear am I, your special island! Come to me, come to me.
Bali Ha’i, Bali Ha’i, Bali Ha’i!
– Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) & Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960), from “Bali Ha’i” (1949)

(This is the second of five blog posts which together help to explain the death process, how the greater reality works, and what eternal life is like.)

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com) 

Amazing grace! how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed! 

The Lord hath promised good to me,
His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be
As long as life endures.
– John Newton (1725–1807), from “Amazing Grace” (1779)

I had thought that talking about what happens at death, and how it actually feels to die, has been pretty much done to death here by now (please pardon the pun). But people in the class that I am currently teaching have suggested to me that, oh no, the death process from the perspective of those who are making that universal journey is something that we haven’t talked about here nearly enough. So if those who have requested this post feel that way, then we ought to talk again about death, because unless you know all about this process, you are likely to feel apprehensive about it. And really, you shouldn’t worry about death at all! Because the fun of dying is the most glorious time of your life. And other than being born, the whole precious rite of passage for each of us back into eternity is the most universally human thing that is going to happen to us all.

Fortunately, thanks to some gifted physical mediums who lived around the turn of the twentieth century, at this point a great deal is known about the usual death process, about the genuine afterlife, and also about the very few things that might go wrong in what is supposed to be an easy and natural process. Let’s call these possible problems “traps for the unwary”, because if you learn in advance what is supposed to happen, you should be able to avoid nearly all of these problems. And thanks to the pioneering twentieth-century work of Dr. Max Planck and our visionary friend, Nikola Tesla, and then also special thanks to the painstaking research of such modern notables as Dr. R. Craig Hogan and a number of others, a lot is known now about the greater reality that we all are going to re-enter at death, and in which we spend most of our eternal lives. So, yes indeed, I guess that it really is time! Let’s all talk again about humankind’s great universal journey that happens at the end of this life on earth.

The first thing for all of us to realize is that almost nothing about our lives on earth is random, and that includes the timing and the manner of our deaths. When we plan our lives before our births, we also plan into them two or three possible exit points that our higher consciousness can choose to take, once we have wrung as much value as we can from our days on earth during this brief lifetime. For most of us, our primary purpose on earth will have been to have achieved as much spiritual growth as possible. For some, though, there may also have been a teaching component for ourselves planned into this lifetime, or a mentoring component, or a writing component, or something else that we came to earth to do; but in any event, once all your purposes have been completed, or else once your higher self has determined that it will not be possible to achieve any more in this lifetime, then your higher consciousness will decide that it is time to go home.

That “higher consciousness”, by the way, is the sixty to seventy percent of your eternal mind that you left behind when you entered this lifetime. You stripped down to just a subset of your eternal mind that is designed and energized for rapid learning! But you will reunite with the rest of your mind almost as soon as you return home, and you will be amazed to discover how much smarter your eternal self actually is.  Please note, too, that you are unlikely to be consciously aware at first that your higher self has made the big decision that it is time to go home.

Your higher self can choose almost any mode of weakening or damaging your body so you can exit this lifetime, some of which causes of death may not obviously look to anyone to have been a planned sort of bodily exit at all. For example, we are told that even nearly all “accidental” deaths are in fact deaths at planned exit points. But certainly, to fall ill with cancer or another rapidly fatal illness is the sort of exit that your higher consciousness planned into this lifetime. Dying in your nineties because your body cannot support life any longer is also kind of a no-brainer pre-planned exit. But, one way or another, about one calendar year before your pre-planned death, your life will begin to wind itself down. You are likely not to be much aware of this fact on a conscious level, but those at the celebration of your life held afterward are likely to be full of stories about how they heard from you suddenly two months ago, after many years apart. Or a spouse will recount that a few weeks before your fatal auto accident, you sat him down and told him where your household cash drawer is and where your jewelry is hidden; or the week before your fatal heart attack, you handed your wife a sheet of paper with all the bank account numbers and the safety deposit box combination and secret codes to whatever your family owns written on it. I hear these surprising winding-up stories from people all the time.

So, the period leading up to your death is likely to be orderly and well-planned, even whether or not you are consciously aware of planning it. And your material body has an instinct for its own survival, so it is going to fight to avoid declining in health; which means that your decline will likely be gradual and sporadic, especially if you are younger, and with periods of reprieve built into it. And of course, if your death is not at a planned exit point, if it truly is an accident like a drowning, a death in war, or a murder, then most of what happens in a natural planned death is unlikely to apply in your case. In most such unplanned deaths, you are likely to find yourself just unexpectedly alone outside your body and feeling immaterial, perhaps looking dazedly at your inert material body. If this happens to you, call for help! Those who have been there and done that will report to us that right away, a tall and glowing being comes running. He or she apologizes for not having been there to help at once, and often others will join that first being. Then you will be whisked away to the third level of the astral plane, which is the entrance level to the afterlife, and there you will be joyously welcomed home.

But if yours is a more regular death at a planned exit point, your material body will likely need to go through a process of weakening over months, or even over years of time before it will be willing to give up its non-material inhabitant. Your material body might be barely functional by the time your actual planned death approaches, but eventually there will come a day when your body no longer can hold on to you. So then at last your death can begin.

