An interesting conjecture. Might the Egyptian Book of the Dead be derived directly from the Atlantean Book of the Dead and be important for just that reason? Here we are discovering the potential depth of direct communication between departed enlightened spirits and those open to it who are living.
What is described is far more than i expected and we get introduced to another realm of the afterlife that also remains benign while appearing to deep in matter and an image of our idea of Hell. I remark that each culture appears to sculpt its own imagined afterlife and they are sometimes quite surprising.
The core law of the afterlife remains like associating with like and that provides huge scope for the visual as that is actually irrelevant but supports the individuals self image. An abode may well be solely an expression of your own imagination as i certainly can attest.
A Western Book of the Dead — A Soul Traveler's Guide to Death, Dying, and the Other Side
http://humansarefree.com/2015/07/a-western-book-of-dead-soul-travelers.html#more
I have known since I was a very small boy in Australia that there are
worlds beyond physical reality, and that we can journey to those worlds
and gain first-hand knowledge of the multidimensional universe and about
what actually happens after death.
When I was nine years old, I was woken up to these possibilities during a crisis of illness.
I
was rushed to hospital in Melbourne after complaining of a pain in my
lower right abdomen. The medical staff found that my appendix was about
to burst and I was wheeled into an operating room in short order for an
emergency appendectomy.
Under anesthesia on the operating table, I
found myself hovering above my body, somewhere up near the ceiling. I
decided I didn’t want to watch the bloody work with the scalpel and
flowed through the door and along the corridor to where my mother sat
hunched and weeping.
I couldn’t stand her pain, so I drifted off to a
window, to the brightness outside, to the colors of spring and the
laughter of young lovers seated at a sidewalk table, drinking each
other’s smiles. I felt the pull of the ocean.
I could not see
the beach from the hospital window, so I floated through the glass and
out onto a ledge where a blackbird squalled at me and shot straight up
into the air. I followed the bird and sailed over the rooftops.
I
saw a huge moon-round face, its mouth opened wide to form the gateway
to Luna Park. I swooped down through the moon-gate – and plunged into
darkness. I tried to reverse direction, but something sucked me
downwards. It was like tumbling down a mineshaft, mile after mile
beneath the surface of the earth.
I fell into a different world.
It was hard to make out anything clearly in the smoke of a huge fire
pit. A giant with skin the colour of fine white ash lifted me high above
the ground, singing. The people of this world welcomed me.
They
were tall and elongated and very pale, and did not look like anyone I
had seen in my nine years in the surface world. They told me they had
dreamed my coming, and raised me as their own.
For the greater
part of my schooling, I was required to dream – to dream alone, in an
incubation cave, or to dream with others, lying in a cartwheel around
the banked ashes of the fire in the council house.
Years passed.
As I grew older, my recollection of my life in the surface world faded
and flickered out. I became a father and grandfather, a teacher and
elder.
When my body was played out, the people placed it on a
funeral pyre. As the smoke rose from the pyre, I traveled with it,
looking for the path among the stars where the fires of the galaxies
flow together like milk.
As I spiraled upward, I seemed to burst
through the Earth’s crust into a world of hot asphalt and cars and trams
– and found myself shooting back into the body of a nine-year-old boy
in a Melbourne hospital bed.
It was a little hard to discuss
these experiences with the adults around me at that time, and we did not
yet have Raymond Moody’s useful phrase “near-death experience” to
describe an episode of this kind.
One of the doctors said
simply, “Robert died and came back” – with memories that made me quite
certain of the existence of worlds beyond the obvious one, and of the
fact that consciousness survives physical death.
There is great
contemporary interest in the NDE in Western society, and this is a very
healthy thing, because to know about the afterlife, we require
first-hand experience, and need to be ready to update our geographies
and itineraries frequently in the light of the latest reliable travel
reports.
In ancient and traditional cultures where there is a
real practice of dying, near-death experiencers – who may be called
shamans or initiates – have always been heard with the deepest attention
and respect.
There is a Tibetan name for such a person, delog,
pronounced “day-loak”. It means someone who has gone beyond death and
returned. The famous Tibetan Book of the Dead, with its detailed account of the possible transits of spirit after death, emerged from the experiences of such travelers.
But to have first-hand knowledge of what lies beyond death, we do not have to go through the physical extremity of an NDE.
