Life Beyond Death
The purpose of death
The nature of life after 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. Barry Long
The purpose of this stage is to extract the pure spiritual essence of the life just lived. We do this by reliving our entire Earth life, with particular focus on the deeper meaning and finer feelings of each experience. In this stage, countless psychic impressions are sifted and reviewed in great detail. Whatever material is no longer useful is cast aside like chaff from the grain. At the same time, the true meaning of our experience is gathered together into a concentrated spiritual essence.
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 spiritual essence. The nature of this essence is a mystery. It could be called Truth or Beauty in their highest forms, or the finest expression of the life experience. Once gathered, this essence ascends to the next level where it becomes a permanent part of our spiritual body, or soul.
As we distill the psychic impressions, we're actually consuming our subtle body; for really, they are 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.
In the process of gathering our spiritual essence, all our memories and impressions from the life just lived are consumed. This can be thought of as a "second death", at which point, we can proceed one of two ways. If our spiritual body is sufficiently developed, and if there's enough spiritual momentum, awareness can make a "quantum leap" to the Spiritual Plane, thus ending the repetitive cycle of birth and death. Otherwise, without sufficient spiritual momentum, residual desires pull awareness back to the Earth plane for another cycle of birth and death. These desires are like psychic seeds, or DNA, which become the template for a new birth, or what may be called "reincarnation". As these desires become activated, we find ourselves attracted to particular experiences that represent our unique destiny during Earth life.
The term "reincarnation" usually refers to some form of individual consciousness, which remains in tact from one life to the next. A more accurate understanding is that birth and death recur within consciousness as a result of unresolved desires. Essentially, birth and death are impersonal processes, driven by cosmic law. By the time a recurring birth takes place, the subtle body (including the individual consciousness and memory) has been consumed in the various stages of death. But it's all right, because the subtle body was only a shell of psychic impressions. The true self (the spiritual body, or soul) remains in tact during countless cycles of birth and death.
Only a small part of the soul shines through into the human personality at any moment. From this perspective, it would not be correct to say that the soul actually takes a human birth. So, who or what incarnates? This is a paradox which can not be understood within the framework of human logic.
