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LIFE, DEATH AND INBETWEEN STATES
What Exactly Happens During Death? – Passing through the seven layers…

There is a beautiful website on near-death experiences. An American doctor did this research. He started meeting people who had near-death experiences. ‘Near-death’ means those who are clinically declared dead and who come back to life after three to four hours. There are many such cases. In our Indian villages there will always be four to five cases.

The other day a doctor was telling me, ‘There are so many cases of those who are medically declared dead, and who come back to life after four to five hours.’ In some persons’ lives, it happens three to four times even, and they come back to life. This doctor somehow got interested in this subject and he started going all over the world, meeting these types of persons. He met 10,000 people from all over the world and collected all their memories and their experiences of how they had their death experience. He did research for 30 years.

After analyzing all their experiences, he reached a conclusion. He made a statement, a beautiful statement that people on the planet earth, only when they live, they are Christians or Muslims or Hindus or Jews or Buddhists. When they die, all of them die in the way that is described by Hinduism. We may be a Hindu, Muslim, Jew or Christian, but when we die we are a Vedanti (person who seeks the Truth).

In the Kathopanishad (ancient vedic scripture), there is a clear description of death. This researcher says, in all these 10,000 people’s experiences which he collected, everybody’s experience exactly matches with what Kathopanishad describes! Let us see how exactly death happens. First, we move away from the physical body. You may be thinking, ‘I came to learn how to live, but he is teaching all about death!’ Understand: unless we understand the mysteries of death, we will not have a clear idea about life. Our concept about death totally changes our concept about life. Our philosophy about life changes when our philosophy about death changes.

See, in the East, nobody cares for time. Things will happen at their own pace, taking their own sweet time. Why? Because all the eastern religions believe that humans have many births. They have eternity in their hands! If not today, tomorrow, that’s all. If it is not coming today, tomorrow, otherwise, next birth, so relax!
All western religions talk only about one birth. They say that after death we don’t have any rebirth. That is why western people are so time conscious. Whatever has to be enjoyed has to be enjoyed in these 70 to 80 years. Nothing else can be done. We have to finish it. That is why their life style, everything is organized around time consciousness.

The idea of death changes the whole idea of life. So never think that learning about death is a waste of time. It is the basic lesson everyone has to learn.

First, a person moves from the physical layer, that is the body which we are having, to the pranic layer, which involves inhaling and exhaling, that is the energy or the air movement, the prana movement inside our system. Prana refers to the life force that is brought in by the air into our system when we breathe. It is the life sustaining energy needed for us. Air is just a medium to bring prana in. Prana is what is needed to sustain life.

When we move from the first layer to the second layer, all our desires, our unfulfilled desires, all the ways in which we wanted to live but did not live, all those things usually come up. When this happens, it is almost as if in a room, ten people are standing, kicking a football around. What will happen? Just like how the football is kicked from corner to corner, our consciousness will be kicked from all corners. In each corner, some desire will be standing and kicking it. At the time our consciousness is trying to leave the body, all our desires will be forcing us to enter back into the body so that we can fulfill and enjoy them further. On one side, our desires will be forcing us to enter into the body again so that we can live and enjoy, while on the other side, the body will say, ‘No! I am tired. I can’t host you anymore, just leave!’ On one side, the body will say, ‘I am tired; I can’t host you.’ On the other side, the pranic layer that houses our desires forces us to live inside the body. That is what causes the pulling and pushing at the time of death. Pulling and pushing is nothing but the fight between our desires and the body.

Somehow, if we manage to move away from the pranic layer, we enter next into the mental body. When we enter into our mental body, all our guilt rises! All the guilt that we had about the way we felt we should have lived our lives but never lived, all the mistakes that we committed, all of our regrets, etc.
Please understand, desire is about the future and guilt is about the past. But actually, both are one and the same. The same thing, when it is about the past, it is guilt, and when it is about the future, it is desire! The way in which we want to live is desire, and the way in which we wanted to live but didn’t, is guilt. I always tell people, guilt is nothing but reviewing our past decisions with updated intelligence.

Our intelligence is continuously being updated. The problem is that with this updated intelligence, we try to review our past decisions. For example, as a seven year old, your mother comes and calls you to eat your food. She says, ‘You have played enough with your toys. Put them away, and come eat.’ What do you say? ‘No, I don’t want to eat. I want to play.’ If your mother comes and tries to snatch the toys, what do you do? You not only cry, you even curse her! But all these years later, now, you know that the toys are not so important as your mother is to you, is it not? Now, your intelligence is totally different. At that time, toys were so important to you that you cursed even your mother.

Now you know your mother is much more important. With this updated intelligence, is it good to create guilt? ‘Oh! At that time, I cursed my mother. I feel so ashamed.’ No! At that time, we had only that much intelligence. All our decisions are made with the available intelligence at that given point in time in our lives.
If we start reviewing our past decisions with updated intelligence we will always create guilt. All our guilt is nothing but trying to review past decisions with updated intelligence. All the guilt that we collect over our lives rises as we pass through the mental body. Then, if we move a little away, a little deeper , we come to the etheric layer that is related to all our sufferings. All the suffering that we went through during our life is stored here.

Like this, each and every layer has got its own samskara or stored memories. Actually, traveling through these layers is what we can think of as hell. There is no other separate place called hell.

Hell and heaven are not geographical locations; they are psychological spaces.
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