We will say that there is no universal idea of penalty or punishment - the Tao punishes no one. Penalty and punishment are fabrications of some sentient species but not all. On some Physical Plane Gaming Systems there is complete freedom of choice with no penalties within the beliefs of the beings. These beings however play closer to their source (essence). It is somewhat like playing in your backyard with Mommy and Daddy watching over you. On other systems, which play further away from their source, choice within the playing environment is so limited that there is no necessity for fragments to form laws governing their behavior. These beings often have no means to create technology with all its potential for karma. Human beings are both distant from their source and in an environment rich in choice possibilities. You have developed artificial systems of law to impose some limitations without which you would result in an endless karmic progression (all creation games are circular). The artificial laws are not by any means universal. They are a product of your own local Physical Plane Gaming System and help you navigate the game. Penalties are an artificial consequence of breaking a rule. It is still somewhat important to understand that the laws you create to perpetuate social order can be reflections or more universal law. For example, it is impossible to destroy essence so the killing of essence is an impossibility, but since you are in a game system remote from your source (essence), you continually forget this and most other Universal Truths. To fill the gap in your memory, you invent the Earth physical plane reflection of this law which is "though shall not kill". However, this is like saying since gravity is a universal law of the physical plane then "a ball will not bounce higher on the second bounce". If you commit a murder you have made an error but you have not broken a Universal Law - since you cannot separate yourself from the Universe you cannot break Universal Law. Since you are here to learn though you will have to correct the error (most of you are already quite familiar with Karma.)
As we talked about in past Michael Lines, this physical plane game has two important elements pleasure and pain with their positive and negative poles. Pain is a repulsive force and pleasure is an attractive force. Your desires are directed by the two sensations. Also important is the loss of your essence memory and your original identity. As a unified entity you have access to the akashic record but after fragmentation into the physical plane the access becomes hidden. This is never a complete loss since you need some impulse to bring you back again, so you always have a distant memory of your source essence. Loss of memory results in a loss of self identity. Without your memory of who you are, which includes your entity structure, you lose all stability for your personal reality; it then must continually be reconstructed, moment by moment, using your primary physical plane creation tool, your incarnation with its physical body. The impulse you retain drives you to continually try to remember your pre-incarnational identity so you continually try on self identities (overleaves) until you realize the right one. Of course there is no right one, but this makes it even more fun for playful essence. Remember the source of who you are is always within you and you will recognize it - you may be recognizing it this moment.
Many fragments rarely recognize their powerful creative abilities. Fragments do much more in shaping reality than they believe. You could say that most of them believe everything is happening to them and that they have little control over any outcome. 'Survival of the fittest' and all its ramifications (the holocaust) is a reflection of this basic belief. For us this is a false idea or belief statement and we, through our teaching are in our way attempting to help you modify it in a way that allows you to see its place in nature, however for the fragments who play under those rules it is a very real and punishing idea. They are in constant preparation for the final accidental outcome of their one and only incarnation. As we said, this sort of obstacle can make the game much more interesting. So consider that at a place within your moment of creation which we will call 'elsewhere' you are now in full realization that you are creating everything in your reality. You are fully awake and you are remembering all that you are including the moment that you are naming 'now'.
We will bring up a 'new' concept of astral boredom. This is somewhat of a restlessness that comes from exhausting the experience bank of the previous lifetime. As one of the newly 'dead' you arrive in the astral plane full of beliefs and experience which construct your location in the astral plane. Since they are usually the fruits of a limited belief system cultivated on the Physical Plane they are themselves limited. The being goes about the business of recreating its old incarnation but after thousands of reconstructions the being will exhaust what experiences the previous lifetime has provided. Then again, if the beliefs are limited enough, very little construction can be done with those beliefs. Imagine playing a harp in your perfect vision of the world for eternity - what a limited belief! It offers very little for the powerful and playful creative drive of essence. To put this simply, once the bank account is empty the party is over. At this time the fragment may say "well I have all this material called karma, perhaps I can do something with it." Karma must be redeemed on the physical plane, so preparation for the next incarnation begins. As a side note, astral boredom can be so excruciating that fragments will go to great lengths to create games that will cure this ill. In some cases the boredom can be so extreme that they will create a hell, complete with an all powerful leader, such as Satan, to keep them busy. They will then try to entice the newly dead into the wrong passage. To make a long story short, if there is no means of fulfilling a desire on the astral plane then an incarnation is set in motion.
