Yes, that's true. Understanding of these things is really an actual preparation for the after life. And this is not simply understanding of an abstract map. I think I've mentioned this before. At the threshold of death we leave the support of the physical body and with it the ability to experience sense perceptions and sensory-like thoughts (verbal thoughts are sensory-like because they sound like auditory speech). What remains in the first moments is what has been described as thinking gestures. If we have explored our thinking while in the body and have become conscious of the fact that we're performing certain spiritual gestures which are reflected in sensory-like thoughts, then we retain something familiar with us. But if we've spent our life as watching a movie where thoughts just stream along, then we enter a state where we don't know ourselves as a thinking being. We're only used to know ourselves as a being that experiences dim sympathies and antipathies for templated streams of thoughts. When the streams are left behind together with the corpse, our dim sympathies and antipathies remain in the air so to speak - we struggle to find something which we can sympathize with, which could remind us of our previous state. So gradually we come to realize that we are the active spiritual force that has been expressing in the dim sympathies and antipathies in the body, but since we've exercised this force only in a dim way in relation to this or that thought and idea, we feel ourselves as if crippled. We entered a state for which we're not properly prepared.Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Thu Dec 16, 2021 9:40 pm Well, by likening it to the post-grad course, I was not suggesting that the P-G course be undertaken in some version after death, but is undertaken here and now in this life, once one has attained and had enough of the mastery of limitations. Then presumably that way one is prepared for the 'after life'.
So we see above that the afterlife is already concealed within our current consciousness. It's not in some other world. We're now living the afterlife too, but it is all time-differentiated and flattened over the bodily sensations, feelings and thoughts. This is the reason why thinking these things through is real preparation. Even if we don't achieve more encompassing seeing in this life, livingly thinking these things, probes what we'll experience after death. It's like we've touched them with our thinking while still blindfolded. Then when the etheric body detaches from the physical, becomes luminous and beings to expand we say "Aha, so this is what my thinking was moving through all the time". We won't say that if we don't know ourselves as a being that was actively moving its thoughts. We can't remember something we never did. Instead we seek to exercise our dim sympathies and antipathies towards images, which however, have now become crushingly overwhelming and we can't discern what we're doing among them.
We are here for mastery over limitations indeed. For modern man it is of utmost importance to understand the limitations within which thinking itself moves. These are our desires, sympathies, antipathies, prejudices, beliefs, etc. We move towards mastery when we understand how we're limited by all these forces and begin to overcome them. And this was the Central Topic.