What helps a person prepare for death?

December 5th, 2007

Dear Puran,
I read with great interest your posting and agree totally with your integration of the heart rhythm as the key to a more complete spiritual awakening. However, I have a dilemma, I am presenting a class this Saturday on The Soul’s Journey by Hazrat Inayat Khan.
The first half will go into the incoming soul and and is similar to re-birthing, I am quite comfortable with what I have to work with in that regard having worked with Murshida Vera Corda for over 25 years. The second half is on the outgoing soul. In my opinion, one of the important offerings we have, is to ameliorate our western cultures fear of death. It has been said often by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan that meditation is a rehearsal for death, and I was planning on structuring the meditation on the samadhi practice and thereby demonstrating that one doesn’t need the body to experience life. You seem to have strayed away from this method and I was wondering if you have any thoughts on the process of overcoming the fear of death in relation to the meditative process you have described in your posting.

“Live lives and death dies” — HIK

“The process of dying is so serious that the dying person is beyond the reach of the living person, so it is better to leave them to their own higher thoughts, what they are feeling at the moment.” — HIK

Baiss

Dear Baiss,

Pir Vilayat used to call his retreats a Rehearsal for Life. Is samadhi a rehearsal for death? I do believe that samadhi is the experience of going up through the planes as one does after death. Having led thousands of people on retreat, I’d say that samadhi is easy once one gets past the physical and mental plane. I’ve also had considerable experience with the dying, and it seems to me that where people have the problem, and need to rehearse, is in the purification of their heart.
The desires of the heart that are not accomplished before death seem to inhibit the ascent and cause souls to remain attached to life. The Egyptians said that the heart would be weighed in the afterlife, and if it was heavier than a feather, the soul would be stopped in its ascent and fed to a crocodile. The fear of death, that you rightly point out is endemic, is partly a fear of the unknown, but I think it’s mostly the despair, as Pir Vilayat so often quoted Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, of what one wanted to do that wasn’t done and what one wanted to be that one did not become. These are matters of the heart.
So I feel the most important preparation for death, and overcoming of its fear, is to (1) resolve our relationships with others so that we attain the state of no blame of anyone for anything, as Hazrat Inayat Khan says, “My thoughtful self, reproach no one, …” and (2) fulfill those desires that we have once let into our hearts, for all such desires must be either accomplished or renounced. People who have done these things approach death with a smile; those who haven’t fall into a paranoid battle with phantoms or trembling despair. In the hospice they say, “people die as they lived.”
Can one experience life without the body? There are different levels of life, but the full experience of life can only be experienced by one who is fully alive. Close your eyes and ears and experience life; that’s as close a description as I can make of the experience of life after death, except for three additional factors. First, departed souls have the ability to borrow the senses of the living, and can then sense what the living person is sensing. Second, telepathy works very well when the senses are gone, just as hearing is improved when sight is gone. So there is a connection between souls, both those living and dead, through telepathy. Third, the senses seem to work after death, just as we see and hear and even touch things in dreams, but what one senses after death is a product of the mind.
Otherwise, on the other side I believe there is a continuation of one’s thoughts, desires, interests and loves. In that sense, the life one had continues on. But let’s give full value and honor to the physical plane, lest someone get the idea that the body is not important. The physical plane is the ultimate culmination of creation! The whole universe of seven planes is supporting this concrete reality — this is it! Leaving this plane must be a loss; here we have access to all the planes we have passed through, but after death we are cut off from the seventh plane, then the sixth, and so on as we progress toward assimilation into the first plane.
Many traditions teach that here on earth we are bound and confined; in the heavens we are free. It’s a glorification of death, the great mystery that Yogis explored through samadhi. But a greater mystery is life, and that’s what I want to explore, through the heart. What we create and experience here is created for and experienced by the whole universe. And through meditation we can still access our jinn and angelic levels. So I say, here we are free; after death we lose some of our ability to co-create, hence we are less free then than now.

Love to you, Baiss, and blessings on your work,
Puran

Entry Filed under: The Heart, Spiritual health, Emotional health, Relationships, Meditation