A talk by Belsebuub in Berkeley, California, 2008
The physical body is left behind every night when dreaming, but it’s not normally known unless someone has a conscious out-of-body experience. With death, there is a permanent out of body experience. Because that which attaches a person to the body – the silver cord, is cut. And then, a person is out of the body and in another dimension, just as when dreaming.
Death is a stage of going from one level of existence to another. And at that passing through different planes, many have the classic near-death experience of going into the tunnel or light.
When someone dies, they find themselves out of their body. They can sometimes see the body that they’ve left behind. They can see the room and everything around them. They often have a sense of peace of having left behind the worries and cares of the world. The process which follows, is a pretty universal one. Many experience going into a tunnel, which is often dark, and passing through it, they recall seeing a light at the end, many go into this light. As they go into it they are sometimes met with a spiritual being, or relatives, or even family pets. And then after that usually comes a review of their entire life, it is done slowly and every single event is captured, even every thought.
After that for some who have near-death experiences, there’s a kind of a barrier which appears and that they say is a point of no return, and if they were to cross that barrier they wouldn’t come back. At that point, a few people are asked verbally or telepathically whether they wish to continue with their life or not. For many others, there is a feeling of wanting to go back and finishing something in life, or they are just brought back to their body involuntarily.
Now those are the classic stages in which people go through when they have near-death experiences and these are pretty universal. Although parts differ by culture the key elements happen regardless of it, regardless of whether someone has a belief in spiritual beings, whether they are religious, or whether they are atheists. These things happen as core experiences throughout the world.
The accounts of those who have had near-death experiences are compelling evidence in the physical world because they happen when consciousness should not be present at all. When the accounts of the experiences make sense, when people have seen things while they were out of the body, which are verifiable here, it’s clear that they’re not seeing hallucinations. These kinds of experiences are shared by people all around the world, there are even cases of blind people seeing for the first time while having a near-death experience.
Q: Can we find out what happens after death without actually dying? If so, how?
Belsebuub: It’s very important to find out what happens after death because our time here is so limited. It doesn’t last long in comparison to eternity. Everyone has a certain lifespan here so it’s a really fundamental issue as to what exists after death, and whether a person survives it.
Fortunately it’s possible to know about death in a number of ways; firstly, in an involuntarily near-death experience, a person is aware of leaving their body behind, they know that they’re out of it, and are existing at a time when their body is dead, which is an impossibility for science.
A voluntary way to find out about death is by having out of body experiences. They are basically the same as near-death experiences except that a person always comes back to their body, and it happens to everyone naturally every night. You don’t have to be dying to have an out of body experience, although a person can be sick and have them. They usually occur very naturally or are the result of intentional practices and training.
The other way to get some information about death is through dreams, this can be more subjective than the first two ways because dreams are often colored with imagination. In dreams people can be visited by the deceased and can get information about someone who has just died, even if they didn’t know that they’ve died, dreams can tell of the process of death and can predict a death. Premonitions show that things happen in dreams which are more than just imagination. Their very existence and the sheer quantity of them is an evidence of there being a communication from the other side.
Dream experiences can be objective because they happen in the place where near-death experiences and death takes place – in the fifth dimension. So in those ways you can see into the world of the dead, no one is completely isolated from it. The body is left behind every night in dreams but without being aware of it. By learning to study dreams and having out-of-body experiences you can learn about death through your own personal experience.
Can we contact people who’ve died in some way?
If you have out of body experiences, you can go to exactly the same place as people who die. So you can contact and meet them. You can also meet them in dreams, but it’s not exactly the same thing because there isn’t the same level of control and self awareness in a dream compared to a conscious out of body experience. It’s also possible to just sense that someone is around you who has died. Many people get into spiritualism or channeling. And what they’re doing is actually connecting with the old personality of the person which was discarded at death, through which the dead persons egos manifest.
