Claim. Human life is structured as a three-stage passage — the aqueous world of the womb, the aerial world of the earth, and the love-air world of the spirit-world — with death functioning as the second birth.
Elaboration. SMM systematizes the threefold passage as a formula: “A person’s life passes through three worlds: the formation-stage world, the growth-stage world, and the completion-stage world. We live in a world of water inside our mother’s womb, and then in this earthly world, and finally in the aerial world in the spiritual realm” (2.2. Life and death are a process that connects three worlds, 116-174, 1982.1.1). Each transition requires destroying the prior environment: the placenta is severed at physical birth; the physical body is shed at spirit-birth. Crucially, the organ for the next world is being prepared in the current one — “as you were ‘breathing’ through the umbilical cord in the womb, you were also preparing the nostrils through which to breathe later” (ibid, 139-212, 1986.1.31). What corresponds to the nose for earth is the love-organ for the spirit world. Death is therefore “nothing special; it is merely the rebirth into the third stage of life” (ibid, 49-286, 1971.10.17).
See also. csg-physical-life-is-preparation-for-the-spirit-world