Page 33 - All India Magazine Dec-2024

What Happens After Death

Someone has asked me a question about death: what happens
after death and how one takes a new body.
Needless to say, it is a subject which could fill volumes, no
two cases are alike: practically everything is possible in the life after
death as everything is possible on earth when one is in a physical
body, and all statements when generalised become dogmatic. But
still one may look at the problem in some detail, and sometimes
one makes interesting discoveries. ...
... in a more general way, I have often told you that, with re-
gard to the external envelope of the being, everything depends
on its attitude at the moment of death, and that attitude neces-
sarily depends on its inner development and its unification.

CWM 8: 335-36
Q: “Domain of death” means what?

Every religion has spoken about it differently. The Greeks had their
“Elysium”, one crossed over in a “boat”. There are all the para-
dises, all the hells.
Generally, “domain of death” is the name given to a certain
region of the most material vital into which one is projected at the
moment one leaves one’s body. The part — how to put it? — of
one’s life that’s usually the most conscious is projected there at
the moment of death. Well, that region, that material vital world
is very dark, it is full of adverse formations having desires at their
centre or even adverse wills, and these are very, very elemental en-
tities which have a very fragmentary life and are like vampires, in
the sense that they feed on all that is thrown out from human be-
ings. And so, at that moment, from the shock of death — for very
few die without a shock, go out consciously, in full knowledge of
the thing, there are not many such — usually it is an accident: a
last accident; well, at that shock of death, those entities rush in

All India Magazine, December 2024 33