What Really Happens When We Die

Flight of the Soul

“THERE is not a mental or physical suffering in the life of a mortal which is not the direct fruit and consequence of some sin in a preceding existence.”

“On the other hand, since he does not preserve the slightest recollection of it in his actual life, and feels himself not deserving of such punishment, and therefore thinks he suffers for no guilt of his own, this alone is sufficient to entitle the human soul to the fullest consolation, rest, and bliss in his post-mortem existence.

Death comes to our spiritual selves ever as a deliverer and friend.

• H. P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy, p. 161

Collective Karma

(The Wider Track of the Karmic Law)

Prayer Wheel

In her influential work The Key to Theosophy, H. P. Blavatsky presented the following clarifying principles on this critical subject:

“HPB. According to our teaching all these great social evils, the distinction of classes in Society, and of the sexes in the affairs of life, the unequal distribution of capital and of labour—all are due to what we tersely but truly denominate KARMA.

“ENQUIRER. But, surely, all these evils which seem to fall upon the masses somewhat indiscriminately are not actual merited and INDIVIDUAL Karma?

“HPB. No, they cannot be so strictly defined in their effects as to show that each individual environment, and the particular conditions of life in which each person finds himself, are nothing more than the retributive Karma which the individual generated in a previous life.

We must not lose sight of the fact that every atom is subject to the general law governing the whole body to which it belongs, and here we come upon the wider track of the Karmic law.

The Web of Life

“Do you not perceive that the aggregate of individual Karma becomes that of the nation to which those individuals belong, and further, that the sum total of National Karma is that of the World?

“The evils that you speak of are not peculiar to the individual or even to the Nation, they are more or less universal; and it is upon this broad line of Human interdependence that the law of Karma finds its legitimate and equable issue.”

“ENQUIRER. Do I, then, understand that the law of Karma is not necessarily an individual law?

“HPB. That is just what I mean. It is impossible that Karma could readjust the balance of power in the world’s life and progress, unless it had a broad and general line of action.

It is held as a truth among Theosophists that the interdependence of Humanity is the cause of what is called Distributive Karma, and it is this law which affords the solution to the great question of collective suffering and its relief.

“It is an occult law, moreover, that no man can rise superior to his individual failings, without lifting, be it ever so little, the whole body of which he is an integral part. In the same way, no one can sin, nor suffer the effects of sin, alone. In reality, there is no such thing as ‘Separateness’; and the nearest approach to that selfish state, which the laws of life permit, is in the intent or motive.”

•  H. P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy, “What is Karma” p. 201-12

Near-death experiences have been hypothesized in various medical journals in the past, as having the characteristics of hallucinations, but Dr Ackermann and his team, on the contrary, consider them as evidence for the existence of the afterlife and of a form of dualism between mind and body.

What Really Happens When You Die

by Peter Fenwick

Peter Fenwick (born 25 May 1935) is a neuropsychiatrist and neurophysiologist who is known for his pioneering studies of end-of-life phenomena. In this interview he talks about near-death-experiences (NDE), death-bed-visitors and how we can achieve a good death. NDE research is at the cutting edge of consciousness research and offers a convincing model for the understanding of what happens when we die.

Peter Fenwick describes the different transitional phases of the dying process and highlights the importance of letting go at the end of ones life. He offers fascinating insights into common phenomena at the end of life, such as premonitions, seeing a light, death-bed-visions and coincidences. In his opinion everybody should know about death and the dying process, because it is a normal part of living.

Interviewer: Jens Rohrbeck Editor: Werner Huemer Director: Mehmet Yesilgöz © 2018 by thanatos.tv

The doctrine we promulgate being the only true one, must, supported by such evidence as we are preparing to give become ultimately triumphant as every other truth. Yet it is absolutely necessary to inculcate it gradually enforcing its theories, unimpeachable facts for those who know, with direct inferences deducted from and corroborated by the evidence furnished by modern exact science.

• The Great Master’s Letter (Excerpt)

“As Above, So Below”

A complete treatise on authentic Theosophical Teachings of
“When We Die” will be found at:

blavatskytheosophy.com

♥

Hidden Karma of the Soul: What Really Happens When We Die

Flight of the Soul

“THERE is not a mental or physical suffering in the life of a mortal which is not the direct fruit and consequence of some sin in a preceding existence.”

“On the other hand, since he does not preserve the slightest recollection of it in his actual life, and feels himself not deserving of such punishment, and therefore thinks he suffers for no guilt of his own, this alone is sufficient to entitle the human soul to the fullest consolation, rest, and bliss in his post-mortem existence.

Death comes to our spiritual selves ever as a deliverer and friend.

