Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality. 

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun – 

Or rather – He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and Chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle – 

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground – 

Since then – ’tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity –
– Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), from “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” (1863)

Oh, how I loved this famous poem when I was a  child! I even was able to recite parts of it when I was maybe ten years old. I could so well envision that Victorian lady who had been about her prim, Victorian life when this mysterious carriage pulled by black horses with black plumes on their heads had stopped for her, so she had stepped up inside, as a lady back then would have obediently done, since ladies then had no control of their lives. When I was a child, this poem was my first interested realization that, of course, you would discover wherever you were going when you noticed wherever the horses’ heads were pointing. And I wondered then over all the things that she passed, the elements of her life that she was seeing from centuries after her death. A Victorian lady had imagined that eternity would be just an endless carriage ride.

But was that how death really was going to work? That was what this poem had made me wonder. I was then just a child, after all. There were two generations of my family ahead of me in line, and I had had that experience of light when I was eight years old, so I was not at all afraid of death, although having so lately seen that amazing light, I was plenty curious about it. Which must have been why this poem seized my mind so deeply when I was so young.  

By now, though, and quite wonderfully, we have had many reports from Miss Dickinson’s near-contemporaries about what her eternity had held in store for her, once she later disembarked from that funeral carriage. If you are still a bit hazy about the geography and the physics of the Greater Reality, perhaps your taking a moment now just to quickly skim through our past two weeks’ posts might help you to keep things straight as we follow some recent afterlife arrivals through all the gloriously dazzling things that there are to do for fun in our eternal lives once we have shed these material bodies. And then we finally, joyously, will arrive back to our infinitely wonderful eternal home!

We are assuming, of course, that those who are dying on earth have closely followed their deathbed visitors straight home. And they have had their post-death nap that lasted for an earth-day or two; and their life review, during which they forgave everyone, and especially themselves; and also their wonderful welcome-home party, during which they discovered that even some of their enemies during this most recent earth-lifetime were actually beloved eternal friends just playing those parts, to aid them in their spiritual learning. They might have needed to spend a couple of earth-months of non-time in the spiritual healing gardens. If they wanted a post-death meeting with, and also a blessing from Jesus Himself, of course they have met with Jesus in His Level Three glade beside the river and had that happen for them as well. Many of us spend as much as a year or two of post-death non-time in these semi-serious, semi-joyous formalities, and in trying to send messages back to our loved ones on earth, to assure them that indeed we have survived.

But, then what? Well, once we are at home and reacclimated, we are spiritually healed and feeling great and at peace, we have spent time with our oldest and dearest friends and family from our most recent lifetimes, and we are settled in and used again to a home base somewhere that makes us feel grounded in eternity, there soon is a cheerily expectant “Okay, what’s next?” kind of feeling that settles in for us. And there is so much there that we can do for fun! Let’s first consider our overall situation:

• Nearly Everyone Returns to the Greater Reality Vibrating Somewhere at Collective Levels Three Through Five. Those are the three Summerland collective levels, and for most of us, the lower vibrational half of that range is where we spend endless ages of incarnations! As you know, we always can go lower than wherever we are vibrating; we just have trouble going higher. So nearly all of us, when we go home, will be able to do a lot of traveling around the Level Three and perhaps some of the lowest-vibration Level Four attractions. But in trying to hit some of those lower Level Four or higher hotspots, unless we have a friend who can come with us and can shield us with their personal higher-vibration auras, we will be so beaten up by the higher vibrations at the upper-Level-Four level that we will have to turn back. So, if we assume that for now, we cannot go above Level Three, what is there for us to do for fun?
• We Can Ski, Snowboard, Swim, Boat, Hike, Climb, and Otherwise Enjoy Vigorous Outdoor Lives. Mikey Morgan, who is an upper Sixth Level Being, tells us that he still comes down to the Third Level and he enjoys snowboarding on occasion. And since the snow isn’t cold and our astral bodies cannot be damaged, he says that he can now snowboard like an Olympian!
• There is a Mental Hotline at the Third Level That Announces What Performances are Now About to Happen. At the turn of the twentieth century, everyone was hungry to see and hear great orchestras perform. And perform they did! You would simply put out your intention to hear Mozart or Tchaikovsky or whatever, and whenever an orchestra would be playing that composer’s music anywhere in the world, you would know it. You would think yourself there, and instantly you would be in an open-air coliseum in the Greater Reality over Paris or Moscow or Kiev or somewhere, sitting front-row center as the orchestra started to play. As it played, not only would you hear it more beautifully than you ever heard it on the material plane, but also you would see the music in clouds of colors over the performers.
• Many Transitioned Earth-Performers are Performing at the Third Level. We don’t know about every recently-deceased star who is performing, but I imagine that a great many people do perform at least occasionally. The names most commonly mentioned are Frank Sinatra, John Lennon, Early Elvis, and Las Vegas Elvis. Reportedly, Elvis is a higher-level being, but he has resolved to continue to perform on Level Three for so long as anyone wants to see him perform. And again, same process: you mentally put out your intention to see some performer, and the next time he or she performs anywhere, you are made aware so you can be front row center.
• There Seems to be a Vibrant Level Three Amateur Performance Scene. Apparently, a lot of people who never performed on earth are performing there in plays and as singers and dancers, and they enjoy doing that. You can, too! They are taught by people who have taught some of the greats on earth, and their performances are well-attended. Children born as talented prodigies likely first learned their skills this way.
• We Can Take Instrumental Lessons from Some of the Greats. The thing is that with our vastly augmented minds, we can learn skills far more easily there than we ever could have learned them here! Many of those who are being born in the early part of this century were likely transitioning into the afterlife maybe a century and  a half ago, too poor ever to have learned to play the piano or the violin or the cello back then, but very eager when they transitioned home to learn to play those instruments, and to learn to play from Mozart! They are being born again now, and they are the children who now are piano and violin prodigies. My Aunt Ruth was a gifted seamstress on earth who made her own clothes, and she dressed like royalty. Once recently when I was speaking with my mother through a medium, she showed me my Aunt Ruth teaching a fairly large sewing class using mind-controlled crystal sewing machines.  
• There are Dress-Up Play Villages. We don’t know how many of these there are, but we know of at least two. I suspect that there soon will be more. The first two that we have become aware of are the Wild West village and the Dickens village. If you feel like playing at being a character in a western movie or in a Dickens novel, you simply think yourself into the appropriate village, you mentally clothe yourself appropriately, and you go to it! I think there soon will be villages for some other novel series as well. Harry Potter, anyone?
  