At death the person goes into the fifth dimension and moves from there into the sixth, which is spiritual or into the abyss. The travel from one level to another is made through a tunnel, which is why many say they have experienced going into a tunnel and seeing the light or the abyss, depending on the person. Later the psyche splits, once death is permanent, if it is not going to the abyss the essence or consciousness goes into higher spiritual planes, another part which is called the personality gets discarded. It is something which is formed throughout one’s life, it’s made of mental matter, which condenses over there into form, it’s the past, it’s history, it’s what is called a ghost. Ghosts are discarded personalities. They usually hang around the grave and around places where the person used to go to when they were alive.
Ghosts are sometimes contacted through channeling or spiritualism, but it’s not recommended because the spiritual part of the person has already left. They exist in the past and are used by the egos of the deceased. If you have an out of body experience, you can actually see and contact these ghosts, if you ask them a question that they couldn’t have known about, something that they would have to use their intelligence to answer you’ll find they can’t do it. They can’t come up with anything new, they just stay in the past. But the spiritual part of the deceased goes through a different process than the ghost that wanders around places where the person used to be in their life.
You can verify all of this with objective out of body experiences. You can also, like I’ve said, get information through dreams, but you need to be clear about what it is that you’re contacting or seeing because they’re different things.
Do people who are dead know that they have died?
The ghost, the personality, doesn’t actually know that its died. It wanders around the earth as though it’s still alive, as though in a dream. They just keep repeating the same things that they did in life. If you have an out of body experience and you meet one of these, you can see how they just keep repeating themselves. They don’t know that they’re dead and if you ask them, “are you dead?” They get confused. They often go into a state of panic because they can’t work out what’s happening to them. It’s beyond the program of those mental forms for them to realize the state that they’re in. They just see everything as it used to be, and live in the past, in those old images. They’re not the real person. It’s just something that was acquired in a life.
It’s different from someone who dies and then comes out of the body. At that stage, the personality hasn’t left yet. That split happens later on. When someone dies, they’re out of the body, usually knowing that they’re out of it and that their body has died. They can go through the process of death aware of what’s happening and when they come back to the body, they can recall it just as clearly as any event in daily life.
I have heard that people see their whole life in retrospect after they die or sometimes in near-death experiences. How does this happen and why?
The retrospective process whereby someone goes back over their life is commonly reported in near-death experiences. Those who don’t get to that haven’t gone as far as that in the stage of death. Less commonly, some don’t remember the stages before then and find themselves very quickly in a retrospective process.
Looking back at the different events of their life, some say how they saw their thoughts in detail and were aware of the repercussions of their actions and their effects upon others. This is because there is a higher spiritual presence behind all of this, which invokes a sense of care and regret for wrongs done.
This process helps someone to see what mistakes have been made in their lives. Anyone can of course reflect while still alive. Anyone can look back over a day or even a life, seeing mistakes made and correcting them. But in death this process happens profoundly, and every event that happened in life is relived.
Do you think that scientists will ever be able to answer any of the questions we have about death, perhaps with some advancements in technology?
Science is really stuck when it comes to understanding death, because the measurements which are taken, the things which study death are physical; they’re three dimensional. And death is the end of the three dimensional part. So there’s no way of measuring what happens to the person psychologically.
As an example of how science can’t really understand consciousness, the response of the body and the brain can be measured when we eat fruit, like an apple. But that response, that measurement tells us very little about what an apple tastes like. To know what an apple tastes like, we’ve got to actually eat it. Death is a personal experience, moreover, one that happens to the psyche in another dimension.
Near-death experiences happen to individuals in the absence of physical things and they happen when the body is dead. Now to science, if the body is dead, consciousness cannot exist…but consciousness does exist. As around 15% of people who die and revive say, they’re very much conscious and lucid when the body is dead.
In the light of this, many scientists today are even having to say that it’s impossible for this to happen. It’s impossible for consciousness to continue while there is no brain activity whatsoever and therefore, consciousness must be separate from brain activity. Now that’s a big step to take. Because as consciousness is separate from brain activity, then the questions of the origin and nature of consciousness arises. And here a person learns more through personal experience than by studying conventional science.
