The entire "afterlife" consists of various separations, communities, and unions where the deceased reside, gathered according to the principle of similarity in aspirations, beliefs, mentality, and so on. Each of these communities is incompatible with other groups based on the principles of its formation and is even territorially and spatially separated from them. Most have no idea about the existence of other habitats beyond their own, which is familiar and dear to them.

This fragmented stratification of all the deceased into an infinite number of different communities based on the historical era in which they lived before their death, their affiliation with a particular nationality or people, as well as the quality of vibrations prevailing in the consciousness of deceased individuals, is very difficult, or rather, practically impossible to represent from the perspective of three-dimensional space.

Moreover, the inhabitants of the numerous subtle worlds of the lower and middle levels of the astral are little interested in the underlying principles and laws that ensure their "afterlife" existence. They perceive the world in which they live as a given and regard everything that happens around them and to them as self-evident, just as we, the living, perceive our own world.

For example, when I asked someone about where they got their clothes, I almost always received the same answer: "I was given it..." or "It has always been with me," and so on. Only a few of the deceased could say that they created their own clothing or that they formed their surroundings through their will and psychic influence. Most have no idea where things come from or where they go.

The memory of the details and peculiarities of their earthly lives is practically absent in all inhabitants of the lower layers of the astral, just as living people lack memories of past experiences that their soul once had. Nevertheless, they continue to live and behave as they did during their time on the Physical Plane of Earth.

Thus, during some of my astral outings, I encountered and communicated with Native Americans who, even after death, continue to live in tipis, wear familiar clothing, hunt bison on vast prairies, ride mustangs, and know nothing (and do not want to know) about the existence of other worlds that are completely different from their own.

Everything in their world is exactly the same as in the earthly one, except that there is no hated civilization nearby, and one can communicate with a mustang to learn its personal views on the surrounding life; a tipi, a bow, or even a Native American pipe can tell a lot about its owner, and bison understand their positive role in the lives of Native Americans, which suits them perfectly, and so on.

Once, I even found myself in a community of dogmatic Christians, whose environment exactly corresponds to the church's notions of paradise: the same banal "heavenly groves" with heavenly trees and birds among which the pious inhabitants monotonously and repetitively spend their "heavenly" existence day after day.

There is even a "hell" of their own, with all the terrible accessories also devised and materialized by blindly believing sinners: boiling cauldrons with bubbling tar, "devils" torturing the poor doomed souls, whose posthumous fate consists solely of "eternal" torment and suffering.

The more a person limits themselves during life with all sorts of fanciful and ignorant notions about themselves and the world around them, the more rigid and restrictive conditions they will encounter in their posthumous existence — this is an axiom. What resides in your consciousness as the dominant thought will form the basis of your entire life after death.

The immediate posthumous experiences differ from those during life in that a person suddenly begins to live their entire life in reverse, starting from the moments preceding their death, all the way back to their childhood and even their birth in the physical world. Before their soul’s eyes, their entire past gradually and sensually unfolds in reverse order, all those events that during their life did not stem from their spiritual nature. Moreover, everything that had a negative emotional or sensory tint towards other people immediately, taking on a flexible and dynamic astral matter, transforms into real pictures and events that become a source of spiritual suffering for the deceased.

Secondly, at the moment of death, each dying person indeed sees the primary radiant light, which almost all researchers of the phenomenon of "life after death" define as a "shining being," filled with love, grace, and goodwill towards the dying, empathetically understanding the essence of the suddenly fallen posthumous problems and concerns.

Do not try to do anything with your fear, because nothing will help, and it will only exacerbate the situation. Whatever you do out of fear will generate even greater fear. It is better to accept it, acknowledge that you have it, and continue to be afraid for a little while longer.

When you can recognize the fact that you are afraid, your fear will soon dissipate on its own, as it cannot last indefinitely. The nature of all our problems is such that they disappear as soon as we reconcile with them, and they become even more complicated if we start to engage in conflict with them. Only acceptance of inevitability disperses its clouds; only acceptance, not struggle.

Only fear itself can give you fearlessness, just as compassion arises from anger, and from understanding the nature of your hatred in your heart, love can be born. But for this, no conflict is needed; only vigilant awareness. And if you set yourself the goal of understanding each of your experiences, there will come a time when you will approach the most significant and acute of experiences — death.

Compared to death, life is merely a faded moment stretched over many years, nothing, because it cannot be as intense and sharp, nor as mysterious and final as death, which always comes as a whole, not in parts. There is nothing sharper, more exciting, and fateful for subsequent incarnations than the experience of death.

