The Author’s Foreword

"Many lives, Arjuna, you and I have lived. I remember them all, but you do not remember".
Bhagavad Gita

For many hundreds of millennia people have constantly argued whether human beings are mortal or a physical Death is their final destiny. Most often in such infinite arguments they leave the most important point of the problem out of consideration, namely: both immortality itself and its antithesis, i.e. Death, are not just separate facts of Nature, but depend directly on people themselves, quality of their Consciousness and their inner condition.

Immortality does not mean maintenance of status quo with respect to our physical body and the thing that we call “Mind”, while the fact of Death does not mean a complete annihilation of everything what caused manifestation of our body and Mind in physical Matter.

Immortality cannot be given for nothing. It must be gained by each personality by way of a persistent and conscious struggle against Illusions and chimeras of the material World, the struggle which result in ACQUIRING KNOWLEDGE of one’s own immortality. The essence of immortality is not in preserving our limited and imperfect personal “ego” vested in the equally imperfect and easily vulnerable physical body, but in realizing the great and infinite Flow of Reality, in which our Life on Earth is just a transient moment.

This invisible and intangible to us spiritual Reality does not contravene laws of Nature, does not contradict or violate them, but includes them and goes far beyond their limits. Each of you are mortal until you cling as hard as you can to your own present, habitual for you, physical form and condition of Mind, until you try to rise over the state of your present ignorance, over the illusion of your satisfaction with defective and partial manifestations of your physical existence.

For most people, regardless of their world view, Death is just an inexplicable event which interferes impertinently with their personal Life and destroys all their plans for the future. It seems to many people as a terrible and sudden downfall into uncertainty, into the World, from which no one has returned yet, and about which no one has told anything objective.

Until a person identifies himself/herself with gross Matter, until his/her Consciousness is connected with the Physical Plane of Earth, – they are identical: the person is earth because his/her Consciousness belongs to ashes, to the perishable, that is the one that IS NO MORE.

Therefore, when the person’s body becomes weak and dies, he/she dies as well, as his/her Consciousness ceases to function and sinks into a latent state. That is what most people call “Death”. The reverse thing happens with Consciousness of a spiritually awaken person who was above gross Matter during his/her whole Life. For such person the fact of birth in the body is identical with Death, whereas Death of the body means awakening, resurrection, Life for him/her.

The ancient Latin saying “Ìeìåntî ìori” – “remember about death” – unfortunately has lost its relevance for people of nowadays. Many Initiates wrote about the art of dying taught at the initiation into ancient mysteries during the ritual of a symbolic Death. Ancient peoples of the Mediterranean territories also knew much more about Death than their far descendants now.

For those who during their Life unriddled the mystery of Death, conscious dying is an Initiation, which in their further existence gives the ability to control consciously the processes of Birth (manifestation) and Death (disembodiment). However, usually during Life a person fully involved in cares and troubles to provide for his/her earthly existence does not have any time to stop one day and think about the hopeless downfall which inevitably comes to him/her with Death and which is to put an end to this insane survival race that we call “Life”.

But Death remains now the same inevitable Truth as before. It is standing behind the back of everyone of us, and no one can escape it or avoid its cold breath. As soon as we are born, we are already sentenced, doomed “to Death”. We still remain powerless in front of Death. We die like animals – in complete ignorance, without any slightest idea about WHERE Death leads us.

Our fear of Death is based on our tremendous ignorance, our complete lack of knowledge of the Truth hidden by Death. This happens because most people consider that they are the outer body which they have and therefore they think that, together with destruction of the physical body, they will also cease to exist. We want to convince you that it is not so; that you are not simply a set of chemical elements that constitute the physical form which hides your true Essence.

We are Sparkles of Life! We are Eternal, Divine Sparkles of Life, vested in “coffins” – physical bodies, which allow us to study thoroughly and gradually this Earth World. It is our work; it is our purpose for each Life given to us. But we will never die, because we never die, because our immortality is the Truth as incomprehensible as our visible Death. We are eternal!

Basically, I do not absolutely care about attacks of ignorant opponents whose individual Evolution level and certain haziness of Consciousness do not give them a practical possibility to understand what is happening. That is why we, – I myself and my spiritual disembodied Masters-Instructors, – have no intention “to cast pearls before swine” trying to prove our rightfulness to the blind and the deaf who “have not ears to hear”.

Instead of us, Jesus Christ gave a good answer in his time and pointed out their true nature hidden behind a hypocritical mask of “truth fighters” and “religious people”:

“…They talk of mercy, yet they bind on human shoulders burdens grievous to bear. They talk of helpfulness, and yet they put not forth the slightest helpful efforts for their brother man.

They make a show of doing things, and yet they do not anything but show their gaudy robes, and broad phylacteries, and smile when people call them honored masters of the law. They strut about and show their pride when people call them father, so and so.

Hear, now, you men, Call no man father here. The God of heaven and earth, and he alone, is Father of the race of men”.

The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ, 155:38-42.

Our knowledge IS ONLY FOR THOSE who ARE intellectually and spiritually ready to accept it. The rest may wait until their Consciousnesses (in this Life or in future Lives) become mature for it: each person can accept exactly as much knowledge as the person’s Consciousness is able to hold. This is law and there is nothing to do with it: drawing it to one side will certainly expose the other side.

The trouble of those, who have tried to tell people about Death before us, is that they, in their attempts to prove to ignorant people who called themselves “scientists” what, like an axiom, does not need any proof, were afraid to be laughed at, forgot about the Truth itself behind thousands of stipulations and explanations; and the Truth still remained “the most fearsome Mystery of Existence” for hundreds of millions of people.

It is not myself, Oris, and much less it is Earthly personality named “Sergei Tsvelev”, who writes; it is the Thought overwhelming Earthly human being that writes, the Thought thoroughly formed by dozens of invisible to your eyes highly developed Spiritual Beings from Sirius, Pleiads, Andromeda, Ursa Major, Aldebaran, Cygnus and many other star systems, the Ones who are not indifferent to the destiny of humankind on Earth. I just try to formulate Their Thoughts with heavy human words and awkward phrases of the human language. All your sagacity and all your Mind are unable to destroy a single letter from the text written here. All your indignation as well as all your tears cannot wash out a single word from what I am assigned to deliver to you.

ORIS.

The Mystery of Death

“There is a reality which lies at the foundation of earth and sky, but it does not have a form let alone a name. Eyes cannot discern it; ears cannot hear its voice. Calling it Buddha or Mind you act against its nature, as at the same time it becomes an illusory flower in the air.

This reality is neither Mind nor Buddha. It rests in calmness and yet it radiates a mystic light. It opens only in front of very vigilant persons. It is Dharma beyond any form or sound; it is Dao that has nothing in common with words.

If you want to hear a thundering voice of Dharma, exhaust all your words, make all your thoughts empty, as only thus you can get closer to the understanding of One Essence”.

Dai O Kokushi.

Nowhere human ignorance vested in elusory evidence shows up with such tremendous force as in the phenomenon of so-called Death. The Thought about Death hangs over human Consciousness as a fearsome fate; and human beings, when they have walked their entire life path, come to the conclusion that this is the end of their participation in Life. Many people, when they think like this and do not know the beginning and see only their end, pass their Life aimlessly, wasting their years in trifles and spending tremendous energy on hoarding illusory and useless values.

Ignorant of deeply unhappy people, who think that they live only once and that is why they should “snatch from Life” as much pleasures as possible, in the race for this phantom, violate not only human laws but also Cosmic Laws casting themselves into misery and diseases, or simply send themselves for their crimes to the electric chair or to the gallows. Instead of accumulating the good and valuable, adding it to the treasures of their Soul accumulated during past incarnations, they waste the little what their Soul has managed to get before through hard work and suffering.

We cannot ignore our past which holds us captive. Spiritual development of a personality on Earth is opposed to advantages or disadvantages of upbringing, environment or hostile actions in order to reveal whether the personality’s achievements are in proportion to its potential abilities. Wealth can become “the eye of a needle” and big obstacle, as they demand much more from the rich than from the poor and they ask more strictly from a talented person than from “a common” one.

There are several steps of human Evolution, but a human being by the quality of his/her WHOLE Life must earn the right of further advance including the beyond of the visible World. Many, if not the majority of qualities which always bring success and material well-being in the Physical World, are just an impediment to further favorable postmortal existence of the Soul.

Vanity, egoism, anger, lust, greed, envy and other so-called “human weaknesses”, that all religions consider as the most terrible sins, are the difficult impediments or defects which must be uprooted still during Life. Earth is a unique school for our spiritual self-education, and we must come back here again and again to receive acclamations or punishment, and so on until finally we become diligent pupils and learn all lessons given to us by Life.

Each person constantly learns his/her own lesson, corrects own imperfections and contributes to the treasury of life of spiritual experience. And at the same time each person is a teacher for any other person, no matter how incomprehensible and unattractive his/her lessons might seem to us. So, as evolutional maturing and spiritual improvement of a human being goes on, he/she rises gradually from one Sphere of the Subtle Plane to another.

As the progress continues on each sublevel, the Soul passes through all these Spheres until it gains all the experience necessary to achieve its Divinity.

Very few Souls are able to achieve this sublime position. But those, who achieve it anyway, rise above all these Spheres of human Existence and become united with God. No matter how difficult this transition might be and however different might be religious beliefs in regard to it, the transition into afterlife existence is a great and responsible stage of the Soul’s progress. It is one of the few experiences that each person living on Earth must undergo sooner or later by.

The next World that receives us after our Death extends in all directions by gradations upward and downward; and the area, where belongs the Soul, depends on many factors, such as a special energy-information sphere (Egregor) or deity to which someone is devoted, or the extent to which ethnic or moral teachings professed by a person during Life have been upgraded (or degraded). Everything in Cosmos is strictly subjected to the Law of attraction of similar vibrations, which define the quality of Energies that constitute subtle bodies-conductors of the Soul.

The Postmortal Path

There are two possibilities to leave this World: either die like and animal without understanding and without remembering anything; or die with further Resurrection, that is with completely clear Consciousness.
Understanding Death itself as the process which takes place inside a dying person.

“Death is a great Illusion which has ensnared you all. That is why you should see to it that “a conscious Death” does not become even a greater Illusion for you when you start to imagine that you already know what Death is…”

Master.

Each of us must have experienced decease of our near relatives or, finally, one day we face the fact of our own caducity and biological mortality. In our previous book we described a method of Meditation on Death by means of which, still during Life, one can learn quite easily how to bring one’s Consciousness into the state that nearly resembles a true dying and thus can train oneself to a conscious Death Passing, the moment of which will come in your Life some day.

We have found out that there are two alternatives to physical Death, as we picture it to ourselves, and both of them are associated with functioning of Consciousness. (Though, there is a third alternative, which we are not going to describe here, as it can be given only to some of Initiates. It is the Ascension, during which there is no need to die, because a person simply passes consciously from the Material World to the Subtle World taking along his/her body.)

However, an ordinary person has only two possibilities to leave this World: either to die like an animal without understanding and without remembering anything, letting the Law act at discretion; or to die with a further Resurrection, that is to pass through Death with a completely clear Consciousness from one World into another and later on transform the light body “in the beyond”.

What happens during the first option? Lower Astral sub-planes have quite disharmonious vibrations. And everyone who dies unconsciously goes exactly there, namely into the third overtone. Because Consciousnesses of most people on Earth vibrate exactly at this lower level. According to the Law of attraction of similar vibrations, a person who dies unconsciously is immediately involved into a constantly moving flow of these lower vibrations and there the person forgets completely about his/her Life here. There, all such persons get involved into a new Illusion, take it for “reality” and are again under the same delusion as they used to have here, on the Physical Plane of Earth.

Let us note that for the last thirteen thousand years people of Earth do nothing but repeat the same cycle again and again: they go “there”, to the 3^rd – 5^th overtones of the Subtle World, and, as a result of the Law of reincarnation, come back to Earth each time forgetting (at the moment of their birth) where they were, who they were and what they must do during each their new manifestation.

As an excursion from the main point for awhile, let me note that this long cycle of births-deaths finally comes to an end; and after the Transfiguration-Ascension of the entire humanity during the period from 1999 to 2013, the Physical Plane of Earth will cease to exist, and Karma associated with activities of all people on this Plane will be “buried” with it.

So, what happens when a person dies and at the same time retains his/her own Consciousness, that is having learnt the art of a conscious Death during Life? First, after a physical Death such person does not have to stay within rough and limiting vibrations of the third Astral overtone, because they have nothing to attract the person’s interest or sympathies.

That is why the person can consciously, in accordance with his/her own choice, practically instantly attain higher, most harmonious to him/her, overtones 10-12 of the Subtle World, which correspond to the level of Christ Consciousness on this planet. Second, such person, who consciously died, retains the memory about his/her Life on Earth; and that is why the person will never have a gap in the sequence of his/her memories.

The problem of many people is that, when they incarnate on Earth, they forget WHY they entered into this World, and instead of starting to collect gradually grains of treasures, which are eternal and valuable in all Worlds and after which they came here, they waste all the energy of their Souls on the things that look attractive HERE, but lose their value THERE, where people come back after the unique possibility of Life on Earth – at the moment of so-called “Death”.

Therefore, very often every such “sally” of the Soul into Life on Earth becomes an “unprofitable” and absolutely “nonremunerative” enterprise, from the point of view of a business person, which for many Souls often ends with a total “bankruptcy” or a partial loss of the little luggage that was earned with a great difficulty during previous lives. That is the reason why you MUST learn how to make your Mind capable to free itself consciously from limiting thought stereotypes.

The fact is that all your notions of Death and your inborn striving for Death are a real psychic complex, which must be localized in your Mind by means of Meditation in order to use the same Meditation on Death to destroy it. The complex is created by all your Thoughts, codes, instructions and convictions directed against Life in this material World.

It is a special “self-exploding device” that provides a fail-safe unconditional return Home, into the Subtle World. The complex is implanted into every person so that, at a definite moment, each one could be returned freely and without resistance by the Archons of Destiny into the World of subtle energies where the person would be able to continue his/her illusory existence and gaining experience. If you have firm faith that it is not you, but someone or something else, that controls all your Life, including its terms, then without fail you make yourself dependent on someone or something and become “a victim”.

