Preparing for the Miraculous

idge across the afterlife 151intoxication or oxygen starvation; or a flood of endorphinsreleased by the dying brain. Etc.Obviously, this flood of experiences exceeds the boundariesof physical science, which by now at least should beused to the astonishing and apparently impossible in itsown backyard. Only the science of yoga, and its experientialknowledge of reality and the human personality, canexplain them.A human being consists of more than a body, and evenmore than a body-plus-mind, as has been the belief in theWest since its classical times. To this body-plus-mind may beadded a soul, although the Western philosophers and theologianshave generally identified the soul with the mind,both being “non-material.” According to the common yogicexperience, however, a human being consists of severalbodies or sheaths, material, vital, and mental, contained ineach other. At the center of this complex being sits the soulor psychic being, which has taken up its bodies in reverseorder when descending into a new terrestrial incarnation.The material body is the one that dies, while the vitaland mental bodies survive for some time, still envelopingthe soul. It is in this condition that everyone has to traversethe worlds that correspond to the state of his vital body andthe development of his mental body. In most cultures andindividual cases the mental body does not possess the necessaryknowledge to protect the transiting person. The lowerregions of the vital plane can be, as the Mother said, “infernal”or hellish, inhabited by hellish beings. (The conceptof hell originated from the remembrance of this kind of postmortem experiences.) The Mother constructed the “protectivepathways” precisely to protect the deceased againstsuch hellish experiences and to have them transit directlyto the plane of the psychic, which is a divine plane.