This is a really monumental movie dressed up as entertainment.  In subject matter, it scales the Earth, heaven and hell, the heights of human love, the depths of depression, and our lives while alive on earth and after. 

Life after death can be heaven or hell depending on the thought habits one cultivates while alive on Earth.  Positive or negative; strong or weak, optimistic or pessimistic, kind or angry, full of love or full of bitterness.  The main character (Robin Williams) loved art and beauty while alive and consequently his heaven was like living inside of his favorite painting.

He dies in a car crash and is met by an old friend (Cuba Gooding Jr.) almost immediately thereafter who becomes his spirit guide.  His guide gently leads him to understand and accept that he has died,  yet still exists and is just as conscious as he was while "alive".  Part of the spirit guide's initial teaching is that this new environment in which the main character finds himself is thought responsive; and that consequently his thoughts create reality.  This is a fundamental premise we students of the subtle world know is true.

I first watched this movie 15 years ago, before I knew anything about the subtle world other than that I had very vivid and interesting dreams.  At that time it was one of my favorite movies because of how artful and beautiful it was (it won an Academy Award for Visual Effects) and how genuine and sincere it depicted family relationships.  Now I'm blown away by how much the content of this movie aligns with all the things I've learned about life, death, and the Subtle World over the last few years.

Background

In Mexico, the “Day of the Dead” is a day of festive remembrance of family and friends who have passed away.  Families typically visit the graveyards where their loved ones are buried and bring pictures of the deceased along with their favorite food, drink, and music.  These items are thought to encourage the visit of the deceased one’s spirit from the “land of the dead”.  The origins of this cultural tradition are thought be among the Aztec civilization 2,500 – 3,000 years ago (see reference 1 below for more information).

The movie Coco depicts this Mexican festival beautifully and the movie has become mandatory viewing for all young Americans of Mexican descent (trust me on this one).

Movie Synopsis

Miguel is a young boy who desires more than anything else to be a musician.  However, he has the bad fortune of being born into a family that has completely shunned music and anything having to do with music for generations.  On the day of the dead, Miguel somehow passes into the “land of the dead”, meets several of his ancestors he’s only seen in pictures, explores the history of his family’s relationship to music and fame, helps his family discover the truth behind a terrible incident, and resolves conflicts that have robbed the family of peace for decades.

It is a wonderful story exposing children and adults alike to concepts worth thinking about and discussing.

The Land of the Dead

Not only does the whole country of Mexico believe that people continue their existence after death in a subtler realm, but so do several other cultures like modern Tibetan Buddhists (ref: The Tibetan Book of the Dead), ancient Egyptians (2), the Ancient Mayans (3) and Aztecs (4), modern Hindus (5), Celtics (6), and even several modern American and British authors like the clairvoyants CW Leadbeater (7) and Annie Besant (8).  In many cases, the aforementioned peoples and writings give a detailed geography of the other world, outlining various regions of it and describing their qualities.  All these people and cultures (except Mexico, oddly enough), say that a person goes there after death and stays there for a time before eventually reincarnating in another body for another round of earthly life.  [Sometimes in dreams we really speak to those people who are living in that realm for the time being.]

Crossing Over

There are 3 ways to cross over into and have experiences in the “Land of the Dead” (i.e. Subtle Realm):

1. Death – when the physical body ceases to function, this has absolutely no bearing on a person’s other energy bodies.  Hence, his next level up” body -his subtle body- is perfectly fine at the time of physical death and he/she is able to interact with things and people on that plane.
2. Sleep – During sleep, the dreams we experience are usually a jumble mess of memories from the day, imaginings from the brain, and actual impression from the subtle realm where the astral body finds itself when the physical body is “deactivated”. 
3. Meditation – In certain yogic practices, like Raja Yoga, sense withdraw is practiced.  This means that a yogi can stop the functioning of his 5 physical senses and thereby become sensitive to impressions made upon his non-physical bodies by non-physical objects and/or people. 

Conclusion

The “Land of the Dead” is a concept embraced by many different cultures around the world and throughout time.  This movie does a great job depicting, in a fun and family-friendly way, what that “place” (realm) might be like. 

If you liked this movie, there is another movie that came out a few years earlier that didn’t get as much attention but that is equally enjoyable and beautiful and also centers around the day of the dead and traveling to the land of the dead.  It’s called “Book of Life”.

