443- Are We here to Stay, or Just Visiting until Death? (Free)

What happens when this life is over and we die? It has been called “throwing off the mortal coil”, along with many other fanciful descriptions that seem to leave the realities of it up to our imaginations. But what really happens? Is it the same for all of us? I have been considering this question for most of my life and as a result have read many accounts from many cultures and spiritual traditions. There are common themes here and there, and there are also vast differences, but I notice most of those differences are recent ideas from the last couple of centuries. How is it that this question is not the most important question for those of us alive? Maybe it is intentionally hidden in order to force each of us to deal with it individually. One quite common description from the past has us all being reincarnated in an endless wheel of time. Other examples include good folks going to heaven and bad folks going to hell. I have read that it all depends on how you live your life, and I have read that life is all a test that you someday graduate from in order to move on from here. I have read accounts from clairvoyant spiritual masters (they claim) that we are at the bottom of an upward moving hierarchy and we move on to places like the so-called astral plane. Need I bother to mention dimensional ideas here? The main point here is that death and dying are hidden with surgical precision in our time, and one might suspect intentionally so. How about we use this episode to put the conversation back on the table. I, for one, would like to have a much better idea of the realities of death and dying. And while I have accepted certain ideas, I am more than willing to learn more. I want more from a spiritual tradition than the same stories being told over and over ad nauseum, by men wearing black with no better idea of what is true than what they decided to believe in. I would like to KNOW something based in reality. At this point I can say that reincarnation seems to be among the popular recurring descriptions of what happens at death and maybe the most popular in terms of the number of cultures who have accepted the idea. But – is it true?