spiritual journey

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Death, Emotions and Reincarnation

Recently a friend from long ago died. I could see them up in the inner planes bright and sparkly, happy and thrilled at how they looked energetically. They were staying around, showing those of their friends and family who could see them how marvellous they looked and how happy they were.

And then, it was onwards to the next part of their adventure in the grand journey of Life.

Knowing them as I did, I knew they considered themselves as a soul with spirit, in a physical body. They thought of death as a transition and they knew about reincarnation.

For people who have such an outlook, death is just another step on the journey. The soul and spirit doesn’t die, it goes on. Those left behind who have this outlook can appreciate this and sometimes see the person who has died move on. This gets mixed in with the feelings of loss for those people who were close, as that person is no longer there, and a big part of their lives is gone.

In my own experience recently, two other people died and came close by on the inner planes basically glowing, and looking so radiant, saying their goodbyes before heading off. What helped is that they appreciated that death was a transition onto the inner planes, so there was no fear, anger, or trauma. Nor did they desperately try to hang on in a body that was too ill. Emotionally, they were at peace.

Emotions are important in death. Many years ago I had a sense that a much-loved elderly relative, was going to die, and they had about four months to live. I felt some preparation would help. They were still a bit active and mobile. They weren’t particularly religious or spiritual. They were kind and tried to be thoughtful in how they lived, which is pretty much a spiritual quality. I came across a book that would help me prepare.

In the 1980’s there was a book published called “The Tibetan book of living and dying” by Sogyal Rinpoche. In it there was a description of the Buddhist concept of the Bardo states. In Christian thinking there is the concept of heaven and hell, where souls go depending on whether the person has been “good” or “bad”, according to what other people determine is good and what is bad.

The Bardo states are more nuanced. There are several levels to them. There are several levels to the pleasant Bardo states, and there are several levels to the unpleasant going from the mildly depressing to the hellish. What determines where a soul goes is what they have done and the karmic consequences of that, and what the soul/person needs to go through to deal with those consequences, and also to deal with the energy of their emotions during dying, during leaving their physical body.

So if a person dies having being good overall, and they are happy and at peace, they go onto a positive level of the Bardo states for a while. If a person dies and has been negative in what they have done in their lives, they go onto an unpleasant Bardo states to repeatedly re-experience their actions to wear out the energy of that. Also, if a person is angry or fearful about their death, they go to a Bardo state to wear out that emotional energy before moving on. The same goes for feelings of addictions, they hang around on a Bardo state re-experiencing those sensations until they are used up.

The Buddhist concept of the Bardo states seems like a good explanation of what happens after death.

With regards to preparation, the Buddhists have prayers to prepare someone for death. These prayers clear any negative energy and provide positive emotional energy to alleviate any fear or anger at the time of death. The result is the person goes onto a positive Bardo state when they die. Prayers done properly and with focus are like light-filled words propelled by a loving intention, to bring about a positive change or situation.

I said the prayers for my relative daily for a couple of months, until it felt like time to stop. When the much-loved relative died I felt there to be a lot of peace about the death, and that they were happy with where they now were. For myself, I just felt a warm happiness for them rather than a sense of loss, as if the prayers I had done over time had worked on me, too.

With the recent deaths, for myself and for the friends who had died, there was the appreciation that death is just a transition and a part of the on-going journey of Life. We also held the concept of reincarnation, so we knew we had had many lives, and there were more to come, and we had died and been born many times. So what is there to worry about?

The best explanations of the reincarnation process and why it happens that I came across was by someone called Meher Baba. I found that understanding something of the reincarnation process stopped death from being a finality. I see it now as a transition we have done many times. I also found learning about reincarnation helped me to understand more of the big picture of what Life is all about. But that is another story.

For more about reincarnation and how belief in it can affect our approach to life, click here for an article on this blog.

For more on death from a spiritual point of view click here.

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Finding a good spiritual teacher to help you grow

Learning about spirituality is different for everyone, depending on what they as individuals need to experience for their spiritual growth. Who we learn from can make a big difference.

A stage that lasted a few years for me was to go and learn some basic aspects of therapy and spirituality. Being part of a group that was friendly, positive, supportive and loving was great, and it was enjoyable. Plus I found it did me a lot of good as I changed and felt a lot happier about myself and life. After a year or so I became involved in helping to make sure the workshops and events ran smoothly. I enjoyed that to very much.

After a while though, the learning slowed. The spiritual information that was being taught was the same all the time. One month was very much like another. I gradually became restless and my interest dropped off.

The people in the organisation who did the teaching were still happy and enthusiastic about what they were teaching. The spiritual stuff they believed and taught was enough for them, and gave them a view of the world that worked as far as they were concerned. But I wanted more. I had some friends who were becoming less happy about what was being taught because they also wanted more. One friend commented that what we had learnt in the organisation was kindergarten level spirituality, that it was time to leave, and learn more at a higher level.

