Feb 26, 201911 min read

The Folly of Avoiding Death

Let’s get personal for a little while, and discuss a matter which will affect each and every one of us one day. And perhaps more than once, vicariously through our family members, loved ones, pets, co-workers, acquaintances, perhaps even complete strangers. Death affects us all sooner or later. We are not referring merely to metaphysical death in this instance–although of course that too is a thing, and many of our previous posts have touched on it more than once (the death of our many egos; it is fundamental to the AUM of Life and of Psychology). In this instance we focus mainly on physical death which is–despite the best efforts of many, including so-called spiritual and religious people who have convinced themselves otherwise–is very much a thing. If you are among them: the sad, sorry souls who are sure that death isn’t real and will never affect them, then please read carefully, for this post is very much for your sake, and the sake of your loved ones who might one day have to carry the burden of your insolence and ignorance when the bell finally tolls for thee. So get ready, because it’s about to get VERY personal, indeed.

Beloved reader, as you may or may not know, we have been relatively quiet these past few weeks because we have been focused on a dying loved one, our terrestrial mother, facing a very aggressive cancer. How aggressive? she was only diagnosed 6 weeks prior to this article being written–stage 4 metastasized kidney cancer. It had spread from her kidneys throughout her body before she had time to even develop any symptoms. She has been admitted to hospital on more than one occasion since that time, and has presented signs of rapid deterioration and even permanent life-altering symptoms (like temporarily losing the power of speech) all of which point to the fact that ‘the writing is on the wall,’ for her. (As tempting as it may be to do so, we are NOT going to get into the whole quandary of Western Medicine, cancer, alternative treatments, etc. All that is completely irrelevant in this case for a number of reasons which we will not be discussing at this time.) As we witness her husband, our birth father, falling into despair and anxiety at the imminent loss of his wife of 50+ years, we are compelled to speak with you, a member of our extended CELESTIAL FAMILY, on the topic of DEATH, specifically, on the folly of avoiding death.

Let us first clear up the blatant misconception among many so-called spiritual people and groups that death isn’t real; that it is only an illusion, a transformation, a release, and countless other euphemisms, theories, rationalizations and other death-defying cases of spiritual bypassing. Death is absolutely real, and is a phenomenon we must all face at least once per lifetime (and if we are fortunate enough, many many times per lifetime in the form of psychological death: the death of our many egos… Fear, anger, greed, envy, lust et al). Death is one of the three factors of evolution and revolution of the consciousness: death (of our egos), birth (of our human soul) and sacrifice (for others). The pseudo-spiritual / New Age belief that death doesn’t exist is based in FEAR. It is construct based in the desire for comfort and security which attempts to AVOID an essential aspect of spiritual advancement. And what could possibly be the harm in that?

We are living witnesses of the tremendous suffering our parents are living through because they had not taken the time to prepare themselves for the inevitable…their own death and the death of their spouse. Now they, each in their own way, are facing the anguish of egos who fear death above all things. Neither can find peace with their present situation and the burden of having to cope with the imminent loss of life which is causing our mother a great deal of suffering and our father deep-down subconscious trauma to the point where he is experiencing chills and shakes. Understand that these symptoms are NOT of his volition or cognition. They are NOT psychosomatic, imagined or illusory in the strictest sense. Both parents are enduring very real suffering, and it is far too late for either to do anything to prevent it–it’s too late.

Still believe death isn’t real? Or it is only a beautiful transformation? Or some such New Age nonsense? The egos within our parents reacting to the imminent loss of life in the family are not reacting to nothing. They are reacting to the realities surrounding a fundamental aspect of reality at the level of three-dimensional being. Nothing is permanent. Everything DIES.

The body DIES. The personality DIES. And even though our egos, which are very attached to this lifetime, do not die upon our physical death, they nonetheless fear death because of ATTACHMENTS–to the body, personality, friends, family, possessions, et al. They are going to lose the vehicle by which they enslave our consciousness; in many ways they lose their slave (us) which they live vicariously through, and through which they execute their programming (desire). Ego is Latin for “I”… So our many egos, our countless I’s all identify with this body, mind, personality, etc. And they panic. Not only at the thought of their own death, but at the prospect of losing a loved one, a pet, even a precious possession. Observe yourself; retrospect on a time in your life when you faced the loss of something or someone precious to you: you know this to be true.

