The exact behavior at death could vary from person to person. A person who had to “have” tremendously would get just so far from a body and be liable to say, “I don’t care, I don’t want to live anyway, I was very unhappy during that whole life and I’m awfully glad I don’t care.”
Somebody else is just as liable to not even think about it. But that person was so little alive, when he was alive, that his aliveness after he has died is also negligible.
With a person who is fairly strong and capable there is an interesting reaction to body death: “I’ll show them they can’t put me out of the game.” It makes him mad and upsets him, and he does a dive halfway across the country, sees a maternity hospital and grabs a baby body.
The exteriorization which occurs at death is very fascinating because the person is totally cognizant of it. He knows who he is; he usually has pretty good perception; he knows where his friends are. Pointing out as a fantastic spiritual phenomenon the occurrence of somebody appearing to a friend after he had died several thousand miles away, is something like being very surprised because a waitress came to the table in a restaurant.
People also sometimes wake up during the night and realize that somebody has died a death of violence. This is usually because of the amount of confusion which is thrown into a being when his body is killed. If a person is killed with sudden violence and is very surprised about it, he can be sufficiently upset and unphilosophical about the whole thing that he is liable to go around and see his next of kin and the rest of his friends in an awful frenzied hurry, trying to reassure himself that he hasn’t gone to purgatory or someplace.
He has suffered a loss of mass. If you had an automobile sitting out on the street and you went out totally expecting to find the automobile there and it was gone, you would be upset. That is just about the frame of mind a thetan is usually in when he finds his body dead. His main thought is to grasp another body. This he could do by finding a young child that he could bring back to life.
But the ordinary entrance of a thetan into a new body is sometime around what we call the assumption, and the assumption occurs within a few minutes after birth in most cases. The baby is born and then a thetan picks up the baby body.
How do thetans behave when they suddenly haven’t got a body? They behave like people. They will hang around people. They will see a woman who is pregnant and follow her down the street. Or they will hang around the entrance to an accident ward and find some body that is all banged up and the being that had that body has taken off or is about to. He may even pick up this body and pretend to be somebody’s husband.
Thetans do all sorts of odd things. When a new body is picked up, if a new body is picked up at all, is not standardized beyond saying it usually occurs (unless the thetan got another idea) two or three minutes after the delivery of a child from the mother. A thetan usually picks it up about the time the baby takes its first gasp.
Would the body go on living without a thetan picking it up? That is beside the point. It is a case of how fast the thetan can pick one up before somebody else gets it. There is a certain anxiety connected with this.
Thetans often say very interesting prayers at the moment they pick up a body. They dedicate themselves to its continued growing and to the family and go through all kinds of odd rituals, all because they are so happy to get a new body. But the odd part of it is, they don’t shut their memory off until they pick another body up. The shut-off of memory actually occurs with the pickup of the new body.
Death is in itself a technical subject. You can, with considerable confidence, reassure some husband whose wife has just died that she got out all right and she is going someplace to take up a new body. If you got there while that person could still communicate with you, in the last moments, you would find that the person usually has something spotted, something planned.
The person doesn’t just back out ordinarily and forget all about it. He backs out of it with full identity and hangs around for quite a while. The being is usually there for the funeral, certainly. He will very often hang around his possessions to see that they are not abused, and he can be given upsets if his wishes aren’t carried out with regard to certain things.
It used to happen that thetans would punish people for not carrying out their wishes after death. People then said this was superstition, and science was against superstition. Well, it is quite interesting that in finding out what is science and what is superstition, we have found that a being is capable of almost anything providing it is within his ability to execute.
Losing your pocketbook, some treasured possession or your body are all alike. But because of the mechanism of forgetting, a great mystery is made of this.
And that is death, phenomena of.
