Part Two – Desire Elementals & Re-Arrangement of Astral Matter

At the moment of death, the consciousness withdraws from the dense physical body and stays in the etheric body for a short while, which often takes for a few hours. Then it passes into the astral body.

In most cases, the actual process of passing-away appears to be perfectly painless, even after a long illness involving lots of suffering.

The painful part of death begins when man starts seeing the whole of his past life, in a series, with minutest details. In that moment he sees the whole chain of causes and effects, which leads to understanding his real self, without self-flattery and deception.

Once the review ends…

Once the review ends, there comes a period of unconsciousness, which may last from 36 to 48 hours, varying with the individual. Then the awakening into the new life occurs.

Very soon after death, in most cases, an important change happens in the structure of the astral body, through the work desire elementals.

A great portion of the astral body is composed of elemental essence. This essence is alive, though not intelligent. This elemental essence instinctively seeks to descend into matter, with the aim of becoming mineral monad. Its objective in life is therefore to get nearer to the physical plane to experience as many coarser vibrations as possible. It doesn’t know, and in fact cannot know, anything about the man in whose astral body it is living for the time being. It desires to preserve its separate life, and feels that it can only happen by keeping connection to man: it is conscious of the man’s lower mind, and knows that the more mental matter it can entangle with itself the longer will be its astral life.

When the man dies, knowing that his astral body will also die more or less quickly afterwards, the elemental essence rearranges its matter in concentric rings or shells, with the coarsest outside, in order to make the man’s astral body last longer.

“The re-arranged astral body is called the Yatana, or suffering body: in the case of a very evil man in whose astral body there is a preponderance of the coarsest matter, it is called the Druvam or strong body.”

Arthur E. Powell

The effect of such re-arrangement is to prevent the free and full circulation of the astral matter, which normally occurs in the astral body. This causes man to be able to only respond to vibrations, which are received by the outermost layer of his astral body. The man therefore gets prisoned in a box of astral matter, being able to hear and see things of the lowest and coarsest plane. This makes him to perceive other people around him as monsters of vice, as he can only perceive their lowest and most negative characteristics.

This continues to happen until the outermost shell disintegrates, which enables man to respond to the vibrations of the next higher level of the astral plane. And then rises to the next sub-plane, one after another. His stay in each plane is connected to the amount and activity of the matter in his astral body belonging to that sub-plane.

This process of re-arrangement, which happens to most people, can be prevented by strong will. In fact for people, who know and understand the conditions of the astral plane, should not allow such to happen by the desire-elementals. If this successfully happens, the particles of the astral body remain intermingled, as in life. And as a result, instead of getting limited to perceiving only one sub-plane, man will be free of all the sub-planes based on the constitution of his astral body.

The elemental, being afraid of such incident in its semi-conscious way, will try to transfer its fear to man who is refusing to undergo re-arrangement.

Therefore it is necessary for all to have thorough knowledge of astral body and elementals in order to avoid or neglect such fear imposed by elementals.

In case the re-arrangement has already happened, it is still possible to break it up by someone who wished to help the man.

References

1. Besant, A. (2010). Death and After and Memories of Past Lives. Kessinger Publishing.
2. Hodson, G. (1958). Clairvoyant Research and the Life After Death. The Theosophical Publishing House.
3. Arthur E. Powell (2005). The Astral Body, and other Astral Phenomena. The Theosophical Publishing House.