During Life of your field capsule (Soul) in the physical body, this original prenatal “instruction for Death” is supported by Thoughts about inevitability of Death for each person and that it is out of control of your Consciousness. And it becomes an irrefutable fact of all your Life: if all your Thoughts, emotions and actions unambiguously form your reality, then the fact of your future Death, which you do not dare to doubt, will become an unintentional instruction, an unmeant context of your Life on Earth that will lead you to the anticipated result – a physical Death.

We want to teach you to think in the absolutely opposite direction, namely about the following: if you want to gain control over your own Life and your own Death, you must come to a conscious belief that it is ONLY YOU and no one else, who are the creator and controller of your own Existence, whether on the Physical or Subtle Plane of the Universal Reality; that it is EXACTLY YOU and no one else, who create your own security, health, vitality, well-being and sets the terms of your stay in any World of manifestation in your infinite Existence.

It is exactly this firm belief that serves as a basis of the possibility of some Initiates to stay in the same physical bodies as long as they wish and of the possibility of an ordinary person to learn how to get consciously from one World into another one, at the same time retaining memory and by-passing dangerous dissonant zones. This is what we call “THE ART OF DYING”: to pass away consciously when you wish and, after Death, go exactly to the place where you wish and no one else but you.

However, we should inform you straightway that far from every person is given such exclusive possibility to pass away at the person’s discretion; and some people may spend all their lives to learn the art, but having missed the main point they will never be able to get the result they want. The main point is that at the same time you must achieve without fail a higher level of Consciousness, which will make you spiritually more pure and enlightened, which, in turn, will allow your Thoughts become much stronger and, therefore, will give them the possibility to manifest much quicker and, what is the most important, with much better quality at the level of vibrations of dense Matter of Earth.

“What is here is also THERE, and what is THERE is also here. Who sees other things here, wanders on from death to death. It can be understood only by a deep Consciousness. Only who discerns this world and another world escapes Death.”

Katha Upanishad.

So, in this book we continue our lesson on the subject which we will call “the Art of Dying”. When you see somebody dying, in fact you never see Death itself – the process inside the dying person. You cannot see it, because the process is not only invisible for your physical eyes, but also it is always exclusively and absolutely individual. From many my observations of dying people, which I performed out of the physical body in varied situations, I draw the conclusion that no Death ever reminds another one, and that it is very difficult, practically it is impossible, to reduce the process of dying to a common denomination.

All sensations of a dying person and all events that follow after the Soul becomes free from its physical constituent are so varied with different people, that I could have written hundreds of fat books only with descriptions of a small part of these conditions. So, it is very difficult to describe dying even in general terms. At the same time, a dying person cannot tell about it, because, in most cases at the moment when the person experiences the process, he/she becomes unconscious; the person is no longer with you on the Physical Plane and you “are not” with him/her in the Subtle World.

The person cannot come back and cannot step back of his/her own will and tell people living on Earth about everything what happened with him/her. Although, the experience in reanimation have already given to people the chance to know some gleanings of remembering first moments of the condition of Consciousness after Death. But this knowledge is not enough to answer many questions that people ask in connection with Death. However, we will try to cast light on some questions.

All theories of an afterlife existence inevitably depend on the theory of presence of the Subtle World around us, invisible to our physical perceptive organs. Our helplessness in the face of the problem of Life and Death becomes more than evident when we begin to understand that the surrounding World is not limited with its physical visibility, but it is much larger and inconceivably more difficult than we thought of it.

Regardless great differences between various theories “of Life after Death”, all of them have one but very considerable weakness: they invariably describe afterlife like Life on Earth, without even trying to understand Life of the Soul in new forms or new categories, unusual to our physical Life.

After I was given the opportunity, under the guidance and direction of the Master, to explore freely different aspects of the Subtle World, which includes vast areas of postmortal existence of field capsules of people, all descriptions of these Worlds that I came across were beneath absolutely all criticism. It became clear that the problem of “Life and Death” requires an approach at a completely new angle. No abstract philosophical views can further satiate the thirst of a contemporary human being for understanding of this vital problem, which he/she will have to meet face to face one day.

All you know now about Death is no more than your leisurely suppositions based, – unless you have already experienced first moments of so-called “apparent Death”, – mostly on “a second-hand” information. That is why for most people Death and everything related to it looks very indefinite, obscure and mysterious. It is not surprising: what can you do not remembering any of your previous deaths?

You can only reflect on it, but these reflections will also be borrowed. You will only repeat what I or someone else told you. All existing descriptions of postmortal experience and all philosophical statements do not correspond to reality and are incomparably far from those direct, genuine sensations, which I observed from the outside during dying of hundreds of people and experienced myself during the most ancient practice of dying – JATI SMARAN.

It is like describing a spiritual, inner Life of stars using only the most primitive telescope. Such descriptions cannot satisfy any inquisitive Mind. Your extended hand can get only what you know and is unable to hold what you do not know. The thirst for experience creates continuance for the Thought; if you desire to have experience, you give strength to your past, because it is in the sphere of what you know already; your desire to experience what is unknown is just another attempt to prolong what you know already.

Dying, Death, Transition from the World with one kind of vibrations into the World with much higher energy level of existence, – all of them are so individual and unique processes for each personality, that even when I learnt practically everything about Death and the process of dying, I still have great difficulties because of the impossibility to share my experience using only human language, which suits more to communicate and describe phenomena of the outer World than events taking place on inner Planes.

Very first attempts to communicate what I saw and learnt during astral explorations showed a real difficulty of the task set for me by my Masters. It became clear to me, why all previous descriptions of afterlife experience are so scarce and repeatable.

From every my visit to one of the areas of the Subtle World I get so much absolutely new and unexpected information, that I cannot find appropriate words, or forms of sentences, which would be the most suitable for what I experienced, or most suitable notions, which would allow me at least to express everything happening THERE for myself, let alone to tell you, dear reader, about it.

However after a while, I found out that during each my “expedition” into the Subtle World near me, besides my Instructor who constantly was present, there was, as it were, my second “Self”, which acted as an onlooker and impartial Observer. It was the Observer whom I decided to ask for help. Unfortunately he either could not always remember everything what he observed with me, but together we managed to grope for everything what laid the foundation of our books.

Each time when I, in my astral body, followed deceased persons, I found myself in a completely new and unknown World, which had ABSOLUTELY nothing in common with our usual physical World. The unknown World even less resembled the place, which, according to various descriptions that I read, had to be a continuation of our Earth existence. I could not even imagine that the new would differ so much from everything we are used to here, on Earth, that it would even have nothing in common with our world.

All existing descriptions of so-called “the beyond” or “afterworld” in fact happened to be absolutely wrong and mistaken. All of them are too insipid, scarce, unvaried and artificial as compared with what I actually observed. In reality the Subtle World is completely unlike anything what you, even having the most luxuriant fancy, could possibly let yourself suppose, because in its higher manifestations the Subtle World neither repeats in anything, nor resembles the material World.

It is the unlikeness to our usual World that makes difficult all my attempts to describe it as precisely as possible. Probably it is just impossible to phrase it, because I simply get lost among a great and infinitely many absolutely new impressions, to verbalize which there is nothing in the human language what would remind them at least remotely and approximately.

Firstly, it is because in the Subtle World everything, absolutely everything exists inseparably linked and united with each other. Each phenomenon and object is not by itself, separable and independent, but without fail it explains something and is explained by something. Everything is so interrelated, that it is impossible to describe separately a single phenomenon, in isolation from ALL the rest. One must either communicate EVERYTHING AT ONCE, or communicate nothing at all in separation, because there is simply nothing and cannot be anything separate “THERE” as it is here.

All things and events in the Astral World are closely and inconceivably connected with each other by one chain of causes and effects. Everything depends necessarily on something or someone, and any object or phenomenon is as if inside each other. “There”, everything you meet is amazingly alive; “there”, there is nothing dead, unconscious and inanimate, there is nothing without a possibility for its intensive self-expression in Thoughts and feelings.

You can communicate, talk, argue and discuss fruitfully with each individual object as long as you want, whether it is an old house or an ancient tree, which is keen to use any chance to tell somebody what it remembers, share its opinion, express its attitude to the environment; whether it is a field or wheatears sowed on the field and glad that they are about to be mowed, milled and baked into bread; whether it is a river or just the grass, on which you sit or lie to have a rest, – everything, absolutely everything and everyone “THERE’ is a living being, full of its own Thoughts, emotions, mood, feelings and wonderful memories.

The most colorful feature of all postmortal experiences which I describe further is my own emotional state, in which I was during my astral explorations. Everything experienced by or happened with an object or an inhabitant of the Astral World, – everything from the slightest emotion to the most high-wrought expression of feelings, – not only passed through my Consciousness, but also through my entire emotional body.

Still I ask you to take into account that all my descriptions of the so-called “afterworld reality” give a very poor picture of what actually happened, because it is absolutely impossible to express with words the emotional element of a reasonless joy, a boundless surprise, an unrestrained elation, an overpowering horror, and a constant intermediate state of the transition of these feelings into each other.

“There”, I could fully feel emotions, which simply do not exist in our ordinary Life on Earth. In the Subtle World, it is simply impossible to remain indifferent or passive toward something or someone; “there”, you either love what or whom you deal with, or feel rabid hate to it, you either long for something or admire someone, but it is impossible simply to remain disinterested.

Nothing can pass you without leaving its trace in your emotional state. It is due to these thousands of new gradations of completely new feelings to me I managed to understand at least a little the nature of the World in which we go after Death. As soon as my Consciousness left the physical capsule and began to come into contact with any object of the Astral World, all my habitual notions about relationship between subjects and objects immediately came apart and transformed into a completely incomprehensible form.

For example, take parts of my body or objects around me here, in the Material World, – they are objective phenomena, but at the same time all my inner psychic content, – Thoughts, pictures of my imagination, notions and views, – have subjective nature. Let alone that immediately after Consciousness became free from the dense capsule, the sensation of time at once changed its quality: time became extremely long, – seconds seemed to last for years, and minutes seemed to last for decades.

In other words, if I was absent in the physical body for several minutes, when I came back into it, I was so overwhelmed with ineffable impressions and with so much of various information, that it seemed to me that I spent many years somewhere in fantastic Worlds. At the same time inside myself I sort of continued to keep a sense of Time habitual to me, but along with it, a kind of different moment of ordinary Time appeared in me, which was separated from the former one by long intervals filled with lots of stunning impressions.

I understand that my descriptions are very poor and improbable, but I assure you, they do not express even a millionth part of what actually happened. If you do not just observe Life of the Astral World from the outside, but there is also an information interchange with one of its inhabitants, then any story is accompanied with the absolutely identical (on the same level) feeling of minutest details and sensual particulars about the event being “told” or transmitted, as if everything happened with yourself and not anybody else.

As soon as we become free from the physical body and enter consciously into the World of more subtle vibrations, everything turns upside down: what used to be just an object, suddenly and voluntarily turns into a subject, and vice versa. It is impossible to communicate these feelings or understand them without experiencing them at least once by yourself.

In the Subtle World, absolutely any your Thought, even the most unconscious one, at once becomes alive, acquires its own reality to be and act AS IF on its own, AS IF independently of you and your desires. Although desires, feelings emotions, motives, sympathies and antipathies themselves at once transform visually and sensually, and the more energy is given to them, the more concrete and “real” they become, AS IF acquiring the ability to act and react logically to constant and rapid changes of your environment.

In the Astral World, any walls, any “objective” conditions simply cannot encumber or hinder the realization of any of your fantasies, limit or prevent the manifestation of your imagination. Each image, as soon as it appears in your Consciousness, at once begins to objectify itself into a completely “real” substantial form, which is absolutely identical in its qualities with forms of other objects that also all the time disappear somewhere, come apart, dematerialize, modify, reappear, try to remind about themselves in any way, attract your attention to them, express joy, grief, jealousy, and act like “alive” ones.

Raise all of it to the tenth power and still you will get quite a feeble semblance of what happens in the Subtle World with Consciousness, which comes into it for the first time and has not learnt yet at least a small part of its wonderful Laws. Personally I had to spend long months of hard work under the guidance of my Spiritual Instructor who accompanied me at first in each my astral expedition. The most difficult was to learn how to THINK IN OTHER CATEGORIES.

The World we enter after our physical Death has not any individual aspects, features or characteristics. That is why it is impossible, as we are accustomed to, first to describe one of its characteristics and then another one and so on. You see everything at once in it, in any its point and this EVERYTHING constantly changes, transforms, moves, comes apart and improves. And all these processes, if you wish, you may watch simultaneously.

Here, everything and everyone is in logical and more often in nonlogical interrelations, in which nothing and no one can exist separately, and all relations between different things have a real existence, independent of the things themselves. The things themselves AS IF do not exist at all, and instead of them there are only “relations between them” or just motives. The same applies to Thoughts.

The Thought, which we, in our present physical condition, may simply overlook or ignore, immediately becomes real in the Subtle World and gets the ability to its “independent” expression, movement, synthesis, transmutation and so on. There is no and cannot be any obstacles and distances for the Thought. It can penetrate freely and easily in any form inside SORT OF impenetrable objects and immediately open in full details their inside, contents and principles, up to the structure of atoms, the chemical condition of any star, the population of any planet during any period of its Evolution. All of it is immediately concretized as absolutely real holographic pictures, moving diagrams, four-dimensional models, etc.

Secondly, ALL of it literally drops down on you and at once it staggers you with its grandeur, power, incredibility, incomprehensibility and singularity. The higher are vibrations of the Astral World, the higher becomes the degree of manifestation of a wonderful Music, which creates a sensual, that is tangible and really perceptible background. In lower overtones the Music is perceived only as several constantly sounding very simple sounds.

Starting from the sixth overtone, this Music of the Spheres transforms into an extraordinarily pleasant, harmonic combination of sound vibrations manifested in most varied visual and perfect forms that allow Consciousness, tuned to the same frequency of vibrations, literally to dissolve in their abundance, bliss and beauty of Harmony. In higher overtones, this Music of the Spheres is integral with everything at the same level, and it explains the state of sublime Love, remarkable spirituality, child's enthusiasm and infinite unselfishness that overwhelm every Consciousness residing here either after a physical Death, or for the purpose of spiritual exploration of the Subtle World.

But after a futile attempt to describe what is beyond description at all, let us, dear reader, come closer to the subject of our today’s conversation and try to come as close as possible to a definite understanding of WHAT REALLY happens with a human being on the eve and at the very moment of leaving this World.

