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Welcome. This is Sananda. It’s an interesting question for almost everyone. What happens when you die? What’s the next instalment, the next chapter? Always assuming there is one, and we are assuming there is one. So to be clear right from the beginning, from our point of view, it is not that you are a permanent presence in the Universe, it is that the Universe is a temporary presence in your life, in your being. In essence, you are timeless, or eternal, or beyond all time. So time is a function of your current mode of existence, and there are other kinds of time that can be experienced in other modes of existence. So what happens next is already embedded in your experience of this dimension of being, this Universe. Nevertheless, an entirely valid and interesting question. 

However, one very proper answer, not the one I will leave you with, is to say you’re not there yet. It doesn’t matter, wait till you get there, concentrate on the present, let the future look after itself. As I say, that’s an entirely valid response and a useful response. If you find yourself getting anxious about what follows on from this lifetime, then I suggest remind yourself of that. Let the future look after itself. 

But I choose not to stay with that answer, because there is, for many of you, value in considering this question, because it also helps you to understand more about who you are now, what you are, what is the nature of your being, what’s the relationship of you as a being to this physical body? I’ve just said that you, as a being, exist outside time ultimately, and yet your clear experience, born out by many thousands of generations, is that this physical body doesn’t last forever, at least not in its current form. It might be that the energy that gives rise to your physical body is, of itself, in some sense eternal, but in the ordinary way of it, you know that the body you are experiencing at the moment is not going to last forever. And when you consider the time in which this Universe has existed (never mind all Universes), a human lifetime can feel like a very short span. 

So what then comes next? A little bit about dying, first of all. Of course, it can seem that dying is something that happens at a time that is not of your choosing, but I encourage you to play at least with the possibility that the timing of your leaving this physical body is more under your governance or your cognisance than you might have assumed; that, as a being, you monitor the progress of your physical life with great closeness, great attention and at higher levels of your own being, a little bit beyond what most of you, most of the time, are aware of, there is real choice being made by you. At those levels, however, the choice is not made from an individual standpoint. At those levels many other considerations are taken into account. At those levels you identify less with your unique human presence and more with a larger consciousness. 

What, then, does happen next? Be aware that as I speak I am generalising, because each of you is a unique being and each of your experiences are unique to you. There are general truths, but even with those general truths, they will not necessarily apply to everybody. So again bear that in mind as you listen on. Use that to give yourself freedom to know that whatever it is I say to you may not necessarily be true for the unique you that you are.

For most, dying is a pleasurable experience. For those of you who have been with someone you loved as they’ve died, it might not be easy to feel that that is true, and certainly in the approach to death there can be plenty of suffering, but death itself, that’s a liberation. It’s a liberation because you’re moving from a close association with all of the limitations that are inevitable when you occupy the kind of physical form that you have, leaving those behind for an expansiveness, a freedom from limitation, a different sense of yourself that for most will be a welcomed, larger, more expansive sense of who and what you are. And so imagine yourself shortly after the death of your physical body. As I’ve said, everyone is different, but let us presume that you experience yourself as being quite well-prepared. Death has not come to you as a surprise. You have some feeling, perhaps a memory from other experiences of dying in other lifetimes, that this is not such a difficult or unfamiliar business and that reorienting yourself after that liberation from a strong connection with the physical body and the physical world is quite easily and quickly accomplished. 

Of course, this is not true for everyone. For some that can be considerable difficulty in adjusting to that changing condition. Sometimes those difficulties can arise from strongly held beliefs about the nature of life and death. It may take a while for the individual to reorient, to adjust those strongly held beliefs to the new conditions that are discovered. For some there can be fear, a feeling of ‘I have made a mess of my life’ or ‘I have done something wrong and I will be punished’, and so on, and those conditions can also exert an influence. 

From this draw a broader lesson, which is that your trajectory, as we might call it, on leaving the physical world is conditioned to a considerable degree by pre-existing beliefs and ideas that you’ve held. Those don’t necessarily stay with you for all that long, but initially they are there. So, though I speak of liberation, this does not mean that you, the being, totally leave behind all of the experience of having been human. Far from it. You came here to learn, to grow, and you have really, innately, the wisdom to recognise that learning from the experiences of your life is a useful thing to do; and, having passed the threshold from physical life to physical death, a recognition that will come for most very quickly that there is still much to learn from the experiences you’ve had, that it isn’t solely the job of a happy old age, shall we say, to look back down your life and learn all the lessons it has to offer. No, there are plenty more to follow after you leave this lifetime, not least because your perspective changes, not just the sense of being more liberated from the limitations of the physical. 