With smiles the organisation tried to persuade us to stay. When we still said no, they were unfriendly towards us, as we no longer wanted to give importance to what they considered important. In a way it was like rejecting them because we rejected a key part of their identity. It wasn’t meant as that, we just wanted to move on to finding out about more aspects of spirituality. And I was very grateful for what I had learnt and how they had helped me change.

One thing I realised though was the people in the organisation I had left were satisfied with what they did and what they knew, but they had stopped asking questions, stopped learning, and stopped growing. They were happy and successful in their comfort zone, and stayed in it.

Myself and the others found some other sources of information and other teachers and learnt about spirituality, life and ourselves at another level. We found some teachers who like us kept on learning and developing, and this meant we were learning new things all the time, and being given the opportunity to change and grow as people.

I realised that some people who are therapists, workshop leaders, authors or “spiritual leaders” don’t learn and don’t change, and come out with the same old, same old. Which is fine for those people who want to learn a bit, and then stay in that comfortable place.

Then there are therapists, workshop leaders, authors and “spiritual leaders” who do keep learning and growing spiritually. These people are great for spiritual adventurers who want to keep learning and growing, learning something new, and then replacing it with something newer, again and again, as there is always More. We live in a time when wave after wave of spiritual energy comes in to transform humanity, the world and creation. Each wave of energy brings a new level of knowledge to match how humanity keeps changing with that energy. Each wave brings a new level of truth to supercede the old (think of layers of an onion as an analogy if you like). So there is continual change and growth. And this will keep happening.

Keeping with the same old teacher who teaches the same old stuff is like treading water in a becalmed sea. Learning with a teacher who keeps learning is like surfing an ocean wave that changes shape and demands you go with it.

I know what kind of learning I like.

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About Death

Death is a massive topic. We have all died countless times, and there is usually huge fear in people about dying. There is a lot of healing and change to occur so that we even begin to see death as a state to go through onto the next life.

Death happens this way:

The soul usually withdraws its energy and awareness from the lifeform as it is time to move onto the next part of the journey. Sometimes the physical elemental in the physical body fights this, and holds onto the energy. Usually the heart stops and the centres close down and the soul leaves the physical body.

Before death, the third eye centre can be seen to close down in preparation. The start of this closing down can be days before. The timing is based on karma. With karma, there are three kinds. There is positive, negative and opportunistic karma. With the opportunistic karma, events can go either way; negative or positive. So some deaths are opportunistic rather than the other kinds of karma. The third eye will show the probability of death, and can reopen if the opportunistic event has gone positive. Close shaves can be like this. A death can be positive karma, as the person has fulfilled all of their karma for that lifetime, and the soul withdraws its energy so the spirit of the person can have a deserved rest on the inner planes, an esoteric cup of tea, a review of events in that lifetime, and a meet up with old friends. They then can reincarnate into their next lifetime with a new set of karma to work through.

I’ve written this in a matter of fact way. With most deaths, there is a lot of emotion. Spiritually, we can know what is happening, but the emotions are something different. For the person dying, there is often fear, even though they have done this millions of times before. The people around them often don’t want them to go. When the person does die they are badly missed by those still living, those still physically incarnate. There is grief and loss in the minds of those left behind.

When we have a connection with someone, there are energetic cordings between us and the other person, from our centres to theirs. The stronger the relationship, the stronger the cordings. When the other person leaves, the cordings start to drop away. If the other person dies, there are no centres for the cordings to get attached to. This can be traumatic on a personality level. Grief ensues.

The person dying usually sees the light and as that is so amazing in comparison to what they experience in a physical body, off they go. Sometimes the grief and the emotional attachment of those left behind binds the spirit and soul in the space around the earth making them earthbound. This is not a pleasant or ideal situation for the person who has dropped their body as they are trapped and stopped from doing what they need to. These souls need to be rescued and released, so they can move on (this is rescue work). For many people, if they were generally happy, their spirit and soul gets to reside for a while in an energetic space that matches that positive emotional nature, where it is re-experienced and drains away. This space was known about by the Buddhists who thought of it as a positive bardo state. In Christianity it is called heaven. If someone’s general state was fear, or anger, or other negative state, the soul and spirit would go to a space that matched this and helped to draw the emotions out for a while so the soul can go off to the next lifetime with a clean slate. The Buddhists think of this state as a negative bardo state, and in Christianity it would be called hell.

When it comes to people we have a relationship with of some sort in this lifetime, usually we have had at least a few lifetimes with them in some sort of relationship such as friend, enemy, sibling, parent, son / daughter of, wife / husband, extended family member, and so on. We will have known them before. It’s likely we will see them again in future lifetimes, too, as there are karmic links. So death ends that well known link for now, but you get to see them again.

When out of physical body, being physically alive as opposed to being a soul and spirit on the inner planes, is not the big deal we make of it when we are in a physical body. We know there is more to that existence, we have it more in perspective. Physical life is a way of learning and developing through many lifetimes to become what we can be, which is a soul on the Divine Journeys, but knowing much more, and being more, than a soul who has not made the journey down into creation and back into the Divine.