Let us be clear: the complete death of the body and personality is not immediate. It takes time. The personality decomposes just as the body does. This is what people experience as “ghosts.” Residual personalities which “haunt” the etheric plane can be occasionally seen and/or photographed. Some clairvoyants can see them all the time. It is advisable to be cremated for the simple reason that ghosts have far less to cling to if the physical body has been turned to dust. As for what fuels ghosts, the answer is simple: attachment; attention; legend; cults of personality. The ghost of Elvis Presley haunts Graceland because it has NO IDEA it is dead. With tens of thousands of Elvis impersonators, millions of visitors, and hundreds of millions of fans, the ‘etheric shadow’ of Elvis’s personality is constantly re-energized, believing it is alive and well, still on tour, still performing, still eliciting the love and adulation of an adoring public.

What of the mind and heart of Elvis? What of his spirit? His immortal soul? It is quite possible that it, too, is still trapped in the personality. With the cult of Elvis still very much alive and well, it is most likely his Monad (Divine Soul) is lost in the Lunar Astral Plane (lower 5th dimension) dreaming itself still alive, still performing, etc). We’ll leave it to you to awaken in the Astral Plane and go make your own investigations to confirm what we have shared here is true.

So this brings us to the crux of this post. Are WE prepared for death? Let’s face the facts: none of us know when the bell may toll for us. Don’t believe us? Our mother was diagnosed with stage four metastasized cancer just over ONE MONTH AGO. How many people have befallen sudden accidental death? Or even violent death? The victims of murder often haunt houses for decades. Why? Because they never prepared themselves for death. For them, the sudden and violent means by which they crossed over was anything but a rainbows and unicorns…neither “transformation” nor “liberation.” They were suddenly and perhaps violently ripped from a physical vessel and corporeal existence to which they are still very much attached. Consequently, they remain trapped in the illusion of life as a result of never having meditated on the nature of death–of death in general, and their own death specifically.

We must prepare for the inevitable. It is important to study everything we know about the nature of death beginning with the Bardo (or in-between state), the Lunar Astral Plane (lower fifth dimension), the Solar Astral Plan (upper fifth dimension), Causal Plane (sixth dimension), and what we must do while we are still alive in order to get to the superior dimensions after we die. If we do not, we will simply not reach those superior levels.

The fact is, if we dream when we go to sleep (or worse, can’t remember our dreams) that revels a great deal about where we go when we die. The dreamscape is the LUNAR Astral Plane. If we are able to fall asleep and remain awake (also called lucid dreaming), that means in those moments we are in possession of our Solar Astral body and can travel freely in the upper fifth dimension of the Astral Plane. However, it doesn’t mean we are “awake” fully, yet. In order to be truly awake, we in the Causal Plane (the SIXTH dimension), we must be in possession of our solar CAUSAL BODY. You hear a lot of people talk about 5D in spiritual circles, as though the astral plane was the sum total of the internal worlds, but you NEVER hear them talk about 6D. The reason is they know nothing about it. They are not awake nor enlightened. They have not even fully formed their solar astral body, let alone their solar causal body. How we go about creating our solar bodies is the process of sexual Alchemy, a topic beyond the scope of this discussion. Suffice it to say, until we are in possession of both (until we create our HUMAN SOUL and achieve union with our Monad), at ANY POINT in our astral travels, be it during sleep or after death, we can fall from the SOLAR astral plane into the LUNAR astral plane AND NOT KNOW IT.

Our consciousness falls back asleep, just as we do in our waking hours. We’ve all experienced it: one minute we are fully conscious and awake, the next minute we find ourselves being carried away by a string of thoughts, fantasies, etc. There’s a reason why we call it daydreaming, and why the present plight of this humanity has been characterized by the allegory known as the zombie apocalypse.

What About Near-Death Experiences?

What about them? They are as varied and deliberately orchestrated for the people experiencing them as there are people who have had them. Yes, certainly, many have afforded individuals some beautiful mystical experience of pure love, peace, joy, etc. But that is simply the characteristic state of the bardo, or in-between state. When one studies the Tibetan or Egyptian Books of the Dead, one discovers prayers intended to be recited by priests, monks, and loved ones of the departed specifically written to offer guidance to the soul of the deceased in navigating the bardo. In addition, when we consider the various ‘heavenly’ experiences many have had, we must recognize that many may have earned a karmic ‘holiday,’ upon death. That is, they may not be awake, and certainly nowhere near being Self-realized, but they might be on the right track, moving in the direction of awakening, and thus are given a little glimpse into the existence they are working toward–a short reprieve from the lifetime of suffering they just endured in the form of a brief visit to Nirvana. But that’s all it is: a visit. They have not yet earned the right to stay–they are not yet a buddha.

