Hollywood versions of the afterlife

 

Hollywood has given us some very interesting versions of what may go on after death and how the living and the deceased interact. The  film Hereafter, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Matt Damon, explores patterns of connection between living people and those on the Other Side: the gift (or curse) of a natural psychic medium; a twin's abiding link with the brother who died; the familiarity of a near-death survivor with other realms.

Home base, in Hereafter, is this world rather than the Other Side. Depictions of the afterlife that intrigue me most are those that take us deeper into Otherworld geography, especially those in which the Otherworld is home base. Here are notes on a few of my favorite Hollywood visions of the afterlife in classic movies, and conversation themes they suggest. . 

1. Dreaming is the best and easiest way to talk to the departed. The vital importance of dream communication with the departed is brought home by the movie The Sixth Sense.  A psychic boy meets the Bruce Willis character, a man who had recently died but is foggy about his situation and distraught because he can no longer touch or talk to his wife. When he tries to speak to her she can’t hear him. The boy tells the dead guy how to proceed: "Speak to her in her dreams, only then will she hear you".
2. Why the departed stay earthbound or feel obliged to play tricks. The wonderful movie Ghost is quite instructive on how the Departed can stay earthbound through addictions and desires (witness the smoker on the subway, desperate for a last drag), and how and why the Departed may feel compelled to produce physical effects to get attention from survivors
   -
3. The afterlife journey (like this one) is all about love and courage. The hilarious Albert Brooks comedy Defending Your Life gives a quite plausible version of a process of afterlife review and assessment, and makes the vital point that our courage – or lack of it – and our ability to love, and express that love, may be central to our progression in any world.
4. In the reality we inhabit after death, thoughts are things. The movie What Dreams May Come dramatizes the fact that on the imaginal plane – which we enter in dreams and journeys, and where the Departed may find or build their homes, at least for a time – “thoughts are things”. This is a real world, but it is a world whose substance is ideoplastic; in other words, it will take on the shapes of our strongest thoughts and desires. To do well here, on either side of death, it is necessary to train the imagination

-
Movie stars can get to know a few things about the afterlife from sources other than movie scripts. According to Dan Aykroyd (the star of Ghostbusters), John Belushi reached out to living people after his death, desperate for help to get to a better life situation than the one he found himself in after he checked out through a dug overdose. Aykroyd said on the Larry King Show back in 2004 that a mutual friend called Isaac had a dream encounter in which Belushi asked for help in order to go into the Light. The reality of this contact seemed to be confirmed by the fact that Belushi used a personal name for his grandmother (“Nana”) that the dreamer did not recognize, but was known to Belushi’s widow. “So Isaac did a meditation with this woman that he worked with her inLos Angeles, and they had a vision of John, you know, extricating himself from bad circumstance, call it Limbo or the Bardo region, Purgatory. And they were able to cross him over into the light.”

This is a very old note awaiting update. I am interested in seeing recommendations and mini-reviews from others.

 

Nights among the dead

 

I am often among the dead in my dreams. They are always alive. Sometimes I remember that they died on an event track we shared, other times I don't. Sometimes they come calling. My father has come many times since his death with helpful advisories for me and the family. Sometimes my dream travels take me to new environments on the Other Side were the dead are enjoying new lives. They show me around and I learn first-hand in this way about lifestyle and real estate options available after death.
    Contact with the deceased, especially in dreams, isn’t weird or unusual or even truly supernatural. It comes about for three reasons: the dead are still with us, or they come visiting, or we travel to the realms where they are now living. The number one reason why people who are not accustomed to sharing dreams decide to tell one is that they have dreamed of a close friend or family member who died but is very much alive in the dream.
    The immense body of data on near-death experiences (NDEs) is scientific evidence of the survival of consciousness after the physical body has closed down. When you become a conscious dream traveler, you confirm through your own experience that awareness is not confined to the body and brain, and therefore is able to survive death. You are ready to learn that healing and forgiveness are always available across the apparent barrier of death, and to develop your personal geography of the afterlife.
    One of the most interesting things I have learned is that the living may be called upon to play guides and counselors for the dead. “The Silent Lovers”, which I included in my book Mysterious Realities, is a just-so story – shocking to me as it unfolded – about how I was called to play advocate for a dead man, otherwise a stranger, going through his life review on the Other Side. Yeats was right when he said, with poetic clarity, that the living have the ability to assist the imaginations of the dead.  

