Let us talk now about the Underworld. I will talk about the Egyptian concept of this as it is probably the most well-known. The Underworld is a representation of your own subconscious mind. As you take your last breath, you enter a consciousness state where you review your whole life, so everything you have done in that life you are now faced with. This is not myth it is an actuality; it is real! Every spiritual tradition, over the many thousands of years, has always represented the journey through the underworld in the same way. Some of these traditions have been many thousands of miles apart, with no physical contact at all, and yet, they perceive the same archetypes that have to be tackled on this journey through the unconscious.
So at the moment of death you will undergo a journey into your own subconscious mind where you are faced with the contemplation of the decisions that you made in that lifetime, and the consequences of those decisions. In some of the spiritual traditions there is an aspect of judgement of the being that is making the journey, and to some degree this is true. The judgement comes from that part of you who projected itself into the 3-D reality to create the personality that we perceive ourselves to be here.
In the Egyptian tradition these are gods or archetypes of consciousness that one adopts in order to assess that lifetime. A process is undertaken whereby the heart of the dying person is weighed against a feather. What does this mean? What it means is that if the heart of the person leaving incarnation has any attachment to the third dimensional plane it will weigh down the heart. Things that can do this are attachment to material pleasures, to lower astral emotional desires, and to pleasures that the physical body can bring. The whole process of passing through the underworld is the releasing of the attachment to the third dimensional plane.
The service to ourselves of walking a spiritual path in this lifetime is the realization of the attachment we are encouraged to make to material pleasures, and the illusion of those attachments. Through walking this path in this lifetime you are already preparing yourself for the journey through the veils to achieve realization on the 5th dimensional plane.
In the spiritual tradition of the West, through Christianity, all references to walking through an underworld realm have been stripped away from the teaching. All that remains is Psalm 23 which states "Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, yet shall I fear no ill".
Yet at the time of Jesus, and through the spiritual tradition of the Hebrews, all the detail about the journey through the underworld was known. So why is there no reference to it in our Bible? It is as if somebody wished us to be totally ignorant about the process, and because of this there is so much fear anchored into humanity through death.
So what is this process of death and dying?
The process is actually divided into two parts. One is called the long death, and the other is called the short death.
The long death starts when a call is issued from a person's soul to withdraw from the physical vehicle and return home. This immediately sets up an interior process and reaction whereby various chemical changes occur, and certain shifts in consciousness are activated to prepare the person for withdrawal. The timescale involved in this can be many years, a few months, or even a few weeks.
The short death involves a period of seven days. The first three days lead up to the day whereby the person will take his last breath on that day. On the fourth day the person takes his last breath. For the remaining three days the person then withdraws from the physical/etheric body and travels the path of return. |