It’s worth saying more about that. For example, when you’re a physical being, you’re used to having five or so physical senses. As you emerge from that connection with the physical body, you can quickly realise that you have many more senses than those five or six or whatever you felt you had in this human life, and all of those additional senses give you fresh perspectives on the life you’ve been living. That trajectory I spoke of, for some will include continuing quite a close identification with what, for simplicity, will call your personality self: the person you knew yourself as, the ideas you had, the enjoyments you had, the sufferings you experienced, and so on. There can be for many a freedom from those, but they still can be there as a kind of shaping. For others, that sense of the personality self may be quite quickly dissolved. So, to give some sort of structure to this process, you leave the physical body, but you don’t leave behind at least not straight away the energy field that allowed you to experience a human life, to draw to you the atoms, the molecules, the cells that were your physical body. 

And that template for a physical life is multi-layered and highly complex, as you might expect. For simplicity we could say that it is something like a Russian doll, that is to say that there are layers, and in the context of a human life then we might say your physical body is the outer layer. You shed that, but then there are other layers upon which you built the experience of physicality. Broadly we may say that your passage, then, on from this earthly life, when you choose to leave the earth plane and that will vary (some want to be around those they’ve loved for a while, others will feel no, don’t need to linger, they can be away) – very considerable variations there. There’s no right or wrong about this, just what suits the individual. 

But in that movement on from the earth plane then there is something like a reverse of the journey into this reality that we’ve characterised as a journey through the energy field of the sun – and the sun grants to you some very important aspects of the energy template you use to gather physicality to you. So that reverse journey then gives you an opportunity to shed, layer by layer, the template or series of templates that you use to give yourself human experience. And the number of those layers that you shed (and there are many of them) will vary from individual [to] individual, from the choices that you make. 

Those choices are not, again, personal choices. Your personal choice comes into it, but they are not solely personal choices. There are certain kinds of laws governing this process, this next stage of your journey, laws governing what you may or what you may not yet release in terms of the denser aspects of the etheric body, the energy body that you use to create the human experience. One of those laws (again I’m speaking in fairly general ways here) that governs how much of your energy field you can release as you leave this earth plane, one of those laws relates to the experience of growing that has been yours: we might say how well you have taken onboarded embodied, the lessons you have learned through life. 

Here I hesitate a little and wish to convey to you this hesitation, because something now that needs to be borne in mind is that you are leaving, when you die, a world in which judgment, judgment of others, self-judgment, has been pretty habitual collectively for humanity, to levels of reality in which that kind of judgment has no place. So the hesitation is, as I address this notion of how well you’ve – to put it in a fairly judgmental way – how well have you learned your lessons, carries with it a lot of idea of judgment.  And, of course, conventionally, in many cultures and in many religions, there’s been a very strong idea that when you leave this life, one of the things that has to be dealt with is judgment, that you are going to be judged or, at the very least, you are going to go through a process of judging yourself. As much as you can, as I continue to talk about this stage after a lifetime, let go of these human ideas of judgment and understand it rather more from your soul’s point of view. 

This also feeds into the whole question that has been asked about exactly who is the ‘you’ who leaves this life. So it is entirely possible for someone to experience, if they’re still choosing to closely identify with the experience of being human and all of the judgment that you find in the world you’re currently living in, it’s entirely possible, for someone who wishes to hold on to a lot of that, to experience a process of judgment, of being judged, of being punished indeed. You can create that – okay – but it is not necessary. Nor it is really a true experience of what is going on. It is conditioned by the feelings of guilt that originate from within the individual and not imposed from outside by other beings. 

What is in common for all, however much they choose to hold on to or release the conditions of physicality, is an opportunity to look at what I term the rich harvest of your life and to draw from that rich harvest all the benefit that you can. All the nourishment, we might say, and, from our experience, those experiences you deem bad and judge yourself for are actually as nourishing as those you deem good and praise yourself for. There’s the same degree of use that can be derived from all of your experiences. However, there’s a side note, but an important side note: I would remind you that your soul, your guides, myself and many other beings are encouraging you to appreciate that, since you learn as much through the happy experiences as through the sad experiences, why not see if you can learn and select and create experiences you enjoy, rather than getting sucked into a tendency that’s there in human consciousness over the past eon for learning through suffering, learning through pain. 

Okay, so we’re moving on. Now, in different ways – divergence, quite a lot of divergence here – people choosing with these conditions that are laid upon the choosing (and by conditions laid upon the choosing, I simply mean that there is a shared consciousness coming in more and more as you lift up to higher vibrational levels of your own being, there’s a much less emphasis on you, the individual), so your experience of yourself certainly can include other experiences from other lifetimes, certainly can become an experience of something that is none of these incarnations, none of these experiences, but has elected to create those experiences in order, broadly speaking, to continue to grow, but is not identifying with them. 

