by Tony Stubbs, also author of An Ascension Handbook,
Living with Soul and It's All About Control

Life Review

After a period of adjustment and orientation, but before your memories of the recent lifetime begin to recede, you will conduct your own panoramic life review. This carries no judgment and is conducted purely for the learning involved. Because you review your entire lifetime, deathbed repentance does you no good. The only issue is the amount of love in your energy and how you served your fellow men while on Earth. A wise counselor will be on hand to stop you from beating yourself up.
How does knowing that this life review will happen make you feel? That you will be on the receiving end of every harsh word you have ever uttered, and of every mean-spirited act you have ever committed. Of course, you also get to re-experience all the good you did.
If someone once asked you for a favor and you declined to help when you could have, you will get to feel the other’s hurt and disappointment. If you shot a ‘holier than thou’ look at a panhandler in the street or at a homeless person huddled in a doorway, you will experience how it made that person feel – the hopelessness, desperation or panic – because you could have done something but didn’t.
The Golden Rule (treat others how you would be treated) isn’t just a platitude. It’s a Universal Law and a constant reminder that whatever you do (or don’t do) for others, you do (or don’t do) for yourself … and either way, you will get to experience that. Fortunately, this also goes for the loving words and deeds, which hopefully outweigh the other kind.
The purpose of reliving your life is not, however, punishment or even the opportunity to forgive yourself, and there are no judges from whom to beg for leniency. The purpose is to understand and work towards unconditional love. For once you finally cross over fully into the soul plane, you will need this understanding.
Again, it must be stressed that the review is not judgment but an opportunity to see that unconditional love is the only true currency; all else is worthless, counterfeit scrip on the soul plane.
All through the review, the tone is loving and compassionate, and the sense that life is a learning experience, with the review as a natural part of the process. There is no blame, just as you wouldn’t blame a child learning to ride a bicycle for falling off. It’s just part of growth, and a chance to look at your life in a loving environment and examine the things that were “too close up and personal” on the Earth plane.
The being who guides you through your review is infinitely compassionate, for he or she (gender is just for your comfort) knows how difficult Earth lives can be. This allows you to relive shameful, humiliating episodes without feeling shame, blame or guilt. After all, few of those episodes were malicious, and more likely done out of ignorance.
(Infamous characters such as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or someone who preyed on innocence such as a serial child molester, are special cases who resonate with low frequency energy on the soul plane, and have much work to do before they are even ready for their review. Apparently, Hitler is still strutting around those lower levels complaining that history has misjudged him, which is why we have eternity.)
The lesson we can learn from the life review process is that of self-forgiveness. Don’t beat yourself up for transgressions committed in ignorance. The caveat, however, is, now that you know the yardstick is unconditional love, you will know you knew better. Ouch!
The life review goes way beyond watching a movie. There’s one screen for each participant in a drama, but it’s more than just audio and visual; in addition to every thought and emotion you had, you also get to experience the thoughts and feelings of all involved. What does this mean?
Take someone who one day snaps and “goes postal.” Firing an automatic weapon, he storms into his place of work, and kills a dozen people and then himself. He gets to relive that incident through maybe fifty simultaneous tracks. He feels everyone’s fear, panic and pain as they die. From their vantage point, ‘he’ sees himself firing his gun and, in slow motion, ‘he’ sees the stream of bullets coming and feels them slam into ‘his’ body, destroying ‘his’ internal organs.
He thinks the other people’s thoughts and feels their feelings as they die, knowing they won’t see their families again. He is each of his victims—the ones who die and the others cowering under their desks—all at the same time. He also experiences the grief of his victims’ loved ones who will never see their mother, father, son or daughter alive again. Then, when he puts the gun to his own head, the fraction of a second it took his brain to explode can be stretched out for hours so that in his review, he really “gets” the pain he inflicted.
On top of this, he also has the psychological insights as to why this happened. He relives his childhood molestation, which destroyed his boundaries and trust, and made him feel unable to cope. Of course, when his molester crossed over, he got to relive the full outcome of his actions, which includes his own heinous crimes as well as those committed by all those he molested.
The ease with which we experience our own actions from the point of view of everyone we impacted, teaches us that we are all one, part of a super-soul being. The review process also calls us to cease, right now, any thought, word or deed that we might regret, knowing we will have to sit through a replay in exhaustive detail.
As for what’s already happened in your life, you can replay events in your mind and rework them, apologizing to everyone you’ve hurt, but it’s much easier to not create any new karma for which you will later need to apologize. Of course, you will still hurt people by accident – forgetting a birthday or an anniversary, say – but these things count for nothing in the review. What really matters is intentionally and maliciously causing pain, for replays of this are uncomfortable And it’s no excuse to claim, “They hurt me first!” Turn the other cheek, remember.
Those who commit suicide can have an uncomfortable review, too. However, the act was committed in ignorance of the larger picture so it just feels like “a dumb mistake” you regret. They get to experience firsthand the pain and suffering their action causes those left behind. One NDEr reported that her review was like an endless loop, with the events leading up to the suicide and the act itself replayed repeatedly, presumably to drive home the point that suicide is never an option. On returning to her body, she vowed, “Never again!”
You will feel some events and experiences much more strongly than others, depending on your intent at the time and how much energy you put into those events. It also depends on the degree of remorse you felt, and whether you apologized and asked for forgiveness prior to crossing over. Maybe you breezed through life, paying little or no attention to the impact of your actions on others. Or maybe you felt a great sense of responsibility for your actions and great remorse for any negative actions and asked for forgiveness before you crossed over. Obviously, these extremes will lead to very different review experiences.
Also, Earth events are seen very differently on the soul plane. You may feel you did many terrible things while alive, but because you were following a pre-life contract to do them, they were not terrible acts at all. All becomes clear in your life review, as you get to feel what the other person was feeling, from their point-of-view. On the other hand, you may believe that you were a genuinely good person while alive, performing great acts of charity, with much acclaim and publicity. But you may realize that the public works were done for ego-boosting rather from love and compassion. This happened when one wealthy businessman crossed over. He protested when his guide dismissed his well-publicized multimillion-dollar donations as meaningless, until his guide showed him the scene where a woman was at a bus stop, crying because she didn’t have the bus fare to visit her dying son in the hospital. The man gave her a dollar and walked away, expecting nothing in return – an act that counted for far more than all the other donations.
Because most of us are basically good at heart, most life reviews are pleasant growth experiences where souls realize what works and what doesn’t for future incarnations. Any act of love and compassion that affected someone else gives you the opportunity to experience that effect as well. And in most of your life times, you did far more good than you could ever imagine in very small ways that you thought nothing of, as with the bus stop incident.
Most reviews are overseen by a Council of Elders. They are not there to judge, but to support you as you look at the events of your life and how these interactions affected every individual you came into contact with. They are there as comfort based on their greater wisdom and compassion. They are neither male or female, having long ago blended the two aspects.
The purpose of the life review is so that you can begin to release the stuff you don’t want in your soul’s energy such as your emotions to do with your Earth life (guilt, remorse, anger and hurt), a process that will continue for a while. Then you assimilate the energy and experiences you do want to keep into your soul, or core essence
"Life Review" is excerpted from "Death Without Fear" by Tony Stubbs.