The After-Death Experience: Does It Really Exist?
Updated: Sep 20, 2020
When you're in the business of death, it's hard not to be consumed by it. I spend a lot of time thinking about it, talking about it and writing about it. Most of my days are dedicated to articulating the unfathomable, probing the incalculable and contemplating ways to convey my insight so that others get a glimpse of what I see and understand. I think people need it, whether they know it or not.
Death is truly life's great mystery, the mere thought (or the word itself) carrying enough power to fill us with terror, awe and trepidation. The way many people manage their unease about death is to try to escape from it - or at least distract themselves from its immediate, imminent or inevitable threat. But how far can we truly get away from ourselves in order to escape the inescapable marriage to our own death that must eventually end in consummation?
It seems to me we have no choice but to accept that death is part of life, and part of our living experience. But I don't just mean by some vague notion that we are all going to die, that's not it. What I mean is that death is part of our living experience, a dimension of us, like everything else. For me, death is another intrapersonal experience - one we perceive and relate to through our conscious-ness - like sleeping, waking and dreaming.
Many of those who come to me have a concept that the physical body is not the 'living part' of us, or at least hope that is the case. The alternative is too painful to imagine - the cessation of thought and experience, their loved ones devoid of all life force. Beyond that, far too many questions abound about the nature of life-after-death, soul and/or spirit to know what happens. Confronted with divergent religious, atheistic or spiritual concepts that claim or suggest one thing or another, most have little to no basis for verification that an after-death experience truly exists at all.
So allow me to set a few things straight. The term 'afterlife' is most often associated with a place or a space in the realm beyond; and 'after-death' refers to the time or stage beyond the expiration of breath and/or brain function (and decomposition of the material of our physicality). 'Dying' is regarded as the process by which the organs of function and regulation (heart and brain) cease their work, and 'death' itself as the marked completion of that process. For some, the experience of dying is slow and painful, for others it is rapid and unexpected. Death, it appears, marks the end of life, but does life really just stop there?
No, it doesn't, and neither do you. The point to understand is that we are comprised of at least five bodies of manifestation. For simplicity, these are the physical body, the etheric body, the emotional body, the mental body and the causal body (soul). Each is responsible for an aspect of function and conscious experience from within a different 'space' - these are regulation, co-ordination, emotion, thought, and an overarching controlling or informing intelligence. All bodies operate in their own respective dimension, and all interpenetrate to contribute to the total person.
To be more precise, the physical body is the material expression of the etheric body, which is in turn is a projection of the causal body (soul). The etheric body mediates between the finer (higher) and denser (lower) planes or dimensions due to its fluid composition, and includes the energies of thought and emotion. The physical body is animated by the etheric to interface with the phenomenal world of life around us; that means the physical or tangible body is the last body of manifestation in the spectrum of plane density to result in form, but the lighter (or dimensionally higher) bodies are still simultaneously operating.
Try this. Think of a yellow banana. Now cover it in purple spots. Now imagine peeling the banana and taking a bite, only to find it's now a rotten hot dog filled with maggots! You have just operated in your mental, emotional, etheric and physical bodies simultaneously. Your physical body may have experienced a visceral reaction to the disgust at eating maggots, but all of that living and moving energy also happened somewhere else. Where? And if your physical body had been disconnected from that experience, would it have really mattered?
So in essence, the real living or 'alive' aspects of us are mostly intangible. That means we can't touch or see them but we know and feel them. After death, you would still be able to imagine the banana and direct those energies to construct the spots and the maggots. The mind and mental processes, our memories, thoughts emotions, desires and sentiments are attributes of our personality (lower or instinctive natures) and not our physical being. These are the etheric energies which make us up, and the physical body is a conveyor of those energies for the purpose of a specific type of experience - that of a predominantly physical life.
Beyond the physical, life still exists. Our mind, thoughts, memories, emotions, desires and sentiments are not extinguished at death, but continue as a collective (minus the densest body of manifestation). That means we can't touch the physical, but rather find ourselves in a wholly etheric experience. Cosmic electric and magnetic forces, the elements conveyed through networks of invisible channels, and an electromagnetic aura that stores, retrieves and transmits experience, is us.
So does the after-death experience really exist? It sure does.
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