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.
The Stages of Life Beyond Death
Introduction
Even as the Cosmic Being creates the universe after dissolution, the individual creates his own world after death.
From the moment of birth, Consciousness expands outward into a multidimensional landscape, gathering experiences all along the way. In the beginning, this outward movement is explosive. In adulthood it begins to lose momentum and in old age, it slowly grinds to a halt. During this process, Consciousness gathers ideas, feelings, emotions and sensations, both pleasant and painful. By the end of life, a huge amount of experience has been accumulated and stored in the form of psychic impressions.
After death of the body, this outward expansion is reversed, like a collapsing universe, falling inward from multiplicity to singularity. All the accumulated impressions must be processed and compressed into a concentrated essence of the life just lived.
Even though a human life is one continuous experience, we conceptually divide it into separate stages of childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Similarly, life beyond death is one continuous experience, with several recognizable stages.
To describe the various stages of life beyond death, we must distinguish the various planes of experience. At the highest level is our Eternal Soul, which is our true Self and forever one with Infinite Consciousness, or God. The Eternal Soul is not a form or body or any kind, but pure presence or spirit. In order to experience the various levels of creation, our Eternal Soul must have a suitable body for conscious experience on each plane. On the physical plane, we have a physical body, which we all know.
After death of the physical body, we awaken with a subtle body, which allows us to have a conscious presence on the inner planes of experience. The subtle body is a bundle of psychic impressions, the sum of our beliefs, emotions and subconscious psychic material, all of which has accumulated during our life on Earth. Although the subtle body survives death of the physical body, it is not eternal and has its own defined life span.
Beyond the inner planes of experience is the Divine realm and a corresponding spiritual body. The spiritual body evolves out of the distilled essence of experiences gathered from many cycles of Earth life.
These different planes of creation are not locations but different states of consciousness within us. We will now examine each of these states in terms of the various stages of life beyond death.
