"Don't depend on death to liberate you from your imperfections. You are exactly the same after death as you were before. Nothing changes; you only give up the body. If you are a thief or a liar or a cheater before death, you don't become an angel merely by dying. If such were possible, then let us all go and jump in the ocean now and become angels at once! Whatever you have made of yourself thus far, so will you be hereafter. And when you reincarnate, you will bring that same nature with you. To change, you have to make the effort. This world is the place to do it." *
Paramahansa Yogananda
"If all it took to gain enlightenment were death, wouldn’t we all be enlightened by now? After all, we have died many times...It is meaningless to be morally upstanding in your consciousness, unless your behaviors in physical reality reflect those choices."
Mary LaBay, who says it even more succinctly-
“Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you’re smart.”
(Or woke, apparently.)
— *Read more:
http://yogananda.com.au/gurus/yoganandaquotes07c.html
(The authors of this blog do not advocate jumping in the ocean now in the hopes of becoming angels at once. Please use discernment.)
BB
PS- Yogananda on the 3 levels of Bodies
"You have read in the scriptures,” Master went on, “that God encased the human soul successively in three bodies—the idea, or causal, body; the subtle astral body, seat of man’s mental and emotional natures; and the gross physical body. On earth a man is equipped with his physical senses. An astral being works with his consciousness and feelings and a body made of lifetrons. A causal-bodied being remains in the blissful realm of ideas. My work is with those astral beings who are preparing to enter the causal world.”
Yogananda on Sri Yukteswar
[Sri Yukteswar explained:] “Just as most people on earth have not learned through meditation-acquired vision to appreciate the superior joys and advantages of astral life and thus, after death, desire to return to the limited, imperfect pleasures of earth, so many astral beings, during the normal disintegration of their astral bodies, fail to picture the advanced state of spiritual joy in the causal world and, dwelling on thoughts of the more gross and gaudy astral happiness, yearn to revisit the astral paradise. Heavy astral karma must be redeemed by such beings before they can achieve after astral death a permanent stay in the causal thought-world, so thinly partitioned from the Creator.”
From Chapter 43, “The Resurrection of Sri Yukteswar“, Autobiography of a Yogi- Paramahansa Yogananda
(The work doesn't end at death, our learning and our possibility for progress continues.)