THE PASSING OVER
The true meditator will learn how to die consciously. When they pass over or die, most people become unconscious at the last minute. But, through meditation and spiritual practices, you learn the art of dying consciously; it is a very, very beautiful experience. Where you go away into another dimension, a finer dimension. I have experienced it a thousand times.
The problems here are caused by the small conscious mind, which is always based on conflicts. In other words, the conscious mind could never operate without conflicts. There is always a contraction and expansion going on. This, of course, is stimulated by the impressions or Samskaras in the subconscious mind.
To overcome this state, we must reach a higher level of the mind, which we call the Superconscious Mind. When passing over, a meditator does not become unconscious; he reaches the level of Superconsciousness where he is aware of the transition.
Some doctors have written a few books, such as “Life After Life.” They have made many mistakes in those books.
They examined people that were practically dead, clinically dead and came alive again. Their shared experience was that they were going through a tunnel, and a light at the other end came and approached them.
No light comes to approach you. As you pass over, the tunnel is yourself going through the various layers of the mind, going to the finer layer of the mind, and that light you see is the light you are projecting outside of you. The light you see would not be an external entity, but it is your Light – for that divine Light resides within all.
FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN
To pass over is like leaving this room and going into another room. It is a pleasurable experience. People fear it because they fear the unknown—they do not know what will happen.
When theologies could not get people together or organise churches through love, they started organising them through fear. Theologies have a lot to blame. Church organisations have much to blame for planting this fear in people’s minds. Instead of teaching hope and love and eradicating fear, they are planting fear with the threat of eternal damnation. No one is damned eternally. There would be no place for eternal damnation; there is only a place for upliftment, for Divinity is omnipresent. Where is the damned place where you will suffer damnation if Divinity or everything is nothing but Heaven? For it is permeated by that Divine Energy – it is pleasurable and blissful.
WHY FEAR DEATH
Why should you fear death when that Light, that Spirit, within you, is immortal? It is Eternity itself. Man can experience life’s eternal value, even with a conscious mind. In the waking and sleeping states, this could be a moment-to-moment experience, totally blissful.
Our minds produce these fears, which are produced by the impressions in the subconscious mind. When man learns to overcome this fear, he will have the experiences you have of happiness and that everything is coming right.
Death, or what we know to be death, is just discarding this little body of ours, which is not worth much. Yet the body is so necessary for man’s evolution. When you discard the body, what lingers on is your little ego-self, comprised of nothing but patternings, thoughts and impressions.
For the little ego self to cleanse itself totally, it would have to take on other births. It will have to reincarnate again. This force of evolution we are going through can only stop when you find total mergence of yourself within that which is in you, the spiritual self. Until then, man will keep on taking bodies and bodies and bodies.
There is one thing to be said that some theologies would deny. They say that if you live a bad life, you will be reborn as a cow, a dog or a cat. That is not true. Evolution is forever progressive. If we have lived a good life here, remember your next life will be better. Reincarnation is true, and progressive evolution is true. You can never be reborn in the animal or plant kingdom once born into the human kingdom.
OTHER DIMENSIONS
In the other dimension, there is no evolution. For man to evolve, three things are required: the body, the mind, and the third that empowers it all is the Spirit. There cannot be evolution if there is no combination between the three.
In the other plane of existence, you have two factors: the ego-self or the mental self and the Spiritual Self. That is where you start evaluating your entire lifetime and all the lifetimes before that. After you have been assessed to retake birth, you might have to wait until you find the proper parents or the appropriate genetic combinations through whom you are born.
Many times, people deny reincarnation. But it is such a logical process. Why should one child be born in happiness while another is born in unhappiness? Why should one child be born deformed while another is in total health? Why one in poverty and one in wealth? The Divine Force is neutral, and it is forever just. It is not unjust. It would not put one person in adverse circumstances and the other in good circumstances.
We control all these births and all these deaths. God has not created man. His energy, the impersonal Energy, gives the human soul the power to be born. You could say He is within you when that energy is within you. Therefore, we always talk of the Kingdom of Heaven within. Then, as we evolve more and more through life, we will find that it is not only within but also without. Here, the subject and the object become one, and only Oneness remains. This comes at a higher state of evolution where there is no distinction.
Discrimination is good for the conscious mind; it will guide him in life and take him on the right path, whatever the case. But in that realm, what is there to discriminate when one reaches that oneness with everything in the entire environment, world, and universe? All these mental qualities that man has dropped off individually as he progresses in Spiritual Unfoldment.
ON THE OTHER PLANE
What do you find on the other plane? You will find exactly what you think you will find. Nothing else, because your mind still carries all the impressions and thoughts that you have, on that plane of existence you will find that to be there.
For example, the Mohammedan people believe that if you have lived a good life – if you have not buggered around with women and you did not drink and all that – when you pass over, you will have all those pretty damsels called “hours”, and you will have rivers of wine flowing there for your pleasure. They are denied to you here but can come to you hereafter. That is what theologies do.
I was giving a radio talk in New Bedford, I think it was, and I said the two wealthiest organisations in the world are churches and insurance companies. The insurance company promises you a lump sum of money after you are dead, and the churches promise you Heaven after you are dead – but we want that heaven to be here and now.
The heaven or whatever your conception is becomes a reality. Whatever we find there is not created by Divinity but made by you. Whatever your conception is of the other side, you will see and nothing else.
When a meditation practitioner reaches the stage of Bliss, he will know that death is approaching. If you go into meditation at that time, you will pass over in full consciousness. It is a blissful experience, and if that is a blissful experience, then on the other side, there will be nothing but Joy and Bliss. It is so simple.
This business about hell and condemnation is the greatest untruth perpetrated upon man. There is no such thing. To repeat, if Divinity is omnipresent and the nature of Divinity is Joy, there can only be Joy in every dimension. There is no place for Hell.
People talk, especially the occultists, of various planes of existence and multiple heavens. In Sanskrit, they are called Lokas. You have the Gandharva Loka that you go to, where you will be flying around with wings and instruments and playing music all the time. Then they have Brahmaloka, the abode of Brahma, or the abode of the Creator, and in between, there are so many other planes of existence.
There are no planes of existence that are already there. You would go through various things, and your soul would travel through multiple things, but those things are the creations of your mind. For in that dimension, there is no time and no space.
IT IS ATTACHMENT THAT IS CAUSING FEAR
It is an attachment that causes fear. If you are not attached, then you do not fear to lose, losing material things, and the same principle applies to death. You are afraid to lose your body. You think that by losing your body, you are losing individuality. But your individuality is not lost until you have become perfected – the soul continues.
People commonly confuse the word soul with spirit. They are two different things. The soul is your ego-self, empowered by the Spirit’s energy. The soul carries within it the impurities that you might have built up, while the Spirit is forever pure.
The mental self, or your subtle body, carries on into another dimension, waiting to be reborn. This rebirth will go on for thousands of lifetimes. We do not want that—we want to find total peace in this lifetime, which is not impossible. If we work upon ourselves, if we do our spiritual practices, the ego-self becomes more explicit and more transparent; an inner Light can shine forth in its most total glory.
Is there any suffering on the other plane? There is no suffering on the other plane except that which you inflict upon yourself by your thought forces, patterning, and Samskaras. Suffering requires thought, and negative thought is suffering. Although negative and positive thoughts are empowered by the same energy – in which direction do we focus? That is important.
… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang US 1982 – 66