We
can learn through our dreams, the dreams in which we receive
visitations from departed loved ones and others who are at home on the
Other Side, and the dreams in which we travel beyond the body and into
their realms.
Our dreams open portals into the multidimensional
universe, including the places we may travel after physical death. As we
become active dreamers, we come to realize that dreaming is not so much
about sleeping as about waking up – to a deeper reality and a deeper
meaning in life, and death.
The Departed are Dreaming with Us
One of my driving purposes in writing The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead
was to help some of the many people in our society who are hungry for
confirmation that communication with the departed is not “weird” or
“unnatural”, let alone impossible, and that it is possible to extend
love and forgiveness and healing across the apparent barrier of death.
We
encounter our departed, especially in dreams, because they are still
around (sometimes because they have unfinished business or are not
actually aware they are dead); or because they come visiting; or because
we travel, in dreams or visions, into astral realms where the departed
are entirely at home.
It’s not just that we dream of the dead; our departed are dreaming of us, and trying to reach us through dreams.
Sometimes
our departed return as counselors or “family angels”, as my father
returned to me, many times, in the year after his death in Australia in
1987, with loving messages and practical guidance for the family.
Sometimes
our departed need us to play guides, because they are confused or stuck
between the worlds, clinging to old appetites and attachments – which
can be extremely unhealthy for the living, who may pick up the feelings
and addictions and even the past physical symptoms of the dead.
One
of the cruelest things that mainstream Western culture has done is to
suggest that communication with the departed is either impossible or
unnatural.
There is nothing spooky or “supernatural” involved,
though these experiences take us into realms beyond physical reality. It
is especially easy to meet our departed in dreams (if we are willing to
listen to our dreams) for three reasons:
Our Departed are Still With Us
Quite
frequently dreams reveal that the departed are present because, quite
simply, they never left. The departed may linger because they have
unfinished business, or wish to act as guide and protector to the
family, or are attached to people and places they loved in waking life,
and this may be a perfectly happy situation for a year or two.
But
there comes a time when our departed need to move on, for their own
growth, and so they do not become a psychic burden to the living.
Because
our society does a poor job in preparing people for the afterlife, many
people who have passed on do not know they are dead, and hover in a
limbo close to familiar people and places on this Earth.
After
death, we continue to be driven by our ruling interests, appetites and
addictions. Some of those who have died but not truly “passed on”
continue to try to feed their cravings via the living.
When the
departed remain earthbound, the effects are unhealthy both for those who
have died and those among the living to whom they are connected.
When
the dead are enmeshed with the living, the result is mutual confusion,
loss of energy, and the transfer of addictions, obsessions and even
physical ailments from the departed to the person whose energy field he
or she is sharing.
Helping the departed may involve a loving dialogue, a simple ritual of honouring and farewell, and invoking spiritual helpers.
As
we become active dreamers, familiar with the geography of the
afterlife, we may find we are called on to provide personal escort
services and help to instruct some of our departed on their options on
the other side. William Butler Yeats noted, with a poet’s insight, that
“the living can assist the imaginations of the dead.”
Our Departed Come Calling
Most
people who remember dreams can recall one in which someone on the other
side made a phone call, sent a letter, or simply turned up at the door
or the bedside.
Our departed return to us in dreams for all the
reasons they might have called on us in physical life – including the
simple desire to tell us how they are doing and see how we are coping –
and for larger reasons: to bring emotional healing, to bring us helpful
information, to instruct us on life beyond death and the reality of
worlds beyond the physical.
Our departed may come visiting to offer or receive forgiveness. They may come to show us how they are doing on the other side.
Our
departed can be excellent psychic advisers when they achieve clarity on
the other side and are aware that they are not confined to the rules of
space and time.
Our departed may come as health advisers and family counselors.
My
friend Wanda Burch had received many dreams containing possible health
advisories, but was finally driven to seek medical attention when her
deceased father turned up in her dreams in a doctor’s white coat and
yelled at her, “You have breast cancer!” Her father’s dream intervention
helped put her on the path of healing and recovery.
Our departed
may visit us in dreams to help us prepare for our own deaths and
reassure us that we have friends on the other side.
In Dreams, We Travel to Realms of the Departed
In
our dreams, we are released from the laws of physical reality, and
travel into other dimensions, including environments where the departed
may be living.
