“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your consciousness, as you think of it, may of course leave your body entirely before physical death. (As mentioned earlier, there is no precise point of death, but I am speaking as if there is for the sake of your convenience.)

There may or may not be disorientation on your part, according to your beliefs and development. Now I do not necessarily mean intellectual development. The intellect should go hand in hand with the emotions and intuitions, but if it pulls against these too strongly, difficulties can arise when the newly freed consciousness seizes upon its ideas about reality after death, rather than facing the particular reality in which it finds itself. It can deny feeling, in other words, and even attempt to argue itself out of its present independence from the body.

(9:32.) Again, as mentioned earlier, an individual can be so certain that death is the end of all, that oblivion, though temporary, results. In many cases, immediately on leaving the body there is, of course, amazement and a recognition of the situation. The body itself may be viewed, for example, and many funerals have a guest of honor amidst the company — and no one gazes into the face of the corpse with as much curiosity and wonder.

(10:00.) The Arab was a very interesting character, by the way, and to illustrate some of the difficulties involved, I will tell you about him. He hated the Jews, but somehow he was obsessed with the idea that Moses was more powerful than Allah, and for years this was the secret sin upon his conscience. He spent some time in Constantinople at the time of the Crusades. He was captured, and ended up with a group of Turks, all to be executed by the Christians, in this case very horribly so. They forced his mouth open and stuffed it with burning coals, as a starter. He cried to Allah, and then in greater desperation to Moses, and as his consciousness left his body, Moses was there.

Of course, it is only because most people believe that you cannot leave your body that you do not consciously have out-of-body experiences with any frequency, generally speaking, in your lifetimes. Such experiences would acquaint you far better than words with some understanding of the conditions that will be encountered.