By James Donahue

When I was a child I recall watching my father hang wallpaper in the dining room of our home in Michigan and vividly remember comments he made about death. He said he did not want to live to be an old man. And he said when life ended he did not believe the spirit continued to exist. He said he believed dying was to like going to sleep but entering a blackness, and this would be the end of everything.

I do not think he meant what he said then. My father lived over 100 years. In the last years of his life he got involved in the Christian church and I believe he clung to the promise that religion gave him of a life in the hereafter. They said he died in his sleep, but they found him on the floor of his bedroom, which meant that when death came, he fought it, right to the bitter end.

As his oldest son, I am keenly aware of the fact that my father lived an exceptionally long life and that I probably cannot expect to do as well. Thus I admit that I am as curious as I am sure my father was about what to expect once we drop these physical bodies.

Like my father, I once followed the Christian path but determined something was wrong with it. The practice of religion used fear to force its followers to try to live according to a man-made list of rules, which in turn did nothing to help people prepare for death. This is why I think my father fought that final moment. Very few Christians go through a peaceful death experience. Because they cannot live a perfect life, they fear a judgment by an all-powerful God which might be severe enough to get them condemned to an eternity in Hell, Christians have developed a deep-rooted fear of death. It is so ingrained in our culture, most people refuse to talk about it, or even think about it. Yet death is so much a part of life that no one can avoid it. Thus we face the great dilemma.

My wife and I have been on a different spiritual path since leaving the church. We have lived among the American aboriginal people and encountered some of the great Indian teachers like Deepak Chopra and Her Holiness Sai Maa Lakshmi Devi who see our existence as a series of learning experiences. These wise teachers believe in reincarnation and say that many of us are very old spirits who have been coming and going from this planet for ages. Each life is part of the journey toward spiritual perfection.  

In a recent televised lecture, Chopra said we were created with eyes so the creator could see itself. He, like the other great teachers that have been among us, said we are all part of the one, the creator, and the spark or spirit within us is God.

Chopra looks upon the great spiritual teachers of the past, from the Buddha to Mohammad and Jesus as men who rose up among humanity to teach us about our own divinity, but historians incorrectly turned them into god figures and created religions. His own Hindu backgrounds are applied in his monistic teachings, that everything that exists is part of the whole, and that the Divine pervades the entire universe, and that every person has divinity within. He once wrote that “we remain unfulfilled unless we nurture the seeds of divinity inside us. In reality we are divinity in disguise.”

Chopra teaches that because we are divine, we are creators of the world in which we exist. Thus, he said, “the world you live in, including the experience of your body, is completely dictated by how you learned to perceive it. If you change your perception, you change the experience of your body and your world.”

So what does this have to do with death? Chopra teaches “who you are depends on what world you see yourself living in. Because it is ruled by change, the first world contains sickness, aging and death as inevitable parts of the scenery; in the second world, where there is only pure being, these are totally absent.”

Chopra’s book, “Life After Death; The Burden of Proof,” proposes that our awareness in the present shapes our existence after death. In other words, the afterlife we experience is created by our own minds.

I once spoke with a person who participated in an experimental class offered at the Monroe Institute, where sound frequencies are used to help people achieve out-of-body experiences. This particular class was a bold attempt to achieve the human death experience and have participants return to report what happened to them.

 This person said he went through the death experience every day for five consecutive days, each time exploring what appeared to be various levels of “afterlife” experienced by the spirits of the dead. And just as they had programmed their expectations during their lives, people found themselves existing in everything from a fiery Hell to a “Christian Heaven,” all of it created by the minds of the souls who believed the stories they were told during their lives prior to death.

There was more to the afterlife, however. This man said there seemed to be layers of places in which to go, and that the best, at least for him, was a place that was a plush, green garden filled with flowers and beauty. And beyond that was a great mass of brilliant light which he assumed was the origin of everything.

If the experiences reported by this man are accurate, in an experiment in achieving the sensation of dying and then coming back, they strongly support Chopra’s theory that everything in the universe is created in our own minds, including what happens to us after we leave these bodies.

There is a dark threat of an end to life on this planet, based on the sheer numbers of humans now populating the world and our failure over the years to maintain the garden. Thus we find ourselves living on a dying planet with the threat of our own extinction looming large in the near future. If our planet no longer supports life, will our pattern of reincarnation also cease? Where will our spirits go when the planet dies?

Sai Maa speaks of a new paradigm, or “ascension” from our present world into a new dimension where those of us who make this shift will find ourselves in a perfect, unpolluted and undisturbed environment. And like Chopra, she teaches her followers to prepare for this change by seeing themselves as divine creatures, filled with light and love.  

The Abba Father, a spiritual force who communicates through my wife, promises that humans will not go extinct. Once the ascension occurs, we will pass into a new dimension where all is new again. “Everyone has the power to open up to light. It is a choice. In the end, all will be light. All will know the truth about their soul light. Then the door will close and the Earth becomes new, not dark,” the entity said.

He said “All systems were configured differently to cope with this coming Earth change. All mankind will begin to resonate this. (The) world will not be the same earth, but a new one, one not remembered. No one is excluded here but (you) must not destroy what is left (of the old earth).”

So just for the record, what does the Abba Father have to say about life after death? He said once we drop our bodies and go into and astral, or spirit world, there will be a waiting period “until all are cleansed. Then a choice is presented to all to return in bodies already constructed.”

The story of reincarnation, then, is supported by the Abba Father. We return “home” to the place from where we came, then we still have the choice of returning to another body and experiencing life in this world once more.