You will find that the cycled off astral beings all very busy and do not suffer from astral boredom, angst, despair or any other affliction. These are purged through incarnation. You could see these afflictions as weights that keep you from reaching a level of spiritual consciousness that allows for cycling off. Cycled off fragments are always striving to create and that could be anything to a new species, a new civilization, a new technical invention, a new inspiring idea or even simply poetry and song. They serve as guides to many of you here on earth. They value your experience and they want to serve you.
Now, to the subject of suicide. The moment of death returns the memory of the incarnational purpose to the fragment. Everything becomes clear again. Memory is restored. Purpose is revealed. Life purpose can all be very different than what the fragment as the incarnation thought it was. For the fragment who thought that winning the election was all important he may find, upon death, that the election had very little to do with his life purpose. The fragment who commits suicide may find that the reason for suicide was of very little importance and a very powerful feeling of loss will overpower the fragment. The incarnation that was seen as so valuable before birth is now a waste. The fragment sees its incarnation as a parent would see a child and the fragment feels as though it has murdered its child.
The fragment will discover another problem. The pre-incarnation contract has not been fulfilled, physical plane agreements cannot be completed, and valuable lessons and experiences will not be added to the offering. (At death, fragments make an offering of the life experience to essence - another story). All that is left is the original boredom with no means of relief. This is somewhat like getting off the bus at the wrong stop and not having any money for another ticket while on your way to visit a favorite friend. What we have then is plenty of physical plane desire with no means of fulfillment.
Suicides are not the only cause of this condition and suicides do not always result in this condition. Suicide can be written into the pre-incarnational contract if the lessons look difficult enough. There are also instances when an incarnation must be terminated - the pain of a lifetime is really too much to bear. For someone who is in 6th internal monad and is suffering from disease, there is really not much to lose so death brings with it no feeling of loss.
No emotion, feeling, anxiety, any resultant thought form thereof can be in any way hidden from view, occluded, covered, or camouflaged within any location of the astral plane. In other words, every thought form that you create is available to all other astral beings. The feeling of loss and all related thought forms cannot be hidden or kept secret from any other astral being. If they choose to be in your vicinity then they perceive everything that you are. You are an open book; your section of the akashic record is open to anyone who wants to examine it. You have no black felt tip markers to hide information. Those who want to hide will withdraw into isolation. To do this they retreat from any location that is occupied. Space is infinite so there is plenty of room for a fragment to lose itself. If a another fragment appears in the location the hiding fragment will move deeper into isolation. The attraction of the entity is always too powerful and the fragment will eventually find its way back to a more populated zone.
A suicide is essentially a breach of contract and on the astral plane it is similar to filing for bankruptcy. In some astral locations you are simply seen as a poor credit risk, however the details are somewhat different than on the physical plane. Astral plane beings are more limited by actuality. If the account sheet is empty then we have no material on which to form a contract. Building material in the form of karma and physical plane experience are needed to create an incarnational contract. Astral plane beings are very pragmatic and matter of fact. They will enter in a communication and the one will say to the other, "well, I like you and I want to help, but the intense karma that is needed to bind our relationship is with the incarnates you left behind. It appears you will have to wait for them to complete their incarnations." Basically, the suicide has created an impediment to writing a contract such as a parent/child agreement.
So suicide, which among your astral companions is considered a "Premature Astral Entry" results in waiting period with strong desires with no means of fulfillment. The fragment can not influence the physical plane to complete agreements and he cannot set a new incarnation into motion. There are in what some religions call limbo, a place of waiting until the right circumstances again come into place. The fragments are locked out of influencing the incarnated fragments of the previous lifetime and they have no means of beginning a new one. Often they will attempt to incarnate into any body available and can end up in an incarnation far away from the original agreements. This is somewhat like saying, "well if I can't go visit my mother in Amsterdam then I will wander the streets of Tulsa until I find a stranger who will talk to me." These situations are considered karmic crap shoots and are best avoided. Also, if they are in a hurry to begin one of these random incarnations they may not choose the best overleaves for the trip. Neutrals and ordinals are best when you are a tourist, but if you next set involves aggression for example, you may find yourself in the school of hard knocks.
If someone in your life has committed a suicide you can send them thoughts filled with love. This will help them. Physical plane love has a substance to it and it is valued in the astral plane. Astral beings will often "tickle you" a bit to produce it. Some use it as a fertilizer in their gardens. It also has great healing properties. You may, if you wish, entertain the idea that the astral plane created the physical plane to create this substance, that is, physical plane love. The idea itself offers a helpful mental image whether or not you want to believe it to be true. We will assure you that your thoughts of love, kindness and compassion to go beyond the electrons in your nervous system. What you may perceive as the most subtle of electric field, you aura, has a solidity to it on the astral plane. Your thoughts radiate through your aura which is your connection to the astral plane. So, think of this person as wrapped in a blanket of love and you will do him well.