Through dreams of this kind, we can begin to
develop a personal geography of the afterlife, which will be vastly
enriched when we learn the art of conscious dream travel, which is at
the heart of my own teaching and practice.
In my workshops, I
often invite participants to focus on a dream or memory of a departed
person and make it their intention to journey – with the help of
shamanic drumming – to seek timely and helpful communication with that
person and to learn about the environment where that person is now
living.
From these journeys, we have collected multifarious and
fascinating details of reception centres, transition zones, places of
recovery and further education and communications arrangements on the
other side.
We have learned that more than one vehicle of soul
survives physical death, and each has a different destiny. We have
explored many afterlife locales shaped by human imaginations and
collective belief systems.
Dreaming is the Best Preparation for Dying
A second reason I wrote The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead
is that I believe that dreaming is the best preparation for dying, and
that through dreams we can gain first-hand knowledge of the transitions
of spirit after death.
Active dreamers have no doubt there is
life after death. We become familiar with many alternative neighborhoods
and transition zones on the Other Side.
We may develop the
understanding – again through direct experience – that consciousness
survives the body in more than one energy body, and that different
vehicles of consciousness have different fates.
By helping
someone who is approaching death to open to their dreams, we help them
to find their way home, and approach the last stage of physical life
with greater courage and clarity, as a time of growth and awakening.
All
we need do, to begin with, is to suggest to the dying person that if he
or she happens to remember a dream, we would love to hear it, and to
cherish the moment of sharing.
Open a safe space for dreaming,
and beautiful things can happen. Katy’s octogenarian father Ed moved
into hospice care after a debilitating series of strokes. His doctors
thought he would probably succumb to kidney failure within a month.
In
fact, he survived for another six months, a time of deepening pain and
frustration over the failures of the flesh that was nonetheless a period
of immense learning and high adventure thanks to his discovery of
dreaming. In each of her frequent visits, Katy gently encouraged him to
share any dreams he remembered.
As dream sharing became daily
practice for Katy’s father, many varied gifts came through. Some of his
dreams rehearsed him for physical adjustments he needed to make as his
body declined, easing these passages for a proud and once strong man.
Dreams of broken plumbing and laying pipes, for example, prepared Ed for the catheterization that was eventually required.
In
an intriguing series of dreams, he was excited to find himself doing
new work and feeling really good about it – an unlikely scenario, in
ordinary reality, for a sick man in his 80s. In one of these dreams, he
was working on an “angel machine.”
When Katy asked him what that
was, he explained, “I’m supposed to comb out the feathers on the angel
wings” and giggled like a happy child, full of wonder.
Towards
the end, Katy’s father often slipped into waking dreams, moving between
the worlds with increasing fluency, learning the art of re-entering a
sleep dream to gather more insight and energy effortlessly, without any
formal instruction.
One of his big dreams seemed to promise a
happy landing on the other side and opened a fascinating personal locale
in the possible afterlife. He dreamed that on a day of heavy snow, he
attended a magnificent banquet in a beautiful mansion.
Everyone
was dressed to the nines, and an elegant, distinguished man wearing an
ambassador’s sash with his dinner jacket showed Ed around and poured him
a delicious drink “like white champagne” but beyond anything available
in ordinary reality.
Delighted by his welcome, Katy’s father had
the feeling he would be going back to the mansion of the dream
ambassador. On the day he passed, it was snowing heavily for the first
time in months, as in the dream.
Through their days and nights of
dream sharing, father and daughter deepened their loving connection.
Katy confirmed and validated her father’s experiences as he opened to
realities beyond the physical, an inspiring example of how we can help
each other on the roads of dying (and living).
Katy believes that dreaming provided her father with a vehicle in which he could travel to the other side.
“He
was fearful of leaving this life that he loved so much, but with the
dreaming he grasped that perhaps there really is a life ‘over there’
that is just as much fun.”
His fear of death gave way to a willingness to let go.
The
story of Ed’s dreaming does not end with his passing. Within days, he
started turning up in the dreams of his loved ones. He appeared to the
one family member who had not been able to visit him in the hospice, sat
with her under a tree for what seemed like hours, and made her laugh.
He
returned Katy’s visits in the dreamtime. In Katy’s dreams, he often
appeared doing things (like skiing) that he had failed to do, or to
master, in the life he had left.
