Caring For the Newly Dead

[kimberlysteele]

We live in a spiritual Dark Age.  Mainstream religions have wandered well into the ballpark of materialistic atheism.  Materialistic atheism has almost no tools to deal with human death, as it is in complete denial of the afterlife.  Because of this lack of tools, funerals have become yet another expensive, corporatized, dehumanized rite of passage.  To die is to pass through a depersonalized, one-size-fits-all grist mill for making money off the bereaved.  

Our age's terror at the prospect of the yawning memory hole of death manifests in psychotic symptoms.  Nobody is supposed to look old and death is better hidden and unobserved.  The elderly are warehoused so they can be forgotten in a kind of grift oubliette.  Families are atomized, begging the question, What is the point of having children if you cannot expect them to care for you in your old age?  

Many Ways to Die

Though there are many ways to die, there are two main types of death: expected or unexpected.  Overall, expected deaths are better for all parties because there is a chance to prepare.  Unexpected deaths are where things can get stuck.  Stuckness occurs in situations where death occurs by murder, heart attack, stroke, accident, suicide, or when an aged or infirm person has not made their peace.  

One way or the other, when we die we see parts of the astral plane fabric that are not visible in normal, physical life.  This is where the reporting of a bright, white light comes from in the NDE or Near Death Experience.  Unless you have gone out of the way and taken special pains to be a horrible person, chances are you will see the white light and be beckoned by its warmth and acceptance.  I fully expect to see the white light.  Though my life has been far from perfectly-lived, as it stands I have tried for many years to be a better person than I was yesterday, if only by the slightest amount.  Once you are received by the white light, there is a another reception on the non-physical side.  From what the dead have told me, we are received by our assigned spirit guides and by the HGAs or Holy Guardian Angels of our loved ones, including pets, places, and in some cases, objects.  This is why dying brings a feeling of going home, even if your Meatworld home was transient or a tar-paper shack on the side of a garbage dump.  You are briefly greeted by guides who comfort you and brought to a place of intimate familiarity, love, and genuine rest before being dunked into the Underworld.

We All Go to Hell, Regardless of Hand Baskets

The Underworld is my catch-all term for the kind of non-eternal hell or purgatory every human on the meat plane must go through before reincarnating into a new form.  The concept of hell and heaven is where most mainstream religions go absurdly and spectacularly wrong. Buddhists obsess about avoiding the incarnation process altogether, hoping and trying instead to escape the wheel of meat-plane cycling to skip the line to a subtle and masterful non-physical state.  They are not the only ones who fixated on escape: Aztecs and Mayans made the avoidance of our current demonic, materialistic age into an art, absorbing village after village primarily to attain victims for blood sacrifice.  The point of the sacrifices was seemingly to keep the priestly class out of incarnation and to prevent the world from becoming what it is now.  Christians misinterpret the Underworld cycle as an eternal pit of torture and pain for the unrepentant wicked.  The only alternative in this binary is an equally unbalanced assumption that they will sit for untold trillions of millennia at the right hand of Jesus based on the judgement of the works of a single human lifetime.  Only Hindus, who can proudly boast the world's most ancient and enduring religion, see the reincarnation process with a sense of balance.  Even they err by playing into the caste system, which has horrific repercussions for almost anyone who has ever believed in it.  The haughty presumptions that arise from belief in the caste system are kissing cousins to boneheaded Quranic and Biblical literalism.  

As I have mentioned in the past, an entity once shared with me that the grace with which we accept our judgements and descent into the Underworld determines how much bounce we will gain before going into our next incarnation.  My childhood as Baby Kimberly was terrible, and not because of anything my parents did or where and how I grew up.  My childhood was awful mostly because of the anger and sorrow I failed to resolve from my previous life.  In my most recent past life, I was a wealthy but embittered widow who lost her two sons in World War I.  Her unhappiness leaked into this life.  Many of her emotional issues were still on the table for resolution well into my current lifetime.

