Why should I feel discouraged?
Why should the shadows come?
Why should my heart feel lonely,
And long for heaven and home?

When Jesus is my portion,
A constant friend is He.
His eye is on the sparrow,
And I know He watches me.
– Civilla Martin (1866-1948), from “His Eye is on the Sparrow” (1904)

It’s time for us to talk about the greatest day of your earthly life!  I’ll grant you that from where you sit, it may be hard for you to envision the day when your current body expires as the greatest day of your earthly life. But please indulge me here, since that future day will bring about a shift in your perspective that might surprise you.

As we have been preparing to launch Seek Reality Online, we’ve been harvesting the best evidence from nine years of podcasts and seven years of these blog posts. And it has shocked me to realize how poorly I have been serving you in helping you to get your mind around what actually is going on in this brief and temporary reality that we share. Our bodily senses are useful tools for living here on earth. But that fact makes of them a tremendous ongoing distraction! Look around you now, and try to realize that the solid-seeming room in which you sit is 99.9% empty space. Your eyes and fingers tell you it’s a solid, friendly, and familiar room filled with furniture and the tchotchkes accumulated throughout your busy earthly life; but in reality, you are sitting in a howling void that you have ventured into only briefly, wearing this imperfect meat-suit. And you bothered to enter it only in the hope of raising your personal consciousness vibration enough to make it easier for you to do some things once you have returned to the places that matter more to you than anything your mortal eyes can see. Have I helped to shift your perspective a bit?

And in this blog each week, we have mostly talked about amusing, entertaining, often speculative things. In quickly sifting through these years of blog posts, I can see my own understanding evolving in ways that I have sometimes found to be enlightening. But I also can see that I have failed you badly in not talking more about where this is heading! The earth-life that you are living now was carefully planned before you were born, and with the assistance of people much wiser than we are whose only concern was to help you gain as much spiritual growth as possible from your brief venture into what Craig Hogan calls Earth School. In the process of planning, you and they planned two or three potential exit points that your higher consciousness could choose to take whenever it judged that you had wrung as much spiritual growth as possible from challenges that you had planned into this lifetime. One such exit point is generally in youth; one is in middle age, and often after some significant life-crisis had been mastered; and one is somewhere in old age. But there are exceptions. In Mikey Morgan’s case, he tells us that his brief life-plan had two planned exit points. One was at the age of twelve, as I recall, and the final one was at the age of twenty. He and those who had helped him to plan that almost unthinkably burdensome extra lifetime had assumed that he would bug out at twelve. But unexpectedly, he was so much enjoying his life as an American teenager that his second exit was the one that he wound up taking.

Your exit point is generally chosen about a year before the death event. You won’t be aware on a conscious level that a choice has been made, but on a subconscious level you will begin to heal any personal rifts, perhaps take trips, and in various ways tidy up your life. When people attend a celebration of someone’s life, often they will hear mention of these tidying-up efforts that were made within the last year or so. And yes, a death is possible that is either accidental or random, but such unplanned deaths are rare. If you find yourself outside your body and alone in a situation that seems to be a non-planned death, simply call for help. People who have been in such situations tell us that help in the form of a tall and glowing (sixth-level) being arrived at once, full of apologies, and escorted them straight home!

It also is possible to go off-track at death. To my surprise, Mikey tells us that as many as a quarter of dead people may wind up going off-track in various ways, although most of them are quickly rescued; which is another reason why it is important for you to know the usual drill, and to follow it closely. You can assume that every suicide is an unplanned death, and since you cannot kill or even lessen the awareness of your mind, for you to kill yourself will only make all your problems worse. Fair warning.

Of course, there are many planned ways to die. And some are neater than others. Among the easiest ways to die might be an immediately fatal auto crash, since you are out of your body and out of the vehicle before the impact happens, so you calmly watch it from above with your spirit guide right there for comfort. Many planned youthful deaths happen that way. On the other hand, cancers and other wasting illnesses can be slow and uncomfortable ways to die, as I often have been indignantly reminded by readers of The Fun of Dying. But terminal illnesses can be wonderful life-lessons. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross told her children after her death that her own terminal cancer had been among the most spiritually important lessons of her life. And of course, our bodies resist dying until they are severely damaged or sufficiently weakened that they are no longer able to sustain life. But how ever we get there, if death is not instantaneous, the last few days before a planned death occurs are remarkably uniform. Although, of course, everything that we are saying here refers to planned deaths only! And we should add that, except for religious terrors, which can be highly traumatizing, the death process itself seems for most to be a pleasant and generally pain-free process:

