The Universal Belief In Life after Life
(The following is excerpted from Linda Georgian’s book “Communicating with the Dead”)

While human beings often pay great attention to the differences between our many cultures, religions, and philosophies, we really do have much more in common than we assume at first glance. Our differences lie in the ways in which we express the basic themes and questions about life and death; in the legends and myths; the celebrations, rituals, and man-made laws we rely on to try to understand, interpret, and live with natures’ mysteries.

Would you be surprised to learn that the Orthodox Jew in Tel Aviv shares many of the same basic spiritual beliefs about the soul and the afterlife as the Huna in Hawaii and the oriental philosophies of Taoist, Buddhist, and Hindus across the globe?

Would you be shocked to know that the physicist in Boston studies the same energy principles as the Chinese mystics who have learned to master chi energy?
Have you ever wondered how continued human evolution affects what we call our spirituality? How the ability to perceive the world spiritually or intuitively, to go beyond our five senses and tap into higher dimensions is a function of the vibrational frequency of the energy we share with everything in the universe.

We’ve come to understand that science and spirituality are simply two different languages that seek to describe the same phenomena. Concepts of respect, harmony, and the living the mysteries of nature are replacing the old paradigms of fear and control. We no longer dismiss the validity of an idea simply because we cannot yet fully explain it to everyone’s satisfaction. We are finally rediscovering the fact that we were created to be spiritual explorers.

There is a little bit of the shaman in all of us-more of it, if we want to open to its development. Physicist Fred Alan Wolf notes in his book The Eagles Quest: A Physicist’s Search for Truth in the Heart of the Shamanic World: “The shamans had been teaching me a way to shift my perception so that I became aware of other realities,” Wolf explains. Among those realities was the higher dimension that includes the afterlife. Applying the principles of physics to understand more fully the mystical experiences of the shaman (and vice versa); he explains that “from a new physics pinnacle, everything is connected. Life flows between points and doesn’t simply begin and end with birth and death.”

Native peoples “were not bothered by the fear of death,” Ernest Becker noted in his Pulitzer Prize-winning work, The Denial of Death. “Death was, more often than not, accompanied by rejoicing and festivities; that death seemed to be an occasion for celebration rather than fear-because they believe that death is the ultimate promotion, the final ritual elevation to a higher form of life, to the enjoyment of eternity in some form.”

Some in the Western world believe that we go either to heaven or hell, with all of their archetypal images of angels and devils, bliss and torture, while others declare that the only place we go after death is in the ground. There is, however, a tradition today that has its roots in every native culture that is not based upon fear of death or the reward or punishment of our deeds in the afterlife. This tradition holds that life is life; we simply live it in different dimensions at different stages of our spiritual development. “The ancients knew what modern man is just beginning to understand,” Joel L. Witton, M.D., and Joe Fisher remind us in Life Between Life, “that the life between life is our natural home from which we venture forth on arduous journeys of physical embodiment.”

The spiritual resurgence of the late twentieth century is very much an extension of what was begun by the Transcendentalists more than one hundred years ago. Transcendentalism was and is today a one-on-one spirituality that rejects the notion of any religious institution or authority, preferring to place the emphasis on each individual’s direct experience with the divine, the creative, the inspired, and the universal. Its philosophy states that reality lies within the world of the soul, the spirit, and our visible world is actually only a symbol of that true spiritual world.

There are Eastern philosophies that tell us that each soul, before entering the three-dimensional earth plane in a body, passes through an etheric, or dimensional, barrier that lowers the vibrations of its consciousness, thereby blocking automatic conscious memory of its existence in the glorious higher dimensions. Why? To keep us from the pain of missing our true home, and enable us to focus on the continuation of our soul’s journey in learning its lessons as it proceeds toward total enlightenment without the distraction of homesickness or conscious remembrance of past life karma.

The nondenominational view of death and the afterlife holds that we are each on a spiritual journey, and that after death our souls, or spirits, move into another dimension. There are some physicists who believe it to be the fifth dimension, an expansion into a higher spatial dimension beyond the three dimensions our five senses can perceive with our “normal” consciousness. Within this higher dimension we continue to have experiences, learn life lessons and teach them, as well as having the ability to reach back over to the three-dimensional plane to offer guidance and interact with those still “living” on the earthly plane.
It seems clear that in most belief systems there are two general principles that they all share. One, that there exists “within” every person a “higher” self; and two, that this higher self continues to exist when the physical body is no longer alive.

Linda was a nationally known psychic, lecturer, and author of four books published by Simon & Schuster available at bookstores nationwide or through Amazon.com. She was the former co-host of the “Psychic Friends Network” with Dionne Warwick. www.lindageorgian.com