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A Vacation. Going through Heaven and Hell without even realising it. The World Beyond (21)
Compiling this series has been like taking a vacation, visiting locations in the Other World, feeling the different vibrations and enjoying the freedom from routine existence. The Life Beyond will be open and free like this if we know that there is nothing to be afraid of.
So let’s plunge into another refreshing account from Beyond, this time from the guide of a well-known English medium.
It is so important for you to have a clear understanding of the Law of Survival and the reality of the spirit world, as it will help you to cure or lessen your imperfections and neglectful habits while you are still in the body.
This is the reason why I am trying to explain these things to you in the hope that you may be more fortunate than I was in recognising while still in the body the importance of integrity and conscientious application in everything you do. [Albert Schweitzer's philosophy of having Reverence for Life * just about sums up this right attitude, which is also endorsed by Buddhism]. So, to return to our spirit world and my own experience: I have gone through what you call the Summerland. I have forgotten my own Chinese existence and have come now to the realization of my true spiritual identity. To explain this to you I must first of all define what I mean by spiritual wholeness. Have you ever had the experience where you have been completely conscious, aware of yourself, and yet have been unaware of your surroundings, when your environment means nothing to you whatsoever?
This is a fairly common experience in people who have not long to live, because they can and do separate themselves from their physical consciousness. They become immediately aware of a fountain of spiritual strength and power that is enabling them to effect a separation from their physical body. You may already have experienced this feeling of separateness on an occasion when you were so ill that you were not expected to live. It is not separation in any callous or careless sense, but a complete disregard, a feeling of complete serenity and peace, with no concern for anything, or awareness of people around you, with all the emotional impact removed. This very inadequately describes the sensation or awarenss of this spiritual wholeness. You are not a person in any physical sense, you are supported by something that is almost unidentifiable, you have lost your own identity without any concern or anxiety about it.
This stage of consciousness is what the spirit people call floating out. It is a kind of emerging from the pull and pressure of the physical into a true spiritual release, and for a little while you don’t really know where you are, you don’t recognize people around you and you are not concerned at all. There is no feeling of distress. It is a kind of oblivion, but a conscious oblivion.
Then you become aware – and remember I am speaking of my own personal experience – of what I can only describe as a harmonic reverberation around you, a beautiful ecstasy, which is impossible for me to put into words.
But if you can imagine yourself being wholly part of wonderful music, wonderful painting, wonderful colour and vistas of nature, this is the sensation. You feel this divine, ecstatic, unified power with such indescribable joy that you just don’t know what is happening to you. There is music and laughter, there is love, there is every quality that is of the highest and best, and your spirit responds to it. This, I suppose, is the true definition of heaven. Heaven is not in beautiful surroundings, although, of course, that is possible. Heaven is not being surrounded by people we love, although that is part of it. Heaven, real Heaven, is this indescribable unity with a divine whole that is joy and upliftment beyond description.
I cannot explain it to you any further than that, but as I try to make these words convey something, I hope you can feel youselves lifted up. I can feel the highest and best in you spiritually receiving this element of harmony that I am trying to explain.
If you could take the highest and best experience in your life and multiply it millions and billions of times, this would give you some idea of the joy of this spiritual wholeness. It is true harmony. You feel it rushing towards you, pouring through you. You are part of it. Swept up in it you revel in it – all the healing, all the love, all the compassion, forgiveness and mercy, all the grace.
There is no time in this kind of experience. Indeed, there is not time as such in the spirit life, no time as you understand the word. But one is limited to a certain extent by one’s imperfections in one’s capacity to enjoy. You enjoy this ecstasy because of those things you have done well, those things in which you have been faithful, loyal and true to yourself. The more faithfully you have fulfilled your duty here on earth so far as you knew it, the more you are able to enjoy this level of perfection.