So the degree of identification you have with your experiences, that changes as you shed more and more of the conditionality of an energy field that gives rise to a human, as physical experience. So, depending on how you choose to do this, you’re granting yourself an opportunity to, figuratively speaking, look back over your shoulder at the incredible richness of the human experience, even a brief human life. Even the child who dies in infancy, even indeed the child who doesn’t survive birth, the child who is miscarried. If that’s been part of your experience, if you wish draw some comfort from this, that sometimes a being will choose to have a very brief experience of physicality, it’s all they need. It fits into a larger pattern of growing and if this has been your experience, then appreciate yourself for having given a being that opportunity. So, immense richness, even in the briefest of human lives. 

Much to consider and as you would expect, really, as you look from a new perspective at the life you’ve lived. As you see it, perhaps from multiple perspectives simultaneously, as you sense it with so many more senses that you had when you were physical, it’s going to look different. Your understanding of what your life was changes and so your understanding of who you, having those experiences, were – that changes too. So you come to a fresh experience of who you are, and that fresh experience, as I’ve indicated, may include all that was put forward in that series of questions and much more besides. 

This is also something important to point out: as I speak to you, yes, I’m communicating in a number of different ways, but I’m certainly using words, and words belong to the physical world. It’s not that something akin to human thought doesn’t exist at higher levels of your being. It does, but it is different and one of the differences it doesn’t really need to be turned into words. As soon as you turn the flow of mental energy into words, you’re turning a river into a series of little dots that can approximate to the idea of a river, but not the river. My words are not the flow of your life. Your flowing life is, way beyond anything at this time that I can put into words for you, so much more richness, so much more subtlety, so much more beauty, so much more love. 

If you take anything away from what I’m saying on this occasion, I would encourage you to appreciate that, whatever your personal opinions about the success or failures you’ve had in this life, you are actually loved beyond anything you can begin to measure while you’re in human form. And if you have the opportunity to experience death or something that you know you’re approaching consciously, then know that. You do know that it’s not the easiest thing to be human. You all know that, but you may not always fully appreciate that your willingness to do this draws spellbound admiration from many beings. And – whatever, whoever -d just for a moment, think of someone you consider to be a villainous presence in the world, someone who’s really messing things up for everybody else. That’s a beautiful being too. 

When I speak, then, of looking back at your life and that much larger understanding that inevitably will come when you open to it, am I then saying when I speak of a rich harvest, when I encourage non-judgment, speak of non-judgment of that world beyond, am I then saying that your life is without consequences? Not at all. No, every action in this life has consequences, every briefest thought has consequences, and part of the joy, we would say, of being able to look back upon the life you have lived is not just that you see those experiences in multiple viewpoints simultaneously, that you are able to see yourself through the eyes of others, and so on, but it is that you are able to understand, what is so challenging when you are in human form, the way in which the energy that you express in this life ripples on out into the Universe and creates consequences. 

And if there’s self-judgment, then that can be a frightening thought, a frightening thing to consider, but it needn’t be. It’s not about punishment. There are karmic consequences to all your actions, but those karmic consequences are just you giving yourself the opportunity to understand more of this huge subject: the law of cause and effect as it operates in a physical Universe, and it’s a very useful subject to learn. You don’t just have history, you don’t just have a past. You have a future and you have a vision, and you are learning, as beings, ultimately to be yourselves creators of Universes. If you’re going to do that, you need to know quite a lot about cause and effect. It’s going to help. So this is just a tiny part, this life you’re living now, it’s just a tiny, tiny part. The merest dot of paint in an immense canvas of unbelievable beauty. But that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. Every being is important. Every moment is important and precious. 

So, as you consider yourself as the being, you know – ‘who is this being that emerges from this lifetime?’ – if we use this idea of learning to create Universes as a kind of timeline, you can find yourself anywhere along that timeline. It depends, for sure, upon the range of skills and subtlety and immensity of consciousness you’ve developed. But intrinsically, you can find yourself anywhere along the timeline, from identifying strongly with who you are right now living this physical life, your personality self, your physical body, anywhere to a creator of Universes who is on a journey to merge with the Source of All, the ultimate Source, and you can not only be locating yourself at one point on that spectrum, but you can be at multiple points simultaneously along that spectrum. And that can include an awareness of, if you choose, all of the incarnations that you’ve had, all of the adventures you’ve had, all of the different dimensions, an opportunity to say, ‘Right, how does this life I’ve been living, now that I’ve had an opportunity to look at it, to absorb, to understand, to explore, how does that fit in with all these other adventures, all these other explorations? And then not just mine, but there’s my soul group, and then my group of soul groups, and then the magnificence of all souls that exist, and then there are other so many different ways of expressing beingness that this human expression is just one way’. And you have at your fingertips, or whatever constitutes your fingertips in these subtle energy spaces that become yours, so many different modes of expression. So there is no limit really to how rich you can discover the being is who has been being you living this life, having the rich experiences of this life. Every tiny, momentary experience in this life is itself a Universe. It can open up to reveal to you a Universe of, in the broadest sense, experience that is yours. Okay, thank you so much for listening and, with much love, go well.