What Happens When We Die

We choose to come to this physical plane to learn, and when the learning for this life is done, we go home. That is what I believe happens when we die, and everything else on this page is detail around that one sentence.

If you have come here because someone close to you has just gone, please be gentle with yourself as you read. Some of this may comfort you now, and some of it may only make sense later. The Seeing Spirit page and the Taken Too Soon page were written with you in mind, and you may want to start there.

Where we actually live

People talk about the afterlife as the place we go after the real thing is over. I see it the other way around. What we call the afterlife is where we actually live. This life is the visit.

Your spirit body is an energy body. When you choose to incarnate, you choose your birth parents, and your spirit being attaches itself to the baby. It acts like the globe in a lamp. It lights the body up. Pregnant women are often said to be glowing, and I think that is exactly what people are seeing, her own inner light with the baby's light added to it. What we see as the aura is a human filtered view of the same thing.

At the moment of human connection your consciousness becomes human, with all of the limitations that come with it. You forget, mostly, where you came from.

That connection between your spirit being and your physical body stays in place for the whole of your life. At your death it lets go, and you return home.

The play is over

The way I explain it is a stage play.

Imagine you are an actor. You chose this play because you wanted the experience of being that character. In your head you know none of it is real. In your heart you play it as though it is, all of it, the dramas, the tragedies, the love, the laughter and the triumphs, because that is how it enriches you.

Now imagine you are also in the audience, watching. You came along because you knew the play would give you an experience that would stay with you.

When the play is over, the actor talks with the other actors, and they all share what they went through. Each one learns from the others. And the audience member meets the actor, and they share their experience with each other.

That is my picture of what comes after. The curtain comes down, and you sit with everyone who was in the play with you and talk about it. Many of them are the same twenty to twenty five souls who travel with you from life to life, and the Soul Groups page is about them.

What you carry out of each life goes into your soul memory, the sum of every human experience you have lived and everything you learned or unlearned in it. The Reincarnation page goes into that.

What others have seen

If you ever talk to nurses who work in end of life care, they will have a lot of stories for you about the afterlife. They sit with the dying more than almost anyone. If you know one, ask them.

People who have had a near death experience bring stories back too, and there are countless accounts of people meeting a long gone and much loved pet on the other side. Animals feature in the spirit world too.

If you would like to read something older, Emanuel Swedenborg wrote Heaven and Hell around 1758, in Latin. There is an abridged and rearranged English version by Donald L. Rose that is freely available. It is a very good read.

Time works differently there

Those in spirit have their own lives to live.

They are not sitting idly by waiting for you to make contact. They generally come through when they have a message they want to pass on, and dreams are the easiest place for that to happen. Time does not exist in the spirit world in the way it does here. It is hard to explain, and I will not pretend I can do it neatly.

The Dreams page in the Relationships and Guidance area covers dream visits, and the Seeing Spirit page covers how to talk to someone who has passed over.

Flawed on the way in, flawed on the way out

There is an urban myth that to be spiritual you need to be fixed, or healed, or complete. The world around us is a bit of a mess, and we as humans are full of human issues.

We came here to be flawed, and we will leave this earthly plane flawed. That is part of the agreement of being here. It is an imperfect world and we are imperfect beings, and at the same time it is a perfect world and we are perfect beings.

If you are still alive, you are still learning.

Nothing to fear

Of the ten things I ask people to take as given about their time here, the last one belongs on this page more than any other.

You have nothing to fear. The love of the universe hugs you.

We all come from the same place, and we all return to it. When someone you love dies, they have gone home ahead of you, and you will be reunited with them when you take your own walk over the rainbow bridge. The human in you will still grieve, and it should. The spirit being inside you already knows the way back.

If the grief or the fear is too heavy to carry on your own right now, please talk to someone you trust, or to a counsellor or your doctor. Spiritual understanding sits beside that kind of help, never in place of it.

What would change in how you live today if you knew, for certain, that you were going home at the end of it?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.