The Brotherhood of the Light

• 
  The Brotherhood of Light, or White Brotherhood, is a voluntary charitable organization. It is dedicated to helping those souls who have died, and are lost and confused, and also to promoting peace and harmony in the universe. The brotherhood is dedicated to serving others.
• The members are not gods, angels, or rulers and they are not specifically Christian. The members follow many religious paths, with the shared goal of helping those in distress. The name of the group was changed about a century ago when the term "white" came to imply an opposition to other races. Sometimes the organization is still called the White Brotherhood but the name is archaic and out of use.
• While the Brotherhood of Light is aware of spiritual organisations of a more political nature, their goals are compassionate and humanitarian. The members guide the lost whose spiritual paths have become confused or blocked. To some extent, they work with karma, but they primarily focus on counselling and education. The organisation trains those interested in counselling troubled souls, and working for peace in troubled regions. The organisational model is closer to a university than to a secret government.
• It is important to emphasise this because there has been much misrepresentation of the organisation, and its goals. For those interested in a brief explanation of the motivation for creating this site and the source of the information contained here.
• This web site will include information on the history, the organization, the centre's structure, and some of the courses available. The sections related specifically to spiritual counselling in the afterlife are "Death, Reincarnation, and Karma", "Healing", and "Counselling" though information about the process of guiding lost and confused reincarnating souls exists throughout the site. The section on "grounds and environment" is perhaps the most detailed because it shows the wide range of activities the brotherhood is involved in by describing the location (or temple) of each activity.
• The Brotherhood of Light welcomes those who are interested.

The Brotherhood of Light

History

• The Brotherhood of Light began with a small group of individuals who incarnated together in one of the intermediate paradises. Many of these souls had skills, and it seemed to them a shame to waste them on their own amusement. They wanted to do something worthwhile, to help suffering beings. Because this group of souls was relatively free of karmic bondage, they considered it reasonable to help those who were bound by karmic necessity.
• The path of transcendence that they shared involved spiritual sound and light. By meditation on mantras and harmonious sounds, as well as meditation on brilliant white and deep blue light, they reached a realm of beauty and peace beyond the worlds of form. Yet suffering exists within the realm of embodiment, and that was where they wished to work.
• On the subtler ends of the world of form, these souls created a temporary heaven for suffering souls. It began small in order to help a few souls at a time, and it grew as volunteers came to help them. The group first visualized a set of buildings, and then the surrounding gardens, and later cliffs and oceans, and a small world in which to work.
• They specialised in different areas according to each soul's skills - they developed centres for counselling, for healing, for spiritual guidance, for knowledge, and for bringing peace to troubled groups. They became the Temples of Wisdom, of golden healing, and of justice. They began as a small group consisting of less than a dozen members, but they have now grown to many dozens, and have the equivalent of clinics, courtrooms, and classes. They also have outside consultants who specialise in such areas as disturbed or insane souls, animal souls, and souls bound to specific locales.
• The members do not demand a specific religion or god, but rather help people along the religious path of their choice. Spiritual sound and light are universals in the world's religions, and are not bound to a specific belief system.
• As the group has grown, it has incorporated the skill of many visualisers, peacemakers, architects, artists, and gardeners. The intention of the Brotherhood of Light is to create a way-station, and has grown from a small inn to a large complex for healing and wisdom.