Only the knowledge of the truth can free a person from the horrors of death: that at death, the soul of a person does not die but merely transitions, is reborn into the subtle world, from where, after some time, it returns to Earth in the body of a newborn child. The soul of a person, reincarnating, lives many lives, constantly improving. Exhausting the possibilities of functioning in the physical body during life, the soul simply departs from it into its further posthumous existence, taking with it its subtle bodies.

The first of these — etheric, astral, and mental — undergo a series of destructive transformations, during which they disintegrate, returning to each plane the energy borrowed by the spirit during its latest incarnation on Earth, so that ultimately, upon completing the cycle of human incarnations, only the immortal spirit remains .(the monad, clothed in the matter of causal, buddhic, spiritual, and atmic bodies).

During the process of dying, under the pressure of life energy accumulated at the center of the greatest concentration of consciousness, a hole or opening eventually forms in the web, through which the soul departs from the physical body when the internal impulse for its rejection intensifies. In animals, children, and also in people whose consciousness during life was fully polarized in physical or astral bodies, the psychic centers serve as exit points: the solar plexus — Manipura chakra and the sacral — Swadhisthana chakra.

In people of a mental type, whose vital activity was closely linked to high-vibrational levels of thinking, as well as in spiritually developed individuals accustomed to intense exchanges with the energies of the spiritual plane, the soul during death is released through the crown of the head — Sahasrara chakra. The soul of an "average developed" person temporarily uses the third exit — there is another exit point just below the upper part of the heart.

There is a close connection between the location of the soul's next posthumous manifestation in the astral and the quality of the energy center through which consciousness "exits" at the moment of death.

Therefore, all evil and cruel people experience an astonishingly similar feeling of endless falling during the exit from Manipura chakra at the moment of death, directly landing in various spheres of hell to necessarily free their astral bodies from the predominance of coarse energies in their field shells.

If the soul departs from the physical plane through the highest exit, synthesizing all high-quality vibrations of the supradiaphragmatic centers, then rebirth in the subtle world will be very favorable, easy, joyful, and prosperous. Everything depends on the vibrations in which consciousness resided at the moment of death and on the predominance of energies of a particular quality in the field shell.

The exit in the area of the shoulder blades has a direct connection to the middle divisions of the astral — with the many manifestations of the so-called "world of doubles," which do not differ much (in a better way) from our own but are very strictly differentiated depending on the religious orientation of the deceased's consciousness.

During the process of "dying," the soul of an ordinary person, unprepared for a conscious transition into the subtle world, does not "fly away" immediately. Various religious traditions assert that there are forty or forty-nine days during which the semi-conscious soul seems to search for a "window" into its best world (we assert that this adaptation period for each unprepared soul is strictly individual and can last either significantly shorter — from a moment to several hours — or significantly longer — months or even years).

The average, "statistical" soul, during these seven conditional earthly weeks — once every seven days — seems to die anew each time, losing consciousness and transitioning to a higher level of awareness. Upon regaining consciousness, the deceased finds themselves in a new, cozier, and more attractive world.

As the soul progresses through the numerous steps and areas of the outer sphere of the astral, it increasingly cleanses its field shell of destructive vibrations through its experiences and spiritual sufferings, gradually acquiring a more attractive human appearance. After all, appearance in the subtle world fully corresponds to the state of the soul.

Everything else — private and trivial, which has not managed to touch the soul and has not aroused any lasting vibrations of true feeling — whether it be good or hatred — quickly dissolves after death in the corresponding spheres of the astral plane and is erased from the memory of the deceased, like processed material. Usually, this process is accompanied by quite unpleasant and painful sensations reflected in the consciousness of the deceased.

What, in essence, is the true meaning of the "art of dying" that we are trying to teach you, dear reader? Primarily, it is to learn to maintain a high level of awareness during the process of transition and to continuously strive spiritually to prevent lower energies from pulling your consciousness into the vibrational levels of low-quality astral flows.

Imagination during the transition acquires enormous power and might. Whatever picture you draw in your mind, the vibrations of your astral body will immediately begin to resonate accordingly with the imagined, and if your will sends even the slightest impulse in the direction of fulfilling the desired, then the matter of the astral will immediately turn the imagined into reality.

Each deceased brings with them into their posthumous existence the memories of their past, the desires that filled them during their earthly life. There is no escaping this: sooner or later, your thoughts and actions will catch up with you, and only you will have to bear full responsibility for everything that you once generated.

In general, it should be noted that death, in very rare cases, when truly kind and altruistically living people die, is simple and easy. In most cases, it is not a very pleasant period in the existence of the soul, at least until it fully adapts to the new conditions of life in the subtle world.