UNIVERSE WITHIN by Gwen Randall-Young

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar.

– William Wordsworth

What happens when we leave our physical form? This is a question that becomes very real for people when they have lost a loved one. So often they tell me they just want to know that the one who has passed is "okay."

Each spiritual tradition has its own understanding of what happens after death. People who have had near-death experiences have reported various events: seeing the room and themselves from an out-of-body perspective, seeing a bright light and/or a tunnel or even seeing relatives who have already passed on.

We actually have no empirical evidence of what transpires after we leave our physical form. However, so much of what we know is not based on empirical evidence, but rather on intuition and direct experience.

Many have maintained communication of one sort or another with a person who is no longer here. Some have memories of past lives. These experiences suggest that there is more to life than "life." The whole question certainly relates back to our perception of reality. If we only believe what we see with our eyes and think that is objective reality, then it is all over when the body can no longer perceive.

If we believe there is more to us than physical form and that there is a part of us that transcends physical reality, it changes everything. When we die, it is only the physical form that ceases to function, while the transcendent part keeps on going. It is eternal; it was there before we entered physical form and continues on afterward.

Our perception can function a little like a microscope. At one level, we see pretty much the same things that we see with the naked eye. Increase the power and another level is revealed that is just as real as the naked eye reality, but it was outside our perceptual awareness. In fact, when we consider all the things we can see utilizing technology –“ from cells to a tiny fetus –“ we realize that what we see using our ordinary perception is a small fraction of what is actually there.

The same may be true of our perception of reality. Perhaps one day the technology will exist that allows us to perceive all the other levels. I believe the technology already exists; we just do not know how to use it. That technology is our own consciousness. It is possible to expand our consciousness beyond three-dimensional reality.

I also believe that the souls of the departed are very much with us. They are with us in the same way as when they were alive, but separated from us geographically. The veil is very thin and very close to us. We can access the other side, but only in those moments when we let go of our own hold on the "here and now." We could even go so far as to say there is no separation, no "other side," except that which is created by our own limited consciousness.

We can learn to use our consciousness as a kind of "mental transporter." In the TV show Star Trek, transporters converted a person or object into an energy pattern (a process called dematerialization) then "beamed" it to a target, where it was reconverted into matter (rematerialization). This was fictional; using our consciousness to "go" to a different time or space is not. We do it all the time.

We do not even have to do this consciously with the departed; it occurs naturally. When we have loved someone, we are connected for all time. What we must do is recognize that level of reality. Death is a metamorphosis. Just because the caterpillar is gone, it does not mean its spirit has ceased to exist. And just because we cannot see the butterfly that emerged, it does not mean it is not there.

Gwen Randall-Young is a psychotherapist in private practice and author of Growing Into Soul: The Next Step in Human Evolution. For articles and information about her books and “Deep Powerful Change” personal growth/hypnosis CDs, visit www.gwen.ca