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The World Beyond Part 55. Social Life in the Next World. The Nature of Light. Worlds super-imposed on yet independent of each-other.
Continuing this series of, as far as possible, true-to life descriptions of the Spirit World rather than of scientific speculation about where it is and what it consists of in material terms [which only confuses the general reader], I am reviewing passages from “The Country Beyond” by Jane Sherwood [Neville Spearman, London. 1969]. Some of us are content with the knowledge that when we die, the experience will be like opening a door and going through to meet our loved ones and friends who left before us. But often spirits come back to tell us that if only they had known a little more about the next world before they died, they wouldn’t have suffered so much confusion as they tried to gain their bearings, unaccustomed to the idea of the continuation of life with so much greater dimension and variety. Even former priests and scientists have expressed this regret.
Jane Sherwood’s old family friend continued to explain how misconduct in this world lay the path open to much painful heart-searching on the other side. But he reminds her that life over there is on everyone’s side. It is no longer fighting a losing battle against its physical manifestation as on earth, trying to sustain itself and keep alive, retaining power and defending itself. There is no death; life is bound to win. Of its own nature it is good and beautiful. As it becomes more abundant, as it is indeed in the spirit world, it aids the sufferer. He (or she) absorbs healing from the surroundings and is relieved of pain by taking in the rays of love and healthy life from those who send prayers and good thoughts in their direction. The very life within a person cries out against the deathly elements which are harming them and the goodness and potency of life free them gradually from the fever and pain of wrong living.
The next stage of life after the preliminary period is more like our idea of heaven. Nations keep their own languages and customs but they are less defined because movement and travel is simpler, and there is much coming and going between the different communities without boundaries, customs checkpoints and passports: sympathies among the inhabitants are wider and knowledge of each other fuller. The language barrier begins to be removed because it is so much easier to pass thought between one another by telepathy. Groups are formed more for the purposes of special interests and occupations than for nationalistic, class or sectarian religious reasons, as Frances Banks has already reported to Helen Greaves (see her “Testimony of Light” and other books). Over there are groups and gatherings of mutual interests having a rich and satisfying communal life. Co-operative activity and close and sympathetic human relationships bring into being many of the ideals of the world’s dreamers. A social order emerges which brings satisfaction to all its members and enables each to arrive at full self-development.
People there can live quite simply, though the “lush” life is still possible, for those who want gleaming palaces and temples and beautiful cities built in elaborate form in surroundings of surpassing loveliness. They satisfy those with artistic and creative ability, and words cannot provide an accurate description of their beauty.
On the higher planes, the people suit their glorious home. They are noble, dignified, happy and fulfilled. They have the glow and splendour of a wonderful maturity. All the emotional disorders of the lower planes have been cured and so the full growth obstructed by them down there can come quickly to fruition. There is less specialization in human relationships and no sense of possession in even the more intimate relationships. The possession of love in oneself implies that one is fully alive and healthy and it must flow freely out to mingle with the love it seeks and finds in others. Freedom has come to it at last and the barriers we set up on earth to protect our special rights of possession are no longer necessary. Life has come of age, and so love can show maturity too.
Expansion of consciousness gathers still more of the future into the present, making the eternal moment “now” more lucid. The flow of being changes the former sense of time, or duration, adding beauty to the mingling of past, present and future. (Jane Roberts’s three “Oversoul Seven” novels, and one unfinished, expertly depict this merging of time into one overall experience).
On these higher levels, all the formerly material forms have thinned out and have more of light and colour and less delineation. The colour and shape of a flower, is its own perfect presentiment of its essential being. It shines out clearly in the form of light so that a shimmering radiance abides continually over field and woodland. This is not due to the refined awareness of the former human spirits, but each apparent “object” of the senses has actual being in its own right, and is not merely a chance collection of sense data presented for the humans’ interpretation. This essence in all things gives the spirits who can appreciate it a true reverence for life which most of us on earth totally lack. We plunder and destroy life-forms all around us, leaving nothing sacred, not even our own fellow creatures !
