There have been numerous messages and signs from the spirit world indicating that many spirits are slow in recognizing that they are “dead,” some floundering in an “earthbound” stupor for a long time, however time is measured in that realm. This phenomenon was popularized in the hit movie, The Sixth Sense, a decade or so ago, when the Bruce Willis character apparently didn’t know he had died.
Emanuel Swedenborg, (below) the brilliant 18th Century scientist who learned to leave his body and explore the afterlife realms, may have been the first to mention this phenomenon. He said that he had met newly departed souls in something of a stupor, unaware they were “dead.” This seemed especially true of people who had “denied the Divine” when alive in the flesh. When they finally came to realize that they had left the physical body behind and were existing in a different state, they were, he said, “acutely embarrassed.”
Now and then I have discussed this phenomenon with people who do not believe in an afterlife. They usually scoff at the idea that one cannot know he or she is “dead.” I then ask them if they know that they are “alive” when they are dreaming during a deep sleep. A puzzled look usually results.
According to a number of esoteric teachings arising out of spirit communication, the magnetic currents hold the spirit body close to the physical body during earthly life and continue to some degree after death depending on the degree of spiritual consciousness achieved by the individual while alive in the flesh. That is, the more spiritual consciousness the person develops, the quicker the magnetic currents are destroyed. Conversely, the soul who has not developed much spiritual consciousness will be slow in breaking the magnetic bonds, thus lingering around his or her physical remains in the “earthbound” condition, indefinitely, not completely comprehending the fact that he/she is “dead.”
Allan Kardec, a distinguished 19th Century French educator and psychical researcher, likened the “earthbound” condition to somnambulism, as in sleepwalking, when the somnambulist who is thrown into a magnetic sleep cannot believe that he is not awake. “Sleep, according to their idea of it, is synonymous with suspension of the perceptive faculties, and as they think freely, and see, they appear to themselves not to be asleep,” he further explained.
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