• H. P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy, p. 161

Collective Karma

(The Wider Track of the Karmic Law)

Prayer Wheel

In her influential work The Key to Theosophy, H. P. Blavatsky presented the following clarifying principles on this critical subject:

“HPB. According to our teaching all these great social evils, the distinction of classes in Society, and of the sexes in the affairs of life, the unequal distribution of capital and of labour—all are due to what we tersely but truly denominate KARMA.

“ENQUIRER. But, surely, all these evils which seem to fall upon the masses somewhat indiscriminately are not actual merited and INDIVIDUAL Karma?

“HPB. No, they cannot be so strictly defined in their effects as to show that each individual environment, and the particular conditions of life in which each person finds himself, are nothing more than the retributive Karma which the individual generated in a previous life.

We must not lose sight of the fact that every atom is subject to the general law governing the whole body to which it belongs, and here we come upon the wider track of the Karmic law.

The Web of Life

“Do you not perceive that the aggregate of individual Karma becomes that of the nation to which those individuals belong, and further, that the sum total of National Karma is that of the World?

“The evils that you speak of are not peculiar to the individual or even to the Nation, they are more or less universal; and it is upon this broad line of Human interdependence that the law of Karma finds its legitimate and equable issue.”

“ENQUIRER. Do I, then, understand that the law of Karma is not necessarily an individual law?

“HPB. That is just what I mean. It is impossible that Karma could readjust the balance of power in the world’s life and progress, unless it had a broad and general line of action.

It is held as a truth among Theosophists that the interdependence of Humanity is the cause of what is called Distributive Karma, and it is this law which affords the solution to the great question of collective suffering and its relief.

“It is an occult law, moreover, that no man can rise superior to his individual failings, without lifting, be it ever so little, the whole body of which he is an integral part. In the same way, no one can sin, nor suffer the effects of sin, alone. In reality, there is no such thing as ‘Separateness’; and the nearest approach to that selfish state, which the laws of life permit, is in the intent or motive.”

•  H. P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy, “What is Karma” p. 201-12

Near-death experiences have been hypothesized in various medical journals in the past, as having the characteristics of hallucinations, but Dr Ackermann and his team, on the contrary, consider them as evidence for the existence of the afterlife and of a form of dualism between mind and body.

What Really Happens When You Die

by Peter Fenwick

Peter Fenwick (born 25 May 1935) is a neuropsychiatrist and neurophysiologist who is known for his pioneering studies of end-of-life phenomena. In this interview he talks about near-death-experiences (NDE), death-bed-visitors and how we can achieve a good death. NDE research is at the cutting edge of consciousness research and offers a convincing model for the understanding of what happens when we die.

Peter Fenwick describes the different transitional phases of the dying process and highlights the importance of letting go at the end of ones life. He offers fascinating insights into common phenomena at the end of life, such as premonitions, seeing a light, death-bed-visions and coincidences. In his opinion everybody should know about death and the dying process, because it is a normal part of living.

Interviewer: Jens Rohrbeck Editor: Werner Huemer Director: Mehmet Yesilgöz © 2018 by thanatos.tv

The doctrine we promulgate being the only true one, must, supported by such evidence as we are preparing to give become ultimately triumphant as every other truth. Yet it is absolutely necessary to inculcate it gradually enforcing its theories, unimpeachable facts for those who know, with direct inferences deducted from and corroborated by the evidence furnished by modern exact science.

• The Great Master’s Letter (Excerpt)

“As Above, So Below”

A complete treatise on authentic Theosophical Teachings of
“When We Die” will be found at:

blavatskytheosophy.com

♥

A Drowning Man’s Vision of His Soul

Le Ravissement de Psyche -1895
Adolphe-William Bouguereau

THE Myth of Er is a legend that concludes Plato‘s Republic (10.614 – 10.621). The story includes an account of the cosmos and the afterlife, Wikipedia notes:

“that greatly influenced religious, philosophical, and scientific thought for many centuries.”

No one, however gross and material he might be in this life and thought, can avoid leading a double existence in reality. One life is lived in the visible universe, the other plays out in the invisible.

This is a fundamental tenet of the Theosophical Philosophy as presented by H. P. Blavatsky.

“Socratic myths describe the ascent of the soul to true knowledge,” Theosophical scholar W. T. S. Thackera says, “its communion with divine realities, and its return to enlighten mankind.”

“The order of the Dialogues is important, as the myths in them,” Thackera explains, “each representing a kind of initiation, progressively reveal new teaching and clarify the old.”

Plato and Aristotle

“Plato opens the Republic with a conversation between Socrates and his elderly friend Cephalus on the subject of death,” Thackara writes. “Cephalus wants to assure himself that, if there is an afterlife, he will be spared the sufferings of the underworld. He even quotes from one of Pindar’s odes to support his argument.

The message is clear: we are all immortal beings, and our destiny is in our own hands.

