The Deep Life Review Zone (Lower Mental Plane, Causal Body)
AC 275: August 24, 2007 (Crawford Lake, Maine)I was in one of the stations of the Afterlife. I saw it as a small train station. It was cheerful and clean, a wooden structure painted in bright colors--comfortable, but clearly not a destination or place to linger in. It was an in-between place. I don’t know how I got there.
Several elderly people were asleep on benches. I knew that they had died.
I observed a woman who had been in her eighties when she died. She was petite, sharply dressed, one of those remarkable women who retain their faculties and strength of mind and body right until the end.
Suddenly, to my surprise, her eyes flew open. Without moving, she allowed her eyes to roll about, slowly taking in the scene.
“Well,” she said, “I certainly didn’t expect this after the embalming process. They must have done something wrong.”
Somewhat timidly, at first, as if afraid they might not work, she began testing her limbs to see whether she could get them to move. Then she sat up, once again allowing herself to take in the scene.
I realized that the bright colors were a symbol of the energy of the place, which was focused on getting people to wake up to their continuing existence after death.
As the woman’s attention roamed around the room, she became aware of me as the only other consciousness inhabitant. She must have decided that we were waiting for a train, because she immediately went into a friendly, chatty mode to while away the time.
She began telling me about her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Several other people lying on the benches stirred, rubbing their eyes and sitting up. They were less alert than my companion, whom I’ll call Betsy. They behaved like people rising from a deep sleep.
There were several men and women. The men were in bad shape, overweight, disheveled, pale, as if suffering from heart problems. The women, in contrast, had taken better care of themselves. They were beautifully done up in their Sunday best, not a hair out of place.
I realized that I wasn’t seeing how these men and women had appeared in connection with their funerals, but the state of mind they died in, their emotional and spiritual health, and how well they were prepared for death.
Gradually, a group of seven dead people formed, including Betsy. There were four women and three men.
The women began comparing notes on their families with Betsy. The men were silent, staring off into space, still in shock or deeply self-absorbed. Everyone seemed to continue in the Afterlife the social behavior they’d exhibited while alive--sullen men and talkative women.
I continued to observe without interacting. I was in the role of a group Facilitator. The group was doing fine. There was no need for me to intervene and direct things.
It wasn’t long before the women felt sufficiently safe with one another to begin sharing concerns about various relatives with health, financial, or family problems. One of them, heavyset, and apparently much younger than Betsy--not a happy person, as Betsy was--seemed to think of this conversation as a competition: whose left-behind family was in worse shape. I could see that she was an expert whiner and complainer. She’d gotten a lot of practice in her long career as an executive assistant.
The men weren’t really listening, just as they might tune out such discussions when overheard, while alive, at a dinner party.
Then the train arrived. It was suddenly there, as if this station were the beginning of the line and it had just rolled in from a nearby station yard.
The locomotive was large and powerful, with a big steam boiler. It was green, as if with verdigris, yet seemed to be equally old and new, somehow polished rather than oxidized, with golden brass shining through underneath. I recognized the green-gold light of the master intention grounding practice, symbolizing a connection from earth-based life (green) to that of the soul (gold).
The engineer was a tall, broad-shouldered man about my age, with blond hair streaked with gray and a short beard. He had intensely blue eyes, with laugh lines on either side--a strong, yet gentle soul. He was dressed in sky-blue overalls. I’ll call him Chris.
The locomotive reminded me of what Charles calls soul trains. Here was the head of this little soul train of recently deceased people, about to pull all of them closer to the Source.
Chris was an advanced old soul, hence the apparent age of the locomotive. The big boiler indicated that at his level of evolution he’d built up quite a head of steam to propel him and his charges closer to the Source.
I gathered up the group and herded them outside the station to the train. I was surprised at first because there didn’t seem to be any cars behind the locomotive. But as the seven Shades at the station advanced toward the locomotive, several open touring cars appeared.
