We live, learn from our experiences, and change and grow. Meanwhile, our body is aging and is eventually unable to keep up with the demands of the soul. The difference between the person/soul and the bodies that it inhabits is the difference between consciousness and form. All forms are temporary, but consciousness evolves and goes on forever, requiring new forms when it wears out the old ones. This is not just a human phenomenon; all life evolves through temporary forms. Death is a natural and essential part of this process. Humans fear death unreasonably. Here is a quote from C.W. Leadbeater on death. “It is impossible for us to calculate the vast amount of utterly unnecessary sorrow and terror and misery which mankind in the aggregate has suffered simply from its ignorance and superstition with regard to this one most important matter.”

I don't mean to dismiss the poignancy and loss from the death of a loved one. If this is your current experience, allow your grief full expression, and take what comfort you can in the more philosophical view that Esoterics offers. Joy has an element of sorrow. There are good reasons to feel joy when a person is freed from a restricted existence in a worn-out body. But sadness and grief have their place in the human experience.

And don't be worried that you or someone you love might go to Hell or Heaven, these are fictions. The person is often still around, without a physical body. We have five bodies (also called "vehicles" or "envelopes") that inhabit the same space and work together. At death, we shed the dense physical body (the only one recognized by science) and the corresponding etheric or energy body, a finer aspect of the physical body. Then we continue to inhabit our emotional body, which is of much subtler material than the physical, and live on in the emotional world. And we still have our mental body and soul, or causal, body. Eventually, we drop the emotional and mental bodies like we do the physical. Those two bodies, along with the physical and etheric bodies, are the “mortal” bodies of a single incarnation. Our soul body remains throughout all our incarnations, collecting experiences and providing continuity for the individual self. When the time comes to resume physical life, the soul finds parents and begins the process of building new bodies for incarnation. In each incarnation, we usually get a more refined set of bodies suited to our level of development. They are not always better than the last, such as when we have abused our last bodies or injured others.

Death is not the "great mystery" we hear it called. We have done it thousands of times to reach our current level of development. Eventually, we will have the ability to remember every life and every death. I am looking forward to a new body that can hear and see better. And without death, I would never be able to retire! But I am determined to complete what I have started in this lifetime before I give up my interface to the physical world (my physical body). We all benefit from the great gift of forgetting, so we can have a fresh start in a new life. Otherwise, we would be traumatized all over again by memories of loss and pain or be trapped in an outgrown and life-limiting belief system despite the new body.

The time spent in the emotional world is mainly a time of rest, certainly not a period of "eternal" torment. The emotional world is full of the imagined heavens and hells that humans create, there is no reason to spend any time in these places unless you have made the temporary mistake of believing them to be as real as the physical world. In a way, the “heavens” there are traps. Some people spend too long there thinking that they have achieved enlightenment, that there is nothing left to explore.

As our essential selves, we are indestructible units of consciousness, moving through ever-higher worlds of experience. The need for "death" eventually ends, and we no longer have a break in consciousness between lives, if we incarnate at all. There is much more here than meets the eye of science or public opinion. The message from those beings who see the whole process is trust life, and trust death.