Do people who have gone to the beyond still have feelings of love for their children or relatives?
The Guide: This is not a question that I can answer with a Yes or with a No. So much depends on the individual. You cannot generalize. There are some spirits who – provided that love has existed during their lifetime – feel bound to their relatives for a very long time. This is not necessarily a very good state to be in.
The further spiritual development goes, the more a being will learn to detach itself from its relatives and from its old bonds. That does not mean that their love ceases, but spiritual growth means that gradually all creatures are included in one’s love, not only the near and dear ones.
The spiritual infant has to learn to love gradually. The more the growth proceeds, the more beings can be included in that love. To love more people in the right way does not diminish the love one feels for a few. Then you must consider also something else: when you return to the spiritual world, you will meet first of all your dear ones of this life.
According to your own will and wish, you will remain in the state you have been at the time of your so-called death. But when you begin to develop further, you will meet many other spirits, some of whom you will recognize as having been very close to you in former lives, or in lives on different planes, not only on the earth plane.
There you will rediscover contacts, loved ones, old friends. And when reincarnation is no longer necessary, the love you are at present only able to extend to some people, you will then have for all creatures. So some deceased people still feel very much bound to their relatives of the last life. Others also have this love, but they are not bound by it anymore. They go on to other tasks. And this state is infinitely better to be in.
Are spirits in the Spirit World still tied to their country and their names?
The Guide: The same answer would apply here as to the last question. It depends very much on the individual. Of course, earthbound spirits, or spirits who are not very developed yet, often hold onto their past earthly bondages, whether this bondage concerns a fanatic patriotism, family pride, a profession, or whatever else it may be.
You must not imagine that when you die your state of being will be altogether different merely because you have left your shell behind. Your whole personality, your thinking, your feeling, your opinions if they are very deeply rooted, your idiosyncrasies and your fixations, all this is not part of your body; it is part, however, of your subtle bodies which live on.
Whatever your personality makeup is now, it will be after death. So when a person dies with a fanatic feeling of patriotism, he or she will not feel any differently after death, and may thus be bound. But if a person has begun to detach himself and takes a wider vision on things, he will be able to progress spiritually much better once in the beyond.
He or she can be guided more easily and thus live a more pleasant life. If you die, for instance, in a state of fear, you will be in a state of fear afterward. If you die in a state of serenity, you will be serene afterward. Whatever you are at the time of your death, you will feel, experience and live afterward, and this will be your world because your thoughts, opinions, feelings and attitudes create the world around you.
I might say it is a psychological world, which does not mean it is a world of fantasy. It is real. For you, abstract ideas are formless. In the Spirit World, all abstract ideas have form and substance. That is how individuals build their worlds – by their personalities.
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Regarding Lecture #112 Humanity’s Relationship to Time, how can one truly face death and accept the reality of life after death so as to live in the Now?
The Guide: I will remind you of two lectures I have given a considerable time ago about the duality: Lecture #81 Conflicts in the World of Duality and Lecture #82 The Conquest of Duality Symbolized in the Life and Death of Jesus. If you have a concept or a belief about the continuation of life after death, but this concept is not yet fully experienced in your whole being – it is still something you cling to through superimposition – then you have to admit to yourself that inwardly you may doubt.
You may hope, and you may believe to a degree of your personality that all these teachings are truth, but you have to face and admit and meet your doubts, as you have to do with your fears. When you do so, in that area of doubt you are not sure that life continues. In that area, you have to meet this fear and this doubt, and go through it and accept at the moment that this is the way you feel.
It is the same process as, for instance, you know through all spiritual, religious and metaphysical teachings, that love is the key to the whole universe. Yet you have to admit to yourself first in what areas your heart does not know about this – where in your innermost self you feel hate where you would want to feel love.
You cannot produce that love if you do not admit hate, resentment and hostility. And when you admit it and meet it and face it and understand it, then it dissolves and you are free for loving.
It is the same thing with your doubts, whether this doubt relates to continuing life after physical death or to anything else for that matter. So naturally the very way this question is put together mutually excludes what I am saying.
You cannot in the moment of doubt live your belief – whatever this belief may be – where you doubt. So there you have to admit, “I am not sure. I am afraid. I am afraid of dying, because I do not know that life continues.” Or “I am afraid of dying because I am afraid that life does continue.” These very thoughts have to be met.
Then you will come gradually through the inner experience that life is an unending process, that it could not be anything else but that. Even if you are actually afraid that life may continue, you will no longer fear it wherever you stand. Or if you were afraid that life may not continue, you will deeply know and sense its truth without having to superimpose it and talk yourself out of the fear.
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What would be the best emotional and spiritual approach to aid someone who is dying in meeting this challenge?
The Guide: There are different answers on different levels to this question. On one level, I would like to say that you human beings always like to forget that death is not a punishment; it is not an end. It is but a new beginning, and therefore, as long as this fearful attitude exists, the answer would then make no sense that would be given from another vantage point.
Dying and being reborn is a constant process in everyone’s daily life, whether in the body or not in the body. The dying and being reborn knows different degrees and stages according to the awareness of the consciousness. In other words, you can die and be reborn in full consciousness and that would be when you are very much connected with the inner truth, the inner reality.
When this connection does not yet exist, the process of dying and of being reborn and redying – of course, you die many, many times, just as you are born many, many times – is, on the ego level, not conscious. On the level of the higher self, it is conscious. So here it depends entirely on the level.
On the level of the higher self, it is merely a change. On the ego level, your everyday little dyings and rebirths that you go through from one change into another can be conscious if you choose to make them so. When you leave one situation behind and go into the next, it is a redying and a rebirth, a redeath and a rebirth. And tomorrow there may be another redeath and a rebirth.
From an overall cosmic point of view, it is exactly the same. A lifetime is but a day from a different measurement system. It is but a dream you have during a night in a different measurement system.
As you human beings become more aware of the processes of your redeath and rebirth, you will discover every time you are on a low point, in a point of contraction, in a point of blindness and groping, in a point of pain, in a point of fear and anxiety, you are in a death process. And every time you unfold in joy and light and confidence, a new birth is taking place in your psychic system.
That birth process happens simultaneously as the death process occurs, but your consciousness cannot immediately connect with the simultaneity of it, and so connects perhaps what you may call “at a later period” with it. But the more you unfold, the more you can literally perceive the rebirth behind the dying process.
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