The soul chooses three very prominent experiences that form the basis for the next life. These form the basis for the physical life, for the emotional life, and for what is called the etheric body: the form life really. …
Robert: Welcome to Inner Sight. Inner sight is simply seeing that which is always present, but not yet fully recognized. You have within you the ability to see yourself and the world around you in a new way with new eyes, so stay with us, and together we’ll look at the world and ourselves with inner sight. Our theme for today is life and death, part two. All of the work of Lucis Trust comes from the founder, Alice Bailey, who wrote twenty-four volumes of spiritual literature. I more or less look at it as spiritual philosophy, and all of the dialogue that you hear emanates from those works as does the following thought: “Death is only an interlude in a life of steadily accumulating experience. It marks a definite transition from one state of consciousness into another.” Well, I think that’s a wonderful thought because can you imagine how free from fear we would be if we could eliminate our fear of death, and according to this thought by Alice Bailey, there really is no death. This view of death is quite different from the common view that death is a complete and total end to life. What does Alice Bailey mean by “accumulating experience”?
Sarah: I think she’s referring to the building up of karma, both good and bad, that accumulates from life to life, if you believe in the doctrine of rebirth or reincarnation. I think more and more people do, not only in the East where it originated, but in the West. George Gallup’s organization has done a survey of American people’s views on reincarnation and has found that a huge percentage——well over half the people—believe that we live again; we are reborn. This accumulation of experience is what happens as the soul incarnates and then discards the body and then returns to birth repeatedly. We are born and die and are born again, over and over again. We’re experts at it without knowing it. We’re experts at the process of birth and death, but for some mysterious reason, there’s a forgetting so that most people don’t carry over that memory of having lived before. Probably there’s some very benign purpose for that, in that it focuses our attention wholly on the present and it makes us give this particular lifetime our fullest and best effort, and that’s probably right and good. But death in the spiritual sense is just an interlude between lives and it’s said that at the time of death, the soul makes a review of its life and stores up a few significant experiences. If we thought about storing up treasures for the soul’s purpose, rather than storing up treasures to bequeath to our children, like material wealth, what a difference it would make in how we go about living our lives. We think we want to leave behind a great deal of wealth, but there’s the spiritual wealth that we leave behind, too, and that we carry with us into the next lifetime.
Dale: Yes, as you said once before there’s the old saying, “we can’t take it with us,” but in fact, we do take our experiences with us.
Sarah: We drag them along, you might say. (laughter)
Dale: Some of those experiences, I think, become the basis for the next life because they become the foundation for the next experience and the next life.
Sarah: Building blocks, I guess.
Dale: I think that’s the whole purpose; we wouldn’t have the intelligence that we have today—most of us—if it weren’t something that we had gained in the past, in previous lifetimes. This is clarified in the writings of Alice Bailey. This is one of the reasons why we have geniuses. They are the result, in fact, of many lives of accumulated experience along a particular line of study, like a genius in mathematics or in music, or in playing the violin. We have these prodigies that suddenly appear on the scene at age five and they’ve got all this experience. They pick up a violin as if they’re old hands at it, and that’s exactly true. They brought over that whole experience from previous lifetimes, and it’s been accumulating and they build on it with each new life.
Sarah: What an interesting thought to think of each of us in the process of perfecting certain treasures, certain gifts to the world through our experience in each lifetime. There’s actually an evening review technique along this line. The evening review is what many people do before they go to sleep at night. They look back upon their day and they trace effects or events back to originating causes that set those events in motion. It’s a way of taking an account and marking the most significant aspects of the day. It’s also said to be what the soul does at the end of a life. It makes a lifetime review. You know how people that have almost died, people that were parachuting and their parachute didn’t open and they say, “my life passed before my eyes”–apparently that happens to everyone at the moment of death; they review their life. Well, you can review your day, and there are techniques suggested; one is that you look for an element of beauty in your life that day. Ask yourself: “What beauty came into my life today?” If you look for that and try to identify it, you might be surprised at how much beauty there is. Even in the midst of a very routine day, there was an element of beauty.
Dale: It’s these lovely moments and very significant moments that happen in our lifetimes that are registered and recorded by the soul and those are the ones that we take with us.
Sarah: I suppose the soul can’t store them up if we don’t pay attention to them, because we are the soul and so our taking note of these events, these treasures, is a way of anchoring them for posterity.
Dale: The soul has a plan for each life, and in fact as I understand it, it plans ahead several lives. It knows which of these experiences to build on because it uses each of these little experiences to provide the foundation for the next, and if it fits in with the plans of the soul, then everything is on course. So, it does matter how we conduct our lives because these little experiences that we go through tend to be very significant.
