'Death' Conditions In Life

After-death experiences will not seem so alien or incomprehensible if you realize that you encounter similar situations as a normal part of your present existence.

In sleep and dream states you are involved in the same dimension of existence in which you will have your after-death experiences. You do not remember the most important part of these nightly adventures, and so those you do recall seem bizarre or chaotic as a rule. This is simply because in your present state of development you are not able to manipulate consciously within more than one environment.

You do exist consciously in a coherent, purposeful creative state while the physical body sleeps, however, and you carry on many of the activities that I told you would be encountered after death. You simply turn the main focus of your attention in a different dimension of activity, one in which you have indeed continuously operated.

Now, as you have memory of your waking life and as you retain a large body of such memory for daily physical encounters, and as this fount of memory provides you with a sense of daily continuity, so also does your dreaming self have an equally large body of memory. As there is continuity to your daily life, so there is continuity in your sleeping life.

A portion of you, therefore, is aware of each and every dream encounter and experience. Dreams are no more hallucinatory than your physical life is. Your waking physical self is the dreamer, as far as your dreaming self is concerned: You are the dreamer it sends on its way. Your daily experiences are the dreams that it dreams, so when you look at your dreaming self or consider it, you do so with a highly prejudiced eye, taking it for granted that your “reality” is real, and its reality is illusion.

Its reality is far more native to your being, however. If you do not find coherence in the dream state, it is because you have hypnotized yourselves into believing that none exists. Of course you try to translate your nightly adventures into physical terms upon awakening, and attempt to fit them into your often limited distortion of the nature of reality.

To some extent this is natural. You are focused in a daily life for a reason. You have adopted it as a challenge. But within its framework you are also meant to grow and develop, and to extend the limits of your consciousness. It is very difficult to admit that you are in many ways more effective and creative in the sleep state than the waking state, and somewhat shattering to admit that the dream body can indeed fly, defying both time and space. It is much easier to pretend that all such experiences are symbolic and not literal, to evolve complicated psychological theories, for example, to explain flying dreams.

The simple fact is that when you dream you are flying, you often are. In the dream state you operate under the same conditions, more or less, that are native to a consciousness not focused in physical reality. Many of your experiences, therefore, are precisely those you may meet after death. You may speak with dead friends or relatives, revisit the past, greet old classmates, walk down streets that existed fifty years earlier in physical time, travel through space without taking any physical time to do so, be met by guides, be instructed, teach others, perform meaningful Work, solve problems, hallucinate.

In physical life there is a lag between the conception of an idea and is physical construction. In dream reality, this is not so. Therefore, the best way to become acquainted with after-death reality ahead of time, so to speak, is to explore and understand the nature of your own dreaming self. Not very many people want to take the time or energy.

The methods are available, however, and those who do use them will not find themselves alienated when the full focus of their attention is turned in that direction after death.

Since your conscious memory is connected so strongly with awareness within the body, although you leave the body when it sleeps, the waking consciousness usually has no memory of this.

In the sleeping state, you have memory of everyone you have ever met in your dreams, though you may or may not have met some of these people in your daytime existence. In the sleeping state you may have constant experience through the years with close associates who may live in another portion of the world entirely, and be strangers to you in the waking state.

As your daily endeavors have meaning and purpose, so do your dream adventures, and in these also you attain various goals of your own. These you will continue in the after-death experience. The vitality force, life, and creativity behind your physical existence is generated in this other dimension. In other words, you are in many ways a fleshy projection of your dreaming self.

The dreaming self as you conceive of it, however, is but a shadow of its own reality, for the dreaming self is a psychological point of reference and, in your terms, [of] continuity, that brings together all portions of your identity. Of its deeper nature, only the most developed are aware. It represents, in other words, one strong uniting facet of your entire identity. Its experiences are as vivid and its “personality” as rich - in fact richer - in context as the physical personality you know.

Pretend for a moment that you are a child, and I am trying to undertake the particular chore of explaining to you what your most developed, adult self will be like - and in my explanation, I say that this adult self is to some extent already a part of you, an outgrowth or projection of what you are. And the child says, “But what will happen to me?

Must I die to become this other self? I do not want to change. How can I ever be this adult self when it is not what I am now, without dying as what I am.

I am in somewhat the same position when I try to explain to you the nature of this inner self, for while you can become aware of it in dreams, you cannot truly appreciate its maturity or abilities; yet they are yours in the same way that the man’s abilities belonged to the child. In the dream state you learn, among other things, how to construct your own physical reality day by day, just as after death you learn how to construct your next physical lifetime.