Jane Sherwood admits that she was puzzled by the kind of matter which must constitute the Spirit World. As we mentioned, the theories and descriptions which mystics like Parmahansa Yogananda, scientists like Ronald Pearson, Jean E. Charon and Sir Oliver Lodge , or entities like Jane Roberts’s Seth, offer us, make the mind spin like the particles they use as illustrations, and leave us in confusion. One day scientists no doubt will be able to describe the essence of spirit better than giving us images of minute electrons, eons, particles, electro-magnetic units of conscious energy, the human genome, or a space substance or “ether” out of which matter and form take shape. But even then, they will not be able to measure or read the contents of the mind, or a unit of awareness. For this we will still have to rely on our own clairvoyant abilities or other aspects of second sight.
Jane’s friend in spirit said it was very difficult to make any useful comparison between the material world and the world of spirit. The Spirit World is not an exact replica of the scenes on Planet Earth, and one is not super-imposed on the other, at different frequencies. The friend said: “It is perhaps significant that our cities appear to correspond with waste and lonely places on earth and that the sites of your busy cities are avoided by us and are waste and lonely in this world. Your speculation about the dual nature of matter will not do. If it were so, we should be interfering with each other all the time. But even though this is impossible I still have to insist that our planes interpenetrate the earth levels just as they interpenetrate each other and the problem of the independent material substance of each of these worlds with worlds is still unsolved. What wonderful scope for your mathematicians !”
He went on to explain that physical matter is non-existent for those in the Spirit World, since it is vibrating below the level of the frequencies which can be registered by spirit senses. Spirit matter for them must of necessity be based on vibratory systems which are within their field of activity and are bound, therefore, to be beyond the human scale of visibility. Only our organic matter can have any reality for a spirit. The etheric matter which is found in plants and animals and in the human body is similar to the "physical" matter of the lower Spirit planes. There are many different grades of etheric substance and the human kind differs from that of the plant. Apart from any living organism on earth, there is a great envelope of free etheric matter associated with the mass of the earth itself. All of these forms of etheric substance may be classed as matter of the second degree only one remove up from mineral matter. The beautiful living world of Spirit is built up out of this second degree matter, but if it has any links with the structure of the human earth world, they are most difficult to discover.
he whole range of physical matter does not continue in the world beyond as visible phenomena. Physical light affects their atmospheric pressure, but it does not register on their spirit senses. No sun, moon or stars shine in their skies. Light pours down uniformly from all parts of the heavens and light, for them, has a necessary connection with life. For all living things here emit light of their own and as one goes higher, life is expressed still more in terms of light and less in sustantial form. The light which pours down on their world is a kind of life. It renews their being, and satisfies and feeds them; In fact, they need no other food. That light shines continuously and constantly renews their life in vigour and joy.
Spirits need rest, but not sleep. Humans crave sleep since our astral and spirit bodies can be set free for refreshment in the "air" of the spirit world. We become exhausted by our interaction with the clumsy physical matter of the body, so we must be released regularly into what is really our true home, and native atmosphere. That is why sleep deprivation through overwork, or in torture, can lead to mental and physical breakdown. Contact with spiritual energy is lost. Normally the spiritual body during sleep is released from its dependence on the physical and lifts into harmony with the spirit world perhaps without moving at all in terms of our space. It is a matter of being set free from its dependence on earth rhythms. When we sleep the higher ranges of being which are as much a part of our body as the physical form are able to lift clear into their own unhindered rhythms and so obtain relaxation. After death of the "person", and their final separation from the physical body, these spiritual bodies along with their mind, personality, memory and consciousness, continue to exist, intact and without any dependence on the brain for their existence, which scientists like Francis Crick believes is necessary for thought. When we are brain-dead, he believes, the spirit and personality is also dead.
However, deceased loved ones have come back to talk with relative through a medium, as well as giving evidence of their identity, giving details of how their relatives came to visit them when they were in a coma, or brain-dead, and after death at the funeral. How could they have seen and heard what was going on around their body, when the brain was not operating, other than that their spirit body and mind was experiencing, sensing and seeing all the details?
Without the continuation of life after death, our existence would be futile and meaningless indeed. But this is the absurd situation for some of the existentialists and their gloomy, nihilistic belief system.
