What happens after death?
The process of restitution
Death comes when the will of the soul to live in the physical body withdraws and becomes strong in its place. This process, when the soul withdraws from its limiting material body shell, is called in Tibetan nomenclature the “restitution” of our form to matter. The words “earth to earth, dust to dust”, familiar to us from Christian funeral ceremonies, refer to this process of restitution and denote the returning of both the material physical body to the universal matter reservoir and the etheric body to the general etheric reservoir.
Death is therefore the conscious or unconscious withdrawal of the soul as the inner living entity from the body. The call of the soul first brings about the separation of the etheric body, which has no life of its own, from the physical body and then, in a second step, allows all the etheric forces to return to the general etheric reservoir from which they emerged at the beginning of the incarnation.
The struggle of the soul
In the case of sudden death by accident, suicide, sudden cardiac death or the like, the shock is so great that the withdrawal from the physical body and the complete dissolution of the etheric body happen practically simultaneously. If death is preceded by illness, the restitution happens slowly. The etheric body can, if the will to live is still strong or the life task has not been completely fulfilled, once again return to the physical body. In this phase, a struggle between body and soul may occur. Often this struggle is fought out in a shorter or longer period of unconsciousness, of coma, which accompanies many death processes. We can distinguish between two types of coma:
- The unconsciousness of restoration: It occurs when the soul has withdrawn the thread of consciousness but not the thread of life. This is to give the physical body time to regain its grip upon the organism and thus to restore health.
- The unconsciousness that precedes death: During this struggling phase of withdrawing, the soul of the dying person concentrates more in the astral body or more in the mental sheath, depending on his stage of development. The dying person is not without consciousness in this phase, as it may seem to an outsider, he knows what is going on. This is very important to know when accompanying the dying.
- The struggle between soul and body can take place at different levels depending on the stage of development of the dying person:
- People who are not yet very advanced, still very earthbound and concerned with security, often have a fierce struggle between body and soul.
- With people who are already more conscious, but still strongly attached to the emotional, the struggle of the soul takes place mainly with the astral body.
- With spiritually seeking people it is mainly a mental struggle.
The further we develop spiritually, the less violent the struggle will be, the easier it will be for us to let go.
When the struggle is finally over, the etheric body can finally leave the physical body, physical body and etheric body are dissolved. This completes the process of restitution.
The human being has now disappeared as a tangible phenomenon, but still remains himself in his finer states of consciousness, his emotional and mental realm, he reacts to the voice of his soul and prepares himself for the next step, the “process of elimination”, with which finally the astral and mental bodies are also dissolved.
Significance of cremation
Through the use of fire, all forms are dissolved. If the body is burnt, the connection between body and soul as well as between the emotional and mental realms and the etheric body is getting quickly and properly dissolved, the astral realm is cleansed of its desire to create forms. The process of restitution and also the subsequent process of elimination can thus happen in a quicker and easier way.
The process of elimination
Now the human being has neither a physical body nor an etheric body, he finds himself in a non-material state, a state of consciousness arising both from feelings and thoughts from his past life on earth.
Depending on the degree of the person’s development, there is also a wide spectrum of possibilities as to how the process of elimination proceeds. Roughly speaking, we can distinguish three main stages on which we as human beings can find ourselves:
a) People whose focus is in the emotional realm:
In these people, purely intellectual independent thinking is still little developed. They remain on the emotional level familiar to them, which is built up by old feelings and past wishful thinking. All these feelings, which now have no longer a physical body, no longer receive any new nourishment, have to be purified and eliminated. Then the human being experiences himself briefly in his germinal mind-consciousness and comes into contact with his soul. The soul answers him, the man sees all experiences of his past life before him and can evaluate them. Afterwards he stands free and is ready for a new incarnation.
b) The more developed person, who has already reached the stage of an integrated personality, also clearly perceives his emotional state and is exposed to deceptions and irritations in this phase. However, since his thinking is already more developed, he can more easily distance himself from this emotional state and leave it behind. Afterwards, purification also occurs in the state of his thinking, he is able to detach from it and get into contact with his soul. Then he sees the totality of the experiences of his past life and can deal with them in a judgemental way with regard to his descent into the next incarnation.
c) Even more developed spiritually conscious people, for whom the emphasis of their past life was on thinking, are surrounded by a shell of thought matter, which is all the more translucent and luminous the more it is free of emotions and desires. These people, too, must now free themselves from everything that is still emotional from the past life and dissolve it by willingly invoking more soul light into their mental shell. This process is all the more dynamic the more evolved the person is. If soul and mind are already very closely connected, this dynamic can lead the human being to a new level where he is ready to take on more and more responsibility within the framework of the world as a whole and of evolution together with other equally developed human beings and to serve the development of humanity.
The path to a new life on earth
When the elimination has come to an end, the human being sees his entire past life before him and can look at it and judge it from his now purified point of view. From the totality of what he has experienced and learned in this life, he now draws the essence from three essential areas of experience that determined this life. Everything else is forgotten, and all the lesser experiences fade out of his memory, leaving nothing in his consciousness but what are called “the three seeds or germs” which will determine the next incarnation:
- Seed One determines the nature of the physical environment in which the returning man will find his place. It is related to the quality of that future environment and thus conditions the needed field o contact.
- Seed Two determines the quality of the etheric body and selects one of the seven centres (chakras) which will be the most active and alive during the coming incarnation.
- Seed Three determines the field of feelings and brings the human being again into relation with those he had close contact in the last life and with whom he is in line with group karma.
The greater the degree of freedom that the human being has already achieved through the development of his mind and his consciousness, the more purposefully and precisely he can prepare himself for the new incarnation. He consciously transfers his life experiences, prepares his new etheric body specifically for the new life task and chooses his physical parents carefully. Thus he gets a body and a framework for his new life that is optimally suited for the task he has set himself for this new incarnation.
In the course of repeated incarnations, the individual human being, with the help of his soul, develops more and more discrimination and thought control. The increasingly growing consciousness manifests itself more and more as a sense of responsibility for higher tasks and goals. He becomes more and more sensitive to the laws underlying all life and is able to progress along an ever more spiritually oriented path in which he serves the welfare of humanity as a whole. At the end of it, he will finally overcome the incarnation cycle.
Finally, a poem by Hermann Hesse:
The Life that I Chose Myself
Before I came to this earth life
I was shown how I would live it.
There was the sorrow, there was the grief,
There was the misery and load of suffering.
There was vice that would seize me,
There was error that imprisoned me.
There was fast fury, which I grumbled in,
There were hatred and arrogance, pride and shame.
But there were also joys of those days,
Full of light and radiant dreams.
With no more crying and no toil.
And everywhere the source of gifts is flowing.
Where love gives to the one who’s still tied to his earthly cloth
The bliss of detached ones
Where man, escaped from human pain,
Thinks as if selected by high spirits.
I was shown the bad and the good,
I was shown the abundance of my failings.
I was shown the wound that keeps bleeding
I was shown the helping acts of angels.
And when thus I saw my future life,
I heard a being pose the question
Whether I’d have courage to live it
For the decision’s hour tolls,
And once more I fathomed all badness
“This is the life that I shall live!”
Gave I as answer with decisive voice.
That’s how I stepped into this new life
And quietly shouldered my new fate
Thus I was born into this world.
I don’t complain, when often I don’t like it
For unborn, I said YES to it.
Literature:
Alice A. Bailey: Death: The Great Adventure
Contact:
Compiled by Doris Zwirner
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