In dreams you solve the problems. In the daytime you are consciously aware of the methods of problem solving that you learned in sleep. In dreams you set your goals, as after death you set the goals for another incarnation.

Now, no psychological structure is easy to describe in words. Simply to explain the nature of personality as it is generally known, all kinds of terms are used: id, subconscious, ego, superego; all of these to differentiate the interweaving actions that make up the physical personality. The dreaming self is just as complicated. So you can say that certain portions of it deal with physical reality, physical manipulation, and plans; some with deeper levels of creativity and achievement that insure physical survival; some with communication, with even more extensive elements of the personality now generally unknown; some with the continuing experience and existence of what you may call the soul or overall individual entity, the true multidimensional self.

The soul creates the flesh. The creator hardly looks down upon its creation. The soul creates the flesh for a reason, and physical existence for a reason, so none of this is to lead you to a distaste for physical life, nor toward a lack of appreciation for those sensual joys with which you are surrounded. Any inner journeys should allow you to find greater significance, beauty, and meaning in life as you know it now; but full enjoyment and development also means that you use all of your abilities, that you explore inner dimensions with as much wonder and enthusiasm. With proper understanding, therefore, it is quite possible for you to become quite familiar now with after-death landscapes and environments and experiences. You will find them to be as vivid as any You know. Such explorations will completely alter somber preconceptions about existence after death. It is very important that you divest Yourself of as many preconceptions as possible, however, for these will impede your progress.

Generally speaking, if you are fairly content about physical reality, you are in a better position to study these inner environments.

If you see evil all about you in physical life, and if it seems to outweigh the good, then you are not ready. You should not embark upon an exploration of these nightly adventures if you are depressed, for at this time your own psychic state is predisposed toward depressing experiences, whether awake or asleep. You should not embark upon such a study if you hope to substitute inner experience for physical experience.

If your ideas of good and evil are rigorous, unbending, then you do not have the understanding that is necessary for any conscious manipulation in this other dimension. In other words, you should be as flexible mentally, psychologically, and spiritually as possible, open to new ideas, creative, and not overly dependent upon organizations or dogma.

You should be fairly competent and sympathetic. At the same time you should be outgoing enough in your physical environment so that you are capable of handling your life as it is. You need all your resources. This is to be an active exploration and endeavor, not a passive withdrawal, and certainly not a cowardly retreat. Toward the end of this book, methods will be given for those who are interested so that you can explore these after-death conditions consciously, having some control over your experiences and progress.

Here, however, I want to describe these conditions somewhat more thoroughly. Now, in physical life you see what you want to see. You perceive from the available field of reality certain data - data selected carefully by you in accordance with your ideas of what reality is. You create the data to begin with.

If you believe all men are evil, you simply will not experience the goodness in men. You will be completely closed to it. They in turn will always show you their worst side. You will telepathically see to it that others dislike you, and you will project your dislike upon them.

Your experience, in other words, follows your expectations Now the same applies to after-death experience and to the dream experience, and to any out-of-body encounters. If you are obsessed with the idea of evil, then you will meet evil conditions. If you believe in devils, then you will encounter these. As I mentioned earlier, there is greater freedom when consciousness is not physically directed. Thoughts and emotions are constructed, again, into reality without the physical time lapse. So if you believe you will be met by a demon, you will create your own thought-form of one, not realizing that it is of your own creation.

Therefore, if you find yourself concentrating upon the evils of physical existence in such a manner, then you are not ready for such explorations. It is, of course, possible under such conditions to meet a thought-form belonging to someone else, but if you do not believe in demons to begin with, you will always recognize the nature of the phe- nomena and be unharmed.

If it is your own thought-form, then, in fact, you may learn from it by asking yourself what it represents, what problem that you have so materialized. Now you may hallucinate the same sort of thing after death, use it for a symbol, and undergo a spiritual battle of sorts that would, of course, not be necessary had you more understanding. You will work out your ideas, problems or dilemmas at your own level of understanding.

After-death environments exist all about you, now. Period.

It is as if your present situation and all its physical phenomena were projected from within yourself outward, giving you a continuous running motion picture, forcing you to perceive only those images that were being transposed. These seem so real that you find yourself in the position of reacting to them constantly.

They serve to mask other quite valid realities that exist at the same time, however, and actually from these other realities you gain the power and the knowledge to operate the material projections. You can “set the machine on idle,” so to speak, stop the apparent motion, and turn your attention to these realities.

