by Owen K Waters 

It was three in the morning when we heard her breathe her last breath.

My wife and I sat by her sister’s bed as she desperately gasped for air to keep her cancer-ridden body alive. Then, something quite wonderful happened but, first, let me explain a little more about what happens after a person takes their last breath. 

We all go through physical death eventually. Hopefully, your passing will be a seamless transition into the light and you’ll pass over leaving behind only a smile and no regrets. Although our survival instinct makes us avoid thoughts of death, as spiritual seekers we have a higher, more compelling motivation. We all want to know what happens beyond the veil of what used to be the unknown. 

“What happens in the afterlife?” 

In the last 40 years, promises of heaven (if you’re good) have been replaced by actual, documented “facts of death,” painstakingly gathered from endless research cases. Near-death experiences have been studied until there can be no doubt as to their veracity. Then, to gain even deeper knowledge of the afterlife, many research subjects have been given recall of their pre-life experiences using hypnotic regression to open up their subconscious memories. 

What we now know is this: After their last breath, a person will typically be filled with a feeling of peace and with freedom from pain, while feeling drawn to pass through an energetic tunnel into a higher world of much light and beauty. 

Subjects also report being personally guided by a being of light who helps them review their life’s experiences from a higher, soul-centric viewpoint without any sense of judgment being imposed on these experiences by themselves or others. 

This heart-centered, non-judgmental environment means that, while a person is still who they are as a personality, everything becomes lighter. The loads that they may have felt compelled to bear during their physical lives dissolve in the joy that comes easily in their new surroundings. 

Are there heavens in the afterlife? Yes, there are many realms of existence, some of them being quite ecstatic compared to the lower frequency levels. The afterlife is structured differently to the physical world. While everyone in this world can, in theory, travel anywhere in the world, the afterlife consists of many realms of existence, each one effectively being a world unto itself. 

A person naturally gravitates to the realm best suited to their personal frequency of consciousness and then lives there among like-minded people. Spiritual seekers, predictably, seek the higher realms. People content with an average type of existence live in communities filled with people of like mind. It follows that those whose motivations are less than amiable will find themselves in a realm filled with people who are like themselves in that respect. Basically, people find their own level by gravitating toward their natural realm. 

Consciousness has a more observable influence on the environment in the afterlife because spirit matter is more subtle than physical matter. Spirit bodies are of a much lighter substance, which is why everyone in the spirit realms is able to levitate and travel through the air simply by exerting mental will. 

A common misconception is to think of spirit bodies as non-physical. Spirit bodies are quite solid to each other, even if they seem tenuous from our dense-physical viewpoint. A better term for matter in the spirit realms would be “quasi-physical.” 

When a person’s physical body dies, they take some time to adapt to life in the afterlife. Some people complete the orientation training faster than others. Those who find their passing to be a blessed release from a body that was wracked with pain are sometimes overwhelmed with a sudden sense of elation at their new-found freedom. 

Such was the case with my sister-in-law. After breathing her last breath in the silence of the night, the atmosphere in the room suddenly changed and her spirit filled the air with an intense feeling of joyful celebration. 

Finally… she was FREE and she was SO incredibly happy! 

Tell a friend…