Life and the Life after
The Spiritual journey through lives
Gospel

When we die, we don’t leave and go somewhere else. 

Our mind and spirit - the real us - is in the spiritual world already.  That world is all around us even though we are not conscious of it. For now, our body drives around in this physical world like a person drives a car.

However, our body is not our mind or spirit - is not us - any more than a car is its driver.

Our mind can look out at the physical world through the body’s senses, but our mind is never a part of that world.

Our mind and spirit live in the spiritual world, which is on a higher plane than physical existence.

To help understand how different the world of the mind and spirit is from the world of the body, think of how free the world of our mind is from the rules of time and space that limit our body.

In our mind, we can travel instantaneously in our imagination to anywhere, in this world or far beyond it.

In memory we can travel back in time to our childhood, or venture far into the future. We can think of things too small for our eye to see or things as big as the universe.

We can even think of abstract things like truth and love that exist only in our mind and can’t be detected by our body’s senses at all.

Once we come to see that our mind and spirit are different from our body even while they “drive around” in the physical world, death is quite simple to understand, and not at all frightening.

For all that death involves is a simple transition, in which our spirit becomes directly aware of the realm in which it has lived all along.

Instead of looking out through the dim and limited senses of a physical body into the physical world, our spirit can then look out from the senses of our spiritual body into the wide and beautiful expanses of its own world, a world surpassing the physical world in every respect.

And, far from being the sort of ghostlike experience that people often associate with the word “spirit,” life in the spiritual world is far more real and vivid than life here.

The death transition itself is a beautiful and peaceful experience, closely guarded by high angels and conducted with the utmost gentleness, however abrupt or painful the beginning of the process may be for the body. 

Indeed, “For some people, days after death [a person is]… totally unaware that he or she is no longer living in the same world as formerly.

The time that has passed is like a sleep, and when anyone wakes from it, they feel they are exactly where they were.” (True Christian Religion 160)

So similar to the natural world does the spiritual world look when we first wake up there that some people do not believe they have died and have to be convinced! 

There follows a very happy time as we meet friends and family who have gone on before and, if our spouse has gone on before us, we have a reunion with him or her.

 Where we first awake after death it is neither Heaven nor Hell but a place intermediate between these two known as the World of Spirits.

 That world serves as a sort of reception centre. It is there that we initially adjust to spiritual existence and then go through the discovery process that spiritually clarifies what kind of person we really are, good or not so good.

This clarification takes place over a period of time and is based on the fundamental fact of the spiritual world that we can no longer hide anything about our moral and spiritual character from anybody, including, especially, ourselves. “Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees, beware of their hypocrisy.

The time is coming when everything will be revealed; all that is secret will be made public. Whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered behind closed doors will be shouted from the housetops for all to hear” (Luke 12: 2, 3).

 ”In the place where the tree falls, there it shall lie” (Ecclesiastes 11: 3).  We have decided by the way we lived our life in the physical world who we are, morally and spiritually speaking, and this can no longer be changed.

But since no one is all good or all bad, even a fundamentally good person typically has some evil traits left and those on the way to so called hell may have some good qualities. 

This inconsistency, in the nothing-hidden setting of the spiritual world, is painful.  So the next step in the process is to have those inconsistencies in effect put to sleep so that we mercifully are no longer troubled by thoughts and feelings contrary to our main spiritual inclination. 

If we are going to heaven, we are also taught any basic spiritual truths we didn’t have a chance to learn in the physical world so we will feel comfortable as we enter heaven. 

This process is what Jesus was referring to, in the parable of the talents, when He taught that “To those who use well what they are given, even more will be given, and they will have in abundance. But from those who are unfaithful, even what little they have will be taken away.” (Matthew 25: 29, 30)

The important point here is that there is no judgment chair, no fierce judgmental God, just each of us finishing the destiny that we chose - in free will -  by our life in the external physical world. In other words, there is no punishment for past deeds involved in this process.  God is ever-merciful and ready to forgive us for any wrongs.

However, the question before us now is this: What does Jesus mean by whoever "believes” in him? Does he mean those who believe he is the Messiah?

Does he mean those who believe he is Lord? Does he mean those who believe he is God? Does he mean those who believe he is Savior? Does he mean those who believe everything in the Bible about him? Does he mean those who believe in his sacrifice on the cross? Does he mean those who believe his teachings?

A full study of the gospels will show the answer to all these is "no." In the gospels, Jesus taught that mere mental or verbal allegiance or lip service to him does not get you into the eternal kingdom. "Believing in him" does not mean having blind faith in my opinion.

It is about living in accordance with the behavioural requirements of practicing, inhabiting, and embodying the unconditional love taught by Jesus and other great teachers.

This can be proven further down in the John 3:16 text to John 3:19-21 where Jesus refers to those who come into the light and live by the truth of that light as opposed to those who fear going into the light because of their fear of judgment.

It is about coming into the light now and not waiting until death.

It means putting aside your fear of judgment living in eternity right now in the light of unconditional love. This is the same message brought back from people in NDEs. Near death Experiences.

Therefore, believing and knowing love is not enough. Love must be lived, practiced, experienced, embodied, until "I AM." This is a very high standard for us. This is why we are here in this World-School.

We are growing to heaven right here on Earth. We are here not just to attain heaven. We are here to bring heaven into this world.

Unfortunately, this may take many lifetimes of soul and bodily evolution to achieve. I personally do not expect we will achieve heaven on Earth until humanity has evolved enough to become immortal, walk on water, raise the dead and heal the sick.

Fortunately, we are getting closer to this goal.

by - Catherine Campbell
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