First of all, you must realize that they exist. As a preliminary to the methods I will give later, it is a good idea to ask yourself now and then: “What am I actually conscious of at this time?” Do this when your eyes open, and again when they are closed.

When your eyes are open, do not take it for granted that only the immediately perceivable objects exist. Look where space seems empty, and listen in the middle of silence. There are molecular structures in every inch of empty space, but you have taught yourself not to perceive them. There are other voices, but you have conditioned your ears not to hear them. You use your inner senses when you are in the dream state, and ignore them when you are waking.

The inner senses are equipped to perceive data that is not physical. They are not deceived by the images that you project in three-dimensional reality. Now, they can perceive physical objects. Your physical senses are extensions of these inner methods of perception, and after death it is upon these that you will rely. They are used in out-of- body experiences. They operate constantly beneath normal waking consciousness so that you can even become familiar with the nature of perception after death, now. Period.

In other words, the environment, conditions, and methods of perception will not be alien. You are not suddenly thrust into an unknown; that unknown is a part of you now. It was a part of you before this physical birth, and will be after physical death. These conditions, however, have been blotted out of your consciousness in the main, throughout physical history. Mankind has had various conceptions of his own reality but he has purposely, it seems, turned away from it in the last century. There are many reasons for this, and we will try to cover some of them.

In many ways then, you are “dead” now - and as dead as you will ever be.

While you go about your daily chores and endeavors, beneath nor-mal waking consciousness you are constantly focused in other realities also, reacting to stimuli of which your physical conscious self is not aware, perceiving conditions through the inner senses, and experiencing events that are not even registered within the physical brain. That whole last portion should be underlined.

After death you are simply aware of these dimensions of activity that you now ignore. Now, physical existence predominates. Then, it will not. Nor, however, will it be lost to you; your memories, for example, will be retained. You will simply step out of a particular framework of reference. Under certain conditions you will even be free to use the years seemingly given to you in different ways.

For example: I told you time does not consist of a series of moments, one before the other, though you do perceive it now in that fashion. Events are not things that happen to you. They are materialized experiences formed by you according to your expectations and beliefs. Inner portions of your personality realize this now. After death you will not concentrate upon the physical forms taken by time and events. You may use the same elements, as a painter might use his colors.

Perhaps your life span runs for seventy-seven years. After death you may, under certain conditions and if you choose, experience the events of those seventy-seven years at your leisure - but not necessarily in terms of continuity. You may alter the events. You can manipulate within that particular dimension of activity that represented your seventy-seven years.

If you find severe errors of judgment, you may then correct them. You may perfect, in other words, but you cannot again enter into that frame of reference as a completely participating consciousness following, say, the historic trends of the time, joining into the mass-hallucinated existence that resulted from the applied consciousness of your self and your “contemporaries.”

Some choose this rather than reincarnating, or rather as a study before a new reincarnation. These people are often perfectionists at heart. They must go back and create. They must right their errors. They use the immediately-past life as a canvas, and with the same “canvas,” they attempt a better picture. This is a mental and psychic exercise, undertaken by many, demanding great concentration, and is no more hallucinatory than any existence.

You may feel that you want to “relive” certain episodes of your life so that you can understand them better. Your life’s experience, therefore, is your own. Such conditions certainly are not alien. In ordinary living, you often imagine yourself behaving in a different manner than you did, or in your mind reexperiencing events in order to gain greater understanding from them. Your life is your own personal experienceperspective, and when at death you take it out of the mass physical time context, then you can experience it in many ways. Events and objects are not absolute, remember, but plastic. Events can be changed both before and after their occurrence. They are never stable or permanent, even though within the context of three-dimensional reality they may appear so.

Anything of which you are aware in three-dimensional existence is only a projection of a greater reality into that dimension. The events of which you are conscious are only those fragments of activities that intrude or appear to your normal waking consciousness. Other portions of these events are quite clear to you both in the dreaming state and beneath waking consciousness during the day.

If you want to know what death is like, then become aware of your own consciousness as it is divorced from physical activities. You will find that it is highly active. With practice you will discover that your normal waking consciousness is highly limited, and that what you thought of once as death conditions seem much more like life conditions.

Such other existences and realities as just described coexist with your own, and in the waking state you are not aware of them. Now, often in your dreams you are able to perceive such other situations, but you often wind them into dream paraphernalia of your own, in which case upon awakening you have little clear memory.

