PMH Atwater, LHD, Ph.D. (Hon.), guest speaker at the Monroe Institute’s LIFELINE® program, is one of the original researchers in the field of near-death studies. She is the author of ten books, including We Live Forever: The Real Truth About Death, which is excerpted here—

If you expect to die when you die, you will be disappointed.

The only thing dying does is help you release, slough off, and discard the “jacket” you once wore (more commonly referred to as a body). When you die, you lose your body. That is all there is to it. Nothing else is lost.

You are not your body. It is just something you wear for a while because living in the earth plane is infinitely more meaningful and more involved if you are encased in its trappings and subject to its rules.

WHAT DEATH IS

There is a step-up of energy at the moment of death, an increase in speed as if you are suddenly vibrating faster than before.

Using radio as an analogy, this speed-up is comparable to having lived all your life at a certain radio frequency when suddenly someone or something comes along and flips the dial. That flip shifts you to another wavelength. The original frequency where you once existed is still there. It did not change. Everything is still the same as it always was. Only you changed, only you speeded up or slowed down to allow entry into the next radio frequency up or down the dial. 

As is true with all radios and radio stations, there can be bleed overs or distortions of transmission signals due to interference patterns. Normally, most shifts along the dial are fast and efficient; but occasionally one can run into interference, perhaps from a strong emotion, a sense of duty, or a need to fulfill a vow or keep a promise. This interference enables frequencies to coexist for a few seconds, days, or even years.

This may well explain the existence of hauntings and ghosts. But, sooner or later, every vibrational frequency will seek out or be nudged to where it belongs.

You fit your particular spot on the dial by your speed of vibration. You cannot coexist forever where you do not belong. Who can say how many spots there are on the dial or how many frequencies there are to inhabit? No one knows for certain. You shift frequencies in dying. You switch over to life on another wavelength. You are still a spot on the dial, but you move up or down a notch or two.

You don’t die when you die. You shift your degree of consciousness and change your speed of vibration. That is all death is. A shift.

I can say without hesitation that you encounter far more than you could possibly imagine when you die. Your previous beliefs do not necessarily determine what that is. Life is not as limiting as you may have thought; neither is death. As near as I can tell, there is no end of the discoveries and the encounters you can have beyond death. Truly, death is but a shift in consciousness—like a doorway through which we pass. What we find, no matter what that is, constitutes hardly more than a “wink” in infinity . . .

What lasts, what we carry with us through death and beyond, is the love we have given and received, and the love that we are. If we connect with the wisdom deep within us, that innate knowingness we all have, we would not be so frightened of death nor so attached to life. Reclaiming that wisdom means listening to it.