By Jay Weidner

At the end of the movie 'American Beauty', another Best Picture nomination this year, the Kevin Spacey character has just died. As the camera pulls away from his neighborhood, we hear his voice on the soundtrack. It says: 'You know they say that when you die you live your entire life over again. Well, what they didn't tell you is that you live your entire life again - but that you do it for eternity. But don't worry, you'll find out'. This is about as apt a description of the basic kA state as has ever been spoken in popular culture.

In the film 'What Dreams May Come', the Robin William's character dies and goes to a place that looks just like the beautiful paintings that he loved while he was alive. The film reveals that the character has 'created' his own eternity in the kA state. Conversely, his wife later commits suicide and is banished to a hell. What they are telling you in this film is that the dreamlike, hallucinatory experience of your kA is based upon your own belief system and the manner in which you lived your life. This also is a clear description of how the ancients looked at the kA aspect of the separation of consciousness at death. Whatever life you lived here in this existence was repeated - perhaps forever - in the kA state after the moment of death.

In these films, the Hollywood mavens have hit a nerve in the psyches of contemporary audiences. The celluloid dreams and illusions that they are creating for the masses can be compared to the numerous types of experiences that the kA may undergo. Is it possible that, by subliminally implanting these scenarios into our collective psyches, they are both teaching us about the kA state and subtly influencing it's journey?

Let us return to the beliefs and practices of the ancient Egyptians and examine this ephemeral kA state more closely. According to their doctrines, there are certain keys to understanding the various aspects of the kA state. They believed that the formation of the kA is deeply connected to the shaping, experience and remnants of the physical form. The kA includes all of the genetic material and characteristics of our parents and ancestors. The Egyptians knew that residue from all of one's ancestors were sharing in the make-up of one's own personal kA So reverence for one's ancestors, and remembering their names, was considered essential to their practices. They believed that our ancestors kA lives on in all of us. Their genes, successfully passed down through the many generations, live on in each being born of their creation. All of our ancestors are gazing through our eyes at this very moment. The ancients believed that by just saying their names we can call them forth, with all of their wisdom and knowledge.

They also believed that whatever objects one possesses in this life hold a part of one's kA state as long as these objects exist. Imbued with the BA essence which once flowed through the physical form, they retain an energetic imprint of this force. This is why psychics can hold a key, an article of clothing, or other type of object in their hand and perceive many things concerning the life experience of the person who once possessed these objects. These psychics have the capacity to pick up the traces of this kA energy . Because of this factor, the ancients decided, wisely, to own as few objects as possible. They did this because they wanted to preserve their kA state in a way that they could control it after death. It was extremely important not to have their kA spread all over the place. Therefore, an essential part of their practices involved the proper preservation of the kA.

In order to accomplish this task, there were important procedures that had to be followed in the life of the person if their kA and their BA were to remain unbroken at death. When they died, their few kA objects would be gathered together by family and friends and placed in their grave, or tomb, with the body. The preservation of the body through the practice of mummification was also part of this process. The Egyptians believed that even the body itself held the kA As long as the decay of the body could be slowed the kA would stay more whole.

When grave robbers, and western treasure hunters, broke into many of the ancient Egyptian tombs they found exactly what has been described above. They found the kA objects, that were the possessions of the person who was interred in the tomb. They also found the mummified remains of the person's body. There was usually a curse put over the door to the tomb. This curse brought damnation on anyone who would disturb the tomb. The non-disturbance of the kA objects, and kA body, were crucial aspects of the Egyptian science of the afterlife. Indeed, as will be revealed, the preservation of the kA, and the kA objects, in an undisturbed state was the doorway towards a kind of immortality. The formula went like this: in order to stop the BA from falling back into a state of reincarnation; and to stop the kA from constantly reliving a fantasy based on the consciousness of the life lived previously, it was necessary to preserve the kA in an undisturbed state. This would 'ground' the BA and prevent it from escaping back into the realms of reincarnation. Since the ethereal link between the BA and the kA had not severed, this allowed the BA to become an ethereal shamanic traveler into the many realms and dimensions that invisibly surround us. This includes, but is not limited to, planets, stars and even galaxies.

Certain rituals were designed to keep the kA inside the tomb and to make sure that it would not be released back into the world to become a phantom or ghost. If one was successful in accomplishing this then the BA would also be freed from the realm of incarnation. The BA would then be able to pass into many different realms of the afterlife at will. In Egyptian mythology it is fairly clear that when this state was achieved it was possible for the BA to actually become a 'light body', or a star in the heavens. Through the careful procedures of this science it would allow the division of consciousness at death to be halted, thereby gaining a certain degree of immortality.

As we have seen, the science of the ancient Egyptians was a science of the immortality of consciousness itself. It was a science of the afterlife that promised to preserve both the kA and the BA It contained practices and procedures that would allow the kA state to not fall into the path of repeated fantasy states consisting of eternally reliving the memories of the previous existence. In fact, the ancient Egyptians - and research has shown that many other indigenous peoples also held these beliefs - created a system that could change this strange destiny at death. In fact, the essential transformational practices of Tibetan tantra including those of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, were created to lead the individual practitioner towards these same ends.