But before that I would like to ask you: when your old clothing becomes useless or stops to meet your requirements, what do you do with it, what do you do in such cases? I think you, just like me, simply throw it away, or change over to different clothes, more suitable for your future work. The same thing happens to the Spiritual Entity, which controls your physical body, – your Soul, – when it has to change its area of explorations and transit from the Physical World to the Subtle World, the Astral World, for this purpose.

This TRANSITION, when there is simply a change of “an outer clothing” of the Soul, is what we, who continue to be in the Material World, perceive as Death: the old “clothing” – lifeless flesh – goes on lying motionless, useless to everyone, abandoned by its former owner, and the new clothing cannot simply be seen by us, living people, with our physical organs of vision.

That is why one gets the impression that a person is dead, AS IF he/she is no more. But in reality, – I observed it hundreds of times being outside my physical body! – the deceased person does not disappear anywhere, and it is simply his/her more subtle body, in which dwells the Soul, the person’s Consciousness, that becomes inaccessible to physical organs of sense of living people. More often the person continues to live his/her life caring little about what would happen with his/her previous “clothing”. It is important HOW the dying person, or the deceased one, behaves before the start or at the very moment of the Transition of his/her Consciousness from one form of Existence into another, subtle-material form.

Each person lives his/her own Life and everyone dies his/her own Death. Death of any of us is as unique as our Life. Often it seems to us, outside observers, painful, fearful and hideous, but in reality at the back of its seeming dreadful ugliness and ruthlessness there is hidden simplicity and naturalness of a logical ending of the Divine Plan.

The Truth is always simple. It is us who, due to our ignorance and in accordance with the degree of our evolutionary immaturity, make it difficult and inaccessible to understanding. The same applies to Death, – it is always simple and always unique.

When Buddha died, – it was, of course, only the Death of Buddha; when Jesus died, – again it was only the Death of Jesus: fragrant, sublime, verging into divine flowering. However it seems from outside, at the very moment of the Transition, in a single instant all their Life became a single flame. The path was over, the task of their Life was honestly fulfilled and that is why they immediately came back Home, into the Divine Abode. Such is the Death of Initiates.

For most of ordinary people, for whom our books are written, their own Death is just the beginning of a different Life, though it is more spiritually creative, it is not less exacting. The Rule of Reincarnation of the Soul is simple: you die here – you are born there; you come out through one Door, and you come in through another Door into a new Life.

And again, even though with a new quality, even though being a new personality, you are born on Earth, again you acquire new relatives, and you get new habits, interests, attachments… Only one thing remains unchanged – suffering. Suffering always remains until you live in this World. And along with it remain illnesses, old age, weakness and… again Death.

And so on – again and again, almost in an eternal cycle: birth, illnesses, old age and Death… birth, illnesses, old age and Death… Constantly being born and constantly dying, – TILL RECENTLY, THAT WAS the lot of most people until they reach a spiritual state, which gives them the right to become equal with Buddha and Jesus Christ. Why WAS? You will know about it, when you read the messages of extraterrestrials in the series of my books entitled “Contacts on the Eve of 2000”.

But let us continue our analysis of the phenomenon called “dying”. So, as the old age approaches a person, his/her Mind, which has not yet discovered for itself a deeper Reality beyond material values of most people: worldly pleasures, sex, power, financial and material well-being, fame, etc., – remains in the state of depression and hopelessness, because the dying dense body is no longer able to fulfill any of the person’s desires.

At the moment of Death, a faint and ever increasing inner disquietude, connected with the awareness of the fact that the person’s Mind is hopelessly lost in Illusions of the Material World, does not disappear at all, but transits along with the deceased person’s personality into afterlife and becomes the true reason of all individual so-called “infernal torments”.

Therefore, those people act rightly and wisely who dedicate their Life not to achieve material heights, but to the development of their abilities which lead them to the discovery of a deep and inviolable Essence of Life that does not depend on a transient nature of Existence in the manifested, material Universe, but is substantially superior spiritually to it.

When a person begins to purify his/her Mind from false notions incident to unawareness and ignorance, it becomes obvious to him/her that there is a previously unknown transcendental Reality which implies a rise over senses, going beyond usual egoistic notions, Thoughts and Ideas about himself/herself.

Many people are convinced that they will be happy only when they achieve the fulfillment of all their material desires. It is the cruelest and the most dangerous form of self-deceit. When they do not get what they want, many people are able to run to extremes: either become infuriated or give themselves up to despair and depression. And if the chance gives them an opportunity to reach what they desire, it gives birth to greed in them which leads to even worse insatiability.

Both constant misfortune and too easy success make your Mind excited, when the clarity of vision and spiritual awareness are no longer possible, – there is only an unsatisfied feeling of selfishness and a fully exhausting struggle for fulfillment of one desire after another. The disquietude of Mind means a total absence of quietude, and everything what most people consider pleasure or rest is actually one of fine forms of mental excitement, which can only temporarily give the feeling of satisfaction only to make a person soon start again the struggle for another pleasure.

It is a vicious circle from which a person can escape only when he/she develops an inner higher vision. Tired of the eternal rush for illusory happiness, Mind must find strength in itself in order to look one day beyond illusions of human desires and begin its search for something more substantial and immutable.

Only in such a way a person can, even during Life, attain an inner peace of mind, an inner realization and spiritual satisfaction, which will not disappear after Death with the decay of the physical body, but will be carried into the person’s postmortal existence and will become a prime cause and a pledge of his/her further spiritual prosperity in the Subtle World.

Peace and harmony do not necessarily mean tranquility of outer circumstances. They characterize an inner state of the Soul acquired as a result of a personality’s understanding of a deep sense of Life as a teaching of Wisdom. The interest in worldly – futile and vain – occupations completely disappears, and instead of it, in Consciousness appears a fervent striving for revealing and subduing one’s own lower “self” and attaining greatness and freedom of understanding and unity with the Higher “Self”.

The true, invisible to outsiders, battle of Spirit and Matter takes place inside each of us and not in the outer World of Time and Space. Impulsive desires and uncontrolled passions are eternal foes of each person who seeks control over impulses of Mind, body and senses. It is our always unsatisfied desires that lure spiritually weak and evolutionally undeveloped Souls into different circumstances of suffering and pleasures not only in the World of relative existence, but also, in a much greater degree, in the so-called “afterworld”.

These desires lead to the degeneration of mental faculties in the Physical World, and, in the Subtle World, they lead to the strengthening of all our vices: selfishness, greed, hatred, anger, lust and other manifestations which hold tightly undeveloped Consciousnesses in strong shackles of lower astral energies. A personified postmortal struggle between Forces of Darkness and Light in a personality is a struggle of each human being for mastering his/her own Mind with its false desires, longings, disillusionments and disappointed expectations.

No deceased person, whose Consciousness was ridden during Life by Illusions of the Physical World and attracted by transitory benefits to satisfy needs of the lower “ego” to the detriment of expectations of Spirit, can escape the fearsome and often mortal struggle. Most people are unable to stand the attack of their lower “self”, its restless desires and insidious passions.

Some of them, by the moment of Death, find themselves in a low condition, indulgent of all their selfish longings and sensual lusts, being ignorant of their true, Divine Nature hidden deeply inside their incarnated personality, which is always under the oppression of selfish Thoughts and unconscious false feelings. When, after numerous losses, violent strokes, physical and mental torments, a person decides to attain understanding of the Divine, the struggle becomes a holly war against ignorance and illusions in his/her Consciousness.

If this process does not turn into a conscious overcoming of one’s own hatred, anger, greed, envy, fanaticism, jealousy and other projections of one’s own personality, this energy is directed at the outer world in the form of political, religious, social, ethnical and other conflicts. The postmortal struggle between Light and darkness in Consciousness of a deceased personality does not end with annihilation of one side by the other.

When a deceased person moves in Astral Spheres and follows the path of intellect, he/she, first at the most difficult moments and then more often, begins to turn to the better part of himself/herself trying to find support, advice and wisdom in his/her own Higher “Self”, unknown during Life. Gradually, when a hardened peel of selfishness of the lower “self” is dissolved by corresponding vibrations of the Astral World, an inborn Wisdom begins to change manifestations of intellect, and discretion follows after the experience of doubts, reflections and merging into the nature of the Truth.

Very often, having lost the physical body after Death, – the main conductor of Illusion into a personality’s Consciousness, – the lower “self” of a deceased person, refuses to obey directions of Wisdom for a long time. But sooner or later, as the astral body gets purified from rough energies, Consciousness begins to rise gradually and learn its own meanness and ignorance from experience. Finally, when Consciousness of the deceased person begins to come in consort with a bigger part of Divine Forces, the lower “self” stops its struggle. The all-conquering Divine Force puts the astral personality on the highest energy level achieved by it during Life for its further disembodied existence.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead

“Against one’s own will dies only the one who does not know HOW TO DIE. Learn to die, and you will know how to live right, for only the one who does not know HOW TO DIE, does not know how to live right”.

Master.

Two cultures in the history of humankind showed a particular attention to and expressed a specific knowledge of all details of the complex process of dying of a human being: the Egyptian one and the Tibetan one. Their priests performed very difficult and occasionally very dangerous rituals and ceremonies aimed at facilitation of the afterlife Transition and they even developed maps which served as instructions in a postmortal journey of the Soul.

A written form of this “guidebook” of the afterlife is known as the Egyptian Book of the Dead, though actually there is not any complete book, and the texts that constitute the unique and ancient monument of culture do not appear to be one comprehensive and connected work. Moreover, they even do not belong to a single historic epoch and cover several thousand of years.

All texts included in the set of works are penetrated with an unwavering faith of the Egyptians in resurrection after Death and immortality of the Soul. Presumably, the texts of the Egyptian Book of the Dead are magical means and incantations which help the dead to move to Heaven, where they could eternally enjoy the blessed afterlife accompanying the Sun god on the solar bark.

However, the texts are penetrated with another, more ancient tradition connected with the ancient deity of burial – Osiris – one of the four divine offshoots of the Egyptian pantheon, who was murdered and torn to pieces by his evil brother Seth (later on he was regenerated by his wife Isis and son Horus, who avenged his father's death by killing Seth in a violent battle).

A dead person, who usually was equaled with Osiris, could be waken to Life again with the help of very complex rituals performed during embalming and burial of the body as well as through mantras, incantations, prayers and magic spells.

According to the Egyptian mythology, the Sun god Ra-Atum by day sails on a golden bark (boat) across the sky. At the hour of sunset the golden boat passes through a mountain chain in the west and at night the god continues the journey across Duat – the afterworld where the dead dwell. It is the part of Duat called Sekhet Aaru (the Reed Fields) that is the kingdom of Osiris, where he lives along with his retinue. Only those are allowed here who passed the judgment in the Hall of Two Truths or the Hall of Maat.

During the judgment, the heart of the deceased is placed on a scale of a finest balance; the other scale contains the feather of the goddess Maat, – a symbol of the Truth and justice. The god Anubis with a jackal head controls the balance. Beside him is Thoth, the ibis-headed god of wisdom and heavenly scribe, writes down the sentence. Behind them are the rest judging gods of the Kingdom of the dead.

The monster combined of three animals (the head of a crocodile, the middle of a lion and the hind quarter of a hippopotamus), Amemet, (the Devourer of Souls) also stands there; and if the gods decides that all evil deeds of the deceased outweigh his/her good deeds during life, Amemet tears apart and devours the condemned Soul so that the breath of Life would never return to it. That is exactly why the Souls of evil people are called “twice dead”; before the postmortal execution they must wander in the world of the living taking a form of anyone including possession of embalmed bodies and living creatures.

If good deeds outweigh the evil ones, the son of Osiris, Horus, leads the deceased to the council of gods of the Kingdom of the dead. The gods bless the Soul to Life on one of the Heavens’ levels, where only the purest Souls dwell. Thus, the Soul is admitted by Osiris to the benefits of His Kingdom. If good and evil deeds are balanced, the deceased is placed among many repentant Souls which serve the god Osiris.

Weighing of words means assessment of a person’s Consciousness – not only Thoughts of a conscious Mind, but also deeply rooted beliefs, desires, emotions, relations, unconscious intentions, motives and actions made by the person during his/her whole Life. The judgment reflects and assesses all possible consequences of each action of the person as well as the level of his/her spiritual development, thus giving him/her to understand that every fruit reaped by the person is a consequence of his/her own acts according to the level of wisdom attained by him/her.

The person makes independently his/her every decision and in that way he/she defines the quality of each his/her action. He/she himself/herself is the judge of all personal actions, Thoughts and motives, and thus, after Death the person defines his/her happy or unhappy postmortal Destiny which is just the consequence of the quality of all the person’s activity on Earth.

Thus, the Soul of the deceased can reincarnate again, transit to the Astral Plane of existence in the Reed Fields of Duat (Heavens), be punished and find itself in the grasp of demons of Duat, come back to the ordinary (physical) World or move further, meet and unite with Osiris in a secret sanctuary.

Many enlightened individuals, who achieved their unity with Osiris during Life, immediately after Death merge with Him in the Beautiful West (in the Region of the Setting Sun-Ra), also called Amenti. If during his/her Life a person managed to succeed substantially in the development of intuitive intellect (Saa) which penetrates into the core of Everything created and the Unity of All, then after Death he/she achieves Saa-Amenti-Ra – a very high level of Consciousness with highly developed intellect, and gains the title of Amenti of the god Ra, of the hidden World.

Those who by the moment of their Death have not achieved such level of spiritual Consciousness, are doomed to various lower experiences in numerous Spheres of the Duat Kingdom, which is divided into twelve regions (according to the number of hours spent by the solar boat in the kingdom of the dead at night). In front of the entrance of each of the twelve regions there is a Gate guarded by three divine guards which pose serious hazard for those in the solar boat. Those who accompany the Sun god have to forge through violent fire and poisonous smoke.

On their postmortal path, horrible monsters, fantastic creatures and huge snakes wait for them aiming at devour them or tear to small pieces. The most dreadful of these serpentine monsters is the very Seth conquered by Horus in a battle to avenge his father’s death. It is this demon in the likeness of Aapep (Apep) who every now and then tries to devour the sun disc.

