Life Beyond Death
The purpose of death
The nature of life beyond death
How we can prepare for death
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. This process may take tens, or even hundreds of Earth years.
As we distill the psychic impressions, we're actually reducing, or consuming, our subtle body. For really, they're one and the same. By getting rid of what is no longer useful, we're becoming less. And at the same time, we're 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 or Beauty in its highest form, and as the finest expression of the life experience. This is the treasure that Divine Consciousness extracts through the process of living and dying on Earth.
By now, the impressions which make up the subtle body have been consumed. All our memories, impressions, thoughts...everything we think of as "myself", are now gone. What remains are the Divine essence, which ascends to the next stage, and unresolved tendencies, which become the template for a new birth, or what is often called "reincarnation".
The term "reincarnation" usually refers to individual consciousness 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 individual consciousness and memory, has been consumed in the various stages of life after death. But it's alright, because the subtle body was only a shell of psychic impressions, not the true Self at all. The true Self is Divine Consciousness, which remains 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.
