There were also other spiritual practices that involved the loved ones of the individual who passed. There would often be priests or monks who would also perform certain rights to assist the soul in their transition from the material world to the spiritual world. So, while our current culture has a sterile and removed approach to death, to our ancestors, death was a ceremonial event. Not necessarily something to rejoice about, but rather a time of transition and reconciliation. While each culture has their own special customs, there are rituals that are practiced across the board in many different spiritual traditions.

For example, it is believed in both Western and Eastern traditions that praying and often chanting on behalf of the deceased is helpful. It is believed that good thoughts and even saying holy names helps the soul make its transition into the spiritual world. Most cultures also use some element of fire or smoke. The lighting of candles and incense is also common across faiths. The belief here is that the prayers of loved ones travel upon the smoke of the incense into the heavens to be received by the deceased. The washing of the body or passing water over certain parts of the body is also widely practiced and believed to purify the soul.

Both fire and water affect magnetism or shift magnetism in the body. Thus both water and fire may both assist the soul in releasing from its physical shell. Cool water and hot fire is also repeatedly used in funerary texts as a metaphor. So when there is a physical death, what happens is that the physical body dies. So the organs lose function and the body dies. Okay, just the body dies though. You know, your eye is eternal. It goes on forever, right, in different forms and different, you know, moves through the heavens and eventually will take a life in a different condition.

So what happens exactly when the physical body dies, okay, what happens is that all of the spiritual forces in the body begin to center into the heart center, the chamber of the heart center, and they begin to gather there and gather there and gather there. And then they usually begin to move up. And they actually go out of the head, out of the crown of the head. So that’s actually how the etheric body, the astral body and the eye as what we would call the spiritual substrate of the human being all bound up together.

That’s how it actually begins to separate from the body. And at this point in time, the cord that attaches the astral body and the higher bodies to the physical body is disintegrated and it wears away. And so along with death, there is also the dissolution of what is called the silver cord. The silver cord being, you know, sometimes when people talk about lucid dreaming or astral traveling, they look around and they see this silver cord following them around. And that is your literal connection of your astral body and your higher bodies with your physical body.

So when you pass away, that cord disintegrates and is drawn back into the etheric and the astral body. So therefore, there technically is kind of a transubstantiation of the form again in the heart chakra, and then it moves up out of the top of the head. And basically, what happens from that point forward is dependent on the level of consciousness of the individual. Because as we’re going to see in this lecture, you know, one’s individual level of consciousness determines pretty much everything about their death process. There is no process that is similar for anyone.

And that’s the incredible thing, but also I think can make teaching it difficult because you can’t teach from that subjective place. Like sometimes I’ll see some, I’ll see on YouTube. And there will be this person that’s like, I had a near death experience and I have all the answers. And it’s like you can’t gather all of the mysteries of the cosmos from like a subjective near death experience. You can get part of it, right? You can get your piece of it from your own subjective experience. But in order to understand the actual structure of the spiritual planes, and the structure of your actual being, you have to study that you have to learn that just like anything else.

And so sometimes in spirituality, there’s this idea that you can just divine anything, you can just go into the spiritual plane and pull it down, and it’s magically always true. And that’s not the case. You know, someone who’s genuinely serious about developing spiritually, you’re going to need to study. You’re going to need to learn spiritual science just like you would anything else, right? So that’s why we’re here today is to really learn the spiritual science of death. So the spot at the head is it’s like a soft spot and babies are usually very soft here when they’re born.

And you can probably actually feel it. It’s I’m not a baby, but I’m sure you can feel it. And I’m sure you know what you what I’m talking about. That is also called the Brahma Andra in Eastern teachings. And that is the spot in which the soul tends to especially in our modern times, release itself was a little different in the past. But in our modern times, that’s typically where it goes. And that’s the crown chakra. Now there’s something very interesting that I’ve that I want to mention here about the death process.

And I talked about this with my groups on my private membership site a few different times. And I’ve also mentioned in my lecture called the immortal body, which is that there is something that can be called a race. Now this is W R A I T H. And a race is essentially when an individual has passed away, and their etheric body is basically hovering around their physical body. So what can tend to happen, sometimes when people pass away, especially if there are a lot of material desires, but not all the time, it can happen in the case of shock as well, is that the etheric body won’t fully dissolve for a while, and it will actually stay united with the physical body.

And this is why people would sometimes look into a graveyard, and they would see this figure, you know, standing above a grave, and they’re like, Oh my gosh, this is a ghost, you know, or they’ll go to a funeral home, and they’ll get the glimpse out of the corner of their of their eye of something standing by a coffin, or just this etheric body that is still united with the physical body. And so this is called a race. And this has always been a problem actually into the occult, because you don’t really want these etheric shells floating around the spiritual world that are kind of like these empty shells.

And I’ll leave it at that. But this is actually why cremation came into place, and why cremation became popular, which was popularized, I believe, through the Theosophical Society, which was that if the physical body is cremated, then there is no chance of that wraith hanging around. And there that that etheric shell is sort of forced to dissolve. And that is actually most oftentimes actually better for the soul. So this is why, you know, that cremation process came about was because of in the spiritual sense, because of the wraith. So let’s take a look at how different teachers have described the wraith, or the etheric shell of an individual.

Helena Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, describes the wraith or etheric body in this way. The ethereal body is united with the physical body by an umbilical cord, a material cord, and cannot therefore be very far from it. In Tibetan Buddhism, the etheric body is referred to as the La body. According to Pezang Arya, after death, the La and consciousness separate. The consciousness continues its journey, drawn into the next reincarnation by its karma. Whilst the La stays on earth, still bearing the person’s shape until the physical body becomes fully decayed.

Although the La is an energy and reflection of the body, it also has a kind of pseudo consciousness. The etheric body wraith or La is also called the etheric double, the life body, or the assimilation body, as it’s really an etheric shell that acts as an intermediary between the spiritual world and the material world for the individual. Thus, the etheric body is really a kind of shell that represents the intersection between the individual’s spiritual self and material self. In ancient Greece, the etherial shell was called the Eidolon, and as a spiritual etheric being, the Eidolon could interact with individuals, though it no longer had the individual’s consciousness within it.

It behaved like a kind of automaton of the individual. The Eidolon was a living shell, a living essence of the individual, and thus like an interactive movie contained the memories. The spiritual shells of individuals that are cast off are therefore often confused with the actual living individuality of the person that has passed on. Many mediums are not communicating with the individuality, but rather the spiritual shell of the individual. In the 1870s, cremation was popularized in America by the Theosophical Society. This was to hasten the dissolution of the etheric body and assist in the death process of the individual.

In occult science, death is seen as the progressive shedding or disrobing of the lower, coarser spiritual bodies and physical body. The first to be released is the material body. Then the etheric body is shed. Each time the individuality retreats deeper into the most rarefied spiritual form. Finally, when both the material and etheric body are shed, the individual dwells within the astral body, existing now in the astral plane. The higher astral plane is the heaven of classical religion or in the eastern sense the Devacon. Thus, the time of death is seen as a kind of successive disrobing and returning to the spiritual world in which we originally all emerged.

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