Death, Dying and Reincarnation
What is death? What remains?
Simply put: death is a change in location. As is well known from the first law of thermodynamics, energy cannot be created or destroyed. Life is energy, so death is not an ending of an energy, rather it’s an absorption of a field of energy, the energy which we call a person. That life essence that you feel inside yourself or inside any living thing, upon death that essence leaves this plane, this material world, and goes elsewhere.
Death is nothing to fear. If you remember back as far as you can, you will remember death, that is to say, the absence of a physical, spatial-temporal location. If you remember that there was a time before this life when you were not in this life, if you remember back then, you will remember no pain, no fear, no horror and that’s what it will be like when you die. You should never fear death. Death is not unpleasant. Death is not frightening. It’s a completion. We return to the source, we merge back into God.
Reincarnation is the process of awakening. Each one of us has an essence that does not change from lifetime to lifetime. Imagine that you are asleep and that you’re having a series of dreams. In each dream you find yourself in a different location. You’re a different person in each dream; you have the sense of a different personality. One dream ends and another dream begins. Yet that which is perceiving, the perceiver, the person who is experiencing the dream, the main character through whose eyes the dream is taking place, is always the same. The personality may be different. You might be having one dream in which you are a woman, another dream where you’re a child, or another dream where you’re an adult male. But that actual essence, the perceiver that is inside all of those people in the dream, the protagonists, and the central characters in a dream, that essence is the same.
“Life is awakening from the dream.”
Rama Dr. Frederick Lenz
Not Always a Straight Line
In each lifetime we grow and develop, we become aware. Death is going to sleep. Life is awakening from the dream. In each human lifetime, during each incarnation that you have had on this planet in the physical world, we evolve, we make progress, it’s kind of like climbing up a ladder.
However, we forget. For example, in one of your past lives you may have had a very advanced incarnation. That is to say, perhaps in your last lifetime, or let’s say four or five lifetimes ago, you had a very spiritual incarnation – perhaps you were a monk or a spiritual aspirant, someone who devoted their life to the enlightenment process. Then for the last few lifetimes maybe you didn’t reach that level, during that lifetime it just didn’t seem that important.
In the process of reincarnation, while it is true that in each lifetime we are making progress, we are growing and evolving, it’s not necessarily a straight line. Every incarnation is not necessarily “higher” than the preceding one, but there is an overall course of advancement, we can see a difference.
The Three Stages
We can divide the human incarnations into three basic sections.
1. In the early human incarnations a human being is not aware of much more than the physical. They’re not really interested in spirit, they live for sensory gratification, and that’s the way they should be, just aware of the physical. In other words, the outer being, the physical being, the physical mind, is not very well connected with the soul essence, which is pure knowledge. A human being will have hundreds or thousands of lifetimes like this. One can say these are like the animal incarnations and the same soul that is in a human body will have had animal incarnations.
2. Then the soul enters into a more human phase. In these incarnations the intellect becomes more operative. Reason is developed. A person is more in touch with elements of the soul essence and there’s some basic spiritual development. A person becomes interested in intellectual pursuits, religion, philosophy, things like that.
3. In the third segment of the incarnations spirit becomes dominant, an interest in spirit and the spiritual is realized. After thousands of incarnations in this world a person begins to meditate and seek their soul essence, find their identity. That becomes the most important thing in their world. They are no longer satisfied with things of this world. Up until that point, like the child playing with a series of toys, they’ve been very happy playing in this world – the plays with power, politics, material possessions, love relationships, all of these things have been wonderful toys that have provided hours and hours, and literally lifetimes, worth of amusement. But then a time comes when we put away the toys of childhood and we graduate to something else, and that is the spiritual quest for enlightenment. We begin our journey, and that journey may also take thousands of incarnations. In each lifetime we learn something new about spirit and its essence. After hundreds of thousands of incarnations -whether on this earth, this dimension or some other planet, some other dimension – one finally attains enlightenment. Enlightenment doesn’t occur in one lifetime. It really occurs gradually over a series of lifetimes.