How can i feel the presence of the soul of the loved one whom i lost in a tragic accident. Is there any method to feel connected? What happens to the extremely strong unfulfilled desires of the life time after departure? What happens to those who die untimely? Please ans soon im desperate to be connected to my loved one.
—annu, India
Dear Annu,
I am sorry to hear of your great loss. I am copying for you below an excerpt from the book Karma and Reincarnation by Yogananda.
I highly recommend that you contact Ananda India Publications to see about getting a copy of this book. (This is a long excerpt, but answers your first question. At the end I’ll try to answer your other questions.)
Contacting Departed Souls
“In real communication with a spirit, one should not lose consciousness, but should consciously commune with the invited soul. These states are usually devoid of exciting emotions. Do not try quick, magic tricks to get in touch with departed souls. That is a great spiritual crime against God and humanity.
By deep, incessant meditation only, try to get in touch with your dear dead ones. Only meditation, and months, sometimes years, of patience can bring them to you.
Every night, with closed eyes, concentrate in the Christ Center, the astral broadcasting microphone of the spiritual eye, and send your good will to your departed ones by mentally saying: “Resurrect, and be quickened in God.” They will get your message.
Then sit in silence and try to feel their love; when you feel exhilarated, know that they have answered you.
Even if some of your dead loved ones have reincarnated, by the above process you can contact their ever-awake astral bodies and receive an answer in the form of a dream during sleep, or a vision during meditation.
By finding friends in this life and following them up in the astral sphere after death, you will learn the mystery of life after death. Then you will know that death separated your loved ones from you so that you might love not only them, but that you might give your love to all the people in all incarnations.
When your heart becomes big enough to love all, you will then know the Father who loves all His children alike. Knowing Him, you will know all your many parents and friends that you loved before. With that intense love you will learn to love all your animate and inanimate brothers as children of your one, ever-kind, ever-mysterious Father-God.
Do not think constantly about a departed soul unless you know that he is good, and unless you feel an undying desire to reach him. If time cannot make you forget a departed friend, then try to contact him. A continuous desire to know about a departed soul is the best astral broadcasting that you can send forth.
Feeling Contact in the Conscious State
If, day and night, you miss a dear friend, then you will have a sort of longing, a soothing presence around your heart.
This will indicate to you that this friendly soul is trying to get in touch with you through your feeling, but he cannot materialize himself because of your constant mental restlessness.
Dream Contact in Subconscious State
If you concentrate upon the feeling that your friend is present for several minutes just before falling asleep, then that friend will appear to you in a dream.
Conscious Contact in the Superconscious State
If you carry the feeling of the presence of your departed friend, and then concentrate with closed eyes at the spot between the eyebrows and visualize him, he will appear to you after some time.
It may take months, or even years, but if you are patient and keep on ever increasing the depth of the astral call of meditation, you will succeed.
The Metaphysical Technique of Finding Lost, Dearly Loved Friends
When you lose someone very dear to you by death and you find it impossible to forget him, then proceed to find him in the following way, practicing for two hours each day, for months — or, if necessary, for years:
Sit on a straight chair, and practice the highest technique of concentration that you know for one hour; then lift your hand and concentrate on the finger tips. Concentrate on the point between the eyebrows, see the spiritual eye, and continuously will to contact the astral body of the departed soul.
Keep on turning your hand very gently in a circle toward all the different directions: north, south, east, and west, and so on. At every direction in the circle around which your hand moves, try to feel the presence of the astral body of the departed soul.
When your fingers feel that you have touched him as you used to touch him while he lived, your heart will be thrilled.
Keep on visualizing him in the spiritual eye and you will see him. Ask your fingers and heart to indicate in what place your friend is reborn, according to the direction you felt him through your fingers. When you feel him through your fingers and heart, and can see him and talk to him, he will tell you where he is in the astral world, or the place where he is born. Then there will be great rejoicing.”
Any unfulfilled desires that a person has must be fulfilled in some future life. You also ask about “untimely” death. This is not something we believe in. We believe each person has particular karma and the time of death is part of that karma.
The death may seem terribly untimely for loved ones left behind, and may not at all be what the human personality that has died would want. And yet on some level, their soul has agreed to this type of death in order to pay off some karma from the past.
The one thing to remember is that where there is true love between people, that love will always draw them together again – in the astral world and in future lives. I hope this can bring you some comfort.
I encourage you to contact not only our publishers in India, but an Ananda Center in Gurgaon or Pune to speak with an Ananda minister there.
In divine friendship,
Anandi