This moving episode confirms the
wisdom of the Lakota Indian saying that “the path of the soul after
death is the same as the path of the soul in dreams.” This is why
dreaming is the best preparation for dying.
The Poet as Guide to the Other Side
I
had another reason for undertaking The Dreamer’s Book of the Death. I
have noticed that most of us tend to live with more courage and clarity –
and cope with the challenges of everyday life with better grace – when
we have looked Death in the face.
As we do this, we may enlist the support of personal guides who are quite familiar with conditions on the Other Side.
I
was well advanced on my work, a little after Samhain/Halloween in 2004,
when I learned that I had drawn a most interesting helper. On a raw day
on the Connecticut coast, I was leading a visionary journey for a
circle of my advanced students.
We had made it our shared
intention to travel to a location in nonordinary reality that I call the
House of Time, a place from which onward journeys to other times and
other life experiences are usually easy, and where encounters with
master teachers sometimes take place.
I was drumming for the
group and watching over them while – at the same time – I let part of my
consciousness travel into the Library of the House of Time.
I
found Yeats waiting for me, on an upper level. He asked me, “What better
guide to the Other Side than a poet?” The answer that came to me was:
none.
I remembered how Virgil appears as Dante’s guide through the Inferno, drawn by Dante’s “love and long study” of his poetry.
Whether
the Yeats who was appearing to me now was a projection of a part of
myself, or some essence of his life and work, or the individual spirit
of the dead poet, I could hardly refuse his offer to guide me.
So
my work took on a further dimension. This, of course, was not my first
encounter with Yeats. He had appeared in my dreams many times.
In
one series of dreams, he demonstrated experiments in “mutual visioning”
that he had conducted with Florence Farr, and attempts to build his
Celtic Castle of the Heroes on the astral plane with his great (but
forever lost) love Maud Gonne.
But after that post-Halloween
encounter in 2004, things picked up. While I immersed myself in fresh
study of the books and papers in which Yeats had recorded his efforts to
communication with the dead and to monitor the soul’s journey between
death and rebirth, the play of dreams and visions and synchronicity in
my own life became intense and wonderful.
That benign entity
that Koestler called “the Library Angel” worked overtime, arranging
bookish discoveries at the most unlikely times and places.
In a
screened and protected psychic environment, I was introduced to many
“dead” people who described their experiences of afterlife transitions
in vivid and fascinating detail. Sometimes I felt that the dead were
holding a séance for the living – specifically myself.
I gained a
new depth of understanding of what Yeats had laboured to convey about
death and dreaming in the two versions of his fascinating, difficult
book A Vision.
He concluded that the main difference between the
dream state during physical life and the dream state after death is
that prior to death the soul remains in “exclusive association with one
body.”
In the 1925 edition of A Vision, Yeats made his simplest
and most important observation about the connection between death and
dreaming:
“In sleep we enter upon the same life as that we enter between death and birth.”
He explains that in dreaming, the spirit may travel through some of the
levels of being that are accessible after death. In rare cases, moving
beyond the astral plane, the spirit may discover “a new centre of
coherence” in the celestial body.
So dreaming may be an exact
rehearsal for the progression of the spirit after death as it gradually
disentangles itself from lower energy bodies to move to higher planes.
In
the 1937 edition of A Vision, Yeats develops the provocative thesis
that our dreams of the departed are frequently the result of the
departed reaching for us.
Yeats describes an early phase in the
after-death transition that he calls “Dreaming Back,” through which the
departed seek to review, understand and resolve the issues of the life
experience that has ended.
With the help of “teaching spirits” a
soul in this phase “may not merely dream through the consequences of
its acts but amend them, bringing this or that to the attention of the
living.” During this phase the dead often appear to the living in
dreams.
Yeats wrote that “the souls of enlightened men return to
be schoolmasters of the living, who influence them unseen.” I believe
this has been my experience, and that it is an experience open to all of
us, which will unfold according to our interests and affections, and
our willingness to do the work.
In The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead
I have sought to honour Yeats’s grand design of producing a Western
Book of the Dead that shows a little of what happens in the soul’s
journey between death and rebirth.
At its heart, the message of
my Book of the Dead is as simple, and as urgent, as this: We don’t need
to wait for death to remember what the soul knows: how and why we came
into our present bodies, and where we will go when we leave them.
By Robert Moss, author of The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead
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