Reincarnation is part of that process. Some distant day in the future we may understand that when someone dies that soul is going on the next part of their journey.

In the West, there are people who request funerals that are more upbeat and more of a celebration of that person and their life, rather than being a solemn affair. I do wonder how they will be when we really come to terms with reincarnation.

Taken from “If reincarnation is true, how would you live your life?” Spiritualgrowthadventure.com

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Spiritual Awakening and Mental Health

A year or so ago, I worked in a hospital with people who had been hospitalized due to severe mental issues.  As I started working with the patients I was shocked to see how fragmented and smashed their auras were. It was as if their auras had been shattered by the breakdown or trauma they had experienced.  Looking at their energy I could appreciate how fragile and tired they seemed, how what they had experienced had slowed their thinking and reduced their emotional responses. I could well appreciate it must take time to recover, to get better, and build up their energy, and their auras to a point where these patients would seem more solid, more grounded and more robust. I realised that some of the patients might never achieve that. 

As mental health issues are more in the open now, and people are more willing to talk or write about their experiences in the media or the internet, it seemed to me that mental health is a massive and complex area of health. Observing the patients in hospital I had a sense of how devastating some mental health issues are and how this showed up in the auras of patients.

Then I knew of people who had depression because of imbalance of the body chemistry and the influence of genetics. This showed up differently in the aura compared to the people I had seen in hospital. Then I knew of people who experienced depression and PTSD because of their experiences, and how the energy of these lodged in their systems.

My own experiences of mental health issues had been minor in comparison. It happened in a period of two weeks when I was twenty. My mind seemed fragile and I just knew my thinking was really not right and a bit crazy. I dealt with that by just keeping life as simple as I could. The episode passed.

In my late twenties, after I had found out about spirituality, a healer who gave readings looked down my timeline and said I would experience a dark period later in the year. When it started several months later, it was like everything looked and felt black and depressing. It was difficult to describe how my mind felt, the closest I could get was that it was lacking in joy, it just felt grim and black, without a happy thought, and depressed. Even though I felt that way, having been warned earlier, I knew this period would end, so for a few months, daily I made myself visualize several goals I had decided on earlier. I made myself exercise and go for walks. I felt like I was processing my way through darkness. After a few months, the dark period lifted, as if I had walked out of a tunnel.  The joy of life came back.

I have read a lot on social media about people discover spirituality for the first time, who have an “awakening”, then go on to experience depression, and in some cases, anxiety.

In the 1990’s I read a couple of books called Esoteric Psychology I and II. They were written by Alice Bailey who wrote many books to do with spirituality with a spiritual Tibetan guide between 1919 and 1949. She wrote that in the future as more spiritual energy came in and people opened up to spirituality, there would be new issues to do with mental health. At the time of reading I was surprised by this, but I get the drift of this more now. If new energy comes into chakras it can create effects in the mind, emotions and physical body, some of which can be difficult to deal with. I could see that if a person suddenly realises that what they thought about life and how it happens wasn’t true, and that life happens a different way, this can be extremely difficult for the mind to cope with. Gone is a sense of what a person can rely on, and gone is the identity they had built up. If there is nothing to replace it, then that is really hard for the mind, and the emotions to cope with.

This kind of mental illness shows up differently in a person’s energy, and has a cause to do with spiritual energy, and an event, called an “awakening”, as far as I can make out. This kind of mental health issue can be dealt with.

This kind of thing happened as well in the 1980’s and the 1990’s. But the culture was very different in the spiritual world. It was expected that at times on a person’s spiritual journey that things would get a little crazy, but there was a lot of support. Looking back, I realised that everyone that I knew that was going on their individual spiritual path looked after themselves because pursuing health wellbeing was all wrapped up in the idea of spiritual growth. People were careful what they ate, how they looked after their body, and even then hydration was a big thing. For emotional health it was normal to get some therapeutic help. For mental health and support people would read books, and I’m amazed when I look at today’s spirituality best seller lists they contain a lot of the same books I read back then. People also went to groups to learn and practise healing and therapeutic techniques, and meditation and movement disciplines. There was a lot of physically meeting up. People looked after themselves and each other. In those years depression just wasn’t something that happened because someone became spiritual.

What happened at the 11:11 Harmonic Convergence in Glastonbury, England, 1987, typified it for me.  The spiritual energy was high, and affected people in different ways, including triggering issues and painful feelings and thoughts for a few people. But there was a lot of support the whole time. There were meditation groups, there were healing groups, massage, crystals and therapy available. There was good quality vegetarian food. There were places for people to gather. There was a lot of nurturing support. People were looking after each other spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically, on the Tor and in the town. And it was an amazing experience.

That was the way to do spirituality; with physical, emotional, mental and spiritual support.

Over 30 years on, this kind of support is the way a spiritual awakening and spiritual journey can be a happy experience and I think the crucial aspect is people getting together physically.  Depression and anxiety brought on in the “awakening” process can be improved this way with the right support.

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