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| Author: Posted: Sep. 8, 2002 | This Page Viewed: 7,121,759 |
Question of the Week: 55 - 8/20/2001 What Lies Beyond? What does your magical/magickal tradition, belief system, training, religion or Path say about what will happen to you when you depart this earthly realm via what we call 'death'? If your belief system includes concepts such as 'Summerland', 'Avalon' or 'Valhalla' as a final arrival point in the hereafter, what do you envision that place/state will be like? Is it permanent or do you move on from there? If your belief system teaches/advocates reincarnation, what steps does the soul/spirit go through in the process? Why does the belief that you have been taught or have chosen concerning the afterlife appeal to you? Do your beliefs- or non beliefs- in the continuation of the Spirit help you in your life today when you encounter hard times, illness or the physical death of a loved one? |
| Reponses: There are 28 responses posted to this question. | Reverse Sort |
| To Spend All One's Time Wondering What Will Happen After Death Is... | Aug 24th. at 12:30:02 pm EDT |
| Emerald (Fort Lauderdale, Florida US) | Age: 20 |
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To spend all one's time wondering what will happen after death is not only pointless, its anti-spiritual. The truly great spiritualists of history, your Buddhas, Jesus's, Ghandis, Martin Luther Kings and the like, did not spend their time Philosophizing about the nature of the hereafter, they understood the most important lesson which is that spiritual nature is real and we needn't understand it to take strength, comfort, companionship, and wisdom from it. Besides, the answer is moot, firstly no one knows 100% for certain until they get there, crazy mixups, imperfections, and unpredictable occurrences exist everywhere, even in spiritual nature. That said, I'll lend my vast knowledge of Near Death Experiences to the conversation. Recent medical tests have proven both the unique nature of spiritual experiences, and the validity and unexplainability of Near Death Experiences, as well as presenting somewhat of a profile of the "typical" experience. The "typical" NDE Experiencer does not say anything so blatant as "I felt a pain and then my soul left my body, " anymore than a butterfly wonders why it's not a caterpillar anymore when it leaves that cocoon. They describe a sense of floating, seeing themselves from above, often seeing the Doctors working on them trying to save their mortal lives. Then they see a tunnel of light, or a dark tunnel with a point of light at the end, and a feeling or a voice beckons them into the light, where they encounter spiritual beings like gods, ancestors, and mystical creatures. The other side is consistently described as a natural paradise. No NDE Experiencer I have ever spoken to has said they saw "the Kingdom of Heaven, " with streets of gold and great mansions and blah blah blah blah blah, they sometimes refer to the natural paradise of the otherside as "heaven" because that's the only term they know. To be fair, there probably are Kingdoms in the otherworlds, but those Kingdoms are not the otherworlds themselves. No NDE Experiencer ever says they were asked what religion they followed or what gods they claimed allegiance to, in fact one's morality in a single lifetime has very little influence on whether one enters the light or suffers in ones' own inner darkness. Sometimes NDEs don't involve entering a bright light, but rather crossing a river into the otherside paradise, such as the River Styx in Hades. In some more rare experiences the soul simply remains in the physical realm after leaving the body, which is of course frustrating to the spirit because they're less material than the material world they've remained in. Still other times a soul instantly reincarnates and carries a hugely intact portion of their past-life memories over into the new life, and sometimes these instantly-reincarnated people remember almost everything from their past life by the time they're only a few years old. In very rare cases people experience a bad NDE, with visions of fire and brimstone and nasty monsters, or simply remembering over and over again all the bad times of ones' life, or the rarest case, utter darkness, total loneliness. It's important to remember that YOU decide almost entirely whether your journeys through the otherworlds will be pleasant or self-torturous. |
| I Guess You All Know The End Of The Lord Of The... | Aug 24th. at 1:12:46 pm EDT |
| Cat (Asheville, North Carolina US) | Age: 34 |
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I guess you all know the end of The Lord of the Rings, or the end of Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles. It's a very beautiful and very sad end; nearly everyone we're fond of goes on to the summer country (i.e. dies) but some have to stay behind and keep going. Someone always does have to stay to finish the book, because the summerlands story is the one that no one knows how to tell. I don't know how to tell it either. Like Agent Mulder, sometimes I want to believe. I imagine this awareness not being lost, or seeing the people who are gone again, and it makes me cry every single time. It's the thing I don't hope for, because if I hoped for it I think it would kill me: to hope for what I can't believe. What I can hope for is for death to come easy, and without long preliminaries, and the near death experiences suggest that it isn't hard. Even if they're hallucination, it's comforting to know that. But no story tells us anything about what's really there; we don't know. We just have to keep going. You know what Darwin said, confronted by the natural cruelty of the world: "Let each man hope and believe what he can." |
| Although I Believe It Most Likely That Our Individual Lives Completely Cease... | Aug 25th. at 1:47:51 pm EDT |
| Secular Pagan (Minneapolis, Minnesota US) | Age: 37 - Email |