Once we have spent time in the Underworld going through the nasty process of sorting through most of our mea culpas and stupid crap we did that hurt our fellow sentient beings while in physical incarnation, we bounce back up to the higher astral plane in order to get ready for our next incarnation.  Contrary to popular mainstream religious belief and based upon what dead people have told me, we do not get a choice whether or not any part of these processes happen.  We cannot choose incarnation any more than a fish can choose to live in water.   As the world ebbs from its current peak, some souls will stay out of incarnation for longer periods and others will be reincarnated as animals.  Of course I could be wrong.  

Despite the way we have been trained to look at it, death is a good thing.  That said, ending your life prematurely can have dire consequences depending on the intentions behind the action.  At any rate, it does not speed up the resolution of any of your problems except on the most superficial level.

They're Still Here: How the Newly Dead Interact

I operate under the assumption that the newly dead can still see us and interact with us on the astral and etheric planes despite being divorced from the physical plane.  When my friend died of cancer in his sixties, he visited me during my daily Sphere of Protection and said that from his end of the astral, it looked like a fireworks show.  There is nothing strange about talking to the newly dead; in fact, it would be better if we all learned to talk with them.  There is also nothing strange about a dead person informing their loved one they have died.  This is usually called a haunting but I think this is far too dramatic a term.  The facts on the ground are the etheric body sticks around for most of the time there is still a corpse.  Cremation severs the link and immediately dissolves the etheric body.  When I die, I am specifically asking in advance not to be embalmed because I feel preservation of the corpse ties the astral and etheric bodies to Meatworld for far longer than necessary.  When I die, I expect to hang around Meatworld until I am either cremated or rotted in the ground from being buried.  Freed of my physical body, I will wander about visiting any friends or relatives I have left.  If they are used to interactions with spirits of dead people as I am, I will try to give them an etheric sign of my presence, such as a candle burning brighter or the scent of citrus, mint, roses, or incense.  If they are a normal person who gets freaked out by occult phenomena (likely) I will only observe and keep my energy to myself.  

Once my etheric and physical body separate anywhere from a few days to a few months after my death, I expect to be led by my spirit guides and my own higher self as I transit out of Meatworld and my old incarnation as Kimberly Steele.  If my experience as a dead person is a typical one, and I believe it will be, we can use it to inform us how to help the newly dead find their way in absence of their physical and etheric bodies.

Candles and Flame

Just as regular incarnated humans are drawn to burning campfires, fireplaces, and flame, candles draw both non-embodied humans and spirits.  Lighting a candle for a dead person has the same effect as giving them a powerful flashlight on a dark road.  Candlelight vigils should be done for any newly dead person in the spirit of helping them through the immediate afterlife process.  Candles burned at the place the newly dead person loved and/or considered home or best: they act as amplifiers of comforting energy and draw spirit friends to the corresponding area on the astral plane.

Flowers

Regardless of whether the person liked flowers while alive, fresh flowers are etheric plane improvers that act similarly to candles; that is to say they are amplifiers of comforting energy that bridge the etheric into the astral.   Once again, flowers provide a temporary energy source that draws benevolent helper entities.  What we think of as flowers are no more and no less than magical herbs.  Herbalists know that herbs have the power to drive away malevolent energy via banishing and draw helpful energy.  The result is greater illumination and purification on the path out of incarnation for the newly dead person.

Music

Music is an extremely potent purification tool and is very effective when assisting the newly dead to connect with their higher selves and helpful spirit guides on the astral plane.  Like flowers and flame, music repels malevolent entities and provides a bright spot on the astral plane so the newly dead can rally and prepare for their next steps.  It's especially powerful and helpful to play the music the dead person loved in life, even if it isn't the most agreeable music to the still living.  While playing the newly dead person's favorite music, send the intention of gratitude for their time in physical incarnation, no matter how brief.  Even unborn babies have "favorite" music that sensitive mothers can determine while they're still in utero.  While sending gratitude, also send wishes for their smooth and easy transition through the Gates until you see them again.