Every day Afu-Ra overcomes all dangers and finishes the trip though Duat; with the help of the cat goddess Bastet he kills Aapep and rises over the East Mountains giving again warmth, light and Life to people. The ancient Egyptians believed that each Soul of the deceased has to go through a similar struggle and ordeals undergone every night by Afu-Ra.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

The review of the first stage of dying
Features of an individual postmortal destiny
“Bardo” – the transition from one moment to another one or six intermediate states
Similarity of descriptions of the Tibetan Book of the Dead with modern researches

“They who do right shall receive a most excellent reward, and a superabundant addition. Neither blackness, nor shame shall cover their faces…But they who commit evil shall receive the reward of evil, equal thereunto, and they shall be covered with shame; as though their faces were covered with the profound darkness of the night”.

The Koran, 10:27-28.

Bardo Thodol is translated literally as “Liberation achieved by listening to the postmortal stage of existence”. We will try to give more details of this unique monument written in the eighth century A.D. and carefully hidden by Tibetan lamas from the eyes of the uninitiated, because it is directly and nearly related to the subject we deal with.

In this book dying is considered as an art, as something capable to bring a dying person to some or other outcome depending on the level of preparation of the person’s Consciousness.

The book had a double purpose: firstly, to provide a practical help to the dying people when they, at the time of Death, experience unusual and complex psychological moments; and secondly, to develop in the living people a true concept of Death so that they would not hamper but could give help to a dying person bringing him/her in a proper state of mind.

That is why for the Tibetans it is a guidebook for the dying and the deceased, a unique instruction, which helps the Souls on their postmortal path to define different phases of their intermediate state between Death and a new birth, and which is an effective means used by Tibetan lamas to achieve Liberation.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead contains a detailed description of different stages through which the deceased have to pass after their physical Death. First stages remind amazingly of some of the states experienced by a person meditating on Death or observed by a person who meticulously studies and explores the phenomenon being outside his/her own physical body.

For example, it contains descriptions of experiences of the deceased when their Soul separates from the dense body and as if plunges for a while into some Void or temporary oblivion, surrounded by a grey, fog-like substance. At the same time everything around is overfilled with all sorts of awesome and frightening sounds which remind the grumble of thunder or the noise of wind.

Also many times I observed such state with those deceased whose Consciousness during their Life was not prepared to the understanding and acceptance of the reality of the fourth dimension. In the unconscious state, the Souls of such people actually reminded something like a grey, fog-like substance, and the Sphere of the third Astral overtone cannot indeed produce sounds which would be more harmonious than a roar or rumble, or sounds associated with the friction of a stone against metal, which, quite logically, taking into account the environment, could be taken for “gnashing of teeth”

And the further description of the deceased, who recover some consciousness after the unconscious state and are surprised at being outside their physical body and capable to observe their relatives and friends who prepare the funeral and neither see nor hear the deceased, – also is very like the state of abandoning of the physical body by the Soul till “the casting-off” of its etheric constituent.

Many times during my astral explorations, I had to calm down the newly deceased who would not believe that they were already “dead”, and explain them patiently what they should do in such cases in order not to be involved into insidious and dreadful flows of karmic delusions. But the logic of thinking is not always working on the Astral Plane whose amazingly plastic Matter seems to protest itself against our common logic and obtrusive explanations of mind.

And still most of the deceased refused to understand what was happening, – especially those who died suddenly, unexpectedly, for example in an accident. Such people mostly did not even want to listen about their Death and did not accept any advice and preferred to remain near the place where they used to live before their Death.

These unfortunate persons indeed experienced hellish vexations of spirit; when they observed events neither being seen nor heard by anyone; they kept tearing about and sobbing in their despair until their etheric body disintegrated into numerous fog-like tatters made them no longer capable of observing visually what happened in the Physical World.

Very often many of the deceased took us, – me and my Instructor-Guide who shined with bright Light, – for Angels or gods, listened carefully to our pieces of advice, divested themselves from a barely visible etheric capsule which enveloped their astral body, and after that they, together with the Souls of other deceased, retreated peacefully into the Spheres of higher vibrations trying to stay away from those tearing about and sobbing, fully involved in the astral vortex of karmic delusions and perceiving nothing from outside but their own inner feelings, passions and Thought-forms…

Some of the deceased who just died, immediately, like an arrow released from a bow, soared swiftly up into the blue height “under the sky” and in an instant disappeared from my astral sight dissolving in a golden shining of the higher layers of the Astral Sphere. It always makes me happy to observe how such perfect Souls that cannot be stopped by anything in their spiritual impulse and desire to unite with their Source.

As for all the further descriptions in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I have to disagree with very many things, because everything what happens with the deceased after their liberation from the etheric body is particularly individual and never repeats any other postmortal Destiny. We should take into account that the Book was written by Tibetan lamas and was intended for the mentality of exactly such people who traditionally had in their Consciousness a set of Thought-forms and Archetypes of the particular level of vibrations.

Maybe the fact that I, as a personality, do not belong to this Egregor, was the cause of my non-perception of the Astral World with the eyes of the people who described all sort of bardos of the deceased. The very principles and laws of the Subtle World do not allow me to perceive normally and naturally the information written in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

“There”, in “the afterworld”, a life-time development of mental and creative abilities of every deceased person plays a great role, as well as the fact of presence in the person’s Consciousness of these or those notions of a coming (or not coming) Life after Death. A lot, if not everything, depends on the quality of Thoughts of the deceased: the one, who expects to see Light after one’s own Death, sees it and goes to it; the one, who expects to face with impenetrable darkness, falls into the darkness and stays in it; the one, who sought for the good all one’s Life, finds it after Death and enjoys the harmony of relations between people (the deceased); and the one, who does not believe in the reality of Life after Death, does not receive it…

Besides, I have never observed with my own eyes that a postmortal fate of the deceased would have anything to do with the events taking place at the same time on the Physical Plane. Thus, it is written in the Tibetan Book of the Dead that phenomena which appear in the sky after somebody’s Death allow to define in which of the six worlds of samsara is reborn Consciousness of the deceased: if the sky is covered with thunder-clouds, a cold wind blows or a snowstorm breaks out, then a deceased person is in hell; if there are heavy black clouds, then Consciousness reincarnates in an animal; if the sky is clear and fair, then the birth is in paradise; in calm weather the birth is among people and so on.

Peculiarities of each individual postmortal Destiny are greatly defined and depend on the dominant of Will in Consciousness of the deceased. But Will efforts of the deceased only is not enough for forming their environment, – to do that it is necessary to unite much efforts in one direction. It is ensured by the Law of attraction of similar vibrations: unconscious manifestation of willed efforts by each deceased attracts him/her to the spheres with identical vibrations and automatically involves his/her Consciousness in creation, support and improvement of his/her environment.

The whole “afterlife world” consists of all sorts of separations, communities and unions populated by the deceased collected according to the principle of identity of aspirations, confession, mentality etc. Each of the communities has incompatible principles of its formation as compared with various other unions, and even its territory is separated in space from the others. Most of the deceased have no idea that there are other places besides their environment, which is near and native to them.

It is very difficult, or rather, it is practically impossible to imagine, from the point of view of the three-dimensional Space, such multiple separation of all the hosts of the deceased into infinite number of different communities in accordance with features of a historical age during which they lived before their Death, nationality, nation and the quality of vibrations prevailing in Consciousness of the deceased.

Besides, inhabitants of numerous Subtle-Matter Worlds of the lower and middle levels of the Astral Plane have little interest in the inside and the laws which ensure their “afterlife” existence. They perceive the World in which they live as of right and take everything what happens around them and with them for granted, exactly like we, the living, perceive our own world.

For example, when I asked someone where the person got his/her clothes. I practically always received the same answer: “It was given to me…” or “I have it all the time” and so on. Only a few of the deceased could say that they invented their clothes themselves or that they formed their environment by their own willed and psychic effort. Most of the deceased have no idea where things come from and where they disappear.

Practically all inhabitants of the lower layers of the Astral Plane do not remember details and peculiarities of their Life on Earth, just like the living people have no memory of previous experiences of their Soul. Nevertheless, they continue to live and act as they used to do so during their Life on the Physical Plane of Earth.

Thus, during some of my astral explorations, I met and communicated with Indians who, after Death, continued to live in wigwams, wear their usual clothes, hunt buffalos in wide prairies, ride mustangs and knew nothing (and did not want to know) about the fact that there are somewhere other worlds which are nothing like theirs.

Everything in their world is absolutely the same as in their environment on Earth, except that near them there is no civilization loathsome to them and they can talk to their horse and learn its personal opinion of the surrounding Life; a wigwam, a bow, or even an Indian pipe can tell a lot about their owners, and buffaloes understand their positive role in the Life of Indians which suits them fine, etc.

Once I visited a community of dogmatic Christians whose environment corresponded exactly to canonical beliefs about heaven: with the same banal pastures of heaven, with paradise trees and birds among which devotees would spend their eventless and monotonous “paradise” existence day after day.

There is even one’s own “hell”, all the terrible accessories of which are also invented and materialized by blindly believing sinners: red-hot pots with boiling tar, “demons” with their refined torture of the poor damned whose postmortal fate consists only of “eternal” torment and suffering.

The more one restricts oneself during Life with all sorts of artificial and ignorant notions about oneself, the more strict and restricting are one’s conditions of postmortal existence – that is fundamental truth. A dominant thinking in your Consciousness will constitute the foundation of all your Life after Death.

Jesus Christ Himself said: “Ye are gods!” What else you need as a right, spiritual pass to aim all the sense of your existence at it, to direct all the energy of your Thoughts, feelings and intentions only at moving in this direction pointed by the Lord Himself?

Studying the Book of the Dead, you should never forget FOR WHICH level of Consciousness was intended these texts. Otherwise you risk to fall into the biggest error, and instead of relieving your future postmortal fate you will get the reverse. Nevertheless, in spite of all these remarks, we ought to render homage to the authors for lots of useful pieces of advice which have not lost their relevance for many hundred of years after the time of writing of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Therefore, let us continue our brief research into this unique monument of culture.

The Book mentions Yama Raya, the Lord of the underworld, as the judge of all the deceased who wears a crown made of human skulls and holds the Mirror of Karma in his hands. The Mirror reflects all good and evil deeds of each of the deceased. There are six karmic paths leading from the Hall of Judgment to different Spheres of Existence in different dimensions – to Heavens, back to Earth or to the underworld, where the deceased will have to get their new incarnation according to their “karmic” test with the possibility to incarnate either in the Animal Kingdom, or in the so-called “Sphere of hungry spirits”, or in worlds of demons who are at war with gods and so on.

There are many translations of the Tibetan word “bardo”, but in the first place it means “a passway”, “a point of transition”. Some translators define bardo as “interval”, “space”; others – as “a gate”. We are not going to deep into the notions and tell only that bardo is another phase of evolution like a metamorphosis between different stages of development.

Bardo is a transition from one moment into another one. Each moment we live either during Life or after Death is bardo. Now you are in bardo: realization and Thought meet each other inside you to form Consciousness; and what difference, in principle, does it make to your Soul whether, at the present moment of its Existence, it is in the physical body or outside it?

Some people are used to think that as soon as they reject their physical body during dying, the Gate of Light will open in front of them there and then. It is a very dangerous mistake. Such whole copulation of Consciousness of the deceased with their Higher Self, which appears as Light or a Lightful Being, happens only to those who are used to accept each moment of their Life as bardo, as their another transition to something new and sublime.

For such people the transition of Consciousness from a physical state to a postmortal, disembodied state changes nothing in the main Principles of their Existence. Now I am in one of my numerous costumes and in a moment I will cast it away and robe myself in another one to feel myself more comfortable and secure in a different World where I will be able to use all my abilities, inclinations and spiritual aspirations even to a greater extent. So what? – there is nothing unusual in it.

All in all, the Tibetans distinguish six intermediate states. The first one is a natural bardo – the Bardo of Birth – a period of pre-natal existence of the Soul incarnated on the Physical Plane, emotions experienced by it inside the body of s future mother. The period includes the moment of birth, – the beginning of independent existence in this material sphere.

The second one is the Bardo of Life. It is the period of infancy of the Soul. It is the Bardo in which the Soul sleeps. It is the growth of a child, maturing of it. It is the Bardo of learning, aging and changes of Life. This interval may be much shorter or much longer than the first one. The Bardo of Life can also be called “the bardo of empty hands”, because during this period a person accumulates preferences and aims, and achieves a state in which he/she wishes to be.

The third bardo is related to decomposition. It also can be achieved in the state of ecstatic balance of the Soul during a deep Meditation. It is the bardo of moments before Death. It is a transition from an apparent substantiality, going out of a limited Space of the three-dimensional World into the NON-Space, a transition of vibrations of the physical form into a more subtle Sphere of energy vibrations.

The rest three bardos are related to Death and a new birth. The fourth one is “Chikhai Bardo” – the bardo of moments after Death. During it the deceased notice and realize that there is no Death, that there are only moments BEFORE and AFTER Death. The notion of “Death” has no foundation in reality. There is a moment for the body during which it is animated by the Soul incarnated in it, and the next moment when it rests abandoned forever by the same Soul.

In this case only the contents of the vessel can be returned, whereas the vessel itself – the human body – is lost forever for the Soul. An electric lamp can burn only if there is a constant supply of electric power, and if there is no such supply the lamp turns into a useless grey piece of glass. So is the human body, which can shine with Life only if it is constantly fed by forces and energies of the Soul. The Soul can either be in the body, or leave it, – there is no intermediate moment.

From the point of view of the physical body, the fourth bardo comes when a lethal outcome or so-called Death comes to a person. But one should always keep in mind that the body never lived its independent life and served only as a conductor (and the roughest one) of vital Energy of the Soul. In fact, after the moment of Death, the most active period of existence comes to the physical body, because it begins to support life of myriads of microbes and other microorganisms by energies of its decay.

The fourth bardo includes the events which take place on the Subtle Plane at the moment of Death. There are three main signs which testify the coming of Death.

the bodily sense of pressure (when "earth submerges in water");
turning of freezing cold into fever heat (when "water submerges in fire");
appearance of the sensation as if the body is torn apart into smallest pieces (when "fire submerges in air").

It is during the fourth Bardo of Appearance or Passing Through Death the deceased see “Primordial Clear Light” and in it in front of them shines the Divine Entity of Existence which they do not identify with their body. At this very moment, as at no other moment of incarnation, the Soul, not consumed by tension, faces a unique opportunity to achieve instantly its Liberation.