In the same way in the midst of life, you dwell with so-called ghosts and apparitions, and for that matter you yourselves appear as apparitions to others, particularly when you send strong thought forms of yourself from the sleep state, or even when unconsciously you travel out of your physical body.

There are obviously as many kinds of ghosts and apparitions as there are people. They are as alert or as unalert to their situation as you are to your own. They are not fully focused in physical reality, however, either in personality or in form, and this is their main distinction. Some apparitions are thought-forms sent by survival personalities out of lingering deep anxiety. They portray the same compulsive-type behavior that can be seen in many instances in your ordinary experience.

The same mechanism that causes a disturbed woman, say, to perform repetitive action such as a constant washing and rewashing of hands, also causes a particular kind of apparition to return time and time again to one place. In such cases the behavior is often composed of repetitive action.

For various reasons, such a personality has not learned to assimilate its own experience. The characteristics of such apparitions follow those of a disturbed personality - with some exceptions, however. The whole consciousness is not present. The personality itself seems to be having a nightmare, or a series of recurring dreams, during which it returns to the physical environment. The personality itself is “safe and sound,” but certain portions of it work out unresolved problems, and discharge energy in such a fashion.

They are in themselves quite harmless. Only your interpretation of their actions can cause difficulties. Now in the middle of life, of life conditions, you also appear on occasion as ghosts in other levels of reality, where your “pseudoappearance” causes some comment and is the ground for many myths - and you are not even aware of this.

Now I am speaking generally. Again, there are exceptions where memory is retained, but as a rule ghosts and apparitions are not any more aware of their effect upon others than you are when you appear quite unconsciously as ghosts in worlds that would be quite strange to you.

The combination of thought, emotion, and desire creates form, possesses energy, and is made of energy. It will show itself in as many ways as possible. You only recognize the physical materializations, but as mentioned earlier in this book, you send pseudoforms of yourself out from yourself of which you are not aware; and this is completely aside from the existence of astral travel or projection, which is a much more complicated affair.

You appear in astral form in realities that are comparatively more advanced than your own. You are usually recognized because of your disorientation. You do not know how to manipulate. You do not know the customs. But whether you have a physical form or not, if you have emotions or feelings, these will take form. They have a reality. If you think strongly of an object, somewhere it will appear.

If you think strongly of being in another location, a pseudoimage of yourself will be projected out from you to that place, whether or not it is perceived and whether or not you yourself are conscious of it, or concious in it. This applies to those who have left your physical system and to those who are in it.

All of these forms are called secondary constructions, for as rule full consciousness of the personality is not in them. They are automatic projections.

Now, in primary constructions, a consciousness, usually fully aware and alert, adopts a form - not his “native” one - and consciously projects it, often into another level of reality. Even this is a rather complicated endeavor, and one seldom used for purposes of communication.

There are other much easier methods. I have explained to some degree the way images are constructed out of an available field of energy. You perceive only your own constructions. If a “ghost” wants to contact you therefore, he can do so through telepathy, and you can yourself construct the corresponding image if you desire. Or the individual might send you a thought form at the same time that he telepathically communicates with you. Your rooms are full now of thought forms that you do not perceive; and again, you are as much a ghostly phenomenon now as you will be after death. You are simply not aware of the fact.

You ignore certain temperature variations and stirrings of air as imagination, that are instead indicative of such thought forms. You thrust into the background telepathic communications that often accompany such forms, and you turn aside from all clues that other realities exist quite validly with your own, and that in the midst of one existence you are surrounded by intangible but valid evidence. The very words “life” and “death” serve to limit your understanding, to set up barriers where none intrinsically exist.

Some dead friends and relatives do visit you, projecting from their own level of reality into yours, but you cannot as a rule perceive their forms. They are not more ghostly, or “dead,” however, than you are when you project into their reality - as you do, from the sleep state.

As a rule, however, they can perceive you on those occasions. What you often forget is that such individuals are in various stages of development. Some have stronger connections to the physical system than others. The length of time an individual has been dead in your terms has little to do with whether or not you will be so visited, but rather the intensity of the relationship.

As mentioned earlier, however, in the sleep state you may help recently dead persons, complete strangers, to acclimate to after-death conditions, even though this knowledge is not available to you in the morning. So others, strangers, may communicate with you when you are sleeping, and even guide you through various periods of your life.

It is not a simple matter to explain life conditions as you know them, so it is extremely difficult to discuss the complexities of which you are not aware.

The main point I want to make in this chapter is that you are already familiar with all conditions you will meet after death, and you can become consciously aware of these to some extent.