Unity and the Afterlife

[anagogy]

Someone on this forum once posted that on the devachanic plane you experience all of your desires from life.

In the astral plane when I'm dreaming my sense of smell is not all that, so I can't imagine how real things will seem.

That could be true about the devachanic plane, but I'm not sure. My understanding of the devachanic/mental plane is that it involves seeing the archetypal mental conceptual structures beneath all form. So, you might be able to experience something of that nature, but it would be like seeing it in a somewhat abstract and fundamental way. Like seeing the elements of consciousness that make a particular reality "what it is" at a functional level. I could be completely wrong.

And as for the astral and dreaming, two things: first of all, oftentimes what we call dreams are a LOT more real than we remember them as. I'm serious. I've done a lot of experimentation in this department, and I can often hold onto the memory of "holy crap, this is soooo freaking real", but I often cannot hold onto the solid memory of the realness qualia itself. It is frustrating, but subtle memories do not impress upon the physical brain very strongly (at least, mine don't).

Secondly, when we dream at night, we are usually in the lower astral or what I call "the orange ray layer", which is the "focus" of personal self. It is like entering the realm of your own subconscious mind. It is extremely topsy turvy, and doesn't come close to the vividness you find in the yellow ray layer and higher, where there are "others" simultaneously contributing to the consensus realities. Those realities, are a LOT more stable and "real", much like the physical world is. When you are the sole occupant of a reality, it changes constantly (perhaps due to our lack of mental control). Shared realities are much more coherent. They are still malleable, but there is a slight resistance to change which gives it a "satisfying" degree of stability even when your personal attention withdraws from them.