Daily Theosophy

Then your breath ceases, and people say: “he is dead,” and perhaps they start crying. No reason though.

(88)

(How it is to be really dead)

How it is to be really dead

Then the mind becomes still clearer and more empty than before, but the light is red of orange, they say, as clear as sunlight. In the meantime all your life-energies have withdrawn around your invisible energy-heart, and are no longer streaming through your body. Then, after that, you experience a radiant black emptiness, ‘like an clear autumn sky at night’ and there are no more mental ideas. And this continues until dawn, when you experience what is like a dawn sky, and then you enter in what the Tibetans call ‘the clear light of death.’ Now you are really dead. All life-energies, which first collected near your heart, have now left your body totally through one of its openings – the best is the top of your head, the worst is your anus. If a clairvoyant person might be standing at your bedside during your dying process, he might see a copy of your physical body floating above you, an etheric body, only connected with a thin thread to your dying physical body. It is the more subtle side to your physical body. That silvery of gold-like thread becomes thinner and thinner, and at the moment it breaks you are really dead. You have definitely left your physical body. No doctor or magician can reanimate you now. You are gone.

At that moment the life energies of all the cells and molecules of your dead bodies get their chance. They are no longer commanded by your life energies. And it is these energies which make the body decompose. Of course you can quicken the process of decomposition by cremating the body. Then you can not linger around your grave in your etheric body, like a spook, as some dead people’s do in the usually invisible part of their physical body that survives for some time, perhaps hours or days or weeks; and the ‘spook’, or better to call it etheric double, will die quickly also if there is no more physical body. In the mean time your own experience has nothing to do with all that, because the real you has left your physical body like a coat dropped on the floor – the experience of the time between death and rebirth into the next state only exists in the subtle mind – and all coarser mental tendencies have been left behind.

Anyway, what your subtle mind experiences are images of real things on earth. They exist in the memory of that subtle mind, even though all your brain cells are dead and burnt to ashes. There is no suffering involved – that doesn’t exist anymore. But most people, average people, see only things in that subtle mind that to them really seem to exist – but they are just good memories and the hopes which were inside these memories, and the fantasies that can arise from that hope. You must really be a very wise person to see the non-reality of existing things – to see that all existing things after death are in fact illusions created by the mind, due to artificial limitations created by the mind. That means you have an advanced state of understanding.

There is some discussion about whether people can see each other when they are dead. In general, all we see when we are dead exists only in our own mind, because we don’t have a body with eyes etc. But soon after you are really dead, may be after a few hours or days, you are born spontaneously and at once (without growth process) in a non-physical body which forms itself instantly and which has all the sense faculties, has all limbs, and it is indestructible, it can go right through all objects, such as mountains or walls or whatever, and you can go immediately wherever you want, because you cannot be hindered by any physical objects. And you can perhaps see the people standing around the bed in which you just died, and hear them talk, but you can not answer or talk or make yourself known to them because your old body is dead and can not function as little as a car without fuel. And they usually don’t have the eyes to see the other side of death. It is said that this may happen up to seven times, though it may also be only once.

Every time you die peacefully (like falling asleep) and are reborn in the next of the maximum seven ‘intermediate states’ or ‘bardos’ as they are officially called in Tibetan language. In everyone of these seven stages of ‘gestation’ before being born in a usually long blissful state (if your had anything of a good mind on earth) and then rebirth as a baby on earth – in everyone of these at most seven stages you experience that you have to choose: the choice is to recognize the Great Light of wisdom, or to hold on to one’s own mind-created ideas. To choose the first you must have great wisdom and you need great courage, great purity, great insight – in fact it is just a real inner exam of your past lives, the totally of insight-wisdom you have accumulated through experience and training – and this will determine whether you will be reborn or not (because it is no longer necessary when you are wise enough), and of what kind the next rebirth will take according to your self-created history lines. However, to succeed completely in the text you must have had all learning experiences one can possibly have on the visible as well as invisible Earth planets – and usually that takes many thousands of incarnations over a period of a few billions of years for average human beings. After this test period (or seven test periods at most), the good mind within you will take a long rest in what we have called ‘the realm of the good mind’, officially called devachan – a state of consciousness of bliss and happiness. The more ‘good mind’ you have, the longer it will last. The coarse side of you will just float away and may still have its own vague emotional experiences, though not for long, until the energies which fuel it are exhausted and than it dies forever. The real You never dies.

If your mind was strongly evil, cruel, morbid, etc. you will “go to hell” for some time (it can be a pretty long time for your experience) This hell is then created by nothing else than your own mind – like a nightmare. But one day is will be over.