Robert: It’s an interesting idea about genius. Am I correct in thinking that perhaps Mozart who was playing symphonies at three years old might be an example of what you’re talking about?
Dale: Yes, Mozart is a good example of the genius that’s been through that before, many times.
Robert: So, his genius really came from several lifetimes?
Dale: I would say so.
Robert: Interesting. What do we mean by Ageless Wisdom, and also what does the Ageless Wisdom say happens after death?
Sarah: The Ageless Wisdom is that body of spiritual teaching that has been with humanity from the dawn of time. Even before recorded history, this teaching was passed on from generation to generation, always in a form that was suitable to the time. That teaching has continued to be available to humanity, even up to present times. I think the earliest written record was found in the ancient Vedas of early India, which formed the fundamental aspect of Hinduism, and the Upanishads which I believe are the most esoteric, most rarefied elements of that teaching. It runs through all the world’s religions. There is this thread of gold, this continuity that links all religions, but at the same time transcends them, and that’s what is known collectively as the Ageless Wisdom. The Ageless Wisdom says a great deal about what happens after death. From the writings of Alice Bailey, there is a compilation that we published about fifteen years ago of extracts taken from all her twenty-four books on the process of death. It’s called Death the Great Adventure. What does the Ageless Wisdom say happens after death? Well, it’s a process that has many stages and is progressive. Just because you’ve died, say, yesterday doesn’t mean that that’s your final state after death. It continues to develop, as I understand, as the soul cuts its links with the various bodies and moves into more abstracted states of being. I feel kind of strange talking about it, because it’s so mysterious, but you can give it a shot.
Dale: Well, all I remember is from what I read in the books of Alice Bailey and she’s laid out quite a lot of detail about what happens. One of the things is what we’ve mentioned previously—the life review that happens. In fact, one of the people on a cassette tape that we offer on the near-death experience mentioned that she had a life review, and she described it as like a movie reel but going very fast. That’s one of the things that one encounters and another is where their whole life is laid out in front of them like a map. We mentioned about the experiences that form the basis for the next life and how the soul chooses three very prominent experiences. These form the basis for the physical life, for the emotional life, and for what is called the etheric body: the form life really.
Sarah: But what about the mind? Isn’t that one of the three experiences: the essence of the mind in the future life?
Dale: It could be included in that, yes, but specifically those three permanent experiences. They’re called three seeds or germs of the future.
Sarah: And everything else is forgotten, I think.
Dale: Right, all the minor points.
Sarah: Quite a blessing.
Dale: Yes, you don’t carry all of that baggage with you. It’s just the major things that the soul wants to build on which fit into the plans of the soul for the next life. Then also there’s one other thing that one runs into—and this depends on where one’s consciousness lies— but you tend to run into those that have passed over. Your friends and your loved ones might be there to greet you, so that’s also part of the after-death experience.
Robert: I can’t help but remember Emily Dickinson’s poem on death: “Because I could not stop for Death,” meaning that she had some unfinished business, but death stopped for her. So, who or what controls the time of death?
Sarah: I think we could say “We do,” in the sense that we the soul decide our time of death. That might surprise people because we’re so used to thinking death comes unbidden and kind of out of the blue, but in fact, some level of our being, our higher self, knows our time and our life plan and knows when we’re through and knows when it’s time to make an exit. It’s implied in the writings of Alice Bailey that in the future human beings will have a stronger sense of that timing of their higher nature, their soul, and I think that would be a wonderful thing to know how many days are left. Our days are numbered, it’s said; it would be nice to know, I would think, how much time we have left. I personally don’t like the idea of an unpredictable future, but maybe other people take comfort in that, I don’t know. In any case, death in most cases is a matter of the will of the soul. There are accidents that take people’s lives, it’s said in the Ageless Wisdom—acts of natural disasters and war that get in the way of the soul’s plan—but for most people it’s the will of the soul. It has to do with cycles and with the great spiritual law of periodicity, which is a fancy way of referring to the cycles that govern incarnation and the relinquishing of the body through death and the return.
Dale: Yes, we mentioned earlier that death really occurs when the consciousness departs and also when the life thread that connects us with God is severed.
Sarah: That’s in the heart, isn’t it? The life thread—this is an important matter—is anchored in the heart, not in the brain.
Dale: Right. The consciousness.
Sarah: There’s this big debate over whether if you’re brain dead that means you’re dead, or whether your heart has died means you‘re dead.
