Life Beyond Death
An ongoing inquiry into purpose of death,
the nature of life after death,
how we can prepare for death,
and how we can assist the dying.
Stage Three - Extracting the Essence
In death, you lose nothing but your ignorance.
The purpose of this stage is to extract the Divine essence of the life just lived. We do this by reliving our past life in every detail, with particular focus on the deeper meaning and finer feelings of each experience. Countless psychic impressions are sifted and the unimportant material is cast aside like chaff from the kernel. At the same time, the finer purpose and meaning of our life is gathered together into a concentrated Divine essence.
As we distill the psychic impressions, we are reducing or consuming our subtle body, for really they are one and the same. By getting rid of what is no longer useful, we are becoming less. And at the same time, we are becoming more, in the sense of more real and eternal.
When extracting gold from the earth, miners may collect 50 tons of raw ore to produce a single ounce of pure gold. Likewise, the huge amount of psychic material from a lifetime yields only a tiny particle of Divine essence. The nature of this essence is a mystery. It can be called truth, love or beauty. It's the purest essence of life experience. This is the treasure that Infinite Consciousness extracts through the process of living and dying on Earth.
By now, the impressions that make up the subtle body have been consumed. All that remains are Divine essence, which ascends to the next stage, and unresolved tendencies, which become the basis, or template for a new birth. This is sometimes referred to as reincarnation.
Reincarnation implies a memory or personality, which remains in tact from one lifetime to the next. A more accurate understanding is that birth and death recur within Consciousness, as a result of unresolved tendencies. The whole wheel of birth and death is impersonal. By the time the recurring birth takes place, the subtle body, along with the personality and memory, has been consumed in the various stages of life beyond death. But it's alright, because the subtle body was only a shell of psychic impressions, not the true Self at all. Our true Self shines as the Eternal Soul, ever one with Infinite Consciousness and the silent witness during countless cycles of birth and death.
What do pass from one lifetime to the next are unresolved tendencies, which are like seeds, or DNA, carrying the information necessary for a new birth. People who are particularly intuitive can pick up impressions from these tendencies and gain some insight about a previous life.