In my own case, I found myself in this ecstatic state aware of people around me. They were not the people I had known in my earthly life, for I had lost that physical memory. The people around me were people from whom I knew I had never been separated. It is important to note this, for husband and wife are not necessarily spiritual companions: brother and sister, mother and daughter, father and son are not necessarily spiritual affinities. They are people who have agreed to walk together on the physical pathway. So, when this complete separation from the earth life take place, you will have forgotten about them as people. But, if they are for you, you will know them in their spiritual wholeness, and this will contain all the love, all the joy, all the experiences you have shared together in a previous or perhaps many previous lives.
There is no relationship as such in this fellowship, [like the group of souls Frances Banks belonged to]. In this spiritual family there are only souls responding to souls, and these harmonise as pieces [instrumental players and sections] of an orchestra harmonise. So, in part, this Heaven consists in meeting our own. It is a recognition of spiritual compatibility with those who travel with us through all Eternity. We are always attached to our particular spiritual group. Sometimes they walk beside us in the physical experiences of our earth life. Sometimes they act as spiritual guardians and help us on the way. Sometimes they act as guides as I am a guide to this particular instrument [medium]. But it does not necessarily follow that because the guide is using a particular instrument that he and the instrument are spiritually related or united, although it can be so.
So, this further extension of Heaven consists in recognizing kindred souls, in sharing this zenith, this highest possible experience of love that we can know. Naturally, the more progressed we are, the higher we have traveled on the ladder of divine progress, the more complete, the more joyous is our ecstasy. We find ourselves, then, as I found myself, among those dear beloved friends with whom we have everything in common and whom we meet in a divine fellowship. Here again also you experience activity, but it is so completely different from your physical activity that it is difficult for me to give an example without confusing you. If you can imagine doing all the things you want to do and if you can imagine the joy, if you are a creative person, that you have found in composing a piece of music, writing a poem, painting a picture or even losing yourself in the power of thought that takes you beyond the limitation of physical things, then that is something like the activity of which I am speaking…. But we do not make things with our hands, or mould things or write things physically. We develop this activity out of our love for one another, and through that love we are directed towards an activity that is relative to the spiritual experience of which we are a part, and all this experience partakes of the same harmony. We cannot on this level do anything that is irksome or difficult or which provides us with any kind of problem. Everything that we do is subject to a harmonic unity. We do everyti8ng together and share a common love and joy in everything that we do.
[In contrast] I suppose that one of the greatest trials of those who are traveling the spiritual path on earth is the increasing feeling of loneliness and separation from people around them. For as we progress we try to understand spiritual laws and to put them into practice. As a conconsequence we seem to be more and more misunderstood and ostracized by those around us, by people who are not necessarily unkind or cruel, but with whom we have nothing in common.
{To get an idea of what it is like here] reverse this picture. Instead of getting further and further away from people, imagine that every moment you are meeting more and more spiritual friends and getting closer to them. Imagine, too, that the joy, ecstasy and upliftment that this brings is one that you share together, so that it is all increased one hundred fold! That is the beautiful and lovely side – a divine and merciful compassion – and there is nothing harsh about the judgment and punishment that follows this kind of ecstasy, since both judgment and punishment are self-imposed….of your own freewill. You enjoy the unity with the God Force to the fullest extent of your capacity. The extent of your appreciation is measured by and is the result of the laws you have obeyed, your integrity and your faithfulness, and you absorb and enjoy it to the level to which you are entitled.
To return to my own experience, after the wondersful and really indescribable happiness and upliftment that I had so recently been enjoying, I was aware of a most frightful desolate anguish within myself. I felt utterly alone. After all the joy and light and colour and love, it was as if I were suddenly surround by twilight, and I called out for help – What has happened? Where am I? And immediately my particular guides were there. But they were quite detached as they explained to me that I was now experiencing the imperfections of my most recent life, and how these imperfections separated me from Divine unity. Of course, I could not appreciate this until I saw exactly what these imperfections were.
