Humans, who embark their journey on earth with biological bodies, continue the subsequent stages of their lives, using the astral-radial body that their biological brains produce during their life on earth.
Since a person who ‘tastes death’[1] becomes detached from their physical body and progresses to their consequential life in the Realm of the Grave (qabir), or to an independent state of existence in the Intermediate Realm (Barzakh) with their astral-radial self, the earth completely ceases to exist in their field of vision. They commence a new form of life within the magnetic field of the earth, orbiting the sun. In other words, they begin living under the administration of the sun and solar energy, hence becoming subject to the sun’s unit of time, until doomsday.
So how long is a galactic year, or one year, according to the sun’s unit of time?
As we know, one earth year is the amount of time it takes for the earth to orbit the sun.
One galactic year, then, is the time it takes for the sun to orbit the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. To orbit this point, from approximately 32,000 light years away, takes 255 million years of earth time. Therefore, one galactic year is 255 million earth years.
Based on this understanding, a person who dies on earth, at the age of 70, would have only lived 8.6 seconds according to their real dimension of existence. When this person disassociates from his biological body at the point of death and enters the Intermediate Realm, the platform of the sun’s orbit and energy, he will then realize what seemed to be a 70-year span of lifetime on earth was actually only a duration of 8.6 seconds!
This is just like the feeling one gets after waking up from a long dream that, in reality, only lasts 50 seconds. Try and remember the last time you had such a dream. Remember how long it felt during the dream and how it felt some time after you woke up. Now try and imagine the relevance of this ‘world dream’ in terms of the afterlife, where the sense of time is such that your whole lifetime will feel as if it were no longer than 7 or 8 seconds!
To sum it up, as conscious beings, we are citizens of a much greater dimension of existence and subject to the values and laws of this system. However, our brain’s capacity to evaluate this vast field has been hindered by the conditionings arising from our perception that we exist in physical form and thus that we are limited to the 5 senses. Whereas, ‘death’ will inevitably wake us up to this truth and force us to realize the fleeting nature of worldly life. We will then discern just how short this life really was and just how much our ignorance and inexorable opinions have impeded our potentials.
Let us now try to evaluate the saying of Muhammad (saw); “People are asleep and will wake up with death” and the following verses in the light of this truth:
“The day they see it, it will be as though they had not remained (in the world), except for a time of sunset or twilight.” (Quran 79:46)