The Shades seated themselves, but not next to each other. The lineup appeared to reflect their proximity to the Source, as developed during their life on Earth. Betsy was just behind the locomotive. I remained with her. The whiner was toward the end of the line, along with the men.
I greeted the engineer with a handshake and he gave me a funny look. I felt a little embarrassed, since I didn’t know why I was there or what I should be doing.
I stammered a lame explanation. “I’m not really with them,” I said. “Or I’m with them, but not of them.” Finally, I settled on: “I guess I’m just along for the ride.” For some reason, I couldn’t say, “I’m a still living human among all these dead people.”
The engineer seemed to know. I guess I wasn’t supposed to mention death or dying in front of the Shades. It was their own job to figure out where we were and why.
As the locomotive pulled out of the station, I found myself getting excited about where we were heading. I remembered what it was like when I was a kid and my kindergarten class got to take a field trip by train.
Betsy also remained alert. She didn’t want to miss any detail of the trip, as if she were on a train traveling through a foreign country. She continued to make occasional remarks about some family member she was worried about. But she gradually became so absorbed in the journey that she fell silent.
The train was bound for the lower mental plane, the area of the Afterdeath Zone that I call the Deep Life Review Zone. I once saw this zone as a vast cemetery--and so it appeared on the present journey.
The train went up and down hills, around curves. It was traveling through the matrix of humanity to find the locations of these souls, who were all related somehow--not by blood, but by having similar purposes or functions within humanity as a whole.
The train stopped in an area with several freshly filled-in graves. They were not contiguous, but spread over an area perhaps equivalent to a half an acre, with other graves and some open spots scattered between them.
The graves represented people who had passed on from here to other areas of the Afterlife. They had markers to represent their personality in their last lifetime and what they’d learned. These were the graves of their mental bodies. The spaces represented people who belonged to the same soul group, but were still present on the planet. The freshly filled-in graves were for recent arrivals, just beginning their Deep Life Review.
The seven Shades making up our party got off the train and were each instinctively drawn to the place that was prepared for them. They would spend the next phase of their Afterdeath journey here, examining each moment of their life to see how it supported or obstructed the soul’s master plan for their growth.
When finished, they would leave the corpse of their mental body here. Their soul would rise to the next higher body, the causal, in the upper reaches of the mental plane, where they would experience a kind of heaven.
Grass would grow on their cemetery plot here on the lower mental plane--symbolizing the growth accomplished at this level. A marker would appear, like a carved tombstone, a monument to the personality of the life left behind, its beliefs and values. This marker will allow their souls, or anyone connected to them who knows how, to visit their world view, a still-living replica of the earth personality, for guidance or wisdom, or an ongoing sense of family connection, even after the soul has reincarnated.
Betsy knew exactly what to do. She walked right up to a person-sized plot of earth that had recently been dug up and filled in, surrounded by grass, and dove in, as if it were a little swimming pool. She disappeared instantly.
The other Shades stood around in front of their plots as if unsure of what to do or doubtful about whether they should do it. To my surprise, two fo the men peed on their own graves. But I realized that they had some fears and feelings of being pissed off over having died. They had to release these feelings before they could proceed.
I was really shocked when one of the women--the whiner--did the same, and discovered with great perplexity that she had a penis. The other two women checked themselves, and sure enough, they did too.
Oh yes, I remembered, they’re beginning to realize that the soul is without gender. I explained this to them, mentioning to the men that if they felt their chests, they would realize that they had the beginnings of female breasts.
One of the men sent back to me a distressed thought that this had already been true of him before he died--the result of putting on weight and hormonal changes associated with aging. He wasn’t ready to accept the genderlessness of the soul.
One of the other men made me smile when he discovered that he could detach his penis. He threw it away, over his shoulder, saying to himself: “Thank God, I’m done with that thing.” Letting go of identifying himself as male was a relief.
The engineer and I were standing by the side of the train observing these occurrences. He motioned to me that it was time to go. The Shades would dive into the Deep Life Review process when they were ready. Our work was done.
Just after we pulled away on the train, I awoke.