I was shown this by being taken to a place, quite alone, which was very like a life-size television screen. On it I was shown from beginning to end the whole of my most recent life, every shade and every nuance of experience, the results of my thoughts and neglects, and all the people these things had affected. How can I tell you or describe my sensations during that frightful ordeal? Everything was shown to me and I saw how easily I could have avoided this or that, how simple it would have been to hold out a helping hand here or there, how easy it would have been if I had made myself find time for that? I wanted to weep, and could not. Most people have to sit through this record of their lives two or three times, because they cannot take it all at once. As you become more evolved this repetition becomes less necessary, but I think I sat through mine three or four times.
For me, the first time when I had finished reviewing, I could not walk and had to be carried. For although we can glide, hover or move with the speed of thought on the plane to which we belong, and do not have your limitations, our spirit world is nevertheless solid to us and we often walk around, just as you do. My guardians took me to a Hall of Healing. I do not think I slept in the physical sense, but was in a kind of oblivion. The spiritual skin which had been torn away by my recent experience gradually reformed and I was made whole, rather like burned skin being replaced. For I had been literally stripped by the experience and left defenceless. During this period of oblivion and healing you are aware of people talking to you and advising you. First of all you have to seek forgiveness from all those whom you have harmed. These people, like yourself, are not always ready to give you this because they still have to progress. They are not present with you, but your mind is in touch with their minds, and you are speaking to them - acknowledging that you pained them in this way or that. If they can forgive you, you are indeed fortunate, because that particular shortcoming has been healed in love and your debt has been paid.
I was forgiven by those in the spirit world whom I had harmed, and I in turn had offered my forgiveness to those who had injured me, thereby mitigating and expiating many of my own shortcomings and neglects. But there were still people upon the earth plane whom I had harmed by my attitude and who had not yet followed me into the spirit world.
The saying that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children not only means physical diseases, it has a spiritual implication. If I had harmed a father and his child suffered in consequence, then my debt is to the child who is still upon the earth plane and to his son and grandson, if what I had done affected them in the slightest degree. So there were those I had left behind, whom I had harmed in this thoughtless and selfish way, and I had to deal with this problem. It was not any good asking their forgiveness, because they did not understand. So I had to find a way to pay my debt directly to them.
This exlains why we work so hard and diligently to try to bring enlightenment and understanding to you, while you are still in your earth life. It is by trying with diligent, loyal and faithful service to prevent you from falling into the pitfalls that WE have fallen into, that we are able to save you from making the same mistakes.
I had come into the Astral plane [close to the earth plane] and was taught how to hang about there - there is no other word for it - and try to get my thoughts to the person whom I had wronged or who had been subsequently affected by my actions. I had to try to get them to respond to the help I was offering them.
Every time they found life too hard and every time my strength and power reached them, something of my faults were washed away. So, because only to the extent of the debts that we owe are we expected to respond, gradually the debts were paid. Here, there was no question of forgiveness being withheld, because the persons concerned did not know, so I had to rely upon their ability to take my help and to act upon it, which can only be done through their aura.
So you can see what a hard, uphill jouney this returning to spiritual perfection can be. Gradually I paid my debts and gradually I was restored because, as these imperfections became less and less, as the debts became reduced to a minimum, so the spiritual light of love and fellowship began to pour back into me and I was restored. It is rather like your parable of the Prodigal Son. So this is your Heaven and Hell and nobody can expiate your crimes except you yourself. If those you have wronged are spiritually awakened so that they are able to forgive, you are indeed fortunate, but even so, there will be certain repercussions over which they have no power or control, and these you must bear for yourselves. Then we can re-enter this state of perfect Bliss to enjoy what this last incarnation has earned us in terms of spiritual evolution towards unity.
Reviewed and condensed from part of one of three trance talks given through the mediumship of Ivy Northage by her guide Chan. The complete talks are availible in book form under the title "Journey Beyond," Psychic Press Ltd;, London, 1972. First published under the title "Journey Into Spirit."
* Read Schweitzer's auntobiography or any of his other books for this, and compare his point of view with the writings of the present Dalai Lama. There is remarkable correspondence of thought.
My comments [within square brackets]. Richard R.
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