The Brotherhood of Light

Organisation

• The original founding members of the Brotherhood of Light come from many different backgrounds, and share the common goal of helping suffering beings. The brotherhood is run democratically, by voting and having representatives come together and discuss issues. The meeting room is arranged in concentric circles of seats, coloured deep purple in the outer ring, through deep blue, then light blue, and finally white closest to the centre.
• We will note here that the origins of the organization are left intentionally vague because the founders come from diverse religious backgrounds many of which do not relate directly to the organization's present structure and philosophy. The founders also wish to remain anonymous to avoid the cults of personality and status that naturally arise when people focus on names, biographies, and personal histories.
• The brotherhood of light has tried to avoid the hierarchies of power which generally lead to the corruption of spiritual traditions in the non-physical worlds. Instead, the power is distributed among many different members. The brotherhood is divided up into various committees. There are judges of karma, negotiators, and diplomats who interact with different cultures. There are organizers of classes, lectures and seminars, and consultants who discuss with the members which skills are most needed. There is a staff of visualisers who are responsible for the maintenance of the grounds, and any additions of natural landscape and architecture. There is a committee for growth and development, which oversees the current state of the haven for wayfarers or visitors, and makes policy for future direction and growth.
• For instance, this committee plans to introduce an emergency response team in the near future to deal with mass deaths and violent passages, and a special counselling section for the mad, and another section for the traumatized and alienated. The rise of organized rape and mutilation as tools of war in both Eastern Europe and central Africa, and the mass hatred in the Middle East and North Africa means that there has been and will continue to be massive trauma associated with death in these areas. The brotherhood will adapt and try to respond to these new situations to the best of their abilities.
• The organization is much like a spiritual university, with social obligations. It brings together souls with skills that were not forgotten at death, and creates a place for the lost and lonely dead.
• If one wished to draw an organisational chart, it would not be a tall mountain or contain an aristocracy. Instead, it would be a collection of overlapping circles, with each group trying to help the others. Both power and responsibility are distributed.
• There were about a dozen original founders, and numerous sub-founders, helpers, counsellors, teachers, guardians, visualisers, artists, and guides. They all meet to discuss policy. In fact one of their recent discussions centred around how much information to present about their organization to the outside world. The members are not gods but beings dedicated to helping those in pain.

The Brotherhood of Light
Death, Reincarnation, and Karma

• Because death brings dissolution, it is important to have one guiding thought which keeps everything together. That can be a god, a heaven, a mantra, or a loved one. This slows the dissolution, and allows the dying person to concentrate on something outside of himself. Then, there is more peaceful transcendence, and less panic at the side effects of death.
• Spiritual guides can be helpful at the time of death, but they cannot be everywhere, and many people die simultaneously. Links forged while alive will bring the guide to the dying person at the time of death. There are many kinds of spiritual guides. Some are specific to religious traditions, like angels, bodhisattvas, or immortals. Some are more general and nondenominational like those in the Brotherhood of Light. Other examples of nondenominational guides are shamans, ancestors, and dead friends. The figure of the Psychopomp who was a guide for the dead existed in ancient Greece but no longer exists in the modern world.
• Guides bring people to their destinations. Most relationships with guides are the result of karmic connections. Sometimes people have created links with specific gods and heaven worlds, and go there after death. Sometimes guides give options for reincarnation but the options are limited by the person's karma. The individual can choose a new birth from one of the options given.
• But in the modern world, most people flounder at death, especially if their religious faith is superficial or non-existent. Then they don't have a goal, and they often get trapped, waiting for something to happen. For these persons, the pain and upset of death will gradually lessen, and the person will stay in a grey world, neither good nor evil, but vague and insubstantial. Here they will await the vortex of rebirth where they will be drawn into another womb and reincarnate in a new body.
• The ability to travel spiritually and meditate in the current life is knowledge that is usually maintained when people die. Some types of knowledge stay and some disappear after death. Specifics like names, dates, and places disappear along with many skills. Basic emotions and habits stay, along with spiritual abilities.
• However, certain kinds of action in life can obstruct spiritual abilities. They place a barrier between the soul and some types of knowledge, as well as its karma. It cuts the soul in two, so that things that are normally remembered are forgotten.
• This does not occur with minor bad karma, which weighs down the soul and blurs its vision, but does not split it. However trauma, or the infliction of trauma on others breaks the unity of the soul. Pain (one's own or another's) severs the soul's access to knowledge.
• Free will at death depends on the acceptance of the dying process and the ability to concentrate and focus attention during life. If the dying process is not accepted, the soul becomes clogged with fear and other negative emotions, and the pathway is obstructed. Ability to concentrate during life allows that habit to be maintained at death, for habits are maintained more easily than rational thought. Concentration allows observation of the process of death, and conscious control over the speed of events. Inability to concentrate means a large number of events happen at once, with the soul being dragged along in a semi-conscious state. In this situation, there are pieces of the self floating around, and the person literally needs to keep himself together.
• We of the Brotherhood of Light can help at death, if we are called. We can protect the soul, and unite its pieces as it is pulled through the vortex out of the realm of embodied existence and into the plane of spirits. Then we can guide the soul to a more peaceful location, and give it some options depending on its karma.