Dale: Well, there are two threads that have to be severed and one is anchored in the brain, which operates the consciousness and then the life thread which is attached to the heart centre—not the physical heart but the heart centre in the etheric body. The soul at the moment of death severs this life thread and that’s when there is no coming back because there’s no more attachment or any possible reattachment to the physical body. You mentioned accidents, but also there is this whole question of suicide, too, which takes the control away from the soul. The individual personality interrupts that soul’s plan, and one of the bad things about suicide is that it interrupts the plans which the soul has for that particular life.
Sarah: Then the soul has to go through all this fuss and bother of returning in a future incarnation to the same circumstances, because you pick up where you left off. You don’t make any progress by ending your life early.
Dale: No, in fact you slow up your progress by suicide.
Robert: So, you’re saying that karma has to be dealt with?
Sarah: Yes, there’s no evading it. This whole problem of suicide is one that’s so troublesome and causes so much suffering to the people that are left behind. I don’t mean to imply in any way a harsh judgement of people who commit suicide. They must suffer awfully. It’s just that there’s no—what is it in monopoly? There’s no passing go—well, you have to go through every step, you can’t just jump for home. Maybe in the future lifetime those who have committed suicide develop a bit more strength or resiliency and work through the problems that defeated them in this incarnation; we always get another chance.
Dale: There is of course the whole question of—I don’t know if we need to get into this but— euthanasia at a very old age or when someone is experiencing a horrendous disease and they know there’s no longer any hope, then perhaps in that case a suicide or an assisted departure is okay.
Sarah: Well, that’s a modern problem. I don’t think in early times we ever talked about euthanasia. Death came early for most people; it’s just that now medical science can prolong bodies long past the will of the soul, quite likely.
Robert: The Alice Bailey writings do suggest that the fear of death will lessen in the not-too-distant future. What do you think she meant by that?
Sarah: Well, it’s implied in her writings that within the next century there will be a greater connection between this life and the afterlife through developments in modern science. We don’t know what she meant, but there are some experiments underway with computers and radio waves that are seemingly resulting in contacts with other realms of life, but I know very little about it and I probably shouldn’t even suggest it, I know so little. There was a comment that I heard a friend of mine pass on that I think relates to this question about the fear of death. This was about a nurse at Hospice and he told her, as her husband was dying, that it had been his experience that we die the same way we lived. That we tend to pass out of incarnation in a way that is along the line of our temperament that we demonstrated while we lived. The fighters probably go through a terrible struggle when they die and the people who are more accepting and easygoing and accommodating probably make a more general transition. That relates to a comment by Leonardo da Vinci that I came across where he said, “While I thought I was learning how to live, in fact I was learning how to die.” We prepare for our death by every day that we live on Earth. If we thought of it that way, that we are in the midst of an endless process that is at every stage a creative process because we’re creating the future out of our reactions and our choices today, including our pending death. If we realized that, I think we would give a lot more care to the circumstances we’re in at the moment.
Dale: I think that the fear of death will probably begin to break down and break through what they call the veil. It will begin to sever and create rents in the veil that keeps us from understanding what goes on, on the other side and that life is really much more vivid and alive on the other side of the veil, in the other dimensions, than it is in this physical world. We have the view of life and death that is kind of opposite from what it truly is, in reality. I mean, we see this as a joyous place but to the soul it’s kind of a prison.
Sarah: That reminds me of the comment by Alice Bailey, that the real struggle, the real death is when the soul comes into incarnation at birth, enters into a little body that weighs about seven pounds and is so limited and handicapped in what it can do; that’s death! It’s an act of sacrifice for the soul to come into incarnation and an act of liberation to be freed from that body.
Dale: That’s why to the soul going through the death process is a liberation and a joyous event.
Sarah: Maybe that’s why I cried for the first six months. (laughter) There’s a wonderful comment that maybe we could close with from the Bhagavad Gita that I think should assure us all. It says, “If it is certain, as it is, that all men have been born, so it’s certain that all men must die. Therefore, why grieve and fret over the inevitable and unavoidable? Know thou that there never was a time when I, nor thou, nor any of these Princes of Earth, was not, nor shall there ever come a time, hereafter, when any of us shall cease to be.”
Robert: That’s about all the time we have for our discussion today. You have been listening to Inner Sight. Now we would like to close with the world prayer called the Great Invocation. It’s a call for light and love and goodwill to flow into the world and into our hearts. Let’s listen for a moment to these powerful words.
Sarah: Closes the program by reciting the adapted version of the Great Invocation.
(This is an edited transcript of a recorded radio program called “Inner Sight.” This conversation was recorded between the host, Robert Anderson, and the then President and Vice-President of Lucis Trust, Sarah and Dale McKechnie.)
(Transcribed and edited by Carla McLeod)
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