Prayer

Prayer is the most important tool we have in our arsenal for helping the newly dead.  The goal of prayer is simple: we ask a deity who is older, wiser, and smarter than we are to help with something they know a great deal about while we ourselves know very little.  In other words, we do what is perfectly logical.  The more connected the newly dead person is to the Divine, the easier their transition out of Meatworld will be.  The reason it is tremendously important to live a virtuous life by being generous, kind, compassionate, fair, modest, diligent, and moderate is because living the Word is far better than preaching it.  Unfortunately, it is common among monotheists to abuse prayer as conversion cacomagic: they take any fledging connection they have with the Divine and use it to guilt trip and browbeat others into serving their specific God.  This act is ironically Satanic and will likely earn them long stints in the Underworld where, as the Bible says, "they shall have their reward".  Instead of telling others how to accept your version of Jesus or some other god into their hearts, you go first by connecting to a god and doing your level best to serve that god with humility and grace.  Connection and discourse with the Divine drives out parasitic, opportunistic entities while affording glimpses of the afterlife process well before it is time to go to the afterlife.

Letting Go

As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, our civilization has a problem accepting death.  We have a problem with divine grace and become dissonant when dealing with endings.  Grace means not clinging to what once was and not pining after what was not meant to be.  As far as I can tell, most of the dead move on fairly quickly -- a few days to a few months -- unless we compel them to stay with constant, intense, unrelenting grief.  When you are tempted to wallow in grief, light a candle and focus on the moments and legacies of the person, pet, or house that were given to you and ruminate about how your life is better because they were there for you in this world.  By focusing on the good and adding gratitude to the mix, you improve and sublimate their journey as well as your own, no matter where they are.  When you see them again, and I believe you will, they will thank you for it.  

 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Kimberly, nice essay, and some good advice, especially around the post-death rituals.

I lost my last 2 grandparents last year (both suspiciously soon after receiving a certain pharmaceutical), and every night for 40 days, I lit a candle and some incense and said prayers to my gods for them. 40 days is the time prescribed in the Tibetan book of the dead for how long it takes the soul to move over after death. Weirdly, my parents seemed to just want to get the funerals arranged and move on with their lives. They never speak about their parents now, and change the topic quickly if I bring them up.

For what it's worth though, I'm pretty sure my last incarnation was as a female spy born somewhere in Eastern Europe after WW2 and who died in her 30s in East Germany in the early 1980s, shot in a basement somewhere - she did not die well. I believe her family was also killed when she was young.

I visited Berlin once, and it brought up some strange emotions. Nostalgia (especially the GDR museum), sadness and dread were the main ones, though at the time I had no idea why.

I was born into this life in the late 1980s, and up until I was 20, I was dogged by the persistent belief that I and my parents were about to die soon, and had a general mental attitude of paranoid hypervigilance (I dealt with this via video games to emotionally detach, which was not a great strategy, in hindsight) Every birthday, I was kind of surprised to have made it another year. It may have also given me my inbuilt mistrust of authority and ability to circumvent the rules, whilst still presenting a "good citizen" outward appearance.

I think I also died relatively young (40s) as a British airman in WW2, presumably somewhere over Germany/Eastern Europe (as JMG has said before that where you die can affect where you are reincarnated). However, before the war, I was living it up in the 1920s and 30s as a pilot flying around the world, including some time in Egypt, which was presumably why I was obsessed by all things ancient Egyptian as a child in this lifetime.

