A common phenomenon in the mentality of the terrestrial human is the fear of death. Nearly everyone is afraid of dying. For many people this fear borders on being an almost permanent, horrifying nightmare. They live in a never-ending fear of it. But why? Why are people so afraid of death? The reason is because human beings have still not been completely formed or finished by Nature's hand. Having a fear of death is an unfinished aspect of the terrestrial human mentality in the same way as being able to feel hatred, anger or bitterness towards one's neighbour. And just as humankind will one day have overcome this ability to feel hatred towards someone or other, it will also one day have overcome every aspect of the fear of death. It is not the purpose of life that human beings should go on living in fear. No human being can be completely happy as long as he is afraid of something.

"Man in the image of God" or the completely developed human being is not a being that is afraid of dying. At this point it could perhaps be said that a suicide for example does not seem to be afraid of death. But this is not so. A suicide is a person who has become so much in conflict with life, that it has become unbearably evil. As people of this sort do not know what it means to die, they believe it to be total annihilation. So they treat death as a lesser evil than that of going on living. That is why they commit suicide. But following that they find out that what they thought they would be free of, what they thought they would be able to kill or wipe out, namely all the miserable thoughts that caused them to commit suicide, are just as alive, just as painful. Very soon after the suicide they find out that they are still in that miserable state that they were in before they committed suicide, in fact that this state is now even worse because of the fact that in this sphere of life, that they have brought themselves to, there are no bright spots at all. Here there is nothing but mental darkness. After death a suicide is only able to contact people that are on the same spiritual wavelength as himself. He will be able to experience only a world whose inhabitants reflect the highest form of mental pessimism. As he is no longer in possession of physical senses, because he has done away with his physical body, he is cut off from experiencing the impulses of light, he otherwise would have got from the physical world. In the world that he has now entered there is no blue sky, no pleasant bright warm sunshine, no beautiful world of flowers and no joyful people. In other words there are none of the enlivening or stimulating experiences that he had the possibility of contacting in the physical world. These phenomena are all to be found on much higher or finer wavelengths than those he is at the moment able to experience. He can now therefore only sense or experience life on that wavelength, that sad sensory state, which the suicide has brought him to. Because this condition is even darker than the one that he, through his action, tried to escape from, he quickly becomes even more miserable. But within him an automatic function exists, which opens up with this increased feeling of misery; this function is the ability to cry out to God for help. Through this cry, this prayer, he releases forces or vibrations that are able to summon help. Loving beings, so called "guardian angels" enter into his dark state and free him, with their loving guidance, from the layers of consciousness in his psyche that drove him to suicide. After these dark layers of consciousness have been removed, by suggestion, from his mind, all that is now left for him is the ability to think of and experience light. After that he will enter into the normal life of the spiritual planes of existence and here he will not be able to remember anything at all about how miserable his condition was before. Only when he, through reincarnation, turns back to the physical world and reaches the age when he, in his previous life, committed suicide, will he again find himself in the same situation and so have to take up the struggle here against the dark tendencies in his consciousness.

However, it is certainly not the case that all people living in our world are unhappy. People who find themselves here in a normal, healthy and happy state, will also be in this state when they, through death, are freed of their physical body. For them the first period of time after death is like a continuation of their earthly happiness. Here they meet friends and acquaintances who have died before them, and for a time they experience the existence that they each have identified for themselves as being an ideal existence. So here they experience just that degree or amount of light that they had got used to being able to bear experiencing or displaying to their surroundings, just as they of course came to work with what interests them most in their life. In this way every living being goes through a paradise before they are born again to the physical world and where, through both dark and light experiences of fate, they are developed further to become the finished or perfect Man in God's image. So after death the American Indian will arrive at his "happy hunting grounds", and the artistic person will a world where he can have all his dreams fulfilled. The scientist will come to live in a scientific sphere, where he can receive answers to all the questions he has a burning interest in, and the belief-orientated person has the experience of seeing his belief materialized into bright, shining states of paradise. But it is not just humans that experience meeting the light of the spiritual world, adapted to the degree of spiritual development they have reached. Animals as well, experience, after death, their own individual paradise, analogous with their physical life experience. So both people and animals each have their own individual paradise between physical lives. All living beings that have still not evolved to real humanity or neighbourly love will all get their experience of paradise in the first sphere of the spiritual world, where that state that we know under the name of "purgatory" also belongs. Their journey therefore through the higher spheres of the spiritual worlds takes place in a more or less latent form.

