Introduction to the Occult by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2022-12-24T00:00:00+00:00

14

Life after Death

At this point I want to talk about the spirits of deceased human beings. No doubt there are many beings in the other worlds that have never been human beings, never will be human beings, and have no resemblance to human beings. But deceased humans seem to be part of the picture. As a matter of fact, it is quite common to experience the presence of a deceased loved one, particularly in the first few days after death.

Years ago I edited a magazine on mysticism called Gnosis (from a Greek word meaning knowledge). We got sheaves of first-person accounts, totally unsolicited, of supernatural experiences, particularly seeing dead relatives. We almost never published these articles; I usually sent them back with a polite note.

Why were people sending these pieces to us? Obviously they’d had these experiences, were fascinated or disturbed by them, and probably did not know anybody who would even believe them. No doubt they would get answers like, “You were just imaging things” or “It was just a dream.”

Sadly for American religion, many people have gone to their ministers and priests with these experiences and gotten nothing like a satisfactory answer. Yet these are trained professionals who are supposed to have some knowledge of the supernatural and help us mediate our experiences with it. This regrettable fact explains a great deal about our civilization and culture today.

In any event, it does appear that the presence of the deceased stays in the vicinity for a brief time after death. Here is one theory that comes out of the influential mystical tradition known as Theosophy. As I said in an earlier chapter, at death the life force leaves the body. The idea is that you have an energetic body, which consists of this life force. It underlies the physical body and keeps it going; the Theosophists call this the etheric double or etheric body. At the moment of death, this etheric body is severed from the physical body. A biblical verse is believed to allude to this fact: “Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel be broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:6–7). The “silver cord” may refer to the bond between the physical and the etheric bodies.

The etheric body survives the physical body for a short while (the traditional time is three days, although no doubt there is some variation) and hangs around the vicinity.

In the last chapter, I mentioned the angels at the Battle of Mons. Some have speculated that the forms that the soldiers saw were not angels but the etheric bodies of dead soldiers. They were still present and were not even aware they were dead, so they continued fighting.

In the astral world, the world of thoughts, forms, and ideas, we also have a kind of body, which has been called the astral body.

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