Death and Dying, A Spiritual Perspective
by Kevin Core

This article is copyrighted to Kevin Core and Christine Deheera, and The Foundation of Cosmic Fire. Permission is here given to send this article out to whoever you feel may benefit from it. All that we ask is that you give due recognition. 2006.

As I have said, this process has been known for thousands of years. Every spiritual tradition in the world has, within its mythological or mystical structure, the knowledge of how to tackle the death process. The Hindus have it, the Tibetans have it; it was taught in Greece using the allegories of Hades, Persephone, Demeter, of crossing the river Styx by boat and paying for that journey with two coins. All of that teaching came out of Ancient Egypt.

In the Egyptian tradition, the 64 Neteru, are the Egyptian gods or archetypes of consciousness. In the last group of eight of these gods, the name is given the Duat, and that group of God's are the ones who guide or process the being who is going through the dying experience; all who are passing through the Underworld. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead a full description is given by the Royal Scribe Ani of 21 levels of the Underworld, each with its pylon or entrance, guarded by its dual guardians. In psychological terms these texts give a complete description of the levels of the unconscious mind that have to be transmitted through successfully to raise a consciousness to the next higher vibration.

The Underworld in any tradition, including the Tibetan even though they call it the Bardo, is how to get through that space that you have to go through in order to make the transition to the next level. So the knowledge of how to pass through the veils of death is totally cataloged in any one of these traditions. Reading any one of these instructions will show you how to pass through the veils of death; it will give you the rules and show you what will happen. It is what happens to everybody, whether that body is a person, a planet, a solar system, or a galaxy etc. The process of death and dying follows known archetypes.

All of these traditions encourage you, that as part of your spiritual practice, you should practice for the day that you die, so that it does not come as a big shock, and you enter the space of the Underworld totally unprepared.

In the West, if you are going for the most important interview in your lifetime, wouldn't you prepare yourself beforehand for the interview? If you were going to a foreign country where you had to negotiate hard terrain, wouldn't you buy a map and study it first? In relation to death and dying in the West not many people go there at all, even people doing spiritual work, but this is a spiritual practice that is well worth doing.

We all do meditational practices where we visualize what it would be like to be in this place or that, how it would feel, what we would see etc. None of us do spiritual practices about what would it be like when we take our last breath, and where we will be. What will it be actually like when I take my last breath and leave this incarnation? None of us do this, and yet it is one of the most profound meditations you will ever do.

If you do this meditation it will totally prepare you for the experience because even though you may have been doing meditation for 30 years, if death catches you unaware, the moment you leave that incarnation and your mind is not in the moment, you may find yourself in a place you may not wish to be. You could have done 30 years of meditation, sitting in blissful states, and then just because you walked across the road and never saw the bus, you find yourself in a place on the 4th Dimension you are not prepared for. You may have been thinking about doing the lottery when suddenly you find yourself in the 4th dimension. What was on your consciousness? I need money. So what will be the environment you find yourself in that space? Las Vegas in the sky, pulling that handle for thousands of years.