There's a few other ones I'm not sure about, but I get hints of being around in the French revolution (as an ordinary Parisian woman caught up in the chaos - I've been to France generally, and Paris specifically, and I couldn't wait to leave) and possibly as a US army scout on the American frontier in the early 1800s (he also died young, though from something stupid like frostbite or tetanus, so I hold no ill feelings about the beauty of the American midwest) Going further back, I think I may have been a Japanese shinobi in the 1600s before they were all rounded up and killed (noticing a theme here?), a Japanese wandering monk in the 1700s and possibly a Portuguese sailor in the late 1500s who visited Japan, as I got a real sense of 'home' when I visited Portugal some years ago, and I've always wanted to (re?)visit Japan. (And was going to in 2020, but then some stuff happened... And now it's gone from being just "very" expensive to "unbelievably" expensive)

Interestingly, I absolutely hate flying in this lifetime (and yes, I realise the irony in the places I've visited above - my parents took me on holiday each year as a child, and every time I'd throw up for a week beforehand in anxiety about flying. I've not been on a plane in 7 years now), and the thought of guillotines practically made me hyperventilate as a child, so I think we carry over a surprising amount of emotional baggage between lifetimes, particularly about the manner of our deaths.

Reincarnation is now basically an unrecognised scientific fact as well. There's an organisation called the Bigelow Institute who research it, and they have documented over 2000 cases that indicate reincarnation (eg. knowledge that a child would have no other way to know, etc). They have some great downloadable essays of evidence on their website. The response from the scientific community is "Well your methods and findings are unrefutable, but we don't have any theoretical basis for how reincarnation could work, so we will reject all the evidence". Much like "structured water" (read: homeopathy), "low-temperature nuclear reactions" (read: cold fusion) and radionics machines, if it doesn't fit in the current model, there is no place for it - evidence be damned! Unfortunately it's a pretty common story with so-called Science these days, as the past 3 years have shown with stunning clarity. Trying to go up against the establishment with facts is a fool's game though, you're better off just circumventing it - in the same way that Florida water is marketed as a "cologne".

It's a shame (or not, if you believe as I do, that suppression of this knowledge is intentional - the original versions of the Bible make reference to reincarnation in such a way that it was seemingly common knowledge, but later revisions edited it out), as since I came to believe in reincarnation, I lost all fear of death. Not in the sense of going out of my way to do dangerous stuff (I don't really want to have to learn to walk, talk and read all over again in a hurry), but taking the long view of "how will this action affect my next life?". I, for one, hope to survive at least long enough that the population starts dropping, so that I reincarnate when the rubble of the long descent has stopped bouncing and industrial civilisation has finally collapsed. Sounds kind of selfish, I know, but I don't really feel like growing up in either a failing techno-dictatorship megacity or a savage hinterland getting hunted by drones and warbands.

Caste systems are a very ugly interpretation of reincarnation though, I agree. If we assume that you "did your time" in the Afterlife, why should you be punished further in your next life? And from the higher-caste perspective, wouldn't treating people like trash just mean you get to be reincarned as lower-caste so that you can feel what it's like? Seems very short-sighted.

Mr. Crow

Ps. How were the Aztec sacrifices supposed to keep the priests out of reincarnation? Just by accruing lots of bad karma to stay in the Bad Place for longer? If so, that seems like... an odd strategy.

Thank You.

[(Anonymous)]

Awesome post; I wish I'd been able to read it last November when my dad died.
We did do a celebration of his life in December-- which he had written and composed himself years before-- so hopefully that was of some use to him.

My reaction is really really odd to me. I did all my grieving for him in the month or so before he died. After the celebration, thoughts of him have mostly gone out of my mind. Shouldn't I think of him more? When I do, it is a fond memory or something that I thank him for-- such as all those beautiful, leisurely summer vacations spent lounging in my bedroom with the air conditioner that he had put up in the window that June.

He was a very kind, giving, compassionate humanist who had very little use for "organized religion". He went to a Unitarian church most of his adult life, which really was a Godsend for him. Most of his friends were there. If anyone lived the Word he did. Unfortunately he succumbed to Coronamania in his last years, but this manifested as a terror that I would catch coronavirus-- "you're my only flesh and blood and I don't want to lose you!" So I would phone him every week to assure him I was still alive and fine.

I take great comfort in your statement that those who live the Word will have a better time of it.

- Cicada Grove

[(Anonymous)]

I refuse to go anywhere without my handbasket.