Karma and Reincarnation

• Reincarnation weaves the web of life, with billions of life forms interacting through time and space. It makes the universe a more complex place than it would be without such causality, but one with more relationships than philosophers and theologians can possibly imagine.
• It means that each being is not only itself, but is also composed of the remnants of those which came before it. These appear as impulse, luck, coincidence, and knowing that which should be unknown. Within each being is another (i.e. a past life), and another within that, creating a vast chain of lives making up the mandala and stained glass windows of the spiritual past.
• When karma first arises, it is in the context of necessity, of action that must be performed, or experience that must be endured. But when karma is studied, the individual can become conscious of its existence and effects. Karma charts out the meaning of a life, and a trajectory of lives. It determines what a person will accomplish, and what he or she wishes to accomplish.
• Karma is a chain until it is recognised and understood - then it becomes a fire for the casting of metal, and creation of lives. It devours the pain and the joy of the past, and becomes clay to be shaped. To control one's karma is an important part of the spiritual path.

• Spiritual travel or soul travel is partial mysticism - visiting the intermediate realms but not attaining the religious goal. The Brotherhood of Light supports people who have spiritual goals, and spiritual travel is a method for attaining such goals.
• The person interested in travelling spiritually needs to develop a control mechanism for travel. First, the individual needs to be able to escape the identification with the physical body - to dissolve the barrier separating the lower and higher selves. Yogic concentration can do this, or the barrier can be melted away by sheer will. A tunnel or vortex can be visualized and the individual can enter and pass through it, and this can have the same effect. This process is sometimes called opening the door, or opening the third eye.
• Then, once you have access to travel, you must determine where to go and how to get there. Mantras and light visualisation can work in a general way for higher worlds, but if you want to go to a specific place in the intermediate realms, you need a way to symbolise and specify that precise location.
• Each person and place has a kind of karmic after-image or identifier. This is an alternative form of the place or person where you see only the karma as organized into patterns, and not the physical form. The person in meditation must be able to shift his or her perceptions to perceive the underlying karmic structure rather than the person or place.
• Certain drugs do this by creating a beautiful and decorative set of karmic images and geometrical patterns, but the individual needs to be able to do this without the use of drugs. This is not only because they are illegal but also because it is a limitation on the individual's freedom and mental power to be dependent on an external substance such as a drug.
• The image of a great wheel or gear opening the world of the spirit is often seen. However, it can also open up the lower world, the realms of desire and frustration, and the traveller must avoid these areas. Using or visualising a square or triangle mandala-like form is a more secure way to travel.
• The physical world may also be made into a background, or made to appear flat by use of visualization. If the world is imagined as a dark blue velvet sky, or the ocean depths, or a vivid sunset, this pulls the imagination away from the physical object. Both mind and heart must guide the soul towards spiritual goals and objects - beings, worlds, and revelations of light.