• We Can Do Library Research. The cities are few, and they contain mainly public buildings, including libraries. All the libraries contain mainly scrolls, and their scrolls are reportedly duplicated so you can do your own research on your own background in the library nearest you. Many people ask me if they will be able to research their past lives in the afterlife. Well, of course you can! Just climb those great stone steps of the library in your nearest city and ask a friendly librarian to help you get started.
• Travel to the Afterlives of Ancient Peoples. Since there is no time and there is infinite space in Level Three of the Greater Reality, apparently you can find every aspect of the earth’s past still happening now, just by thinking yourself there. In browsing one of the many old books that I bought during the nineteen-seventies, I found an account by someone who had visited the afterlife of the American plains Indians. It was an active plains encampment surrounded by thousands of buffalo. While he was there and conversing by mind with a chieftain, the sky opened, and a sixth-level Being appeared, carrying a woman, He deposited her in a teepee, then left the teepee, nodded to the chieftain, and disappeared the same way that he had arrived. The chieftain explained that sometimes when people die with extreme spiritual damage, these Beings will bring them here to be healed, “since my people are especially strong spiritually.” A few of the things on my post-death to-do list are to travel to the ancient Egyptian afterlife and watch the Pyramids being built, and to travel to Philadelphia in 1776. And what about sitting on that hillside and actually hearing the Sermon on the Mount? (Note that conversations being held by mind are in a universal language.)
• Travel to the Edge of the Material Universe. Not only can we travel by the power of our minds anywhere we might like to go in the material world, invisibly; but we also have the ability to travel to the edge of the material universe by mind in an instant. And some people do that, just to say that they have been there; although they generally ask a higher-vibration friend to accompany them. And since there is nothing there to see, they will just float around for a bit and then come back.
• Travel to Plant, Animal, and even Mineral Minds. There are far-distant planets in the physical universe where the life is not recognized by us as intelligent, and yet it is quite intelligent. I have  been taken by Thomas to visit three such planets while I was lucid-dreaming, to try out inhabiting the different life-forms on each. On one, I tried out being pond-scum. That felt meh. On the second, I was a creature very like a horse, running with its herd, which felt great! On the third, I tried to think myself inside of and actually tried to become what seemed to be a piece of reddish sandstone, but I couldn’t stay inside it. The thing was moving S-o-o  V-e-r-y  S-l-o-o-w-l-y.
• Travel to Level Two. In the whole Greater Reality, the only accessible negativity at all seems to be on Level Two, the second aggregate level, the level just above the punishment level that Jesus called “the Outer Darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (see Mt 8:12; 22:13; 25:30). Visiting that Second Level is really the only dangerous thing that you can do in the entire Greater Reality. It seems to be populated by lowlifes of various sorts who may be up to doing nefarious things: think of that cantina described as a hive of scum and villainy in the original Star Wars movie. I once knew someone who was just a normal person living on earth, who astral traveled as a hobby, and he was fascinated by the Second Level’s lawlessness. But he got into some kind of trouble there, and he never was heard from on earth again.
  

Well, there you have it. An eternity of endless entertainment awaits us all, and my goodness, this is only what we can know about from here! And you can do all of it without traveling any higher than Level Three in vibration! So, why would you want to bother with vibrating higher? Because there is even more to do, and everything is even vastly more beautiful, the higher in vibration you are able to go. Believe it or not! Finally, my dear ones, to answer the question that I have been teasing you with: Why does this eternity full of endless fun, perfect joy, and boundless happiness exist? It turns out that YOU, and ONLY YOU, are the reason why anything at all exists! The earth. The Greater Reality. Anything at all. In a lifetime of seeking, I never have been able to find any other reason. It is impossible for you to comprehend how very much you in particular are loved.

(This is the fifth 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)

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)