Recent general interest about the subject of death sparked this question to Michael:
We would suggest changing this question somewhat to read, "what is the reality of essence beyond the limitation of any single incarnation?" This of course being an even more involved question and one that the physical plane personality will not fully understand within the present limitations of the intellectual center. To a greater extend an understanding can be reached with the moving and emotional centers. That is, a mountain climber hanging on the edge of a cliff, fully in her moving center, will have an awareness of the moment which transcends all intellectual points of view about the climb. For example, the thought of what her friends may say about her achievement is forgotten while she clings to a precarious slop. Her complete focus is in her climb providing it has offered her enough of a challenge. Many of these moving centered activities are pursued for the purpose of aiding the union of essence and personality, no matter how fleeting or temporary the moment of awareness may seem. Emotions share the same quality. We are saying here that the other centers must be employed freeing the mind from the sole duty of making a statement based on logic or reason that satisfies the different set of demands placed on personality by the emotions and physical body. If you say to the body, "you will die and I, the mind, will live for eternity" then the body will be distressed to say the least. "Why can't I live forever too?" asks the body. The emotions will do the same. They will say, "I of all centers offer you the greatest reward. I am the reward of life. Without me you are nothing!". All the words in the world will do little to convince anyone who has not brought both the emotions and the physical body into the pursuit of an answer to this age old question. Extremes in both body and emotion are sought after to bring closure to this question.
Within the higher centers there is no question. The experience of essence is given. In your higher centers you simply know. You have no necessity to prove you are real. Within the higher centers the answer is obvious. You are within the realm of pure truth, love and energy of which the separations, believed necessary for the protection of the body and personality are simply no longer felt as necessary. When you are in your higher centers you lose the need to continue constructing realty out of your own separation from it. When you are in your higher centers you encounter the awareness of essence who says, "I am all things". The voice of the higher centers will say, "I am now, I am the moment, I am eternal".
The body and personality want to hear that they will survive intact in some ideal form within some ideal world. Many want a place where all their desires are filled, or where the life they know remains intact. This can be arranged - we do no exclude this idea we only wish to broaden it since it is, much like your present personality, a temporary vehicle to carry you through a prearranged set of lessons learned through the experience of the vehicle (body/personality) in the physical plane. Once the lessons are complete the vehicle is no longer necessary. Why keep an old car parked in your front lawn? Essence can however, reconstruct your present lifetime with all its minute details at any time. Essence is not restricted to the linear, sequential system of moments that you as a personality find yourself confined within. You can say then that the personality survives completely after the moment of death. For it also survives before the moment of death as well as before the moment of birth. We bring up this seeming contradiction simply to emphasize that your lifetime is a construction that can be, from the standpoint of more aware levels of yourself, recreated. It is - always being recreated. You as personality perceive it in its past, present, future linear relationship, but to higher level regions of your Self it is much more fluid. Survival is not an issue.
The Akashic record is in most understandings thought of as a universal memory. You can look at it also as the sum total of all information in the entirety of the Physical, Astral, & Causal Universes (you may play with the idea of the Mental, Messianic and Buddhaic planes as being information free, another term for purity or unaffected). The information that is necessary to create all events, in both past present and future, is within the Akashic record. At any time, the information of any event can be retrieved from the record and played - or activated. Entire star systems are activated this way. It is helpful to understand that the information within the record is potential rather than determined. You have both potential for past as well as potential for future. Within the Akashic record there is the potential for no Universe what so ever. This potential is also applied as a complete non-Universe. Again, survival is not an issue.
(there was more to this as I recall however it has dissappeared somewhere in the hard-drive)
The causal plane has been getting a little stuffy so we have been opening some windows to let in a little fresh air. Air here you may remember is the energy of the mental plane. We are in the process of doing some house cleaning and remodeling. We are reconfiguring the structure of our space to adapt to the finer levels of consiousness that we are attuning to. It is somewhat of a surprise for us. We were not expecting the energy levels of our new location to be so difficult to assimilate into our structure. Thus, we adapt.
You too are adapting the same rise in energy currents that mirror our own change. We change together as all beings do. Nobody on the planet or in any associated or related dimension, is going backwards. The current maintains its direction and all beings follow it. If you resist and go the other way you are still carried with the current. Any ship's captain will tell you this.
So what does this have to do with Karma? We will say first that Karma is nuetral and mechanical. It has no mind and it has no will. It cannot work againt you nor does it work for you. You give it form, quality,and quantity. You give it energy. You collect it. You could think of your Karma collection as a room full of shelves that are overflowing with nicknacks, books, collectables and all sorts of useless little