• The purpose of the spiritual area of the Brotherhood of Light is to provide a place where people can learn to travel by means of light and sound. When the person dies, and the soul is freed of earthly dress, a variety of things might happen. It may be weighed down by bad karma or sin, and taken off for punishment. It may be full of light and joy, and may be welcomed into a paradise. Or it may end up in the uncertainty of the astral realms, where good and bad balance each other, and there is no clear and strong will. Some of the uncertain will meet with us, and we will help them and council them. Most will go on their way to new lives.
• However, some choose to stay and learn, and we are willing to teach them. In the spiritual area, we teach them about the many worlds that the soul may enter, and also how to travel in the soul body.
• Souls have many layers or bodies one inside the other like a set of Russian dolls. The personality may identify with any of these bodies, and travel in that body through the world that that body inhabits. People have access to many worlds, but they need to know how to focus upon certain bodies and place the others in the background. This can occur spontaneously but often it is a learned skill. As different bodies are associated with various sounds and forms of light, meditation upon musical sound and mantras, and also different colours and intensities of light can move the attention from one locale to another.
• Attention is very important for spiritual travel. When the senses are withdrawn from the world and the person looks inward, the mind is often disordered, and ideas rise randomly and chaotically to the surface, each one fighting for attention. Desire, memory, appetite, questioning, attraction and repulsion all seek to gain attention. The seeker must suppress all of these, and one way to do this is by meditating on light and sound. Harp and flute are good beginning sounds, as are thunder and the buzzing of bees. Contemplating memories of light like a sunrise, a comet flashing in the night, a candle flame, or even fireflies are a way to begin meditation on light. These inner sensations grow larger until the soul rides the crashing waves of the light and sound of infinity.
• The traveller is a studier of worlds, but he or she must retain humility. Pride causes the individual to be attached to physical objects dragging him or her down. Love is needed for that which is higher.

The Brotherhood of Light Healing

• The healing section was one of the first developed by the Brotherhood of Light. It seemed obvious to them that one of the basic acts of compassion was to heal people from mental and emotional pain, loss, fear, grief, and sorrow. They developed classes on how to deal with painful emotion, and brought in consultants for specialized types of healing.
• Some healing methods, such as separation and immobilization of traumas with repeating effects, were developed by them. Others, such as the rare cases requiring exorcism and direct spiritual intervention, were learned from others.
• The beginning of healing is often difficult, for when defences of survival drop away following death, the intense emotions flare up - grief, anger, fear, envy, and greed. The individual is in a maelstrom of emotion, and cannot concentrate or find balance. He or she is pushed and pulled by these forces, which dominate the will.
• When a person enters who is deeply in need of healing, he is bound to a gurney, and taken to the temple of healing. Entering through the gate of the golden rising sun, the problem is analysed by the diagnostic counsellors, and the patient is referred to specialists. Some specialists work with trauma, others with addiction and emotional bondage, others with extreme alienating emotions, and others with the inability to organize thoughts (often a result of degenerative physical illness).
• Counsellors can describe the problems to the soul, and give options for dealing with them. Healthier souls will choose one of the options. Unhealthy souls may deny there are problems, and refuse treatment. If that denial is strong enough, the counsellors may determine that the individual cannot be helped by them, and the patient will be returned to their earlier state of wandering. This is rare for counsellors normally allow entry for only those souls who appear open to learning and growth.
• Some spiritual healing is more like an operation - something analogous to a cancerous growth must be removed. Some problems are so powerful that they become almost like living beings, developing defences and survival tactics. This is seen in the case of multiple personality where traumas develop separate identities and ego defences. When they become strong enough to temporarily dominate the central personality, they must be removed and relocated to a place where they can do no harm. Dealing with them is the spiritual equivalent of a surgical operation.
• Healing and restoration is done in an atmosphere of growth and nurturing. The soul is given a room facing the mountains, where starlight is bright and reflects upon the water of a lake. There are plants, flowers, books on comfort and happiness, and pictures representing birth, growth, and beauty. For a few hours each day, quiet music plays, along with the sounds of distant bells, chimes, and harps.
• The counsellors speak of hope, faith, and new beginnings.

Counselling and Guidance

• The buildings and grounds of the Brotherhood of Light are intended to be a place of peace and instruction for souls who are lost and upset in the process of reincarnation. It is a way station where they feed the hungry, cheer up the sorrowful, and instruct the ignorant. This is the primary purpose of the Temples of Wisdom.
• As counsellors and teachers, the members find and help lost souls. They have generated the grounds and the temples by concentrated will, and maintained them by will, and the force of compassion. For those souls with no spiritual orientation, who are paralysed by fear or anger or sorrow following death, the brotherhood has helpers. They speak of the process of dying, of the necessity of moving on, and suggest reasonable options to such souls. These souls may not be able to reach the heaven worlds, but neither are they so malevolent that they will be forced into the hells.
• The counsellors examine their karma and can suggest some directions of travel and incarnation. Many souls at death call out for guidance and the counsellors allow time for deities to attend to them, if they have a pre-existing relationship with a deity, or if one takes mercy on them spontaneously and comes to their assistance. The counsellors look to the neglected ones whose fear or sorrow has prevented the travel that would normally occur following death.
• The observers of the brotherhood see if it looks like they can be helped - if their thoughts and emotions are open to learning. If they are open in this way, then the counsellors of the brotherhood can help some of them.

