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;
          Not in entire forgetfulness,
          And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
               From God, who is our home

-William Woodsworth, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality”

A recent Aug Tellez livestream reminds me of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor’s info on the post-death astral realm. On memory retention post-death. “You either use it or you lose it,” Aug says, of memory, of knowing who you are.

When you die, according to the H.B. of L’s tradition, your soul must face the astral realm and its own karma. Time in the astral realm expands exponentially so that your soul essence is magnified and you become, in a few seconds of Earth time, what you would be if you continued in that level of awareness and habit and personality, for thousands if not millions of years. This is clearly shown in the film Lazarus Effect.

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She died and went to “Hell” and in that time-dilated state, soul death (seen as simply a sleep and a forgetting) would have been a blessing, but instead she is brought back to life via new experimental technology, and thus had to reintegrate thousands of years of Hell memories back into her physical vessel. Spoiler: she can’t reintegrate, she becomes evil, demonic.

So luckily, for those poor souls who lack self knowledge and awareness and soul integrity are blown to bits like spaghetti on the wall in terms of memory retention, and they end up with the mind of a child or like someone with amnesia. It’s too much to integrate. You must have enough soul integrity to be like a fan turning on where the blades are part of yourself and instead of the fan blades shooting out in all directions due to centrifugal force, they stay integrated through centripetal force, and you can retain your memories (soul) and pass on to the higher realms of spirit.

Thomas Burgoyne (secretary of the H.B. of L) writes, “at death, the soul enters its own soul images, and with relentless monotony, the panorama of all he has vitalized swings around him. He rests no more than a sleeping body in awful dreams; and these images continue for ages, aye, for thousands of years; until the soul can endure no more and falls asleep, to awaken; if it does awaken; only as a little child. It is to escape this that the Occultist toils and labors.”

So when a true occultist speaks of soul death, they are not referring to extinction or annihilation of one’s essence. One’s essence, being a deific ray of God, cannot be destroyed, as it exists outside of time in an eternal state. However, its differentiation and evolution can be delayed, by “soul death” or losing one’s memories that they attained while embodied in a physical vessel on Earth. Soul death occurs to those who only develop their animal portion, they got too enmeshed or attracted to the illusions of Maya, worshiping the material world.

You can think of soul death thus defined as like waking up from a dream that you just can’t hold onto, even though you sense that the dream was dreadfully important and that if you could retain just a bit of it, it would change everything…

Aug says, on getting out of the system (anything in parentheses are my notes), “going into a new universe or domain with a different format – you’re going to go through a shift as your mind transfers, or you won’t, but the aspects of you that are temporally relative to each one will, and they will fade away through that, and you have to be strong enough, big enough, centered enough, small enough like a pinpoint shooting through it to more or less survive it. And it’s not necessarily “survive it” like you’re not going to exist in a way, it’s not physical, but it IS real existence, you’ll just forget who you are, your memories will get slingshotted back that way and turned it to spaghetti on the wall and then that’s that. You gain certain things spiritually but you can’t actually consciously know it, and that’s part of the game. So, it’s a big thing if you want to – I don’t know if you like what you are experiencing here but that’s what we were told: forever – that you use it or lose it. And I don’t want to call it a war, but it’s always happening. If you fall over and just lay there, bugs and bacteria will come eat you. This world has always told us these things, we’ve always known this, we’ve just become deluded…

…Anything that doesn’t align with that fan blade, your consciousness fractal, can’t be in there when this (bodily death) happens, and if it’s there, either the fan blows apart (soul death), or a piece of you crushes and streams off in order to get through the point, and that’s the burning of the spiritual fat. And you have to have enough of that knowledge of who you are in contrast to who you aren’t in order to have this ratio of creation/destruction in order for your consciousness to get to the other side. And you (Your Higher Self/Divine Ego) pokes it and says ‘are you there?’ And it (your Soul) says ‘yes! I’m me and I remember everything!’ It’s the weirdest thing… It’s described as a consciousness mandala with your thoughts, emotions, intentions and actions that you’re creating this prismatic triangulation of consciousness space-time in energy and it’s segmenting that time-body out in that system.”

William Burroughs, in the Western Lands, writes, “Horus Neferti turned aside into a Jump Joint, where your dreams come true. Yeah, sometimes. They work like this: you got a scenario in your mind, usually made up of dreams. Sophisticated electronic equipment makes the dream solid. Or rather there are infinite nuances of solidity….How does the machine work? Largely by amplifying what is already there. A dream amplifier.”