Art: "Houses of Death" by Robert Moss

You Can’t Get Away from Your Imagination

 

“A good local pub has much in common with a church, except that a pub is warmer, and there's more conversation.” There’s quite a stretch between the Wiliam Bake who wrote that and the ascetic monk and theologian Dorotheos of Gaza (c.506-565), recognized as a saint of the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic churches, who gave instruction on the need to eliminate passion and the virtues of meekness. Yet they are in agreement on something every human needs to know: when you die, you step into your imagination.
     In  A Vision of the Last Judgment, Blake said it like this: “The world of imagination is the world of eternity, It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated [i.e. mortal] body.”
    Dorotheos had to step carefully, because he willingly bound himself to church doctrine, which held that the important decisions about the post-mortem fate of the soul would come when it was roused at the Last Judgment. But the monk was convinced that in the period between death and Judgment, the soul was not merely asleep, or seemingly dead. It was having experiences, and the shape and nature of those experiences was determined by memory and imagination.
    In a sermon on the “Fear of the Punishment to Come”, Dorotheos declared that the thoughts and images to which the soul was attached in life will become its new reality after death. Memories and images will have more power than they did during physical life – for one thing, because you can’t get away with them by jumping ack into your body. Desires and fears you tried to ignore, fantasies that did not play out in the world, will now come after you, capable of taking on entirely palpable shapes, gathering terrific force and intensity. You won’t be able to escape the products of your imagination. Because you have no place to go  outside it. [1]

It is probably not a good idea to let your imagination get stuck within the astral geography developed in medieval times by the Eastern Orthodox church. An influential tenth-century hagiography, The Life of Saint Basil the Younger by Gregory of Thrace, opens with a vivid description of twenty "aerial toll houses" where the departed have to deal with demonic customs officials on the ladder to heaven. The demons use all their craft and brute force to shove the traveling soul down to hell through the rungs.
    There was an alleged eyewitness account of how this operates: a visitation by a deceased female servant, Theodora, who appeared to Gregory, a pious layman, after he prayed to know what had happened to her. She described how demons of the middle air stop traveling souls and grill them and inspect them to find out whether they contain some part of a sin embodied by the demon. If the demon finds something of himself in you, you are bound for Hades. This setup was reminiscent of some of the burdens of ordinary life, where tax collectors and border guards held up travelers and shook them down for money.    
    Huge murals depicting Theodora's trials are on the walls of the Bucovina monasteries in Romania. The version here is from a Russian print created in the mid-nineteenth century. 

 

1.Dorotheos of Gaza, Discourses and Sayings trans. E. P. Wheeler ([Kalamazoo, Michigan: Liturgical Press, 1977), pp. 183–86.Nicholas Constas attempts a paraphrase in an excellent essay that I used as a starting block. See "'To Sleep, Perchance to Dream’: The Middle State of Souls in Patristic and Byzantine Literature”. Dumbarton Oaks Papers vol. 55 (2001), p.100.

Illustration: Toll Houses Ahead   

   

Imagining Spirits on Both Sides of Death

 

Introducing Bardo Robert: If the Many Worlds hypothesis in physics is correct - and our universe is constantly splitting into countless parallel versions - then we have many alternate lives in which we are already dead in this world. For quite a few years I have been looking on on one of my possible alternate selves who has established a comfortable residence in the afterlife. Here's a sample of what I learn and test with him. I now call him Bardo Robert. I give some thought to the pas de deux we may be performing. When I am dead like him, is he alive as me?

