Earthly Necessities Not Needed | Steve Beckow

By Steve Beckow, January 14, 2023

(Golden Age of Gaia)

It occurs to me that life on the Astral Plane bears a striking resemblance to what I imagine life on the 5th Dimension to be like.

Let me take one area to illustrate, a page from New Maps of Heaven. (1) Let’s look at the need – or lack of need – for food, drink, and other material sources of nourishment on the Astral Plane.

What’s the impact on their lives of not needing what we consider the necessities of life?

Earthly Necessities not Needed

Such things as hunger and thirst and going to sleep and waking up – those are cast off.

(A.D. Mattson in Ruth Mattson Taylor, ed., Witness from Beyond. New Cosmic Concepts on Death and Survival from the Late A.D. Mattson, S.T.D., through the Clairvoyant Margaret Flavell Tweddell. Portland, ME: Foreword Books, 1975, 51.)

Human passions and human needs and wishes are gone with the body, and the spirit lives a spirit life of purity, progress, and love. Such is heaven.

(Spirit leader “Imperator” (Malachi) speaking through Stainton Moses, Spirit Teachings. London: Spiritualist Press, n.d. (Prior to 1883.), 66.)

Life can be so free here! There is none of that machinery of living which makes people on Earth such slaves. In our world a man is held only by his thoughts. If they are free, he is free.

(Judge David Patterson Hatch (“X”), Letters from a Living Dead Man. Elsa Barker, med. New York: Mitchell Kennerly, 1914. Ebook downloaded from http://www.earthlypursuits.com/LtrLDMan/LtrLDMan.htm, 28 August 2008, Letter XVI.)

Nothing to fear, neither sickness, poverty, age nor death. Why count the years when each passing one will only add to your happiness and power and preserve forever both youth and beauty? Goodbye to birthdays! Greet the future with joy that will take no cognizance of years.

(Spirit control Mary Bosworth in Charlotte E. Dresser, medium, and Fred Rafferty, editor, Spirit World and Spirit Life. Los Angeles: Rafferty, 1922, 93.)

As for the rest, be assured that we do have the spirit counterpart of all the blessed things on earth: – libraries, homes, flowers or lakes or groves. But we do not have the clumsy and awkward material things which are found necessary on earth. We do not need cars, or balloons, or automobiles. Oh, no! Life is easier than that, and travel a luxury, and movement a delight.

(Spirit Control Mary Bosworth in Fred Rafferty, ed., Charlotte E. Dresser, medium, Life Here and Hereafter. Author’s edition. Downloaded from http://www.harvestfields.ca/ebook/02/001/00.htm, 2 Feb. 2008, 94.)

Things which are of the essence of mind, such as music and musical instruments, function here admirably, but objects which really appertain to the physical Earth, such as cars, only have an outward semblance; they do not work well. Mainly because our own methods of transit are so different. But a ship can be made to function in a gentle gliding on great glimmering sheets of water; it is a fine sensation when one is wanting to rest and whizz about.

(Philip Gilbert in Philip Gilbert through Alice Gilbert, medium. Philip in the Spheres. London: Psychic Book Club, n.d., 29.)

There are no political parties and no big business. As there is no need for money. Life is much happier. Ambition of that sort has no object. There is no fighting and struggling for success in a material sense.

(Grace Rosher’s sister Phyllis in Grace Rosher, medium. The Travellers’ Return. London: Psychic Press, 1968, 80.)

These wayfarers find themselves in familiar surroundings amongst people of a similar mentality. But they find very frequently that their actual needs are not the same. They are not condemned to some mechanically-performed task for the greater part of their existence, because their etheric bodies do not require food.

They draw what is essential for their well-being from that all-pervading invisible substance [love?]. On Earth men are slaves of the physical body, and, therefore, slaves of darkness. In the Hereafter we may truly say that, given certain conditions, they become servants of the light.

As food, or its equivalent money, is not the principal object of their existence, they have at last time to serve the light. That is to say, they are in a position in which they can reflect at their leisure and begin to reach towards this strange and marvellous life of the mind.

(Frederic W.H. Myers through Geraldine Cummins, medium. The Road to Immortality. Being a description of the after-life purporting to be communicated by the late F. W. H. Myers . Located at http://www.trans4mind.com/spiritual/cummins/cummins1.html, n.p.)

[Think] of the myriads of things we don’t need here. In an idle moment you could compile such a list of commodities that are not required for life in the spirit world as would reach the dimensions of a store’s catalogue.

Think now. Start with the domestic arrangements of a house. Food, for instance. We don’t need food, so that means the elimination of a huge industry comprising all the various departments of eating and drinking, and all the vessels and utensils for manufacturing it, cooking it, and serving it.

Our clothes are provided for us by the operation of a natural law – another vast industry dispensed with.

The transport system you have already seen here! … Then think of all the trades and professions that have no counterpart or equivalent in these lands. … Of shops there are none … because there is no commerce of any kind.

(Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson through Anthony Borgia, medium, More About Life in the World Unseen. San Francisco: H.G. White, 1956; c1968, 68-9.)

Footnotes

(1) From “The Astral Plane – Common Summerland Elements” in New Maps of Heaven at https://goldengaiadb.com/index.php?title=The_Astral_Plane_%E2%80%93_Common_Summerland_Elements