Death and Dying, A Spiritual Perspective
by Kevin Core, 2006
Page 5 of 8
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Let us talk now about the Underworld. I will talk about the Egyptian concept of this as it is probably the most well-known. The Underworld is a representation of your own subconscious mind. As you take your last breath, you enter a consciousness state where you review your whole life, so everything you have done in that life you are now faced with. This is not myth it is an actuality; it is real! Every spiritual tradition, over the many thousands of years, has always represented the journey through the underworld in the same way. Some of these traditions have been many thousands of miles apart, with no physical contact at all, and yet, they perceive the same archetypes that have to be tackled on this journey through the unconscious.
So at the moment of death you will undergo a journey into your own subconscious mind where you are faced with the contemplation of the decisions that you made in that lifetime, and the consequences of those decisions. In some of the spiritual traditions there is an aspect of judgment of the being that is making the journey, and to some degree this is true. The judgment comes from that part of you who projected itself into the 3-D reality to create the personality that we perceive ourselves to be here.
In the Egyptian tradition these are gods or archetypes of consciousness that one adopts in order to assess that lifetime. A process is undertaken whereby the heart of the dying person is weighed against a feather. What does this mean? What it means is that if the heart of the person leaving incarnation has any attachment to the third dimensional plane it will weigh down the heart. Things that can do this are attachment to material pleasures, to lower astral emotional desires, and to pleasures that the physical body can bring. The whole process of passing through the underworld is the releasing of the attachment to the third dimensional plane.
The service to ourselves of walking a spiritual path in this lifetime is the realization of the attachment we are encouraged to make to material pleasures, and the illusion of those attachments. Through walking this path in this lifetime you are already preparing yourself for the journey through the veils to achieve realization on the 5th dimensional plane.
In the spiritual tradition of the West, through Christianity, all references to walking through an underworld realm have been stripped away from the teaching. All that remains is Psalm 23 which states “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, yet shall I fear no ill”.
Yet at the time of Jesus, and through the spiritual tradition of the Hebrews, all the detail about the journey through the underworld was known. So why is there no reference to it in our Bible? It is as if somebody wished us to be totally ignorant about the process, and because of this there is so much fear anchored into humanity through death.
So what is this process of death and dying?
The process is actually divided into two parts. One is called the long death, and the other is called the short death.
The long death starts when a call is issued from a person’s soul to withdraw from the physical vehicle and return home. This immediately sets up an interior process and reaction whereby various chemical changes occur, and certain shifts in consciousness are activated to prepare the person for withdrawal. The timescale involved in this can be many years, a few months, or even a few weeks.
The short death involves a period of seven days. The first three days lead up to the day whereby the person will take his last breath on that day. On the fourth day the person takes his last breath. For the remaining three days the person then withdraws from the physical/etheric body and travels the path of return.
Why seven days?
The reason is that seven is an archetype of creation. In the Bible the world was created in seven days. In any one moment your consciousness is spanning seven days. In the now moment, where you are reading this article, is the fourth day. Your consciousness is projecting from this moment, three days into your possible future; and at the same time it is withdrawing from the three days of your past from this moment. So in any one moment your consciousness is spanning three days either side of the day you find yourself in now.
To give an example of this! How many of you reading this article have found yourselves approaching a holiday and as you get closer to the date of your departure you find yourself finding it harder and harder to focus on your everyday reality. So if you were at work, as your last day approaches, you find it more and more difficult to concentrate on the job in hand, until on the last day before you go, concentration on work is virtually impossible. Why is this? The reason being that three days before your departure date a part of you had already set out on the trip. On the second day more of you has left, until by the third day there is not a lot of you actually hear.
Of course this also works in the reverse. When you are on holiday, it can take you anything up to three days before you actually let go of your life and work back at home before you start to really enjoy your holiday. As you begin to approach you’re leaving date to return home, you find yourself thinking more and more about what you will have to face when you get back. You start to latch-in to the problems you feel you will have to face when you return back to work or home. Again, this is because three days before your departure date you start to return home in consciousness. This is a cosmic archetype of consciousness.
Therefore, as you sit in the room reading this article your consciousness is actually spanning seven days and this is one of the keys to the understanding of manifestation, of bringing what you wish into your life in any one moment.
This is also the key to understanding the process of death, of withdrawing from the physical body. So a person who is dying goes through the process over seven days, takes seven days to die, to leave this incarnation on the third dimensional plane. There are three days that lead up to the day where they take their last breath. On the day before they take their last breath, whether that person has had a serious illness, or had an illness which has affected their consciousness, such as senility; on the day before they die they appear as normal as they ever were before they had the illness. I am talking here very generally.
They appear to be normal, without pain, in very good spirits, very animated and willing to chat in a very good humour. Everybody who is around them, their family and friends, are amazed and feel that a miracle has happened. However, this state may continue for about 12 hours, but soon after the person then lapses into a state of unconsciousness. Then, again very generally, that person will remain in that state for another 12 hours leading up to them taking their last breath.
It is here that I wish to emphasize that although the person has taken their last breath physically they have not necessarily left the physical body. The process of abstraction from the physical body can take another three days. Their consciousness is still attached to the physical body for a further three days.
It is said that a person who has taken their last breath and is in the process of detaching from the physical body, will be called back to that physical body at the same time they took their last breath, on each of the successes three days following the day they took their last breath.
In many of the spiritual traditions, including the Buddhist, a person who has died is not touched for three days after they have taken their last breath. This is to allow the person to complete the process of abstraction undisturbed. This is also why in the Bible, Jesus was interred for three days, and then arose again.
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