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

[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.

[kimberlysteele]

Thank you Neb! I hold out hopes this essay and its equivalent series on TikTok will help someone. I probably should have come out with this essay/series earlier because of all of the sudden and unexpected deaths that have been happening in the last three years. Unfortunately, I expect the unusually high number of sudden and unexpected deaths trend to escalate before it ebbs.

As for the flowers and candles, I keep meaning to spruce up my office and studio space within my home in the same way.

[stubborn_ass]

Thnk you for this. I am extremely thankful that so many are freely sharing their knowledge and experiences, both traditional and esoteric-based, as we move into a period of time where literally centuries will happen in weeks. We will need all the mental and physical toolkits to cope ..... so much 'truth' has been coming out in different spheres, that on one hand, it's gotta feel like a super exciting time to be alive to be experiencing all of these.. yet we still have free will and have to be responsible for making the changes that we desire come into play, some of which will face a lot of resistance.

[kimberlysteele]

Having lived through most of the 70s up to the current era, I can say there is a shift in energy lately, especially post-Coronahysteria. The New Religiosity is upon us, and it is going to be very diverse and eclectic.

[kimberlysteele]

And from the looks of things, Orthodox and Traditional Catholic Christianity may be the only parts of that religion that will come out intact. There is a huge and growing movement of ex-Evangelicals who are forging internet careers upon the takedown of Evangelical Christianity.

[(Anonymous)]

I grew up in a sort of evangelical milieu, and it seemed like it was headed for the rocks by the 90s at the latest. Perhaps it was earlier, and I was too young to notice. Trying too hard to be "cool" as the world defined it (but only achieving cheap knockoff status), while letting go of everything that anchored them to historic Christianity. "Be nice as long as it's not too much trouble" will never be able to substitute for "Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Me."

I think the Christianity of our future will be much smaller in numbers, and far more spiritually powerful, in practice. The modern age hasn't produced a lot of saints. I think that will change, and it'll be good for us.