  • Perhaps oddly, the first significant event in the death phase is a slight improvement in bodily condition. The dying person seems to rally, and perhaps takes a bit of food and drink. This is generally seen by experienced physicians as a sign that death is no more than a day or two away. Often family members will be summoned to say their temporary goodbyes.
  • At about that time, deathbed visitors will begin to appear. People who are soon to die are as clueless about what is coming next as are people who are soon to be born, but fortunately help is available to them. One or two of the people they most love and trust who have passed long before will generally appear in the upper corners of the room about now, looking young and happy. Or sometimes many more people will appear, or a childhood pet will be included. In the early part of the twentieth century, there often would be lavish displays in which whole walls would seem to disappear and reveal beautiful gardens with buildings in the distance, but modern drug regimens seem to have reduced what happens to just the arrival of someone’s parents, and perhaps a pet or two. Often the dying will mention to those around the bed the names of relatives; but just as often, they simply will stop talking to the living and lie staring at an upper corner of the room as they talk with their dead relatives in their minds. These deathbed visitors perform a crucially important function. Once the dying person is free of his body, it will be his mother or his sibling who will coax him to leave the crowd around the bed right away and enter the next dimension.
  • There may be a period of terminal lucidity. It is surprisingly common for people who have been brain-damaged, comatose, or suffering from senile dementia to go through a period within those final twenty-four hours when briefly they are mentally almost normal. Sometimes they will wake up, even sit up, and speak with those around the bed. Given that these people had been mentally handicapped, sometimes for years, and in some cases their brains are severely damaged, science has no explanation for this phenomenon. But we understand it! At this stage, the inner energy body, which is leaving, is separating from the material body, including the brain, all parts of which are in the process of dying. And once the energy body is clear of the damaged brain, the person who is leaving is able to function normally again.
  • The rest of the energy body begins to separate as well. As death proceeds, the inner energy body actively separates from the material body, beginning in the fingers and toes and progressing up the limbs and then up the body in a process that feels like tiny threads breaking. This doesn’t hurt, although it does feel funny. The energy that is leaving gathers in the chest area and leaves the body through the chest wall, or occasionally through the top of the head. This can sometimes be seen as what looks like a gray mist that rises rapidly from the body and seems to disappear, but in fact it simply rises in vibration beyond the ability of most people to perceive it, and it forms into a human shape in the air. It is naked, but once the person notices that, he or she envisions clothing.
  • Reunions and the silver cord. Now is when a lot of things happen at once! Deathbed visitors hug the dying person; the silver cord that still connects him to his body starts to fray, and soon breaks; and the visitors urge him away, since once the silver cord breaks, his body dies and those around the deathbed will react to that.

So, let’s say hypothetically that you have just diedYour loved ones around the bed are calling for the doctor and feeling for your pulse, and your instinct is to reassure them that you have survived your death just fine. “Hey! Here I am!” But in fact, that is the worst thing you might do. If you try to interact with the living, you will lower your consciousness vibration and lose your ability to perceive the dead loved ones who have come to take you home, and that is the easiest way to make a new ghost. Your living loved ones can’t see you now anyway, so the smartest thing that you can do is to get out of there just as fast as you can. Remembering having read this blog post, of course you are going to do just that!

You, your mother, and your childhood dog soon find that you are entering a grayish fog. Your vibrations are rising rapidly now. Others have quietly joined you, too: your spirit guide, and perhaps more loved ones. And as you look back at your death scene, you see that the room and the people in it are looking vague and vapory. And then they fade away altogether.

The arrival gardens on the third level of the North American afterlife will require a separate blog post to do them any kind of justice, so we’ll be talking about them next week. But even before we get that far, I think you can begin to see that the day when you finally leave your earthly body might be turning out to be not such a bad day, after all!

I sing because I’m happy!
I sing because I’m free!
His eye is on the sparrow,
And I know He watches me!

– Civilla Martin (1866-1948), from “His Eye is on the Sparrow” (1904)