If the deceased tarry, later they are given a similar opportunity, – at the very moment when a second source of CLEAR LIGHT will shine above them, however it will be less bright. If this chance is also missed, the Soul will have to begin its Transition through a sequence of psychic events, impalpable for our physical and logical understanding, during which Consciousness will gradually go away more and more from a liberating Truth and move closer to its new incarnation.

The fifth bardo, – the Bardo of Death, “Chonyid Bardo”, – may be called as “the bardo of reality trial”, “the bardo of wandering”, in which the Soul of the deceased passes to the next stage of its learning, ageing and growth. It is in this bardo the Soul meets with many peaceful and hostile beings.

The Soul surveys whole pantheons of deities illuminated with shining of different colors, Guards of Gates, as well as furious deities, keepers of Knowledge, yoginis of the four central points. This is the place where the Soul meets with “ten thousand loving aspects and ten thousand furious aspects of Mind”.

The Transit happens when your Mind exhausts the conditional contents of the past Life: attachments and the wish to achieve safety. It is liberation from your past, another opportunity to get a direct access to the forms which appear in your Mind and create the environment of the deceased. It is the bardo of dying of Mind which thinks in terms of Time.

Along with the presence of these numerous beings that absorb the attention of the deceased, the Soul begins to observe dim sources of Light of different colors, which point to separate Lokas or Worlds, where the Soul can get its new birth: the World of gods (Deva-Loka), the World of Titans (Asura-Loka), the World of humans (Manaka-Loka), the World of animals (Tritiaka-Loka), the World of hungry spirits (Preta-Loka), the World of hell (Naraka-Loka).

The attraction to these dim sources of Light, owing to the identity of their vibrations and vibrations of the Soul’s astral capsule of the deceased, is capable to impede very much the spiritual liberation and induce a repeated birth.

So, if a disembodied Soul missed its chance to achieve Liberation during its stay at previous stages of its postmortal Transition, it automatically transits to the state of Consciousness described in “Sidpa Bardo” or “the Bardo of seeking rebirth”. The sixth bardo of the moment before birth is dissolution again.

At this stage the deceased are cautioned against wishing wonderful karmic abilities, which they believe they have at the moment, and against attaching to them. If until now the Soul has been unable to use the opportunities provided to it for its Liberation, then any unique abilities are out of the question.

There, astral bodies acquire the ability to move freely and pass through dense object. The Soul can appear and disappear by its own wish, change its size and shape, multiply itself by any number of holographic analogues and transfer itself instantly to any desirable place.

The feeling of happiness or the one of bitterness experienced by the Soul in the sixth bardo depends on Karma of the deceased. There, the Souls burdened with bad Karma suffer from a constant and uncontainable fear which produces into the environment horrifying sounds, visions of monsters and predators, furious elemental forces of nature such as landslips, earthquakes, storms, fires, etc.

The Souls, that during Life gained karmic virtues, will enjoy all sorts of pleasures corresponding to the level of their Consciousness. The Souls with neutral Karma will meet only cheerless dullness, drab and monotony. It is the moment when the Soul is inevitability attracted by the next stage of growth, when desires begin to push it to a new womb, from which it will be able to appear with a new human shape in the Physical World, which, as always, will be either very big and uncomfortable, or too small and cramped.

An important part of this stage of the postmortal Transition is the Judgment, when the Judge of the Dead (Yama Raja) uses the karmic mirror to view all virtues, imperfections and acts of the deceased, and then he defines their fate in accordance with their Karma. There are six karmic paths each of which leads from the Hall of Judgment to a separate Loka, area, where the Soul will reincarnate. There are the following trials in the lower Worlds: tortures with fire, molten metal and cold, tearing to many pieces, attacks by blood-thirsty beasts, fantastic monsters that devour the flesh of the deceased and so on.

During the stay in the last bardo, the Soul of the deceased will make futile attempts to enter again its dead body, but it will find it either in decay, or cremated, buried, frozen, drowned, or mutilated by predators and birds, depending on circumstances of Death. For many people a further destiny of their physical body, relative to the process of decomposition of chemical elements constituting it, is vitally important.

The most important thing to understand and learn at the present moment is that all this delusion is just ravings, derivative of your Consciousness, that is NOTHING, the ILLUSION OF LIFE. If one does not understand it, there will inevitably be another birth and, probably, it will require thousands and hundreds of thousands of years for the Soul to become at last free from this engulfing pit of adversities and suffering.

When the dawn of fires of the six Lokas appear in front of the Soul, it still can make an attempt to “close the gate of the womb”. To do that it is recommended to use the following proven methods:

start praying and begging God for indulgence, acknowledge your own depravity and ask for forgiveness and mercy;
try to understand that everything what happens to you and around you is no more than Illusion, a mirror reflecting your lower nature, start your Meditation and direct your Consciousness to the Clear Light;
concentrate on remembering your good acts which you did in your Life and on the symbols of positive Karma (altruism, unselfishness, love, kindliness to all creatures, however terrifying they might be, and so on.);
by all means avoid visions with scenes of lechery, coitus, naked men and women with evident sexual motives;
at all accounts strive for detachment from ambivalent Oedipus and Electra relations with your future parents.

When the Soul is unable to do any of the above recommendations, it will use vivid illusions and illustrations of its future Life to move inevitably towards its new birth. At this stage, various kinds of features appear and point out at the nature of the Loka of its future incarnation. This process is accompanied by thousands of individual traits which we are going do describe later.

If the Soul, having missed practically all the possibilities for its spiritual Liberation, performs purposeful positive thinking, even at this last stage, it can, with the help of its Guardian Angel and Birth Angel, influence substantially on the choice of its future parents with whom it is going to live its future Life.

Notions of different bardos are used to show that Illusion takes place right now, no matter what we are attached to. It is typical that all bardos follow in a certain order: appearance (ascension), existence (wandering) and dissolution. This also holds true for each state of our Consciousness, which may appear, exist for a moment and disappear just to give room for its next appearance, existence and disappearance.

Watching how our Mind is constantly from day to day born at one moment and dies at another, during our Life we can consciously prepare ourselves to a new incarnation of our Soul, however it might be. There are no bad incarnations, there are imperfect human Consciousnesses. Observation of such constant process of appearance and destruction helps to free ourselves from a false sense of substantiality, from the necessity to protect ourselves from “something”, be it during Life or after Death.

Pay attention to the fact that both Bardos of Appearance are interchangeable: the Bardo of Birth and the Bardo of the moment AFTER Death are the same. The Bardos of wandering, both during Life and after Death, consist of the same elements of Consciousness and old tendencies of Mind. The two Bardos of Disappearance (the Bardo of the moment AFTER Death and the Bardo of the moment BEFORE birth) are also interchangeable.

Thinking of these examples, finding these transitions in your everyday Life, when they happen, CONSCIOUSLY dying and CONSCIOUSLY being reborn from one moment to another, you will be able to achieve a complete spiritual Liberation after Death.

Between the Tibetan Book of the Dead and modern researches there is a striking similarity at least in two respects. The similarity shows that the description of the book is based on the out-of-body experience of its authors. First, the description of the impression of the Soul’s stay outside the body at the first moments of Death is practically fully identical with the data of contemporary researchers of the Subtle World: the Soul of the deceased appears like a shining illusory body which is seen by other beings of the Astral Plane, but unseen by the living people.

During first hours after Death the past experienced by the deceased is combined into a single picture of remembrances. The Soul, separated from the physical body, continues its wandering over the Universal Life without it. The Soul keeps everything it accumulated inside itself and made its very own during its life activities. It does not need any outer organs of sense any more because it transferred itself completely into the Sphere of its inner sensations.

At first the deceased even may not notice whether they are dead or still alive, because their activity and abilities do not correspond to the notions of Death they used to have during Life. They see people around their bodies, hear the lament and cry of mourning relatives and have all the abilities of their previous sensual perception; their movements are not constrained by anything and they can even go through dense bodies.

The first postmortal experience differ from the one during Life in such a manner that the deceased suddenly begin to live their own Life as if in reverse, from the moments before Death back to the very childhood and even their own birth in the Physical World. All the past, all the events which came from their spiritual Nature during their Life pass in front of the deceased’s spiritual eyes in reverse order, gradually and filled with feelings. And everything, that used to have a negative emotional or sensual tone towards other peoples, there and then, becomes enveloped in a dynamic Matter of the Astral Plane and turns into real pictures and events which cause suffering to the Souls of the deceased themselves.

Second, at the moment of Death each of the deceased actually sees primordial shining Light which is defined by practically all of the researchers of the phenomenon of “Life after Death” as “a luminous Being” filled with Love, Grace and Benevolence towards the deceased; the Being has a warm-hearted understanding of the point of postmortal problems and troubles rained thick upon the deceased.

Many other coincidences in the description of afterlife existence given in the Book of the Dead and modern serious researches of processes relative to dying and my own experience in this subject give grounds not to doubt the trustworthiness of the facts. Naturally we should keep in mind the difference in a specific character of Consciousnesses of the ancient Tibetans and Egyptians which differ completely from the notions of the Afterworld of modern human beings grown up in absolutely different historic, social and information conditions.

There is also certain similarity between the two Books of the Dead. The Egyptian book describes how, after Death, the Soul passes through many changes and meets with many gods and the other world’s creatures (four holy monkeys, hippopotamus-goddess, various gods with dog, jackal, monkey, bird heads, etc.). In turn the deceased at one moment become a swallow at another take the form of a falcon, a crocodile, a heron, a lotus flower or a snake with a human head and so on.

But in the Egyptian book we can clearly see the description of particularly individual perceptions of a purposeful researcher of the Subtle World. You should not take them as a revelation about WHAT may actually happen with you in particular during your own Death, as a personality that has lived its own Life on Earth. But we leave this matter fully for your further individual study.

"Mors certa, hora incerta"

("The most definite in Life is Death,
and the most indefinite is its hour ")

“Lo, what is death?

It is the passing of the soul out of the house of flesh. Man is the master of the soul and of its house. When man has risen up from doubt and fear, lo, he can cleanse the empty house and bring the tenant back again”.

The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ (120:27-29).

We think we have described quite in detail the Egyptian and the Tibetan Books of the Dead, and that you, dear reader, do not need any other proofs that birth is not at all a beginning of our Life, just like Death is not its end. This is the Truth. You can see it for yourself during a purposeful Meditation on Death, described in detail in our previous book, when the whole process of a visible intrauterine Life, from the conception till the very birth, will pass before your inner vision.

We also find the same thing when we witness people coming back to Life from the state of apparent Death. We make sure of this undeniable Truth when a person dear to us is gone for a long time or forever. When the Soul of the deceased cannot come back to its old decomposed or decayed physical capsule, it has to be reborn, passing again all the way from the conception and intrauterine Life till the very birth. When we die we are born but in another World.

Death has never been an enemy to a human being. On the contrary, it is a great and wise teacher that teaches and directs us to our own fear and impels us to work WITH IT but not UNDER ITS INFLUENCE. Death teaches us how to treat Life as a whole but not as some manifestation of reality, which is dangerous to our True Nature and from which we should rescue ourselves.

In our first book we already told you about “the Art of Dying”. Now we are going to continue this topic as our main goal is to persuade you to stop seeking a bitter enemy in Death and start to seek the one inside yourself who indeed is your bitter enemy and who, after Death, can give a lot of troubles to your Soul (it means to you personally).

The aim we pursue in this book and all other our books is to teach you how to discern this foul part inside yourself and try, when you are still alive, to get rid of it. We have already noted that the texts of the Egyptian and Tibetan books of the Dead are quite complicated to be understood and comprehended by Slavonic and European people brought up by completely different traditions, folklore and culture.

However, it is not generally known that these books had their analogues in the European cultural tradition. In the Middle Ages, due to the general instability of Life, a lot of works under a common title “Ars Moriendi”, that is “The Art of Dying”, were written in Germany, Austria, Italy and France. At that old and troublesome time, hundreds of thousands of people died in wars, of mass epidemics, pestilence and hunger, and also during dangerous trips on land and sea.

Death of a third or even a half of the population of a certain country was an ordinary event, and Death, it its various forms and manifestations, was a constant concomitant of each person starting from the childhood till the great age, although the latter circumstance was very rare. People constantly faced Death of their relatives, friends and persons they knew, and funeral processions were common at that time.

Literature sources about Death go back as far as the end of the 14^th century when the death-rate among population of some countries reached its critical and even catastrophic point, and priests physically simply could not attend to all the dying to prepare them for Death.

As a result of it, very many people had to die without a spiritual assistance at the last moment, and after Death they faced their own sins, vices and weaknesses. The search for ways to prepare the living for their own Death was initiated by priests, especially Dominicans and Franciscans, who taught not just the art of sermon to all interested people but everything one ought to know about Death and arranging one’s last matters.

We can divide the literature on “the Art of Death” into two almost equal categories in terms of their volume:

one deals with issues related to the meaning of Death in Life of a person;
the other is focused on issues related to experiencing a real physical Death, preparation for it and rules of taking care of the dying and preparing them for the Transit.

It would be fairer to call the first category not “the Art of Dying” but “the Art of Right Living”, because this literature pays more attention not to the subject itself but to contemplation of how to come to defy this World through Death.

These works teach:

Each moment should be lived as if it is the last moment of your Life;
Fear of Death, with all its negative influence on a personality, is still a source of any Wisdom, as it brings constant vigilance into our Life and constant strive for escaping such results of our actions that would negatively influence the state of our Consciousness and our position after Death.

People should not think how to live more in this world. They should think how to live and make fewer mistakes that could bring to bad results after Death.

The greatest sage, Solomon, said not in vain: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”. Death does not recognize ranks or human hierarchic positions sought so eagerly by our Mind filled with pride, lust for power, envy and all sorts of other vices. “All face one way…” Even the most prominent personalities follow the only inevitable scheme of Life common to everyone.

Numerous naturalistic descriptions of all metamorphoses, that happen to a mortal human body at different stages of its decay and decomposition after Death, not only provoked a great aversion to transitory Illusions of this World, but also helped to open the Gate to Spiritual Worlds; and that, in fact, led to the beginning of a new quality way of existence of the human being who understood that striving for satisfaction of earthly desires, wealth and power would result only in bitterness and suffering at the hour of own Death.

The poetry of that time dedicated to the topic “Memento mori” (“Remember about Death”) represented philosophical and religious issues concerning Life and Death as numerous dialogues between a human being and Death, a human being and the World, between Life and Death, the Soul and the body and so on. Poems on the theme “Vado mori” (“I go to Death”) expressed feelings and conditions of dying people or personified human qualities before Death or at the moment of it.

