I wish to make you aware of the fact that you will not be here for much longer (no matter how young you are as a reader reading these words) and that there is a far more exciting, infinite journey ahead of you. In making you aware of your own mortality (of the mortality of your physical body) you will be more interested in what comes next… because the soul always has to have a ‘next’. The soul is always moving on to a new experience, to a new integration of itself with levels of energy.
The level of energy that you leave when your soul parts company with your physical body is a low one, is a restrictive one, is a limited one in vision, understanding and experience. So many souls cling on to this experience and return themselves to it. In this book I hope to show you that there is much more ahead for you than you could ever experience on the earth plane. Also, I hope to change your attitude towards death – not so that you welcome it (you are supposed to be here, you are designed to be here for a certain amount of time) but so that you are not afraid of it, and so that you are given the option, to examine and to consider, of not coming back here.
Many of your cultures talk of reincarnation. Reincarnation does exist, but you are the one who instigates it and you instigate it because either you feel that you have unfinished business on the earth plane or you feel that the experiences the earth plane has to give you are worth re-experiencing. You are drawn back to so many things: you are drawn back to physicality, to sex, to food, to pain. How can you be drawn back to pain? Because pain becomes familiar and because, when pain stops, you are relieved and feel that you have achieved something (and I am talking not just of pain physically; you also put yourself through mental pain, through spiritual pain and through emotional pain). And you will say: ‘Joseph, this is nonsense, I could never return into pain,’ and yet you do time and again; you become used to it. Do you not say better the devil you know? You become used to it and you blind yourself to the possibilities, to the realities, to the illumination and evolution of the next steps in your infinite journey as a part of God.
So this is ‘the last chapter’. Your life and this book begins with your physical death, and it is my intention to explain, scientifically and as precisely as I can, what happens to you upon physical death and to explain to you why it is a far better idea for yourself and for your brothers and sisters in God that you decide to move on when you leave this place.
Joseph [speaking to David and Jane]: This book is far more complex than the ones that have preceded it and there are many concepts that will have to be woven together by my words over the coming months. You will have to approach it in a more fluid manner than you have with the previous books that far more easily fit into chapters. I will return to themes throughout the next few months so that we can expand on them and so that we can get everything in its right place. I find myself having to remain calm in bringing through this information because I am excited about it. There is so much to tell and there is only one small beam of communication along which to direct my words.
You must act as monitors of the book that is taking shape and you must ask me questions – and you must remember that I am only presenting one dimension of a multi-dimensional concept and want to present as full a concept as I can to your readers. So I will begin this today by asking you to ask me questions if there is anything that you need to expand upon in what has been said in this introduction to the book.
Jane: I am appalled to think that people sometimes stay with their bodies after they have died and try to re-animate them for a while and I just wondered why they don’t notice that their bodies are underground, in a grave, rotting? What do they see?
Joseph: They see themselves. They identify completely with the body and they are so steeped in and so locked into the idea that physicality is all there is that they (for a time) shut out the possibility of there being more for them than identifying with the physical body. You must understand that there are thousands, millions of souls who look in the mirror and say, ‘That is me’ and that there is a lifetime of reinforcement of: ‘That is me! No matter what goes on within me, that is me. I am this island of flesh and nothing more’, and because God grants through the soul whatever the soul desires then that desire and belief is solidified. They are locked into an idea of that is me, and so, when they are suddenly not that image of that is me they cannot cope with it. They are so identified with their physical image they attempt to re-animate that physical image even though, from the perspective of another soul, they are standing next to their body and looking identical to that body but a good sight healthier. Do you see that?
Jane: I just wondered whether they were trying to re-animate the body that is in the grave?
Joseph: They are in a kind of dream-state (Michael has experience of this through working with souls who have become lost for a time), so it is not a consciousness as you would understand it today from your perspective of being in an earthly body. It is, if you like, an ‘un-waking dream’; it is a muddied perception; it is a sense of self projected onto something that they know will not respond any longer. So, if your question is: are they aware of their bodies degrading and are they aware of being underground – not as such because they are not there in effect, but they are making the link with the physical in a dream-like state (much as Michael goes into trance). You might call it an ‘earthly trance’ – a pull back to that perception of themselves that they believe.
You are, unfortunately, living in a time of celebrity, a time when so much importance is given to the physical body… The physical body must be preserved at all costs – particularly for women. You therefore have souls who pass having believed for the greater amount of their physical lives that the physical body must be preserved at all costs, so their instinct and their volition forces them for a time (until they realise something else) to buy into that and to continue their expectation that the physical body must be preserved at all costs. And so, of course, they are linked to the physical body until such time as we can convince them that there is more to do and a greater perspective ahead of them. They are in a stupor (as many discarnate souls who are linked to the earth plane, for a time, are) because they cannot exist in a physical world and they have not yet learnt to exist on a higher vibration. They are ‘between’. It is a twilight; it is a dream – as everything is a dream – but they are more aware of it being a dream-like state than the spirit who is in an earthly body or the spirit who has passed on to one of the higher spheres. Does that make sense?
Jane: Yes.
David: When we do go through a physical death and the soul withdraws you say that sometimes a soul forgets that it is a being of Light. Rather than just hanging around the physical plane I presume it can actually plummet even further down the vibrational scales. Is that the case?
Joseph: That is a very good point and it is the subject of quite a few paragraphs. You see how there is so much that needs to be said! In fact I will address this next time, touching on the effects of the Lower Astral on the soul and the effects of this plane on the soul at the point of it being severed from physical death.
We are talking about a vast book here and it was mentioned by Michael’s mentor, Joan, that there would be difficulty in bringing through the third book. There will be no difficulty but you have to be very precise and I am trying to follow a logical sequence of events. So we have, first of all, the shock and the realisation that must be brought to people that they will leave this plane, that they will meet that point of physical death. It is inevitable. Then I wish to explain what happens next and that is where that attraction via the astral plane and also via the earth plane (for many souls wander the earth plane for quite some time, having left their physical bodies) needs to be put under the microscope. I will do it next time. I will talk about the pull of the Lower Astral, and we must also talk about the upper vibrations, the upper desires with each soul and that the desires of the soul, on the point of death, determine what happens to it next and attract like-vibrations that can either be of a higher vibration or a lower vibration than the earth plane.
In constructing this book we must work together far more than we have done on the first two books and have an interaction to place