The higher spheres of the spiritual world can be experienced only in proportion to the individual person's true ability to love. To the extent that he lives here with the purpose of serving his neighbour just for the pleasure and joy of it, and spreading light and happiness around himself through his way of being and behaving, to the same extent he will have the ability to experience life's highest worlds after death. And to the extent that the individual develops himself in the art of loving his neighbours as himself, so he is freed from having to return to the physical plane, in fact he is actually quite unable to come onto the same wavelength as the lower planes of existence. Once this state has come about, the terrestrial human will have attained cosmic consciousness, and will from then on for millions of years go on experiencing life in the highest mental light-regions of existence. But those abilities that in themselves make up the conditions for the individual's sunlit life of truth in the high spiritual worlds are of course phenomena that are created. And created phenomena are impermanent. Therefore those abilities, with which the living being experiences the highest light of existence, must at some point degenerate, after which the being once again sinks down into the spheres of ignorance and experiences being reborn in a physical world, in order here to have his abilities to experience mental light renewed. So darkness and physical terrestrial life exist only for the purpose of renewing the living being's abilities to experience life's highest state of light. It is this eternal process of renewal that is the secret behind all reincarnation and rebirth.

Now perhaps someone may want to ask how they can know for sure that my presentation of these spiritual problems is correct, that it is the truth. On the physical plane everything certainly does seem to be mortal. We see here plants, animals and humans being born and dying. We see the bodies of animals and humans turning into corpses that disintegrate and fade away. We see green leaves turning yellow, withering and falling to the earth. These experiences have caused people in fact to come to the point where they live under the superstition that they are mortal beings, which means beings that someday will pass away, be wiped out and from then on cease to have any being or existence. And with this superstition people cut themselves off from understanding the real eternal life, of which they themselves are an absolutely eternal, immortal part. It is quite obvious that people's understanding of life and way of being must at this point be correspondingly faulty. If one removes immortality from the living being's physical life, the universe will in fact be the scene of the highest form of all-encompassing sadism. Absolutely no form of justice would be able to exist. Every living being's life would be an experience of flagrant injustice. However, if one can see that the person of the past is the same as the person of the present day, the situation then becomes one hundred per cent in contact with life's other phenomena, just as the law of fate turns out to express the greatest possible justice. Whatever a being sows, that is what it will reap, whether it is evil or good.

Apart from all this, it can, however, be observed that death, in the sense that people understand it, does not exist at all. Death in the absolute sense, in other words something living being able to die, is a complete impossibility. There is absolutely nothing at all on the physical plane that we can take hold of and feel, that does not at one and the same time give expression to both "something dead" and "something alive". It is this "aliveness" that makes the living being manifest itself, that makes it create, that causes it to love and to hate. And it is this same aliveness that we find in both animals and plants, in fact even in all mineral matter. That this is the case is borne out by the fact that absolutely no combination of matter at all can exist without changing. Everything that we behold constitutes a single enormous changing process. Even a stone, in fact even the hardest diamond is subject to change, even though the change in this case takes place very slowly, measured on a human time-scale. The fact that a thing changes, makes it clear that there exists in the thing an invisible power by means of which the material is changed. However, because we can see that the change is logical and fulfils a useful purpose it proves that this power, which exists in all things, expresses intention. And because intention can only be released by consciousness and so by something living, it proves that all matter is permeated by "something living". So this aliveness can only be recognized by the fact that matter changes. But it does not take place at the same speed in all things. While it does happen very slowly in mineral matter, it happens extremely quickly in vegetable or animal matter. This aliveness can incarnate in matter, and it can withdraw from it. When we see a person die, all that happens is that "the aliveness" in the person frees itself from that combination of matter that made up the physical body. There is still something living left in this body, but it is so microscopic that it is incapable of handling the body, with the result that the body lies still, unmoving, and this is what we would call "a corpse". But the fact that the corpse decomposes, indicates that there is still something alive in the corpse, but this aliveness is not the same aliveness as that which used the organism as its instrument for experiencing life. It is this other aliveness that is the one that constitutes the being's immortal being. So the living being is above death. It cannot die. It can liberate itself from physical matter, but this liberation does not imply a real or absolute death.