Unfortunately, the ego-mind is a clever and subtle slaver. Although NDEs often lead atheists and others not on the path to awakening to begin pursuing a spiritual life; they have the opposite effect on many believers and aspirants who either reinforce erroneous beliefs about the afterlife or decide their work is done, since their NDE showed them a glimpse of heaven. Some NDEs involve a simple out-of-body experience, in which the person is still very much entangled with their personality, giving them a wholly problematic impression of what the afterlife is like. Regardless, the majority of people who have had NDEs count them as profound life-altering experiences. How exactly those experiences change them for the better depends on their capacity to discern the pure experience itself, their intuitions about the significance of said experience, and the erroneous narratives and beliefs their ego-mind is try to weave around those experiences. This is as true for those having had NDEs as it is for any aspirant having had any significant spiritual experience. We must always be cognizant and on-guard that our egos (particularly mystic pride) do not weave elaborate beliefs around profound kernels of Truth, lest we become utterly hypnotized and attached to said beliefs, since the experience/Truth on which they are based is so compelling and profoundly resonates with us. We have made a video on this very real danger:

So how do I prepare for death?

In a word? MEDITATE. Using the most powerful formula for meditation there is…

Relax
Concentrate
Visualize
Pray

Enter into meditation and visualize your own death. See yourself lying on a slab in the morgue, or in a coffin surrounded by loved ones, or in some surreal composite scene. You don’t have to be morbid about it; and you certainly don’t have to be neurotic about it. We are NOT suggesting you visualize yourself dying of chronic disease, being shot, hacked to pieces by an angry machete-wielding mob, or even mangled in a terrible car-accident. The purpose of meditating on death is not to predict how or when we die (or even to concern ourselves with such details). The purpose is to prepare our consciousness for the inevitability of death–to sit peacefully with the eventual reality of our own death…”I am dead…” so that we can move on without any attachments, without getting lost, remaining entangled in our personality, etc.

Second, and this perhaps goes without saying given our lengthy discussion about sleep and dreaming, is to awaken, consciously. Yes, this includes practicing Astral Projection and Dream Yoga but it will also involve sexual alchemy: preservation and transmutation of the sexual force to create the solar bodies–the solar astral body, the solar mental body and eventually even the solar causal body. These are what are needed to be fully present and awake at the moment of one’s death, so as to be able to ascend to the higher dimensions of the internal worlds (the supernal worlds) instead of descending into the lower dimensions (the infernal worlds). Put another way, we want to always be working on the level of our being.

Level of Being

The sum total of our lives can be calculated and graphed as a function of level of consciousness over time. The one being our line of being, the other the line of life.

Line of Being and Line of Life

It is actually quite elementary when you consider it. Based on our actions and level of wakefulness, we go up or down as we progress through our life. However, the key her is wakefulness: are we aware of our level of being? If not, how do we expect to make real progress? Yes, the line of life ‘progresses’ regardless of our being awake or dreaming, but progression is not the same as (nor does it guarantee) progress, especially not spiritual progress…the level of being.

Therefore, if we really want a radical change, the first thing we must understand is that each one of us (whether black or white, yellow or brunette, ignorant or erudite, etc.), is at one “Level of Being” or another. What is our Level of Being? Have you ever reflected upon this? It would be impossible to pass into another level if we ignore the level in which we presently are. Samael Aun Weor, Treatise of Revolutionary Psychology

All the actions of our life should be the result of an equation and an exact formula in order for the possibilities of the mind and the functionalisms of understanding to surge forth. Samael Aun Weor, The Revolution of the Dialectic

And this is where we come full circle to the topic at hand: death. For the key to maximizing the level of being in life (in preparation for our death) is to undergo death while we are still alive (experience psychological death; that is, death of our egos).

Psychological (Metaphysical) Death

It’s precisely our egos (fear, anger, lust, greed, pride, et al) which lower our level of being. Since, in death, we are concerned with increasing our level of being, it is death which we must embrace while we are still alive. In other words, we must die BEFORE WE DIE. And that, of course, refers to psychological death (the death of our egos). So much has been written on this subject which we could share. However, because it is part of our mission and purpose to SIMPLIFY matters and strip away as much religious baggage from the picture as possible, we offer our video on The AUM of Psychology here as a good first step in understanding and beginning to practice the process.