The first thing that you will be likely to notice, a day or two or even as much as a week or more before your body actively begins to die, is the presence of beloved people that you used to think were dead, simply appearing in the upper corners of the room. Sometimes they will speak, but perhaps at first they just will be there; and perhaps one or more of them will step down and join you, but just as often they will simply stay where they are in the room’s upper corners and they will begin to talk to you in your mind from there. One or more of them might even be treasured pets! These have been judged to be the deceased loved ones that you are most likely to trust, and to follow. And the first sight of these loved ones, looking to be no more than in their twenties now, healthy and happy and solid, is going to banish every remaining fear from your mind. If you are at a dying loved one’s bedside, you might enjoy sharing some of these wonderful moments as the deathbed visitors first arrive; more often, though, as these visitors arrive, the dying cease to communicate with the living altogether.

We know, too, that a dying patient who might even have been comatose, perhaps for years, can sometimes now become alert and aware and even talkative again. This amazing phenomenon is called “terminal lucidity,” and it can include some extraordinary phenomena, even a full awakening, sitting up in bed, and normal or nearly normal communication with those who are at the bedside. When a dying person has been in a coma or has a severely damaged brain and has been unable to communicate for many years, for that person suddenly to seem normal, even for many hours, in the period just before death seems impossible! And yet, it is thought now that terminal lucidity likely happens in most cases when people with damaged brains, or people who were comatose before death begin the active dying process without much sedation in their systems. So, why does it happen?

The planned natural death process is highly predictable. Our bodies while we are on earth are built like a set of nested Matryoshka dolls. The outermost layer is a transparent energy shield that protects us from various kinds of negativity, and can actually be seen by sensitive people to barely shimmer and glow with one or more colors. Then comes the material body, which is dying now and will be left behind; and finally, there is the inner energy body. That inner energy body is you; it is who you actually are, and is what is about to go home. That body at first begins to separate from the head and the extremities of your material body. As it does that, you become free of your material brain, et voila! If your mind has been trapped by a damaged brain, you might enter a brief period of terminal lucidity as your energy body separates, when you will be unexpectedly able to interact with those around your bed. Meanwhile, your inner energy body is gradually continuing to separate from inside your material body, in a process that feels like a lot of tiny threads breaking. It doesn’t hurt at all, but it does feel funny.

Once your inner energy body has entirely separated from your material body, it gathers inside your material chest. By now, you have stopped communicating with those around the bed, and your personal vibration is rising rapidly. Then your energy body rises from your material body, occasionally from the top of the head but most often from the chest, and some sensitive people at the bedside can actually see this as what looks like a gray mist rising for a couple of feet and then seeming to disappear. What actually happens is that the mist, which is you, simply rises in vibration higher than what any living people can see, and it reforms into a naked body in the air which is still attached to your material body by your silver cord. There is no pain in any of this. Nothing about dying is painful, or has much sensation to it; in fact, sometime in the final days or even weeks before actual death, and even for cancer sufferers, pain seems to largely disappear altogether. The only strong sensation reported is that many who have died report a sensation upon first  leaving that boat-anchor of a dying body of almost unbearable joy. Your dead loved ones who have come to take you home all gather around to hug you now as your body reforms in the air, and everyone is happy and laughing, while you of course now notice your lack of clothing, and you hurriedly mentally clothe yourself. This is such a joyous time!

Meanwhile, your silver cord, which during your life on earth has been stretchy enough t0 let your energy body travel to the edge of the universe while your body slept if you ever had a mind to do that, has begun to fray. And then it breaks, and your body on the bed breathes its last. This is a moment of danger for you, since your instinct might be to try to comfort your loved ones around the bed who are distressed at your material death. But you cannot help them now, since it is impossible for them to see or hear you! And if you try to get their attention to show them that you have survived, you will lower your own vibration so you will no longer be able to perceive those who have come to take you home. That is how we make ghosts! No, instead you must resolutely join your mother, your aunt and uncle, and your childhood pet dog, as together your vibrations rise even more.

(We might just note here that the silver cord is a faintly bluish energy cord that was first mentioned in the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes. It connects your material body to your inner energy body, viz: “Remember Him before the silver cord is broken and the golden bowl is crushed, the pitcher by the well is shattered and the wheel at the cistern is crushed; ⁷ then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it” [Eccl 12:6-7].)

The most amazing thing about entering the afterlife at your death is that you will find that it is right in the same place where you died! But it’s just at a slightly higher rate of vibration. So, dying is as simple as changing TV channels. As your joyous loved ones surround you and your childhood dog licks your hand, all of you together are entering a brief gray fog. You glance back at your deathbed scene, and you can see that it is all looking vague and vapory now. And as you watch, it simply disappears, and that gray fog briefly surrounds all of you. But ahead of you, things are growing brighter and brighter. And to your amazement, as the fog around you thins, what dawns ahead and around you is the most glorious possible whole new world.

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we first begun.
– John Newton (1725–1807), from “Amazing Grace” (1779)

(This is the first of fice blog posts which together help to explain the death process, how the greater reality works, and what eternal life is like.)

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)