So what we experience as death is not a real death but a process of the living being in the being freeing itself from the physical combination of matter that we call "the organism". In this way the living goes on being living while the matter continues to be matter. And thus every death expresses at one and the same time both a death and a birth. No death exists without it at the same time being a birth, and no birth without it being a death. Birth and death are realities that have been created, they are processes of change with the help of which the living being either clothes itself in matter or frees itself from it.

So what is the living being? The living being represents another form of matter than the purely physical. It exists in an organism made up of radiation, in vibrations and wavelengths that we cannot observe with physical senses. It is this state of affairs that causes the ordinary terrestrial human being continuing ignorance about his own higher spiritual nature. He takes his physical body to be identical with himself, and so he supposes that his life stands and falls with his physical body. He still does not know that his real body, his cosmic structure, is electrical by nature and is connected to the physical body only by means of a combination of the brain and nervous-system, and that on account of this he always survives the destruction of the physical organism.

Just think how divine this state of affairs is. Is it not plain, when seen as a whole, how miserable life would be if we were to remain here in battered, wounded or worn out bodies? Which person would be able to endure a never-ending life in an organism broken down by illness, and what purpose would this illness have if it didn't leave behind, for later use, personally gained experience, in the spiritual or ray-formed organism? As things are, life has set a limit to every suffering. If people were in a position to see how beautiful the liberation process we call "death" actually is, no one, absolutely no one, would ever be afraid of it. Because of the ability of ray-formed matter to free itself from physical matter, the hopelessly sick person will one day experience waking up, free from all pain. And more than that. Surrounded by a glowing light, he will see friends and people he knows coming towards him, welcoming him, and congratulating him on having done with the painful physical life. When death comes as something natural, as something people have not themselves consciously brought about, it is always a wonderful festivity, an experience so beautiful that there is nothing comparable to it here on the physical plane. Darkness, suffering and pain belong exclusively to our world. It is true that people with a very dark mentality, people who have consciously inflicted pain and sorrow on others, immediately before or after physical death, experience a shorter period of purgatory, but as I have already said, its sole purpose is to make them so miserable that they cry out to God for help. As soon as they let out this cry - and it always comes because in every living being there is an automatic cosmic contacting organ, that may certainly be reduced to a very weak functioning, but may never be extinguished altogether - the real, bright spiritual world begins to open up. There is no hell after death other than what someone's own guilty conscience creates around them and even this guilty conscience soon turns into, as people will understand, a blessing for them. As soon as this experience of purgatory, which the person's guilty conscience has brought about, is over, the spiritual world is all light, radiant light and a love so glorious that there are no human expressions to describe it. So the things that we call darkness, suffering, pain and sorrow, belong only to our world, where their purpose is to develop and perfect the human soul. The boundary for this darkness is death, after which only light exists. To know this means being free of every kind of fear of dying and even every kind of anxiety about life. As things are at present, people are afraid of death because they know nothing about its real nature as the gateway into a world of all-overwhelming light and love, and as the very fulfilment of all the beauty that they so often dream of experiencing.

As people will come to understand, there is nothing at all to fear in death, that is really a birth into the realms of light that people with their spiritual seeking are striving for. Death does not break the contact we have with our loved ones here, and it does not take us away from something that we with our hearts feel connected to. In its innermost essence, death is nothing more than light, as through it the terrestrial human being comes into being once more in the high, pure spiritual world. With it, a journey through the regions of pain, suffering and sorrow has ended, and with the occurrence of death the son of God returns to his eternal Father's dwelling places of light.