Such poems of meditation were ancestors of song lyrics performed during so-called “Dances of Macabre” which, just like epidemics, spread very fast all over Europe and attracted attention with a strange power of their psychological influence that could very easily break not only sexual barriers, but also the difference in age and social status of its participants.

However, now we will pay more attention to the second category of works on “the Art of Death”, which describe real experience of the dying and give detailed recommendations on how to take care of and help the dying. Many of these works gave samples of prayers to God, Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary or saints. But some of them contained descriptions of actual experience during the process of dying, though they were influenced by traditional Christian beliefs. Among all these numerous descriptions we should pay a special attention to phenomena experienced as attacks of the forces of evil or devil himself on the dying.

The reason of them is in a particular state of Consciousness in which a human being stays during last hours, minutes or even seconds of his/her Life on Earth. Priests explained those attacks as attempts of Satan to allure the outgoing Soul to his side, distract its attention from the Higher Divine Spheres in order to seduce it by promising all sorts of earthly pleasures and eventually spoil it by them.

The attacks of evil forces were divided into five main kinds:

Serious doubts about the teaching of Christ and a weak faith, a desperate search of a way out and unwillingness to submit to the coming of Death that do not allow the dying to see in Death a unique and wonderful opportunity to unite with their own Divine Self;
Helplessness, despair and desperation in front of a coming uncertainty, a feeling of guilt and tormenting remorse as to the content of righteousness in their past Life;
Impatience, aggressiveness, impetuosity, fear and irritation caused by them due to physical and emotional experiences, sufferings that lead the Soul into the spheres of lower astral vibrations;
Falling of the dying into excessive haughtiness, clinging to earthly achievements, to false vanity and personal pride, unwillingness to submit to the process of coming Death that prevent distraction of their attention from illusory magnitude of their personality and taking Death as a coming joyful meeting with God;
Provoking sudden aggravation of vicious qualities of the dying that accompanied them during Life: envy, possessiveness, lust, jealousy, hatred, greed, avidity and distraction of their attention to the sphere of earthly worries and attachments and so on.

Versus these serious devil’s tendencies, they gave the influence of Divine Forces: a feeling of grace, high blessing, atonement, salvation, which, in advance, gave to the dying the possibility to feel the flavor of forthcoming heavenly spiritual pleasures, prepare the Soul to face the High Judgment and give it a chance to get assistance from above and a promise to save it in case of a complete repentance of its sins.

Nonetheless what is valuable about the works on “the Art of Death” is that they contained accurate instructions, directions and recommendations both for the dying and the people trying to support them or attending to them in their last post-mortem journey. We have paid your attention to the fact that the Egyptian and the Tibetan Books of the Dead contained the influence of cultural and religious aspects peculiar to each of the nations. The influence was also caused by particular needs of those historic times and places. That is why, when dealing with these unique monuments, it is essential to allow for the level of Consciousness corresponding to that time.

For those people who think wider than any dogma or concept, these books, as well as the European works on “the Art of Death”, are a unique source of information about peculiarities of human mentality and Consciousness at the border of different spheres of Existence. Personally, I will try to expand these books with my own impressions based on a rich experience of my own detailed out-of-body explorations of a postmortal existence of the human Soul.

The Fear of Death

Fear is the most complex and dangerous of all human feelings.
The right to an individual immortality has to be gained!
Reasons of the fear of Death:

The terror in face of the unknown and uncertain.
Unwillingness to part with all cherished things and with those whom the person loved devotedly or for whom he/she felt a deep affection.
The terror in face of a final rejection from the Physical Plane.
Doubts about one’s own immortality.
Identification of oneself with one’s own physical body and the terror in face of the possibility to lose it.

“The veil that separates the worlds is but an ether veil. For those who purify their hearts by faith the veil is rolled aside, and they can see and know that death is an illusive thing.”

The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ, 129:19.

It is hard to find any event of larger importance in a human Life than the process of dying and Death, maybe except birth. How many of you are ready to die this very moment, extending fully and easily beyond your own limits, changing nothing and not attempting to do anything, just leave with joy, not being attached to anything or anyone?

Few people are able to understand and take Death in the right way. Most of us are in the state of a deep sleep or awakening from an illusion-dream, at best. Until Illusion dies, the true immortal Nature of a human being cannot manifest itself neither in his/her Life nor in his/her Death.

One of the most common manifestations of the activity of our astral body is FEAR IN GENERAL and the FEAR OF DEATH as one of many its particular manifestations. Fear is the most complex and dangerous of all human feelings. It never resides alone in a human being and is always accompanied by a swarm of other dangerous parasites which also rot everything valuable in a human being’s spiritual world.

Fear is able to infect everything around, filling the atmosphere with its finest vibrations, each of which is as poisonous as a viper’s venom. Those infected by these terrible vibrations are already suppressed as active, reasonable beings. Fear brings dissonance and disharmony into the Soul.

Thoughts can only live and catch the finest intuitive insights when the whole human being is harmonic, when all forces of the body are in a stable balance. Only then, through your conscious part, you will be able to get to the superconscious realm where your Divine Self dwells and creates. But if thoughts are in the paralyzing clutches of fear, you will never be able to set your Spirit free and tear your Consciousness away from a fixed focus on your lower nature.

Most situations that cause our fears are most often excited by reactions that appear in our lower centers not related to survival energies: these are emotions and associations, intuition and imagination, communication, etc. Fear mostly arises on a subconscious level and is most often used by the physical body to activate Consciousness.

However, few people know that each time when we feel fear, we, unaware of it, provoke such extreme mental situations in our Life which subsequently strengthen even greater this feeling in us and thus create a real threat to our Life. Francis Bacon once said about it: “Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other”.

Yes, a human being is afraid of Death. An oriental saying states that one ought to look into Death’s eyes, one must look deep into its essence, as the very deep, fearless look into one’s own Death can help to overcome it. The one who has looked into Death becomes beyond Death.

If you manage to do it, if you manage to meet with Death, you will get to know that there is SOMETHING in you that is beyond the power of Death. Avoiding Death, you remain under its power. Meeting with Death face to face, you overcome it.

Our fear of Death, like the fear of other life problems, even if they are much less dangerous, is constantly dwelling in our subconsciousness, because Death will remain the most powerful and mysterious of all feelings for us until we experience it. We solve the riddle of Death only during dying.

Christianity is absolutely and positively right stating that a personality, a human being that has lived a Life on Earth, will never come to this Earth again; and his/her personal postmortal Destiny will give only those fruits which had been personally sowed by the human being during this Life, which is the only one and will never repeat for him/her again.

Sergey Tsvelev never knew personally Shota Rustaveli who, as a personality, after his Death, had a Destiny on the Astral Plane which was worthy of all his good and bad deeds. Being a Christian he, however, knew about a succession of human Lives that constitute the Unity of Existence of human Consciousness. But he lived being aware that it was only he (and not someone else to be born again in order to continue also his human life experience) who would have to be responsible for everything done, said and even thought of by himself.

You must understand that neither myself, nor anyone of you will have a second chance to “get registered” in these or those Spheres of the Subtle World: the level of vibration “reached” by your Consciousness during Life will be the highest level for you personally which you, as a personality died on Earth, can expect to reach after your Death. It is absolutely wrong and ignorant to say that, if I made a mistake during this Life, I will be able to repair the omission in my next Life.

This is an enormous and the most dangerous of all fallacies!

Remember: you personally will never have any “your next personal Life” on Earth, except the achieved level of your postmortal existence, till the end of the current evolutional cycle.

Only if you manage to form developed astral and mental bodies during your own Life and make a good foundation for developing your causal and spiritual bodies, you can expect that during the so-called “last judgment day”, which will happen at the end of a big cycle of evolution of the present humanity, you, as an individual Spirit, will be able to continue your Evolution in the next cycle. But for that you need to achieve a very high level of Consciousness and spirituality HERE, and not after Death!

In all other cases, - if only you manage to keep your personal individuality after Death, - a Life in one of communities of the Subtle World is reserved for you. The community’s vibrations will be most consonant with the ones of your subtle bodies (after their complete cleansing of rough energy). Having reached your optimal age at the beginning of your “Life after Death”, you will start to get gradually older and your energy will wither, making you smaller until your second, astral Death.

If during Life you have developed nothing but your emotional body, and into the bargain in its lower range of vibrations, then do not even dream about experiencing your second Death: you will never be anywhere, you will simply become a part of material of the Astral Plane serving as a basis for incarnation of other beings.

You must get ready for such perspective if you do not draw any adequate conclusions and fail to change immediately all your Life toward its spiritual side. The one who has sowed Good and Love will certainly reap Good and Love after one’s Death. And all his/her good deeds will fill his/her true personality with vibrations of Light which allow it to irradiate peace and bliss.

Remember: you, as a personality, will be truly free and devoid of your next astral Death only if during your Life you put into practice the Truth, and not just talked about it, that conveys the laws of just, meek, peaceful children of God with clean hearts.

Those who did not live, but wasted their own Lives, worrying only about hoarding and acquiring material wealth, immediately after their awakening during first hours after Death, will be deprived of the memory even about the most common things they used to know during their Life. Only the worst memories will be left to them about each their fault which excites painful moral fire of shame, bitterness and an infinite feeling of guilt in their Souls.

We are not going to “frighten” or “scare” anyone here, but we cannot but warn you that a great many of people will meet far from the best fate beyond their Death threshold, even compared to their earth existence which is really hellish. But that is the choice they have made themselves, and they will not be able to blame someone else. The right to an individual immortality has to be gained by evolutional and spiritual growth!

The fear of Death is multifarious. The most courageous of us think they do not have one until, to their amazement, they find it inside themselves. Fear is not an abstract notion; it does not exist by itself, without a connection with anything. It manifests itself only in relation to something.

The roots of fear are in the foundation, in the fabric of Matter itself, in the interaction of pairs of opposites – Spirit and Matter. Fear is mainly an action or a consequence of the principle of Mind, the mental activity of a human being. But the point is not that a human being has Mind; if a human being used his/her own Mind in the right way, he/she would have eliminated all kinds of fear inside himself/herself. The source of fear is in what they call “the Cosmic Evil”. Though, only Initiates can understand the true meaning of this notion.

The whole life experience of a person, all his/her numerous hard feelings, felt throughout his/her Life, also determine the type of his/her Death. A sharp inner struggle and a hard death-agony are closely connected with unsolved life conflicts and psychic traumas, with the activation of birth-agony which remains non-assimilated by Consciousness during Life.

You must have a thorough grasp of the Truth:

A postmortal Life of the Soul, as well as the future intrauterine condition of a human being and his/her birth in a new incarnation are mainly, if not totally, determined by the quality of the human being’s last desire and last Thought at the moment of his/her Death.

We do not know how big the letters must be to write this Thought for you to pay your attention to it and make it the foundation OF YOUR WHOLE LIFE ON EARTH. The point is that the last desire of a person depends inevitably on the form of his/her Thoughts, aspirations, desires, passions, habits and the whole Life style in general shaped by him/her.

The last desire will always be unintentional. You cannot just plan it, or control it. It cannot be adjusted to a definite moment of your Life. At the very last moment, all your Life, without your consent to it or your participation in it, will reflect on your fading Consciousness, and your memory will raise all the events of your Life and all emotions which accompanied them from all forgotten nooks and hidden corners.

Some pictures will instantly flash as they have not left a sensible trace in your Consciousness, other ones will resurrect your forgotten emotions giving rise to either your regret for them, or your satisfaction at them. But this whole “movie” will have one MAIN event, one MAIN Thought that will DETERMINE the whole sense of your passing Life. The dying brain gets free from the memory in the last very powerful impulse; and the memory restores, to the minutest details, every impression kept by it for the whole period of your brain activity.

The feeling and the thought which was the most powerful, has left the most clear imprint and the strongest impression that displaces and outlives all other feelings destined to be resurrected either in Hell, if they correspond to the vibrations of Infernal Spheres, or in Heavens, if these feelings were full of unselfish love.

No one dies in an absolutely unconscious state. Even a mad person or one in the state of insanity has a moment of absolute lucidity during Death. Though, people who are beside such person are unable to discern it. The person may SEEM to be already dead, but you must know that, from the last beat of his/her heart till the time when the last warmth abandons the physical body, - the brain still continues to work, THINK, and during these short seconds the Soul has enough time to review its whole Life.

That is why it is so important to approach the moment of your Death not only having managed to get rid of the fear of it, but also in the full conviction that your Thoughts and feelings will not draw you into a dreadful whirlpool of “the Planet of Death”. So let us have a more detailed study of the things that nourish the fear of Death in our Consciousness.

Reasons of the fear of Death.

The fear of the inevitability of Death has a multistep foundation, however, its main reasons are the following:

- The terror in face of the unknown and uncertain.

- Unwillingness to part with all cherished things and with those whom the person loved devotedly or for whom he/she felt a deep affection.

- The terror in face of a final rejection from the Physical Plane.

- Doubts about one’s own immortality.

- Identification of oneself with one’s own physical body and the terror in face of the possibility to lose it

- Subconscious memories about violent Deaths in past Lives.

1. The terror in face of the unknown and uncertain.

People are often frightened not by the perspective of dying, but by the unknown hiding behind Death itself. After all Death should not frighten us, because, since our childhood, we know that once the time will come and we will have to die.

But it is in our nature: until we try everything by our own experience, we do not believe any words or arguments. Death, being nearly the most essential event in our Life, is not learnt by the majority of people through their personal experiences, and that frightens and disturbs them.

For an ordinary person Death is always unknown. Whatever knowledge about it we may have, Death itself cannot appear among the things we know. We hold out a hand to grasp it, but it is already gone.

Association is the known. On the contrary, the unknown cannot be made known; usual methods cannot help to comprehend Death. That is another reason of the fear of Death. Though, many of us clear unconsciously this “fear” hurdle every night.

When the part of our Being, which is outside our Consciousness, dominates, it absolutely has no fear of Death, although, to all appearances, it is influenced by Thoughts and actions from the conscious Mind. It is used to function beyond fear and finds better its bearings in the laws of the Astral World. When the conscious Mind is switched off for the night, the human Soul comes to the front.