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Although I believe it most likely that our individual lives completely cease when we die, even if there does prove to be some form of afterlife it is important to realize that this life and this world is an end in itself, not merely a sort of way station or school through which we pass to "something better." The best way to prepare for any subsequent life, whether in an "ultimate" sense or simply in the "mundane" sense of the different stages of our mortal lives, is to live the present life fully, wholly, in alignment with our deepest, truest values. Keep uncovering who you are and simply BE that self, to the best of your ability and knowledge at any given moment. Give what you can to the world, to your community, and open yourself to receive such good as comes your way. In a word, LIVE. Here. Now. For how will you be prepared to live any other life if you haven't been really living this one? Now if this life is the only one we have, if it proves (of course we won't know if it does!) that death is the cessation of our existence -- and this is what I believe is probably the case -- there is still meaning and pattern and beauty in the cycles of mortal life. We, as individuals, do not exist eternally, but Life, the "Great Life" of which we are all a part, goes on, even as our bodies continue to live through all of the birthing and dying of the individual cells that comprise it. We are born into this world, into the dance, to take our place in it for a time; we grow, we learn, we dance, and, when our part is complete, we pass away, to give other dancers their turn in the Dance. |
| I Believe That We Are All Reincarnated Until We Achieve Perfection. Then... | Aug 25th. at 2:40:16 pm EDT |
| Vwondola (Waycross, Georgia US) | Age: 14 |
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I believe that we are all reincarnated until we achieve perfection. Then we go to the Summerland(or anything else you want to call it). I'm not sure what it would look like, but i think that it would be absolutely beautiful. I intend to try my very hardest to achieve perfection in this life, then i will know what it looks like :) |
| This One Question Thing Does Not Work Sometimes Because You Have To... | Aug 25th. at 11:58:57 pm EDT |
| Nury (OZ, North Carolina US) | Age: 1 |
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This one question thing does not work sometimes because you have to test it out to see if your post can go through because for whatever reason sometimes they don't. |
| What Does My Belief System Say Will Happen When We Depart? We... | Aug 26th. at 12:27:37 am EDT |
| David (OZ, North Carolina US) | Age: 1 |
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What does my belief system say will happen when we depart? We will go to heaven or hell. But most people in the Christ teaching do not follow it very close. If you follow it close no one will like you except God because it goes against societies ways. You challenge the church not through your pagan beliefs but their beliefs written in the bible, most do not follow. The last church I went to worshipped TCT AND TBN. What they said could not be challenged (www.pfo.org). Some people may be getting help for this for cancer and then it might be a scam, do search for cancell Wren. Contacted a women her father made it not first. I asked about NCI saying there was no studies about the 20, 000 mice experiments she did not respond back but I also asked about Agnihotra and she is a Christ person. There is a meeting somewhere that they talk about their experiences with it it can be found on the site, a phone number. I'm keeping an eye on you witches. My belief appeals to me because I feel it is the right one but I don't follow it. A gathering in temples to pay are pentence due, how much do we owe, the ones we slayed for you, religious wars destroy us, blood in sand abounds, Jesus your the answer, we cut you up, and burned your crown. Christ people sometimes are not very nice but that applies to you witches too. |
| What Happens When We Die? This Is One Of The Major Queastions... | Aug 28th. at 1:49:19 am EDT |
| Di (Adelaide, South Australia AU) | Age: 19 - Email |
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What happens when we die? This is one of the major queastions in our life that can never seem to be answered. It is something that all religions tend to want to beautify to help people become less 'scared' of the unknown. Many people believe in reincarnation. Others believe in mythical lands filled with a person's ideal beauty. Personally, I believe in reincarnation. I believe that when we die we automatically go into another body. It doesn't matter about what type of physical being, ie. animal, human or plant, we will exist in some shape or form. This allows us to continually be connected with the earth, air, water, and fire. It allows for the spiral of life and time. I have a favourite quote that I think goes for this: 'Life isn't for anything, it just was'. I like this analogie, and if you can look closely it can also help. Two literature aspects also come out - A good movie for this is 'What dreams may come' - A good fictional novel based on philosophy is called 'Fly away Peter, Fly away Paul' by David Malouf. It has a good death philosophy. |
| Choice Lies Beyond - I Have Always Believed This, And I Have Taught... | Aug 28th. at 4:35:10 pm EDT |
| Dawn Nikithser (Hightstown, New Jersey US) | Age: 30 - Email |
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Choice lies beyond - I have always believed this, and I have taught it to my students. When we pass from this life, and we are granted union with the Great Spirit manifested in the Goddess and the GOd, we are given a choice. We can come back, reincarnated in a new form to live life again. We can remain, and become a part of the Great Spirit, adding our uniqueness to the Life Force that touches all of us. Or, we can choose to return in a non-physical form, to watch over the loved ones we left behind. For those who choose the latter, when they feel their "work" is done, they can decide between the other two choices once again. I also believe that there are those souls who are unaware of their passing, unfortunate ghosts who are stuck. Sometimes they are stuck because their is somethign left for them to do, to communicate, to know. It is up to the living to help these souls, if, of course, they can communicate with or perceive them. I don't really know how I came by these beliefs - it's simply what I have known, in my heart, since I was a child. Those people who have studied with me have always agreed with these ideas, some of them even agreeing it's what they always believed as well. I know that some of my loved ones choose to stick around - I was lucky enough to feel many of them at my recent handfasting. And I have seen the old souls, the ones who made a choice to come back and live it all again, in the eyes of children; I have even seen those all-too-human eyes staring out at me from animals, and have felt the connection there as well. And there have been ghosts, and I have tried to help. These beliefs have been of great comfort to me when I have lost loved ones, or when I have become melancholy thinking of those who have passed. My apologies if this answer rambled a bit, and I thank you for offering up such a thought-provoking question. My best to you all. |
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