In many scriptures these worlds have been called ‘heavens’ and ‘hells,’ but they are temporary, and do not contain more than the mind had on earth. The more spiritual wisdom you gain on earth, the higher your experiences after death. Thus those who are dead can see each other, at least according to the Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu in his book Treasury of Knowledge (Abhidharmakosha), and can also be seen by pure clairvoyants – who have the pure divine eye and can see the bodies made of life-energy themselves. Vasubandhu also says that beings of a higher type can see the lower ones. But everyone lives in his own mind. During the period that you are dead, your inner, immortal being is collecting the essence, the truth of every experience on earth. Your inner immortal being absorbs the essential teachings of life, but not their outer form, not book-wisdom, or things as people told you – only the truth or essence of what you read or heard and thought about. If you didn’t think for yourself, nothing much will be clear for the future.

How your life will be during death depends greatly on your inner development. It depends on your level of real spiritual understanding (not just the ‘spiritual understanding’ learned from books). The intensity and duration depend on what we have caused during our life in a physical body. After that period – which may be days or weeks, but mostly hundreds of years, sometimes thousands, all of us will experience about the opposite of the dying process, and will then be reborn as a baby, and your new brain mind has forgotten all that happened between your last death and this birth – because the physical mind is too coarse to perceive the subtle mind of a dead person. You will, before you take rebirth, again experience in your mind, in the light of more wisdom that when you live in a physical body, your former life as well as your life to come in broad lines, and you choose your new rebirth, environment, parents, outer circumstances, challenges etc. depending on your wisdom and courage. Before the beginning of your new life on earth you first die as a dead being. Because when you are dead, you are really very alive, and you must die in that life also. But that life is too subtle for your earthly consciousness to remember after you have been reborn. Still, your immortal essence remains, as always, continuously – but your physical brain mind does not know that, or rather, can not handle that. The beginning of the use of your brain mid, your coarse mind of earthly life is the only moment when, from an earthly point of view, you fully forget the past; and that is why we don’t usually remember former lives and states between lives. That is why millions of people do not belief in reincarnation – because they can not remember it with their coarse mind. But for people who have learned to ascend to the subtle mental consciousness while staying in their body, and then bring some of their memories back to the brain mind, reincarnation is even clearer than the sequence of waking and sleeping is for you. But average people remember nothing or at most have some sometimes some flashes of which may be memories of former lives during the day or in dreams. Even then it is difficult to be sure, unless there is concrete proof that what is remembered really happened.

Or, perhaps, if you look deep inside it, you do know. In your new physical body you will have the same character as when you left – but inwardly you have grown tremendously. After having entered a fertilized egg cell, and become an embryo, fetus, baby, child, adolescent – that means after being youthful, you will just continue your development as where you left off last time, like you do the next morning after a sound sleep. You take new tasks on you, some easy, some difficult, some happy, some terrifying – just to do your duty for others and feed your immortal essence with new experience and wisdom. Your life depends only on what you have done and thought in the past, for good or evil. No God or gods can change what you did for yourself, and what you created for yourself, because it is your own free choice, for good or bad – it is you yourself. God or gods can only help you when you really, in your inner silence without opinions and personal wishes, turn to them and ask for inner wisdom, deeper insight, essential knowledge. For the rest, God or gods know better what is good for people and humankind (and all other beings) than your brain mind (which might be rather stupid, or a little bit less so) – so you don’t have to ask them.

In the above we have only talked about the experience of your real ego, your immortal consciousness center – and not about miserable circumstances of people’s lower personality after death. These experiences are usually not very strong, and do not last very long – most people may hardly be aware of them, unless you have been really evil and mean, or unless you have especially trained to experience that world consciously and be master over it. If you would not be master over it, you would be slung about from one emotion to another, just blindly following your worst desires. So that is why religions in all times have always taught to become master over your senses and emotions during your life, and to use your sane mind always, and to try to abandon all evil, i.e. selfish ways even when much evil is done to you. Such experiences have been sufficiently discussed by means of earlier stories in this series.

This was only a summary of all that happens. I described only the experience-side of dying and being dead – not the scientific side, as a biologist ought to do. Later on in this series I hope to discuss the scientific side of all this in some detail. It is all about the biology of dying and being dead, and how life works in the body and how it withdraws.

So this was quite a long explanation of what life actually is, as Praja sees it, and she hopes humankind will understand it in the future, or even now.

(89)

(What is a universe?)

What is a universe?

Without life energies moving about everywhere in the universe, the heart would just be infinitely blissful and happy, it would be infinitely conscious, but not self-conscious.