We emphasize again: the fear of Death is nothing but the fear of the unknown. You have not met it yet. You have not seen its face and do no know whether it is beautiful or ugly. You cannot say anything about it - whether it will be your damnation or blessing. Now ask yourself: if you do not have any idea about Death, then how can you be afraid of it in advance?

But you are still afraid of Death, because your Soul keeps the memory about its past partings with the body, about dying and leaving Earth in the past. The human being strives for keeping an individual Consciousness, but it is possible only at the moment of a complete realization of the Truth. And the moment usually comes to people very late, not when they are still alive, but when they are already dying.

That is why so many people, as a result of their misunderstanding of the meaning of Life, have to start everything from the beginning after their Death. Or rather the Soul, in its new incarnation, begins to tread well-trodden paths of life from the beginning. As for the human being, the personality that has lived its Life on Earth, unfortunately, there will not be any new possibility to try to re-evaluate everything undervalued during Life.

A new Life of the Soul will be connected with a new personality, though that personality will have many things in common with the previous one. Nonetheless, the new one is completely independent of the previous one.

As no other society in the world we tried to obliterate Death from our Life. But all that we have managed to do is only an outlook full of most ignorant wrong beliefs and vague doubts. In our society the fear of Death is almost not connected with personal experience. We have separated ourselves from Death, put responsibility for everything connected with it on charted specialists.

We do not want to have anything in common with Death, that is why we console ourselves with the ridiculous thought that it is our Death that will happen a long way off. Many are afraid of Death just because they are not absolutely sure whom they will become after Death, where they will go, what they will do, what will remain of them immediately after their demise, of their appearance, memory, feelings, emotions, their earthly attachments and material possessions, their culture and pleasures.

We can reassure such people right away: if in their Life they have not committed any evil deeds, violence to other individuals, murders, cruelty and atrocities, then Death will be like a dream for them, during which they will get rid of most of their bad traits that now make them ashamed for themselves and cause suffering not only to their intimates but also to them. Everything that waits for them after such “Death-dream” will be much nicer, more beautiful and splendid than they can even imagine.

The process of Death which is mysterious to many people is accompanied by some phenomena unusual to us. One of them is becoming free from limitations of the physical body. In reality, there is not any frightening slough off, if it is not a violent or sudden Death.

In stress situations, a person is not chiefly seized by the fear to experience Death, but by the fear that he/she may eventually stop to exist at all and above all as a personality. All reactions to fear, - whether it is a spider in the bed or a nightmare, - also are mainly conditioned by our fear of our own Death.

In any condition of fear or an acute critical situation the body is immediately tuned to survival and seeks help from its first energy chakra - MULADHARA, releasing the Soul’s experience in survival accumulated in the chakra along with all the knowledge which can help to support Life.

The person who understands the essence of Death always take this fear as it is in reality, namely, - as an intense reaction of the body to an unusual or unexpected irritant, and thus make all possible consequences of this feeling substantially weaker.

That is why most of those, who have visited, during their apparent Death, the other side of Existence, who have been hanging between Life and Death, are able to keep substantially more calm and dignity in such deathful situations as earthquakes, and during various cataclysms or accidents.

Their experience of Death gave them the chance to see their own false understanding of it, and that is why they remain calm in the face of a danger, when all the others, who are ignorant about it, spend very much Energy to escape Death by all means.

Undoubtedly, the people who have experienced Death also can be frightened, but their fright differs very much from the fear of those who still do not know that Death as it is, as an end of our conscious Existence, simply does not exist. Those who have learnt by their own experience the truth and beauty of “the beyond”, become for ever free from the fear of Death and even wait with sincere hope for the coming of the moment when, after their righteous and honest Life, they will start a more deserving existence than they have here.

It can hardly be said that people infected with the virus of fear in its chronic form are wholesome human beings, creative constructors and creators of Life, capable of a conscious participation in the formation of a sublime and eternal Spirit.

They live only in the World of transient, temporary forms. While Consciousness of all the people able to work creatively resides in two Worlds: in the World of a toiling Earth and in the sublime World of creative Heavens. The Souls of such active constructors, without fear and prejudices, introduce into earth forms the shining and perfection of those eternal forms which they can see and retain in their memory.

From our own experience and on the basis of retaining Consciousness for many incarnations, we can state with all responsibility that the THING usually taken by people for “DEATH” is simply another stage of entering of the human Soul into its more integral and fruitful Existence. You are an integral part of the Whole, a coming and going wave of the Unified Ocean of Life, an arrival and departure, Existence and Non-Existence.

You come and go, and the Whole remains. And you exist because of the Whole, and the Whole, in its turn, exists through you. Sometimes It gets a form, sometimes It becomes formless, sometimes It blossoms in the human body, sometimes It leaves it, but each time It remains beautiful.

Life is rhythm: sometimes you have to stay in the physical form, but afterwards you must take a rest from it, sometimes you have to be active and stirring, and sometimes you go to the depth of the Whole and relax, having a rest and gathering strength for your new activity. Likewise, Death is just a change of rhythm, a movement from one state to another one. When you die here, on Earth, soon you are born again more alive and younger in another place, outside the Physical Plane of Earth.

2. Unwillingness to part with all cherished things and with those whom the person loved devotedly or for whom he/she felt a deep affection.

The more we attach ourselves to perishable things, the quicker we approach Death, because shrinking into our little existence is already Death, a real Death, and this is the reason of a great fear of it.

Most people still take Death as something separate, as an independent phenomenon, which they should be afraid of and escape by all means. It is not Death that the human being is afraid of. In reality people are afraid of losing their attachment to Life, being deprived of their habitual Life style for ever.

Undoubtedly, Death will completely change you; it will take you into the dimension you know nothing about; Death will not leave you as you are now. It will take away your body, your Mind, - everything you used to consider yourself.

The process of natural dying is first of all characterized by disappearance of everything what has lived its life and served its time. Death uses dying to free some space for new phenomena of Existence which are to succeed our habitual views of Life.

Very often, when someone dies at an undesirable moment and in the wrong place, we feel discontent and even irritation. Let us not deceive ourselves: Death is really very cruel and merciless not only in terms of physical appearance, but also in terms of its psychological aspect, when it takes away the person we love, leaving just a cold, lifeless corpse instead.

Those, who, as we think, deserve a long Life, die in the prime of life and full of strength, and villains and scoundrels, who have spoiled Life of thousands and even millions of people, live in wealth till their extreme old age. All this seems too cruel and senseless to a perfunctory person, as if there is neither Divine Justice nor Divine Love…

Very many of those, who consider themselves spiritually aware, but who in fact only in rare cases forget about their deep, subconscious dependence on fear, pertain to the most pitiful and limited sort of mistaken people. Their constant weeping for their beloved, who have passed away, in fact is just a purulent discharge of their selfishness multiplied by their attachment to the physical form without any vestige of true selflessness

3. The terror in face of a final rejection from the Physical Plane.

Regarding this cause of the fear of Death, we can say that no one dies ONCE AND FOR ALL, except maybe the case when there is nothing in you belonging to Earth. Before your return home, all the dust and dirt accumulated around your true Self must be removed. Death is the only means to rejuvenate without the so-called “philosopher’s stone”. Not only Jesus Christ has arisen from the dead, - we all arise in Eternal Existence.

All of us are like a tree which sheds dry and old leaves to get new ones in spring. If the tree has not shed its old leaves, how it can rejuvenate? It would simply perish. The old must go, and the new must come to its place, - this is the Law. The old vanishes to give the road to the new, create a place and prerequisites for its coming.

When you die, - it is not a disappearance for ever, it is just a fall of old leaves in order to create conditions for a new leaf to appear at the same place. Here, you die finalizing your Life on Earth, “there”, you are just born beginning your Life as an entity of subtle matter. When you disappear here, you appear immediately “there”, moving constantly from the formless to the form and from the form to the formless.

We are all in two steps from God. One step is the step from this World. AND THE OTHER ONE IS THE STEP FROM THE NEXT WORLD.

4. Doubts about one’s own immortality.

“How is it that ye believe not in GOD? Since ye were dead, and He gave you life; He will hereafter cause you to die, and will again restore you to life; then shall ye return unto Him.”

The Koran, 2:26.

Death is far from the end. There is no Death as “an antithesis of Life” in the World, and it cannot be. Death is just one of many episodes of Life of the Soul. It is one of many ways of transformation and development of Life. Our illusion about Death is that we take our outer personality, i.e. “a human form”, for ourselves.

The illusion about Death is dispelled by learning the laws of Life in other Worlds. Death is defied and defeated by the victory over it - a spiritual experience, when we see for ourselves: that in the next World we are as “mortal” as here; that we must leave the next World as we leave this one, that is through Death, becoming temporarily dead for it.

When we say that you are potentially immortal, we do not say about any abstract doctrine, we say about what we have experienced many times. When you are ready to be destroyed, something new will come without fail out of it, something which is not always worse than the previous. Each your destruction may become your creative Birth. If you are ready to die, you can begin a new Life being born after your Death at a new, higher-quality level of Existence.

Death will destroy only the trash, husk and garbage you have accumulated in yourself for all your Life. It destroys only what is not you. And when it is destroyed, you will see for yourself that you are indestructible, that you are immortal.

Only after a conscious experience of Death we make sure of our own immortality. But if you fail to do it, you will be alone to blame, not someone else. There is the River of eternal Life. It exists by itself, it flows and it is absolutely not its fault that you cannot swim, that you even cannot bend down to try to enter into it.

There is an infinite Divine Existence around you, but nothing can help you, for how the Divine can penetrate, if you have made an impassable castle around yourself? Do not blame the River of Life for your misfortunes, blame only yourself, your “ego” that has paralyzed your Consciousness.

All the time we form ourselves - first, after the likeness of rough passions which reside in us from the ancient times when we explored the Animal Kingdom, then we begin to express our dominant - the total of all our desires and Thoughts. The human being changes his/her ideal many times until he/she understands that the best etalon for him/her is God’s likeness

What people so strive for, not knowing about it, what they so long for on Earth, - is an unconscious yearning for finding a higher, Divine image in themselves. Tormented and persecuted by their own Genius, such people cannot find a stable happiness in anything else on Earth. Satiety kills desire, the achievement of an earthly goal creates emptiness. So many times, having achieved his/her ambition, the human being feels, as said in the Holy Scripture, “that all of it is THE WRONG THING, WRONG and WRONG…”

The only achievement which cannot be satiated with, the only “RIGHT THING”, - is realizing oneself in God. Until it happens, the fear of Death, the fear of disappearing for ever from the Universal Existence will kill the human being every moment. Some people achieve such realization as a result of long spiritual exploits, others do it through a great Love, some people do it through a high art or another kind of spiritual creativity. Immolating themselves for others, letting the vibrations of Love, Charity and Mercy pass through them, many people become gradually or instantly enlightened.

Often the human being unconsciously enters into the circle of Divine Afflatus - the Divine Grace is gifted in various ways: some people receive it as a result of hard work, some get it as “an insight”, others, whose Souls are quite experienced in their previous incarnations, have the gift of Enlightenment from their childhood.

Renunciation of one’s own Will removes one’s “candlestick out of its place”, and when this mystic moment comes, all principles of the Soul meet together and restore again the integral Consciousness. Devoting yourself and your acts to God’s Will means recognizing God as a king inside you instead of the previous egoistic “self”. And if God Himself is inside you, then any fear of Death is out the question.

The World corresponds to the level of Consciousness; Consciousness and the World in which it resides are identical. Myriads of water drops that form a rainbow reflect the same sunlight; all is multiplicity or unity only depending on the ability of Consciousness to perceive that ALL.

Having understood the law of Life in God, the human being becomes a conductor of God’s Will and regains the lost freedom. No longer focused on any separate form of Existence, the human being resides in ALL, moving freely from one Plane to another as it used to be before the “fall”. But, unfortunately, such supreme final is still very far away for a great many of the Souls that sleep and have selfish dreams in the bed of relativity of earthly Life.

Until you reach such awareness, self-identification with God, your fear of Death will always exist in you and, as your constant concomitant in Life, it will be present in each your word, gesture and action. You simply get used to your fear of Death and even do not notice it, until a slightest stress situation throws it out on the very surface of your Consciousness and overwhelms all other emotions by it, sometimes even clouding your Mind.

5. Identification of oneself with one’s own physical body and the terror in face of the possibility to lose it.

Quite a strong fear at the beginning of natural dying brings you directly to the final stage of apparent Death. It is not for nothing that we say: “frightened to Death” or “dead with fright”. This really happens and quite often.

But we know for sure that in most cases of natural dying the only somewhat unpleasant sensation, which overwhelms a dying person, is a sudden feeling of an imminent and absolutely inevitable danger, a subconscious menace of obvious physical destruction, and sometimes something that reminds the sensation which happens during electric shock.

When human beings see only themselves inside, they are alarmed, anxious and worried about tomorrow. They feel fear and animosity towards people and animals, are afraid to lose intimates, are afraid of Death, distress themselves unable to satisfy their desires, and always depend on opinions of others, on a chance, a success or a failure.

Those, who resist the fear of Death and have a strong interest in material things, are constantly focused on this instinctive feeling and that is why they will always be afraid to die. The fear of their own Death will gradually penetrate every aspect of their Life, sometimes even becoming a phobia.

Unaware of it, such people change gradually their Divine Nature to the demonic one, set the inner image of God upside down to the likeness of devil. Nature becomes a loving mother only to those who have come to peace with themselves and with God through themselves. Wild animals do not touch such people, because there is nothing disharmonic in them to frighten the animals; elements obey them, because their inner and outer Harmony are balanced; Nature spirits serve them, because all their decisions are creative.

An enlightened person never dies, because such person does not hold to Life. He/she has voluntarily refused it, he/she is already dead. Buddha, Mahavira, Jesus, Moses and other well-known and not well-known Enlightened persons at first glance seem to have died like you will die, but it is only at first glance.

It is written in Dhammapada that “if your Soul is free, you will not have to pass through birth and death any more”. Really, for the majority of people Death turns into an unexpected awakening, - which is more or less painful, more or less pleasant, sad or full of exalted joy. Everything in your Death, just as in your Life, depends completely on you and on what you have sown inside yourself and in the World for the time of your Life.

For those ridden by pride and ego, Nature is their severe stepmother, their neighbor is their deadly enemy, animals are their bloodthirsty foes, elements are insidious demons, and Death is not the moment of Liberation and unity with God, but a complete and final disappearance.