“Plato ends the Republic with the Vision of Er, as Socrates describes the spiritual warrior who is slain in battle and returns to life, physically resurrected in order to transmit the message of all saviors. (W. T. S. Thackara in Plato’s Myths and the Mystery Tradition).

“Music of The Spheres”

“Between Science and Theology is a bewildered public, fast losing all belief in man’s personal immortality, in a deity of any kind,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote in Isis Unveiled [2:593], “and rapidly descending to the level of materialism.”

Yet, she adds, “from the remotest antiquity, mankind as a whole have always been convinced of the existence of a personal spiritual entity, within the personal physical man.”

“This inner entity was more or less divine, according to its proximity to the crown — Chrestos [The Higher Self].”

Astral Body while Physical Sleeps

“It is on the indestructible tablets of the astral light that is stamped the impression of every thought we think, and every act we perform. And future events — effects of long-forgotten causes — are already delineated as a vivid picture for the eye of the seer and prophet to follow. the vast repository where the records of every man’s life as well as every pulsation of the visible cosmos are stored up for all Eternity!”

H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled [I:178]

Changing Your Face: What It’s Like to Die

Changing Your Face

According to tradition, the Buddha’s dying words were (freely translated): “all compounds are perishable.”
It was not man’s immortal spirit he meant. Rather, Buddha was pointing to the temporary physical, passionate, personal and psychic parts of us.

Our deathless spirit uses sensory and physical vehicles merely as instruments of expression in every new ly minted life.

Functionally linked those parts are temporary and are separated from each other at death. They are reduced to their primal elements, like the fuel of a fire, recycled and returned back to Universal Nature, their primal state.

The process is entirely natural, the recycling of renewable substances of evolution, of the temporal forces and materials required for an earthly body:

“Dust thou art,” states Genesis (3:19), “and unto dust thou shalt return”— referring to those perishable parts of man’s complex construction.

By contrast, in a dream, “the Spirit of man is free,” as the occult teaching of the Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad (13) declared, “and naught adheres to the Spirit.”

Death is Sleep

Mme. Blavatsky agreed with the Upanishads, and explains in the Key to Theosophy (109) that “death ever comes to our spiritual selves as a deliverer and friend.” And for the average mortal, “it will be a dream as vivid as life, and full of realistic bliss and visions.”

Even for the materialist, who, “notwithstanding his materialism, was not a bad man, the interval between the two lives will be like the unbroken and placid sleep of a child,” Blavatsky wrote.

“As the man at the moment of death has a retrospective insight into the life he has led, so, at the moment he is reborn on to earth. He has a prospective vision of the life which awaits him and realizes all the causes that have led to it.

Chasing Dreams

“He realizes them and sees futurity, because it is between [the bliss filled after-death dream state called] Devachan and re-birth, that the Ego regains his full [spiritual mind] manasic consciousness, and re-becomes for a short time the god he was —before he first descended into matter and incarnated in flesh, in compliance with Karmic law.”

“The ‘golden thread’ sees all its ‘pearls’ and misses not one of them.” – H. P. Blavatsky

“I repeat it: death is sleep. After death, before the spiritual eyes of the soul begins a performance according to a programme learnt and very often unconsciously composed by ourselves: the practical carrying out of correct beliefs or of illusions which have been created by ourselves. The Methodist will be Methodist, the Mussulman a Mussulman, at least for some time — in a perfect fool’s paradise of each man’s creation and making.

Fools Paradise

“These are the post-mortem fruits of the tree of life. Naturally, our belief or unbelief in the fact of conscious immortality is unable to influence the unconditioned reality of the fact itself, once that it exists; but the belief or unbelief in that immortality as the property of independent or separate entities, cannot fail to give colour to that fact in its application to each of these entities. Now do you begin to understand it?”

(H. P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy, Section 9,
“What is Really Meant by Annihilation)

Across Time and Death: A Woman Reunites with Her Children from a Previous Lifetime

IT is not the fact that we have failed to remember our past life and lives that ought to surprise us, but the contrary, were it to happen.

Yet the Spiritual “I” in man is omniscient, Theosophy insists, and has every knowledge innate in it. 

By contrast, the personal “I” is the transient creature of its environment and the slave of brain memory.

“Could the Spiritual I manifest itself uninterruptedly, and without impediment,” H. P. Blavatsky declared, “there would be no longer ordinary humans on earth, but we should all be gods.”

Revealing the first principle of an occult spiritual technique, Mme. Blavatsky wrote (The Key to Theosophy, Section 8): “to get convinced of the fact of re-incarnation and past lives, one must put oneself in rapport with one’s real permanent Ego, not one’s evanescent [brain] memory.”

Jenny and Sonny

“The record or reflection of all past lives must survive,” she assures her readers, “for when Prince Siddhartha became Buddha the full sequence of His previous births were seen by Him — and anyone who attains to that spiritual state can retrospectively trace the line of their lives.”

