Life After Death

Question: What happens when we leave the body – where do we go, what do we do?

Munjiji: The creation in which you live comprises the visible and the invisible, they are all the same creation, just different expressions. As well as your physical realm is the astral plane and beyond that the causal realm, or plane of the soul, and it’s one of those realms you wake up in when you leave your physical body.

We say wake up, because it’s all to do with consciousness, and how expansive your consciousness is. If your consciousness recognises that there is the infinite, then when you drop the body your consciousness can include the new realm in which you find yourself. You all have had the experience of dreaming when it is vivid, vibrant and seemingly solid, but when you wake up, for a moment, the dream and the waking state seem the same, which is a little confusing. Your five senses soon bring you to realise you are in the physical realm.

In the same way as the vivid dream is real, the existence you wake up in after dropping the body is also real. In the dream you can only remember it because of your consciousness, otherwise there would simply be nothing, no experience. The consciousness is the experiencer modified by the contents of the mental body.

The astral realm is where most people return to, and there they create a reality based on what they were attached to in physical life. Depending on the contents of your mind it will either be a heaven or hell, or something in between. Just like the dream you will be able to travel anywhere, create any situation just by thinking it. It’s not that you actually create or go anywhere it’s simply you change your conscious perception making it seem as if things have changed. As far as your consciousness is concerned things have changed, which is all that matters. You are literally living in your own little world.

Now take the example of a person who is so identified with rational thought that they cannot conceive of an existence outside of the body. One day the time comes when they no longer have the body, but because their consciousness couldn’t conceive of an existence outside of the body this is still their experience. However they are fascinated that without physical constraints their mind can range far and wide. But their consciousness is still restricted to the view it had in earthly life, and they don’t know they are, so called, dead. Friends and family in the astral realm, who have a better understanding, will try and penetrate the deluded consciousness trapped in rational thought. Through a type of telepathy they inform them of their new existence, and gradually the individual can open up to the new reality.

Others on earth whose consciousness has expanded to such an extent that the light of their inner being, or soul, shines through, will experience themselves, on leaving the body, in a wisdom bliss state known as the casual plane. This is a realm without all the confusion of the astral world. The astral, as we’ve said many times before, is teeming with life at all levels of development. People with a degree of illumination can be in the causal because they know it exists, they are conscious of it. It’s as simple as that, if you are not conscious of it then for you it doesn’t exist.

If the consciousness is completely transparent it knows its true nature as being none other than one with the Creator, then it dissolves like a wave on the ocean, back into the ocean of the omnipresent absolute, never to return to creation unless at the bidding of the Creator.

For the most part those beings in the causal and astral planes will eventually take another body and return to the physical plane. The opportunity to become conscious of who you truly are is awaiting you in the material world, because this existence is full of friction, contrast and all the opposites you can think of. It is this friction that propels your expansion of consciousness, to know who you truly are. Unfortunately people all too often are mesmerised by the five senses which limits the horizon of their consciousness. Due to constricted consciousness, many human beings immediately go in search of the very experiences they know cannot last. Eventually one by one, through painful disillusionment, individuals begin to look for another answer, and really it is only those people who can hear our words. To others we don’t exist because their consciousness cannot include us, or anything beyond the material.