In the Sumerian-Babylonian verse of the Epic of Gilgamesh (about 3000 BC), the hero mourns for his friend: “Day and night I have wept for him. I would not give him over for burial for what if Enkidu had risen at my beseeching? Six days and seven nights I waited until a worm fell out of his nose since he has gone. There is no life left for me, I buried him. How can I be silent? How be still? My friend whom I love has turned to ashes and clay. Am I not like him? Will I lie down, to turn to ashes and clay? Let me not see Death, which I so dread!”

We are afraid of Death, because very often we see that it is painful and merciless, bloodthirsty and dreadful by appearance, inexorable and inappeasable. We also try to avoid thinking about Death, because it is disgustful and uncomfortable, and for us everything it touches is connected with losses which are sometimes very grievous.

We hate Death, because to the limited Consciousness of our physical body it seems to be a force hostile to Life, because it takes away our property, breaks our habitual relations and interferes roughly into our current plans and prospects. We are also ashamed of it, because the fear of it abases us in our own estimation and requires making constant, enormous efforts.

Russian Tsar, Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov (1596-1645), as a result of constant and troublesome thoughts about his own Death, “fell into immobility” and died “of… sorrow”. Russian empress, Elizabeth Petrovna (1709-1761), also was terribly afraid of the dead and even issued an edict which forbade carrying the deceased to a cemetery past the royal palace.

The one who knows one’s own Death and one’s own fear of it, does not think all the time about it, he/she simply allots psychic space to himself/herself in Life, as an immortal Entity, from one side, and to Death, as a part of Life of his/her personality, from the other side.

Then the fear begins to vanish gradually, until it leaves the person completely; and at the same time the fear leaves the person’s friends and relatives who communicate with him/her. Such person may enjoy Life to a greater extent and he/she will step through the threshold of Death with fewer losses when it will be necessary.

For those who have undeveloped Consciousness their Death is literally a dream and unconsciousness, because their Mind is not yet sufficiently awaken for a fully conscious reaction, and the depository of their memory is also practically empty, with no events that could create at least some likeness of Existence after a physical Death. For a common honest person his/her Death will be a continuation of the life process in his/her Consciousness and a pursuit of all interests and tendencies that the person used to have during Life.

Consciousness of such persons and their understanding of processes around them will remain the same. They will not feel any substantial difference in their own conditions and often will not be even aware that they has passed a short episode of their own physical Death which they were so afraid of.

It is quite another matter with evil and self-centered selfish people, along with criminals, killers and those who have dedicated their Life HERE to achieve material and other consumer and sensual benefits. After Death they enter a state of so-called “conditional energy attachment to Earth”.

It means that all relations developed between them and all earthly things, earthly focus of all their goals, ambitions, desires and feelings tie them more securely than the thickest chain to lower levels of the Astral Plane located in space very close to the surface of Earth. That is why, even after their liberation from their physical and etheric bodies, they will remain literally squeezed into their habitual earthly environment.

All their desperate attempts to establish by all means a contact with the Physical Plane are futile. Because of this they have to experience many sufferings which we will describe in every detail later. By the way no better is the initial postmortal Fate of those kind and wonderful people, whose great personal love and personal attachment to persons they have left on Earth or their failure to fulfill a reputedly imperative duty keep them in the same state for a long time.

For those, who, all through their Life, pursued to fulfill their spiritual duty and implement high goals and Ideas on the Physical Plane, their Death is virtually an immediate entrance into the sphere of identical dedicated service and expression which they are used to in their Life, and which they will recognize at once.

Such people, during their rest and sleep while still alive, have developed in the Subtle World active and powerful mental fields of their future service and learning. Immediately after Death, they will begin the same active functioning in them, but on a permanent basis.

Will to live, which roots in every living creature, manifests itself through the instinct of self-preservation at lower stages of spiritual self-development. This is the place where we should seek the origin of the fear of Death. Step by step, as a result of experience reiterated many times, the human being begins to understand higher goals and higher interests in Life.

OVERCOMING THE FEAR OF DEATH

“Seek not to save your wealth, or you will lose your lives. Go forth, and look not back upon the crumbling walls of sin. Do not forget Lot's wife. Whoever tries to save his life will lose his life; whoever freely gives his life in serving life will save his life”.

The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ, 145:18-19.

We have mentioned that Death is a state before rebirth of the Soul, and destruction is a state before creation or creativity of the Soul. Like black color may be considered as an extremely positive color in a common gamma of a picture, so is Death, with all our fears in face of it, must be considered as an extremely positive event in the Soul’s existence, like a ring during the last lesson; and Life must be considered as en event, during which we express ourselves completely and then become free for our participation in the next great event.

When you know what Life is, God will be waiting for you at the door you call Death. Until you do not know what Life is, you are so afraid of Death that, when the door indeed opens, you are almost unconscious and miss the moment. You have missed the moment for many times already. You have died many times, and each time you missed it. There is only one way not to miss it: to die before Death!

The fear of Death steals up on us to torment our brain when the body has not enough nerve power. Those people, for whom the lack of Energy is normal, live in constant fear of Death. It seems that Thoughts about incurable diseases replace all their spiritual interests.

Mental institutions are full of people who have become insane because of the fear of Death. This fear is simply useless, because anyway IT will come to each of us sooner or later, irrespective of whether you think of IT or not.

In the Tragedy of Julius Caesar Shakespeare wrote:

“Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come”.

Any attempt to get rid of the fear by struggling it incessantly will lead to no good. If the fear appears and you begin to do anything against it, then, as a result of this struggle, a new and even more complicated kind of fear appears, which have driven very many people into mental institutions, - the fear of your own fear.

That is why if you feel the fear in you, the first thing you ought to do is to try simply reconcile yourself to it: say, yes, I am afraid of it, so what is special about it? It means that’s the way I am…

Do not try to do anything with your fear, because nothing will help, but only will make the situation worse. No matter what you do for fear, it will bring even greater fear. It is better to accept it and note that you have it, and go on being afraid for some time.

When you are able to realize the fact that you are afraid, your fear itself will soon disappear as it cannot go on infinitely. The distinction of our problems is that they disappear as soon as we reconcile ourselves to them, and they become even more complicated if we begin to conflict with them. Only acceptance of the inevitable makes its clouds vanish, only acceptance, but not struggle against it.

Fear is not you, not your personality, and especially not your essence. It is just a temporary, specific state of Consciousness, which, once having you entranced, hypnotized, would again and again take away your chance to perceive rightly the reality of Space, making you identify yourself with your sufferings that are not you.

Fear, as one of the most active unconscious manifestations of your resistance to negative circumstances of the outer world and as a result of your inner surrender to sufferings, makes you begin the war against the outer world and all its phenomena in order to protect your imaginary “self”.

In its turn, such inner resistance creates around you a very favorable environment for attracting more and more unfavorable circumstances to you from external Space to make your sufferings even worse. The later you understand it, and the stronger is your resistance to subjective and objective reasons which cause effects negative to you - to your understanding! - the more favorable are conditions for even deeper penetration of destructive vibrations of fear into your astral body.

On the one hand, being in the state of fear, your Mind begins to function in a very limited mode, focusing your attention mainly on committing obsessive acts. But on the other hand, in its definite initial phase fear can give you a very useful possibility to stop and look around; after that you will understand that you have approached an area of Life which is not yet explored by you, so you have not enough life experience to make quick and on-the-fly decisions in such circumstances.

In such cases, the best answer to your fit of fear will be its acceptance, entering into it in order to merge with it, become temporarily as one whole with it, and only then - letting it gradually and gently go in order to accept the Truth whatever it might be.

But in order to enter into the Truth and try first to cognize it and then accept it, you must completely refuse your own security; because, being attached to the illusion of your inalterability, you will NOT be able to follow further the Path of self-discovery, and hence you will NOT be able to realize some time, that inside you there is no one and nothing for you to attach your selfish feeling of protection of you personal “self”.

We are all Divine Consciousnesses that have to dwell temporarily on this Earth in imperfect physical capsules. Most of us have completely forgotten about our own divine origin, and being involved into heavy vortexes of Matter we have become cowards, and we must have courage to confess to it at least to ourselves. Courage which we show at critical moments of our Life is just a mask, a disguise of our human cowardice, our animal fear to part with our Life, die, disappear and become lost as individuality for ever in the Unknown.

All “outward” braves are cowards inside just like all other people, and most often even to a greater extent; because in order to hide their cowardice they always try to support their outward “halo” of bravery. But their daredevil and brave acts are just a screen of their fear. How can they remain brave, if every day they face a chance to die, if a person is just a leaf which trembles pitifully in blasts of the wind of Life? How could one not tremble in such case?

In order to hold out against such wind, there is only one way: never say the leaf that it is a coward, but repeat softly, little by little, that it simply lives and that is all. Now it lives here, tomorrow - there, and the day after tomorrow - somewhere else, inconceivably far away, beyond this Life. And when you are trembling, when you are gripped by fear, remember that you are just “a leaf in the wind”; it may tremble, but it does not make the leaf less beautiful. So why make a problem out of it?

However, human nature is such that we, people, make problems literally out of everything or out of nothing at all. Our problems are our wrong answers to lessons which Life teaches us. If we learn the lesson accurately and make a right decision, then there are no problems at all. Everything what exists is GOOD, EVERYTHING IS BLESSING for us, however unattractive or frightening this BLESSING might outwardly seem.

But a human being is not the one to recognize immediately the GOOD and BLESSING that is in any “negative” event. For instance, if you are afraid of darkness, on the spot they teach you: be brave, you must not be afraid. And you compel yourself, you start fighting your nature and become strained.

Yes, you endure darkness, but the price you pay is your own inner tension: you tremble with all your nerves, but try to restrain your fear. In this case the fear will follow you all through your Life. But there would be nothing bad in being afraid and then scream and run.

In such case you would have come out of the situation just more experienced and with more knowledge, you would have understood that you were scared for nothing, and that nothing fatal happened to you. But suppressing yourself you will never get such chance, you will never take anything out of the event. The true Wisdom comes through suffering and acceptance.

Birth is very much like Death in the Subtle World, and Death is like birth in the Material World. There and here, the both processes are connected with suffering. But it worth suffering, because a new dawn of the Soul will appear, and a new Sun will rise out of the darkness of suffering. When you submerge completely in darkness, it would only mean that your dawn is very close. When suffering becomes unbearable, it is a sure sign of coming bliss.

That is why during dying and Death do not try to avoid suffering, because due to this you may miss the most important thing. Do not run away from it, just go through it like through a purifying Fire. The power of the Fire will burn and destroy you, though in reality you cannot neither be burnt, nor destroyed.

Only fear itself can give fearlessness, just like anger brings compassion, and understanding the nature of your hatred in your Heart brings fourth Love. But you do not need a conflict for that, you just need a vigilant realization. If you set your mind on knowing each your emotional experience yourself, then a time will come when you will approach the most important and deepest experience, - Death.

As compared with Death, Life is just a faded instant extended to many years, nothing, because it cannot be either as tense and acute, or as mysterious and final as Death which comes always wholly and not in parts. There is nothing more acute, exciting and important for next incarnations than experiencing Death.

But if you are afraid of it and run away from it before it comes to you, having lost your Consciousness for fear, then you will miss the perfect chance to go through the wonderful Door with a completely clear Consciousness and understanding of everything what happens to you. If you are used to take things as they are, then, when Death comes, you will be able to accept it easily and patiently, without any attempts to run away or hide behind the shroud of your sleeping Consciousness.

If you accept it as a long-expected guest, without any efforts on your part, then a miracle will happen: it will disappear, you will simply not notice it, because it does not exist in that dreadful and frightening appearance you have imagined to yourself.

The danger of the fear of Death may have much more unpleasant consequences to you than you can suppose. It is because if you fail to get rid of the fear while alive, then, at the very last moment of your Death, it will paralyze all your Soul, all your Will and you, even being a good and kind person during your Life, will enter into the process of your dying with heavy vibrations. And after cessation of your Consciousness, the vibrations will attract your Soul to dreadful Spheres of the lower Astral Plane, where the fear intensified hundreds of times will become a dominant feeling in your postmortal existence for a long time.

Like equality is impossible in Life, so is impossible inequality in Death. Realize this Thought, think it over carefully. Not only from the point that Death is something obligatory and inevitable somewhere in your distant future; when you think that, although your Death is inevitable, it is still far away, again you will not be able to understand it.

You must understand that your Death is possible directly at the next moment. You might not be able to read my next sentence to its end, just as I may not be able to finish it at the next moment. But no one worries about one’s own Death.

Wittingly, cunningly we avoid being interested in it, because this breeds fear. Our Death always happens at the next moment. Make it consciously closer for you to be able to focus on it, and the focusing itself will help you enter inside yourself. Thus you will create a new need.

None of normal persons takes Death as it is described on paper, however understandable are the images and allegories used by authors. How one can go round the barrier of the fear of Death, we do not know. It is an individual way of every person.

You can overcome the fear of Death only when you understand that you will Live until there is at least one sparkle of Life in the Universe, when you can say absolutely sure: I am in everything, I am in everyone, I am the whole Life, I am the whole Universe! After realizing this, you will never be afraid of anything, either in your present incarnation, or in your next ones.

If you have known fearlessness, which comes not from your Mind, but from your Heart opened to Love, then you will be able to know easily the Path of the Eternal. Then you will take your own Life just as a simultaneous work of your Soul in the two Worlds. And you will never chose what is more profitable or comfortable to you at the present moment, but you will create with all the wholeness of your Heart, accepting joyfully all circumstances related to you as those in which it is easier and simpler to fulfill the task of your present incarnation.

If you have conquered the fear and realized the Divine Temple of your Heart, then you have made your first step in Life in the Eternal. From now on each day of your earth Life will become just a moment of current Eternity. It means all lower feelings and passions fettered by conventions will disappear. You will finally cease to compare your Destiny with Destinies of other people, and thus will get rid of envy, jealousy and blames based on carnal selfishness.

If you have banished the fear, then you see your service to Life in the form, place and Time your Soul needs most. The creative task of your Soul consists not of your personal “self”, but of WHAT comes through you into the World and is given to people. You will understand that all living on Earth do their duties imposed on them by God.

We hope that for many of you our books themselves will become your first psychological step on your path of overcoming the fear of Death; and that this will provide a considerable help and bring a substantial relief to your Soul at a decisive moment of each of you.