Note: time and its distortions in Spirit is also covered in other chapters
The fact that many spirits remain earthbound is often a function of their subjective sense of time. Rather than experiencing time as we understand it, souls newly arrived on the transitional plane may experience a constant replaying of the same time frame over and over again. This accounts for the refusal of so many to recognize that they are dead. They simply “don’t have the time” to conceptualize their new condition, and they remain sequestered in their “haunts”, unable to cross over into the mainstream spiritual world.
Other souls find themselves caught in a time trap constantly reliving the intense feelings that consumed their thoughts towards the end of their lives. These feelings include guilt, personal hatreds, desire for revenge, generalized depression, delusional thinking or any number of intense emotions. An intense desire for drugs and alcohol may also consume the souls of addicts. Persons dying in any of these states may remain trapped on the transitional plane because they truly cannot see beyond their addictions or their emotional horizon.
The suspension of time on the transitional plane is NOT a hard, fast rule. Some earthbounds know they have died and remain earthbound because they are afraid of a “celestial judgement”. They fear that a vengeful god will cast them into Hell because of the various mistakes they have made throughout their long lives. They really don’t understand that no such judgement ever happens! While it is possible that their own spiritual density may well drag them into the lower planes after they cross over, they don’t realize that those dark planes exist to benefit them. The hells are parts of the mainstream spiritual realm, and even there, they can still evolve and climb the spiritual ladder into the brighter spheres…something they can’t do if they remain earthbound.
For souls who have crossed into the mainstream sequence, time does not stand still. Even there, however, spirits experience time differently than we do (see chapter 7). Once a spirit has made the transition, its circumstances can change depending on its own mental state. These changes of state can be described as “evolution” for souls who tend to ascend to higher planes, or even “devolution” for those whose mindsets draw them toward the darker planes or even back to the earth (reincarnation) . Whether a mainstream plane is heavenly or hellish, souls can evolve there, unlike the souls who confine themselves to the transitional plane and who remain forever locked in a static state.