Life after Death
Many people believe that there is life after death but no one knows about this illustration, people who are base or believe in faith they believe that there is life after death and also believe about Heaven and Hell.
Life after death, or what is simply called as afterlife, refers to the ideology that the consciousness or mind continues to exist after the death of the physical body occurs. Basically, such continued existence is perceived to be in an immaterial or spiritual realm. It was also believed that dead people usually go to a particular plane of existence after death that is determined by a god based on the actions of individual during physical life. While people’s existence is increasingly more modernised, death occurrences remains to be a mystery that is challenging the belief systems of the people. As such, when death comes to oneself or other people especially loved ones, many want to know rather than to depend on the belief alone.
First thing that we have to realise about death is that it is perfectly a natural incident in the course of our life. This ought to be obvious to us from the first since if we believe at all in a god, we should know that a fate like death comes to all alike, and that whether we are in this world or the next we must be equally safe in this god’s hands. Death therefore shall not be dreaded since it is a necessary step in the evolution of an individual. Leadbeater (2009) noted that “death is no darksome king of terrors, no skeleton with a scythe to cut short the thread of life but rather an angel bearing a golden key which he unlocks for us the door into a fuller and higher life than this” (p. 2). Question now is: how can we know that it is really so?
One aspect that makes life after death true is apparitions or the awareness of the presence of a personal being whose physical body is not in the area of the experiences wherein the experiences is sane and in a normal waking state. Apparitions are experienced in many ways and “seeing” is the most frequent sense of modality that furnishes such an experience. As apparitions are usually of short duration, it looks lifelike that it can be mistaken for a flesh-and-bones person only that is suddenly vanishes, giving away its ghostly nature. To wit, these apparitions mostly portray the dead as a felt presence (Osis, 1986).
Evidence of life after death is that we are continuing the present existence and not having a strange new life. We are not separated from the dead for they are here about us all the time. The only separation is the limitation of our consciousness so that we have lost not our loved ones but the power to see them. Nonetheless, it is quite possible for us to raise our consciousness that we can see them and talk with them as before. A man may focus his consciousness in his astral body while his physical body is still awake but that needs special development and in the case of the average man would take much time. When this happens, an individual would be conscious of the dead astrally instead of physically particularly through dreams (Leadbeater, 2009, p. 6). It would be very difficult for the average mind to grasp the reality of that we cannot see with our physical eyes: how very partial our sight is. Clairvoyance or the astral sight opens for us one or two additional windows that enlarges our prospect and spreads before us a new and wider world which is part of the old one although we are not aware of it before.
Dead therefore conforms with another dimension which we can either be with God (heaven) or be separated from Him (hell). Heaven is often called the “beatific vision” since in heaven we will become like God and behold him face to face (Madrid, 2001, p. 62). Few people deny the existence of heaven but there are many who deny the existence of hell. The Church’s doctrine held that hell exists and this can be discovered as true after death. For Madrid (p. 2001), denying the reality of hell is like denying the reality of gravity and so the best strategy is to live life so as not to go there. Scripture reveals that hell is a real place where real people go.
References
Leadbeater, W. (2009). Life After Death: And How Theosophy Unveils It. BiblioBazaar.
Madrid, P. (2001). Where is that in the Bible? Our Sunday Visitor Publishing.
Osis, K. (1986). Apparitions old and new. In K.R. Rao (Ed.) Case Studies in Parapsychology: Papers Presented in Honor of Dr. Louise E. Rhine. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 74-86.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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