Beloved Guruji, my question is about the care for the dying, and also about the caring for the soul after death. The Tibetans read The Tibetan Book of the Dead with the idea of accompanying or helping the soul with the different transitions it goes through during the first hours after death. For us, are prayers and beautiful thoughts of love in any way helpful to the departing soul, or is that more to help those help those who have been left here?
GURURAJ: Ninety‑five percent false and five percent true. At the moment of dying, what really happens is this, to the person that is dying that his entire lifetime flashes through his mind, just like that, and when he reaches another realm of another dimension he is taking with him his entire lifetime, all his good deeds and bad deeds or whatever you wish to call them. So these impressions go with him, and never mind what you do, will be of no assistance to the departed soul, as you would call it, because there is a great difference between soul and spirit. For the soul goes; the spirit is forever there and everywhere.
Now when you pray, those thoughts do not reach the departed one, although all theologies say, «Let us pray for the dead.»
They do not reach, but as you said, they do comfort the bereaved one because the comfort comes in this form, and it’s very logical, that by prayer the mind is silenced and that very silence of the mind in true, sincere prayer naturally helps the one that is left behind, but it does not help the one that has departed.
Because you, and this is very logical, too, because you are praying in a total different dimension than to the dimension which the departed soul has gone. And although there is a connection between all things, that mind of the departed is so wrapped up with its past life, his thoughts are filled with that because he goes with that, so that you cannot penetrate the barrier that is created. And it’s a good thing. Because that will give the departed one a chance to gather himself, to gather all the pieces of the life he has lived, and by that, they would be able to formulate their future births, their future existence to get rid of the samskaras that are formed in this life.
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