Notice the karmic zone post-death merely amplifies what YOU created in life; there is no outside God judging and weighing souls in the way religion has often claimed and frightened people. However every action does indeed have a consequence.

Burroughs in his allegorical fashion discusses the astral realm or “Land of the Dead” and a special zone there he calls “Last Chance:”

“Few pilgrims reach the town of Last Chance. Sloth, self indulgence, alcohol, addictions, old age, stupidity, are all obstacles. But lack of a special courage is the only insuperable barrier – the courage to confront your opponent, your final enemy. If you lack this courage, you will never reach Last Chance. Any pilgrim who has in life solved problems with violence must go through Last Chance or back to square one.”

So in addition to being swallowed by the lower animal nature, (the dark night of the soul), Burroughs says if people solve problems in life with violence they will have to contend with this place, this hell as well. Any part of your negative karma that you’re holding onto (or that is holding onto you) is going to keep you from getting through the “zero-point” and will be the theme that you contend with in Hell for as long as you’re attached to that memory/feeling/thought or action.

In the movie What Dreams May Come, Robin Williams plays a husband and family man “Chris” who dies and is allowed into Heaven. However his wife, stricken by grief, commits suicide. In the movie, all who suicide go to “Hell” which we can interpret as eventual soul death (again not to be seen as any kind of extinction of consciousness, merely a forgetting, a deep sleep, and amnesiac barrier).

So Chris’ wife and the other Hell inhabitants are stuck reliving their most traumatic moments, wallowing in them, as they sink further into soul death. Chris can pass on to heaven but chooses to sojourn into Hell to save his wife. This is symbolic of the Christ/Sophia Gnostic myth. The Aeon Christos applying a kind of correction to help Sophia who fell into a troubled dream of her own. That troubled dream is the physical world man currently inhabits. This myth is a retelling of the Egyptian myth of Horus (like Christ, a savior God) who comes down and rescues Osiris from the underworld (Earth). Horus has the head of a hawk, and birds and wings are symbols of the soul and it’s flight to Heaven.

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So what does Chris (Christ/Horus) do in the movie? He descends to the underworld to find her and bring her back. When he finds her, she does not recognize him, because her soul has already begun the “sleep of oblivion.” But through true love, he defies the impossible and awakens her dormant memories. He risked his own soul to do this, as any longer spent there would have destroyed his own memories (soul) as well.

Chris is played by Robin (a species of bird) Williams (Will, I AM).

The film Inception follows a similar track. Advanced dream-sharing technology allows one to spend months, years in the dream state and then return to real-time in the duration of a few hours. The risk is getting lost in the Sim’s expanded time-space and then returning to normal time and struggling to reintegrate years of Sim memories in a flash of real-time. Cobb’s wife Maude can’t do it and has a psychotic break (and also ends up suiciding.)

The futuristic sci-fi show Black Mirror delves into these topics as well which I covered here.

A final word about the post-death astral realm. It shouldn’t be viewed as a fatalist system or somehow unfair, or a soul trap. Because notice that Aug says that for those who lose their memories (what Burgoyne equates to “soul death”) they still retain spiritual growth. They are just not consciously aware of it; this being a cosmic law or what Aug calls ‘part of the game.’

Soul death thus defined is a return to the ‘womb and tomb of the universe,’ to their Divine Atomic Ego which is One with God and knows that I AM.

Conquering death (the second birth) is retaining what you developed here and progressing to a higher realm. Thus saving your soul is literally like saving your game or reaching a “check-point” in your video-game.

The great law of the Universe is the Cycle of Necessity, in which all Ego’s must routinely leave heaven and incarnate into flesh. Thus WE are the fallen angels. Forced by Deity to fall into fleshly bodies.

What does it mean to retain spiritual growth if one loses their memory of it? I take it to mean that in the next Life Round or Solar Cycle, the God who differentiates their Ego will take that growth into account. Thus they will be differentiated in a loving way to give them a chance to round out latent qualities that got in their way previously. This may also be seen as a working out of karma, with a little nudge from the Divine. But the Divine will never do the work for you. It will put you in a new situation that will allow for the chance to face again, whatever challenge hung you up last time. And you will have hopefully evolved just enough to have a better chance. Thus we can see how the universe, which is the mind of the Godhead, in each successive and infinite Life Round, evolves to higher and higher states. So we have cycles depicted as the figure 8, but the shape of Eternity is really an upward spiral, ever progressing on and on, increasing its complexity or density of connection. It is the eye ever seeking to see itself. And this is true of your destiny as well, as an eternal part of that glorious divinity, dear reader.