—Princess Cutekitten

Thank you

[nightwatchwaits]

Dear Kimberly. Thank you for another beautiful essay. Blessings upon you (and the cats who reside with you too this time!). It is an honour to walk alongside you for some of your journey through this life.

Questions & ghost story

[(Anonymous)]

Kimberly, thank you for sharing this post. I appreciate the stories and the info.

I have a few questions, if you feel like answering any, I would be most appreciative.

How long after death is lighting candles, playing music, or having flowers beneficial?

If we are not near the places the deceased considered home, are these practices still helpful?

To share:

When I was 12 my grandmother was in the hospital and doing poorly. My mum and grandfather left me alone while they went to visit her and do some errands.

Whike I was making myself a sandwich for lunch I had a flash of incite. I knew she had died, yet she was standing right behind me. I turned round and saw her. We talked for a bit. She gave me some advice and said goodbye.

She was very religious. She said death wasn't what she expected, and even though it was very early days (minutes), so far it was "just grand". She'd had a very hard life and had been very ill for a long time. She was quite happy to be free of it all. She was hoping to find Jesus and my deceased father. But even if she couldn't, she was still ready to "go adventuring".

When my mum and grandfather came home hours later they told me my grandmother had died around lunch time. No surprise to me.

I missed her, we were very close. But she'd been so happy and so thrilled for this next part of her existence, I found it hard to be sad.

I told a few people about what happened and they said I had just imagined it. Or dreamed it. It's weird that I "imagined" seeing her spirit right around the time she died and before anyone had told me she'd passed.

- Heloise

[nebulous_realms]

Wonderful essay, Kimberly! I have grandparents that may pass soon and will keep this information in mind for them. I also took the liberty of sprucing up my current bedroom space with flowers and candles - because it makes an instant etheric difference in my bedroom environment I can't live without now! And thank you for your sentence on grace - captures in one sentence a sentiment I am starting to come around to. Short story, I made some mistakes this year that'll hurt me in this life, but the proper response is to understand that what I could have achieved sans those mistakes, is just not meant to be for me at this time, and that's OK.

[brendhelm]

I read somewhere - I forget where - that the spirits of the newly dead often attend their own funerals. Does this seem to match with what you've been hearing from them?

As for my personal experience with death and reincarnation, I have also felt a sense of feeling like I came back into incarnation this life too quickly and far from willingly - I've often had generalized feelings of "not being ready yet" or "not being prepared yet", have unusually hostile feelings towards the common New Age idea of "you chose to incarnate here and now", was hyperlexic as a kid coupled with insisting on referring to myself in the third person straight up until first grade (I knew how to use "I/me/my"; I just stubbornly refused to use them - possibly because my soul wasn't really thinking of this body as being actually "me" yet.

My past lives have not been particularly forthcoming as of yet - so far the only two I have really glimpsed, via guided past life regression, are 805 as a kid during the Siege of Patras (which I hadn't known about beforehand), and 1817 as a French mariner who seemed to have been involved in a mutiny. In both cases I was male and hanged as a relatively young man. I am pretty sure I was also a German soldier during World War I who died in 1918, but I don't really know that life and I don't know what came between it and the present one (with the discarnate period as short as it has been this past century, there'd have to be one longish life or 2-3 short lives in the interim). I may ask your Ogham one Sunday about this; I've had a kind of nostalgia for the fifties and small-town America even though I am way too young to actually remember them and never lived in a small town, but I'm not sure if that's actual past-life stuff or if it's me empathizing with Boomer nostalgia.

[lukedodson]

Shortly after my brother passed, my mother and I were talking about him, in a grumbling but affectionate sort of way, and we heard the sound of a very small bell - kind of like a meditation bell or something similar. Baffled, we looked around the room for a bell that might have fallen over, but couldn't find anything.

Much later, I read on JMG's blog that bells are one of the ways in which the departed make themselves heard by the living...

[slithytoves123]

Do you happen to remember anything from between your lives? It seems few if any people with past life memories remember the time between, which is a curious fact in its own right.