References

1) https://www.diffen.com/difference/Day_of_the_Dead_vs_Halloween

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_religion#Afterlife 

3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_death_rituals#Beliefs_about_the_afterlife

4) http://www.pitlanemagazine.com/cultures/aztec-mythology-and-afterlife-and-life-after-death-in-aztec-beliefs.html

5) http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/rs/death/hindubeliefrev2.shtml

6) https://www.adf.org/articles/gods-and-spirits/ancestors/afterlife-hero-dead.html 

7) Book: Life After Death

8) Book: Death - and After?

Summary: In 14 pages, the author describes some of modern philosophy’s strongest arguments against non-physical (disembodied) human existence and puts forth astonishingly powerful arguments against their validity.  He does so by defining two different notions of physical reality and using them to finely examine the two main strategies put forth by the proponents of the “no-disembodiment” theory, which state that it is not possible for a human to exist without any physical support.  He concludes by asserting, by ironic understatement, that disembodied existence (in some “afterlife world”) is probably more than a mere possibility.

Paolini’s impeccable logic is showcased throughout.  He takes us to the boundaries of what we would call “conventional wisdom,” and then challenges us to go beyond that.  Every question, every answer, broadens the picture he is painting with his pen.  For example, many, if not most, people would say that “Anthony” is identical with his physical body, and that consequently, when his body dies, Anthony is extinguished.  Paolini follows this up promptly by asking, why is it not more accurate or reasonable to identify Anthony with his (non-physical) collection of memories instead?  And since this not outright deniable, doesn’t that mean that actually neither of them are identical with the true essence of Anthony?

These are some terms he uses that caused me some trouble, and necessitated extra readings of this paper, so I’ll briefly outline them here in the hopes that it might help the reader.  First, he describes 3 types of “possible worlds”:

• Physically-1 possible worlds - those worlds that share the same (fundamental) physical laws of the actual world in which we currently live
• Physically-2 possible worlds - those worlds that are governed by (fundamental) physical laws. Physically-1 possible worlds are naturally a subset of physically-2 possible worlds
• Metaphysically possible worlds -those possible worlds in which no (openly or covertly) contradictory proposition is true.

These descriptions themselves further illustrate how Paolini starts with what we know and then proceeds to broaden our perspective step by step.  Each one of these categories of possible worlds gets larger, with more possibilities as we go down the list.

Second, he describes two different classes of physical objects:

• Physical-b - an object is a physical-b object if and only if it has some paradigmatic features(s) F traditionally attributed to all and only material objects in the “actual world” (e.g., it has spatio-temporal or a temporal location, it is impenetrable, etc)
• Physical-a - an object is a physical-a object if and only if it is part of the ontology of the fundamental physical theory of that world or it is completely constituted by objects that are part of the ontology of the fundamental physical theory of that world.

Again, the set of all possible physical-b objects is a subset of all possible physical-a objects.  To bring all of these terms and definitions together for you in two of Paolini’s sentences, allow me to quote from page 10: “[it is possible that] Anthony’s [is] identity-dependent on some actual physical-a object c that could also live in some [physical-2 possible] worlds where fundamental physical laws are radically different [than those of our actual world]. In that world, the object c  might turn out to become a somehow immortal composite object, given certain relevant differences in the [fundamental physical] laws (e.g., given the absence of entropy increase).”

While he doesn’t outright suggest that the Subtle Realm exists, he has allowed for the possibility of its existence by merely stating that it is possible that there are worlds that exists with different laws of physics than our own.  A simple premise that ought to be hard to reject.  He continues, “Perhaps there is a metaphysical possible world in which nothing has F (see definition of physical-b above) and in which Anthony exists: how can we exclude such a possibility -and why should we exclude it?”  There are so many more of these interesting “possibilities” that this work serves up to the mind open enough and persistent enough to receive them.  Why do I say persistent? Because this work is quite challenging to read and understand; however, it is equally as rewarding.

In closing, I feel strongly inclined to state that the only other time any text challenged me to think this deeply (and in REAL terms) about the afterlife was when I read Plato’s Phaedo many years ago.  And just as back then, I thoroughly enjoyed the expansion of my (pre)conceived notions.