People who have had near-death experiences are in a much stronger position to understand them than those who study just the accounts of those who have had them or who study scientific data. So if someone wants to voluntarily understand near-death experiences, they must have a similar kind of personal experience without actually facing death. And for that out-of-body experiences are required, with them, it’s possible to personally explore what happens with death. You can go to the same place where deceased people go, as I have done many times. With out-of-body experiences, you can go where science cannot.
Science in this respect is essentially grounded in medieval or renaissance viewpoints. And so no matter how much the technology improves, it will not be able to measure and understand matters of consciousness which are nonphysical and multi-dimensional. It can only reliably tackle things up to the fourth dimension at best, and mostly speculate upon the rest. And it is completely out of its depth when it comes to understanding out of body experiences and near-death experiences. For those, personal experiences are necessary; it’s the only way.
Most religions describe something continuing after death, but why is the description so different between different religions if it is indeed a real phenomenon?
Although there are descriptions which vary between different religions about death, the actual core experiences of near-death experiences are very similar. What changes are really incidental details. The main experience of being out of the body, going through the tunnel, meeting other beings, having a sense of peace, the review of one’s life, or hellish experiences for a few; they are essential experiences whether someone is in China, in the USA, in Europe, wherever. No matter what culture, no matter what religion they have, the core experiences are the same or similar. They get dressed in different ways, they have certain emphasis depending upon what culture or religion a person has, but essentially they are very similar.
Many religions allude to some kind of heaven or hell that we can go to when we die. Is this a reality?
Most near-death experiences have a spiritual sense about them and if someone goes far enough, they recall going into light, meeting spiritual beings, feeling a heavenly presence and things like that. They are going from the fifth dimension to the sixth and the tunnel that they go through is the passageway from one dimension to another. The sixth is much more spiritual than the fifth. Practitioners of Buddhism and other religions who meditate a lot can experience going into the light, it is essentially the same place as those who have near-death experiences go to when they go into the light. However, not everyone who has a near-death experience goes into the light. Many people don’t get that far.
A smaller, but significant percentage of people have hellish experiences, very negative ones. They sometimes see things as described in classical demonology or they are in horrible places which they can’t define. It is a hellish experience in other words. The two opposite kinds of NDE’s are of heavens and hells. If you have a solar astral body, you can discover the existence of the infra-dimensions by going there.
Why do different people have different types of near-death experiences, i.e. some just see their body, while others have a more spiritual experience?
People have different kinds of near-death experiences depending upon how far they have gone along the different stages of death. Some might go no further than being out of their body. Some might just enter the tunnel. Some may go through the tunnel and just see the light and come back, others may go into the light and so on…there are different stages. So usually it is because people are at different stages of death. But there are also differences because there are cultural differences. And there are also differences due to the individual learning that each person is to go through.
The cultural differences tend to be a kind of a layer, beneath which the core experience is formed. So a person in one religion will see a spiritual being in one kind of way, in another religion they will see it in another different way. It is interesting that children who die and revive have twice as many near-death experiences as adults and they tend not to have very fixed ideas about death. These near-death experiences happen to children as young as three. Yet they go through the same processes that adults go through, although more commonly the life-review is not seen. So there are different stages that people go through, depending upon the individual. In the case of those who experience the hellish side, they have another kind of experience to go through. But the core hell is essentially the same.
Now this really leads us to the point that it is in everyone’s interest to explore death and OBE’s while alive. You don’t have to wait for death to learn about death. And if you can learn about death then it brings you back to your life, to question it, to ask what it’s for, what you can do with it and what higher purpose it has. It is very important to look at these things because of the temporary nature of life itself. If you can look into your life and explore it, then you can discover its purpose, fulfilling its purpose and awakening prepares a person not only for death, but for eternity thereafter.
