Hi Midlander - Thinking about your reply, I realise that saying 'life without a body' needs to be understood from several viewpoints. This was bright home to me on the 20th by a dream I had, which follows.
The dream was lucid. The quality of the dream changed and I felt lost. This was because I had been following Hyone and had no sense of where to go back to, as if I didn’t have anywhere to live or had no home. I stayed in that state for quite a time, and then went into a meditative condition. As I had nowhere to go and nothing to do I sat and felt I should do nothing. So sat and tried to drop all thoughts. It developed into a struggle to drop the idea of myself as a body. What I mean is that we are so thoroughly locked into seeing our own self image in the image of having a body. It was really hard to get rid of the feeling of the body as me. But eventually I managed it. I realised as this was happening that this only applied to my inner life, and that the body had its own needs.
So it is not simply the body, but out self image of being the same shape, gender and person we were. I had an experience of this once. Here is a piece quoted from The House of the Ancestors. It was a conversation I had with a dead friend.
"This communication was unlike any other I had experienced with Shaun previously. I started by asking my usual question as to what he was meeting now in his after death life. He told me that the process of losing himself had continued and he was now on a boundary, which if he passed over, he would no longer be the Shaun I had known.
I was trying to understand this and asking questions when suddenly Shaun was a woman, and engulfed me in wonderful female love. This was so unexpected and beautiful I wept. To be loved in that way by somebody I had known as a very masculine male was an extraordinary experience and very moving.
Gradually I recovered from the surprise and the feelings, and saw that Shaun was now male and female at the same time. He had not switched to becoming a female, but had enlarged to being both male and female. The losing of himself as he had been, and the adding of things that he could not experience while in the body, had led him to become this fuller very loving being. Now, he/she was a whole person.
As I experience this I wondered what the border was that he/she was now ready to cross, so asked him/her if she/he knew what was over the other side. She/he replied that it was very simple. “It is a life without boundaries.”
Although those were the only words spoken, I received a flow of impressions or insights helping me to grasp something of a dimension of experience. And as this was happening Shaun said something in a manner typical of him in life. “And you, you bugger, have already been there before me.”
I could sense the smile and love in this, and understood what was implied and stated in the words. Shaun was saying that during his life, and even since his death, I had been like a guide to him, making it easier for him to find his way in life and death. He was also directly referring to a dream I had experienced".
Tony