The After-Death Experience

"One student wondered whether or not there was any kind of organization in the immediate after-death experiences. Since this is a question that will come into many minds, I will deal with it here.

First of all, it should be obvious from what I have said so far that there is no one after-death reality, but [that] each experience is different. Generally speaking, however, there are dimensions into which these individual experiences will fall. For example, there is an initial stage for those who are still focused strongly in physical reality, and for those who need a period of recuperation and rest. On this level there will be hospitals and rest homes. The patients do not yet realize that there is nothing wrong with them at all.

There are also training centers. In these the nature of reality is explained in accordance with an individual’s ability to understand and perceive it. The familiar parables, for some, will still be used at least initially, and then these individuals will be gradually weaned away from them. In these centers there are certain classes in which instruction is given for the benefit of those who choose to return to the physical environment.

They are taught, in other words, the methods that allow them to translate emotion and thought into physical actuality. There is no time lag, as there must be in the three-dimensional system, between the initiation of such thoughts and their materialization.

Now I have spoken of such development earlier. Some of my readers, not being perhaps aware of any psychic ability of their own, might think then that they are in for a long and protracted period of after-death training. Let me hasten to tell you that all such ability is not necessarily conscious, and that much of it takes place during the sleep state when you are simply not aware of it.

Now: You may after death utterly refuse to believe that you are dead, and continue to focus your emotional energy toward those you have known in life.

If you have been obsessed with a particular project, for example, you may try to complete it. There are always guides to help you understand your situation, but you may be so engrossed that you pay them no heed.

Much later and on many levels you will finally learn to take many forms, as you choose, consciously. In one manner of speaking you do this now, you see, translating your psychological experience — your thoughts and emotions — quite literally but unconsciously into physical objects. You may find that when you imagine yourself as a child — after death — that you suddenly have the form of the child that you were. For a certain period of time, therefore, you can manipulate this form so that it takes any appearance that it had when it was connected with your physical form in the immediately previous physical life. You may die at eighty and after death think of the youth and vitality that you had at twenty, and find then that your form changes to correspond with this inner image.

Most individuals after death choose a more mature image that usually corresponds to the peak physical abilities, regardless of the age when the physical peak was reached. Others choose instead to take the form they had at the particular point when the greatest mental or emotional heights were achieved, regardless of the beauty or age that characterized the form. Do you follow me?

These after-death environments do not exist necessarily on other planets. They do not take up space, so the question, “Where does all this happen?” is meaningless in basic terms.

It is the result of your own misinterpretations of the nature of reality. There is no one place therefore, no specific location. These environments exist unperceived by you amid the physical world that you know. Your perceptive mechanisms simply do not allow you to tune in to their ranges. You react to a highly specific but limited field. As I mentioned earlier, other realities coexist with your own at death, for example. You simply divest yourself of physical paraphernalia, tune into different fields, and react to other sets of assumptions.

From this other viewpoint, you can to some extent perceive physical reality. However, there are energy fields that do separate them. Your entire concept of space is so distorted that any true explanation is highly difficult. Give us a moment.

As your perceptive mechanisms insist that objects are solid, for example, so they insist that such a thing as space exists. Now what your senses tell you about the nature of matter is entirely erroneous, and what they tell you about space is equally wrong — wrong in terms of basic reality, but quite in keeping of course with three-dimensional concepts. In out-of-body experiences from the living state, many problems are encountered, in terms of space, that will be met after death. And in such episodes, therefore, the true nature of time and space becomes more apparent. After death it does not take time to go through space, for example. Space does not exist in terms of distance. This is illusion. There are barriers, but they are mental or psychic barriers. For example, there are intensities of experience that are interpreted in your reality as distance in miles.

After death you may find yourself in a training center. Now theoretically, this center could be in the middle of your present living room, in physical space, but the distance between you and the members of your family still living — sitting perhaps, thinking of you or reading a paper — would have nothing to do with space as you know it. You would be more separated from them than if you were, say, on the moon."

from the book Seth Speaks by Jane Roberts, Chapter 9: Session 537, June 24, 1970