In the Spirit World, the lfe-giving light there has its own scale of frequencies which vary for each plane, just as the physical universe has its own broad range across the spectrum of light. The senses of the inhabitants of the various planes are able to register that particular range of frequencies as light. It is suggested that this living light is the thought and love, made visible, of the supreme intelligence which most of us refer to as God. It must somehow stream down equally through all the planes, including our own, whether it is visible or not. It is the great creative agency, which, while it illumines, also crystallises its meaning in the different degrees of space which we then interpret as patches of matter. Light is a form of very intense activity, the highest known to us on any plane. Therefore it may well have the power to influence activity and even to create it. This creative light shines on earth as well, but it is unperceived by us. The basis of all matter is the power and energy of thought from some level of mind, human, spiritual or divine, directing activity, not chaos or chance as some would believe.
That is a brief review of the first four chapters of Jane Sherwood's "The Country Beyond" - Neville Spearman, London. 1969, which also includes an earlier publication of hers, "The Psychic Bridge." The reader is encouraged to read these titles in full, and also her "Post- Mortem Journal" and "The Fourfold Vision." These books have much useful information about the Spirit World and its intangible nature and yet its evidential existence. .
For more detailed discussion of microscopic and macroscopic worlds in the physical universe and beyond, and the ultimate nature of reality, the following reading list may be of help to readers whose minds may boggle at the intricacy and immensity of the topic.
Dean Radin: The Conscious Universe. Harper Edge, 1997.
Gary Schwartz : The Afterlife Experiments. Pocket Books, 2002.
Jean E. Charon: Le monde eternel des Eons. Stock, 1980.
Jean E. Charon: L'esprit cet inconnu. Albin Michel, 1977.
Jean E. Charon: Treize questions pour l'homme moderne. Albin Michel, 1977.
Walter Russell: The Secret of Light. University of Science and Philosophy, 1947.
Walter Russell: The Message of the Divine Iliad. University of Science and Philosophy, 1948.
Stanislav Grof: Beyond the Brain. State University of New York Press, 1985.
Stanislav Grof: The Holotropic Mind. Harper San Francisco, 1992.
Stanislav Grof: The Cosmic Game. State University of New York Press, 1998.
James Redfield, Michael Murphy and Sylvia Timbers: God and the evolving Universe. Tarcher/Putnam, 2002.
Jane Roberts: The Unknown Reality - vols I & II. Prentice-Hall, 1979.
Franklin Merrell-Wolff: The Philosophy of Consciousness without an Object. The Julian Press Inc., 1973.
Jeffrey Mishlove: The Roots of Consciousness. Marlowe 1975 - revised 1993.
James Glick: Chaos: Making a New Science. Penguin Books, 1987.
Satprem: The Mind of the Cells. Institute for Evolutionary Research, 1982.
Edward Douglas Fawcett: The World as Imagination. Macmillan, 1916.
Oliver Lodge: Raymond. Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1916.
Paramahansa Yogananda: Autobiography of a Yogi. S.R.F., 1946
Paramahansa Yogananda: Man's Eternal Quest. S.R.F., 1975.
Paramahansa Yogananda: The Divine Romance. S.R.F., 1986.
Paramahansa Yogananda: Journey to Self-Realization. S.R.F., 1997.
Francis Crick: The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993.
Michael Evans: Dead Rescue: Guiding Lost Souls. Con-Psy Publishing, 2008.
Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding: Lychgate: Entrance to the Path. Rider, 1945.
Linda Williamson: Contacting the Spirit World. Piatkus, 1997.
John Edward: Life After Death. Hay House, 2003.
Leslie Flint: Voices in the Dark reprinted by. Two Worlds Publishing.
Arthur Ford and Jerome Ellison: The Life Beyond Death. Longmans, 1971
Eileen J. Garrett: Does Man Survive Death? Helix Press, 1957.
Neville Randall: Life After Death. Robert Hale, 1975 / Corgi Books, 1986.
Helen Greaves: Testimony of Light. Neville Spearman, 1969.
Helen Greaves: The Challenging Light. Neville Spearman, 1984.
Douglas Conacher: Chapters of Experience. Frederick Muller, 1973.
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