The “Death” Experience (3)

Seth Speaks, Session 537

The “Death” Experience (3)

One of Ruburt’s students wondered whether or not there was any kind of organization in the immediate after-death experiences.  Since this is a question that will come into many minds, I will deal with it here.

First of all, it should be obvious from what I have said so far that there is no one after-death reality, but [that] each experience is different.  Generally speaking, however, there are dimensions into which these individual experiences will fall.  For example, there is an initial stage for those who are still focused strongly in physical reality, and for those who need a period of recuperation and rest.  On this level there will be hospitals and rest homes.  The patients do not yet realize that there is nothing wrong with them at all.

In some cases, the idea of illness is so strong that they have built earthly years about this psychological center.  They project ill conditions upon the new body as they did upon the old one.  They are given various kinds of treatment of a psychic nature, and told that the condition of that body is being brought about by the nature of their own beliefs.

Now, many individuals do not need to pass through this particular period.  It goes without saying that the hospitals and training centers are not physical in your terms.  They are often, in fact, maintained en mass by the guides who carry out the necessary plans.  Now you may call this mass hallucination if you will.  The fact is that to those encountering that reality, the events are quite real.

There are also training centers.  In these the nature of reality is explained in accordance with an individual’s ability to understand and perceive it.  The familiar parables, for some, will still be used at least initially, and then these individuals will be gradually weaned away from them.  In these centers there are certain classes in which instruction is given for the benefit of those who chose to return to the physical environment.

They are taught, in other words, the methods that allow them to translate emotion and thought into physical actuality.  There is no time lag, as there must be in the three-dimensional system, between the initiation of such thoughts and their materialization.

All of this occurs more or less at one level, though you must understand that I am simplifying the issues here to some extent.  For example, some individuals do not undergo any such periods, but because of development and progress during their past lives, they are ready to begin more ambitious programs.

Now I have spoke of such development earlier.  Some of my readers, not being perhaps aware of any psychic ability of their own, might think that they are in for a long and protracted period of after-death training.  Let me hasten to tell you that all such ability is not necessarily conscious, and that much of it takes place during the sleep state when you are simply not aware of it.

You may after death utterly refuse to believe that you are dead, and continue to focus your emotional energy toward those you have known in life.

If you have been obsessed with a particular project, for example, you may try to complete it.  There are always guides to help you understand your situation, but you may be so engrossed that you pay them no heed.

Now:  I will cover the subject of ghosts separately, rather than in this chapter.  Suffice it to say that large fields of emotional focus toward physical reality can hold you back from further development.

When consciousness leaves the body and is away for some time then the connection is, of course, broken.  In out-of-body states the connection still holds.  Now it is possible for an individual who has died to completely misinterpret the experience and attempt to reenter the corpse.  This can happen when the personality identified himself almost exclusively with the physical image.

It is not common.  But nevertheless, under various circumstances, such individuals will attempt to reactivate the physical mechanism, becoming more panic stricken when they discover the body’s condition.  Some, for example, have wept over the corpse long after the mourners have left, not realizing that they themselves are completely whole – where, for example, the body may have been ill or the organs beyond repair.

They are like a dog worrying a bone.  Those who have not identified their consciousness with the body completely, find it much easier to leave it.  Those who have hated the body find, strangely enough, that immediately after death they are quite drawn to it.

All of these circumstances then may or may not occur according to the individual involved.  However, after leaving the physical body, you will immediately find yourself in another.  This is the same kind of form in which you travel in out-of-body projections, and again let me remind my readers that each of them leaves the body for some time each night during sleep.

This form will seem physical.  It will not be seen by those still in the physical body however, generally speaking.  It can do anything that you do now in your dreams.  Therefore it flies, goes through solid objects, and is moved directly by your will, taking you, say, from one location to another as you think of these locations.

If you wonder what Aunt Sally is doing in, say, Poughkeepsie, New York, then you will find yourself there.  However, you cannot as a rule manipulate physical objects.  You cannot pick up a lamp or throw a dish.  This body is yours instantly, but it is not the only form that you will have.  For that matter, this image is not a new one.  It is interwound with your physical body now, but you do not perceive it.  Following death, it will be the only body you are aware of for some time.

Much later and on many levels you will finally learn to take many forms, as you choose, consciously.  In one manner of speaking you do this now, you see, translating your psychological experience – your thoughts and emotions – quite literally but unconsciously into physical objects.  You may find that when you imagine yourself as a child – after death – that you suddenly have the form of the child that you were.  For a certain period of time, therefore, you can manipulate this form so that it takes any appearance that it had when it was connected with your physical form in the immediately previous physical life.  You may die at eighty and after death think of the youth and vitality that you had at twenty, and find then that your form changes to correspond with this inner image.

Most individuals after death choose a more mature image that usually corresponds to the peak physical abilities, regardless of the age when the physical peak was reached.  Others choose instead to take the form they had at the particular point when the greatest mental or emotional heights were achieved, regardless of the beauty or age that characterized the form.

You will feel comfortable with the form that you choose, therefore, and you will usually use it when you want to communicate with others you have known; though for such communications with the living, you may instead adopt the form you had when you were known to the individual you want to contact.

These after-death environments do not exist necessarily on other planets.  They do not take up space, so the question, “Where does all this happen?” is meaningless in basic terms.

It is the result of your own misinterpretations of the nature of reality.  There is no one place therefore no specific location.  These environments exist unperceived by you amid the physical world that you know.  Your perceptive mechanisms simply do not allow you to tune in to their ranges.  You react to a highly specific but limited field.  As I mentioned earlier, other realities coexist with your own at death, for example.  You simply divest yourself of physical paraphernalia, tune into different fields, and react to other sets of assumptions.

From this other viewpoint, you can to some extent perceive physical reality.  However, there are energy fields that do separate them.  Your entire concept of space is so distorted that any true explanation is highly difficult.

As your perceptive mechanisms insist that objects are solid, for example, so they insist that such a thing as space exists.  Now what your senses tell you about the nature of matter is entirely erroneous, and what they tell you about space is equally wrong – wrong in terms of basic reality, but quite in keeping of course with three-dimensional concepts.  In out-of-body experiences from the living state, many of the problems are encountered, in terms of space, that will be met after death.  And in such episodes, therefore, the true nature of time and space becomes more apparent.  After death it does not take time to go through space, for example.  Space does not exist in terms of distance.  This is illusion.  There are barriers, but they are mental or psychic barriers.  For example, there are intensities of experience that are interpreted in your reality as distance in miles.

After death you may find yourself in a training center.  Now theoretically, this center could be in the middle of your present living room, in physical space, but the distance between you and the members of your family still living – sitting perhaps, thinking of you or reading a paper – would have nothing to do with space as you know it.  You would be more separated from them than if you were, say, on the moon.

You could perhaps change your own focus of attention away from the center, and theoretically see the room and its inhabitants; and yet still this distance that has nothing to do with miles would be between you.