The Brotherhood of Light

Dreams

• There are many uses of dreams. They cleanse cluttered piles of unconscious information, reorganizing them for easier access. They symbolize emotions and passions, allowing them to be processed, rather than intensifying and becoming destructive. And for some people whose souls are structured in a specific way, they can become a jumping off point for spiritual travel.
• The Brotherhood of Light does not interfere in the lives of their members and students. They do not change the student's spiritual evolution, their vibrations, or influence any number of other vague and personal concerns. However, if they are called, they can help guide individuals and take them for instruction to their Temples of Wisdom.
• For some people who possess more yogic skills, they can give instruction during conscious and intentional meditation. For others, whose minds are blocked by negative emotions, doubts, and hesitation, instruction during dreams works better. Doubts become irrelevant as the conscious mind sleeps.
• This sort of unconscious travel and instruction brings new perspectives and ideas, which eventually penetrate the conscious mind. By a slow process of insight, the person comes to accept spiritual truths.
• Perhaps the best situation is when a person is able to become conscious in his or her dreams. In this way, individuals have the freedom of spiritual travel in dreams, mingled with the full awareness of the conscious mind. What is needed for this is the ability to become aware in dreams, along with concentration upon sound and light which creates a pathway that the soul may follow.
• There are many dream worlds, indeed there are worlds within worlds. Once one world is entered, another may be opened. The guides of the Brotherhood of Light can help and teach individuals, but they will only be there for people who seek spiritual truth. Once such travel becomes tied up with power, mercenary goals, or invasion of the privacy of others, the members of the brotherhood will cease to act as guides. 

• For visitors who are sincere in their desire to learn about spiritual or soul travel, and do not do so from selfish or power-hungry motives, there are ways to visit.
• The novice should bathe, wear clean clothes, and try to enter a mental state of purity. He or she should first listen to classical music (Beethoven, Mozart, or Bach) and then concentrate on remembering the sound of the music when it is over. This helps train the mind to remember music, so the sounds can be used in meditation.
• The one meditating should then focus on the sound of a specific instrument, such as the flute, violin, viola, or harp. The sound should reverberate through the body, and waft the soul into a realm of pure music. The soul should visualize brilliant light around itself - white, mother-of-pearl, golden, or deep blue.
• Avoid music with drums or other deep percussion instruments, which will bind the soul more deeply to nature and the body. Visualizing dark and muddy coloured light should also be avoided.
• The sound and light can make the soul rise in joy. When that joy is mingled with compassion, without distraction, the soul is ready to visit.
• The one meditating should then visualise a great, shining, sapphire blue door surrounded by silver filigree work. The soul should then ask for entrance to the Temples of Wisdom of the Brotherhood of Light. The guardians at the door determine who is ready to enter.

Conclusion - My Commentary

• This has been an introduction to the activities and environment of the members of the Brotherhood of Light. The knowledge that such a group exists may be of help to those who fear death, and hope for some form of assistance in the process of dying, and entering into the afterlife.
• In addition, the site suggests a very different vision of what life is about, and the direction in which mankind is evolving. It provides a glimpse of the kinds of activities spiritually advanced souls are involved in, and the kinds of worlds they inhabit. This vision is something to which some human beings in the physical world can aspire.
• Finally, much literature which attempts to describe non-physical groups and states of being is full of cryptic language and imagery. The result of this is that such literature becomes inaccessible to many who are interested. This site attempts to avoid the confusion that arises from this use of obscure terms. Instead, we attempt to use common terms and straightforward language that can be understood by a reader with little specialized training.
• The information at this site will be expanded in the future as more material becomes available.
• Please visit again at a later time to check for additions and changes as this site evolves.