This is because “the undying qualities of the personality — such as love, goodness, charity, etc. — attach themselves to the Immortal Ego.

“They imprint on it, so to speak,
a permanent image of the divine qualities
of the human who was.”

♥

Therefore, she says plainly: “something of each personality must survive, (unless the latter was an absolute materialist with not even a chink in his nature for a spiritual ray to pass through.) It leaves its eternal impress on the incarnating permanent Self or Spiritual Ego — and that real ‘Ego’ has lived them, and thus knows them all.”

As Mme. Blavatsky’s colleague William Q. Judge wrote in the article Theosophical Study and Work: “There is a mysterious power in these doctrines of karma and reincarnation … It is due to the fact that the ego is itself the experiencer of rebirth and karma, and has within a clear recollection of both.”

On fostering a greater spiritual development, Judge, in The Ocean of Theosophy, Chapter 8 titled “Of Reincarnation” wrote simply:

“Getting back the memory of other lives is really the whole of the process…”

≈

“For as long as she could remember, Jenny Cockell had felt she had lived a former life as Mary Sutton,” an Amazon reviewer wrote. “Finally, Jenny acted on her intense need to find her lost family. After years of painstaking searching, she finally reunited with family members from her previous lifetime. This is her startling, true story.”

Eye of the Seer

Le Ravissement de Psyche -1895
Adolphe-William Bouguereau

SOCRATIC myths describe the ascent of the soul to true knowledge, its communion with divine realities, and its return to enlighten mankind.

The order of the Dialogues is important, as the myths in them, each representing a kind of initiation, progressively reveal new teaching and clarify the old.

Plato opens the Republic with a conversation between Socrates and his elderly friend Cephalus on the subject of death.

Cephalus wants to assure himself that, if there is an afterlife, he will be spared the sufferings of the underworld. He even quotes from one of Pindar’s odes to support his argument.

Plato ends the Republic with the Vision of Er, as Socrates describes the spiritual warrior who is slain in battle and returns to life, physically resurrected in order to transmit the message of all saviors, (W. T. S. Thackara in Plato’s Myths and the Mystery Tradition).

The message seems clear: we are all immortal beings, and our destiny is in our own hands.

“Music of The Spheres”

“Between Science and Theology is a bewildered public, fast losing all belief in man’s personal immortality, in a deity of any kind, and rapidly descending to the level of materialism,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote in Isis Unveiled [2:593].

Yet, “from the remotest antiquity, mankind as a whole have always been convinced of the existence of a personal spiritual entity, within the personal physical man.”

“This inner entity was more or less divine, according to its proximity to the crown—Chrestos [The Higher Self].”

“It is on the indestructible tablets of the astral light that is stamped the impression of every thought we think, and every act we perform. And future events — effects of long-forgotten causes,” Blavatsky also writes in Isis Unveiled [I:178],—”are already delineated as a vivid picture for the eye of the seer and prophet to follow. the vast repository where the records of every man’s life as well as every pulsation of the visible cosmos are stored up for all Eternity!”

2012 in review

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Click here to see the complete report.

Life Goes On

BETWEEN Science and Theology is a bewildered public, fast losing all belief in man’s personal immortality, in a deity of any kind, and rapidly descending to the level of materialism.

From the remotest antiquity, mankind as a whole have always been convinced of the existence of a personal spiritual entity, within the personal physical man.

This inner entity was more or less divine, according to its proximity to the crown—Chrestos [Christos, The Higher Self].

The closer the union, the more serene man’s destiny, and the less dangerous the external conditions. This belief is neither bigotry nor superstition, only an ever-present, instinctive feeling of the proximity of another spiritual and invisible world.

This world, though it be subjective to the senses of the outward man, is perfectly objective to the inner ego.

Ω

The foregoing words were written in Isis Unveiled, (Ch. 12) by H. P. Blavatsky her first first major work on Theosophy—examining religion and science in the light of Western and Oriental ancient wisdom, and occult and spiritualistic phenomena.

Out of this World

BETWEEN Science and Theology is a bewildered public, fast losing all belief in man’s personal immortality, in a deity of any kind, and rapidly descending to the level of materialism.

From the remotest antiquity, mankind as a whole have always been convinced of the existence of a personal spiritual entity, within the personal physical man

This inner entity was more or less divine, according to its proximity to the crown—Chrestos [Christos, The Higher Self].

The closer the union, the more serene man’s destiny, and the less dangerous the external conditions. This belief is neither bigotry nor superstition, only an ever-present, instinctive feeling of the proximity of another spiritual and invisible world.

“This world, though it be subjective to the senses of the outward man, is perfectly objective to the inner ego.”

Ω

The foregoing words were written by H. P. Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled, her first first major work on Theosophy—examining religion and science in the light of Western and Oriental ancient wisdom, and occult and spiritualistic phenomena.