For Democritus, the air is full of images. Everything sends out a film of itself. These images, or eidola, enter human bodies through the pores of the skin, generating dreams and visions and shaping perceptions of the world. The idea continues to prosper over centuries.
     In Latin, as in Lucretius, the Greek eidola become simulacra. In his important treatise De insomniis (On Dreams), composed around 405, Synesius says that we engage with the realm of living images in our phantastikon pneuma, a term the scholars have a hard time translating. Pneuma, for the bishop of dreams, is “the first body of soul”, one of several vehicles of soul/spirit alive in a human and active after death. Phantastikon means “of the imagination” (for which the Greek word is phantasia, not to be confused with fantasy in a trivial sense). Hence we might think of the imaginal spirit, or imagining spirit. When I was using only the old Augustine FitzGerald translation of Synesius [1], I did not fully appreciate the importance of this term – and the operations of the vehicle of consciousness and energy it describes. His language is explored in depth in the excellent academic commentaries that accompany a new bilingual edition of De insomniis with translation by Donald E. Russell.[2]
    Back to the eidola and the realm of living images. In modern language, we might say that we live among shifting holograms, emanated by everything around us and also from within us.
    I know a way of  projecting a dream reality from within and floating within it, inside a 360-degree bubble that can expand until it is as big as a world. Truly, work for an imagining spirit.
    I have an excellent teacher. He is an alternate Robert who has been at home on the Other Side for years of tick-tock time. I first became aware of him in a lucid dream in which I flew to an amazing scholar-city I sometimes call the School of Soul. The excursion began, like many of my adventures in lucid dreaming, with lying flat on my back in bed and allowing myself to drift in a state of relaxed attention or attentive relaxation. Then I formulated my intention for destination dream travel: I want to visit the School of Soul and learn more about the advanced courses on offer.
    As I approached the great scholar city with its many towers and spires, I was nudged by a knowing inner voice: Higher. I soared up to the roof terrace of an apartment building dozens of stories high. I felt entirely at home here. I swam in an infinity pool and explored a magnificent private library. I found it contained books by me that I have not written and may never publish on Earth. This confirmed the identity of the occupant of this penthouse in another world.
     He did not seem to be at home that day – unless, of course, he was me. Was I already dead, and dreaming of a continuing life on Earth? Had I slipped into a life on the Other Side? If so, had my double on the Other Side taken over my body on Earth? Or was I checking out a parallel life option for size and fit?
    Returning to my physical body left many questions unanswered. I was happy to have discovered a possible afterlife residence that I found highly attractive. The silence and neatness of the place were striking. So was its solitary nature. There was no sign of other people, even though the building could accommodate many hundreds, and the city millions.
    Maybe, on a return visit, I could sit down with the Robert who is at home in the afterlife and learn from him in direct conversation. I managed this a few times. He received me cordially, though I sometimes had the impression that I was intruding on his main activity, which I am pretty sure is similar to my own, to judge from all the books and research materials laid out on a vast desk far neater than any I have used.
    After a few visits. I realized that I had seen only part of his apartment.  I had never visited his bedroom. Does he even have one? After all, he presumably has no need of sleep in this reality. He obliged me by showing me a bed in a pleasant room, with French doors opening onto a balcony with flowering vines. So what goes on here?
    He invited me to lie down and dream as he does. I found that thoughts and images from inside me instantly took form around me, quickly composing a complete hologram that seemed entirely real, vibrantly alive. I floated in the waters of a wonderful sea cave, enjoying the scene with all the senses of my subtle body. I cruised in the pulsing night life of a great city. I sat in the royal box at an opera and took flowers to the leading soprano. I watched movies on eight screens in an octagonal viewing room, without confusion, then stepped through a screen into a director's chair. Mere fantasy, or reality creation? Either way, great fun.
    I am not uneasy about my double in the afterlife. I am delighted to think he has created a comfortable pied-à-terre in the next world that I might occupy, or at least a showroom where I can select the design for my own version.
    I was about to call him Dead Robert, but he won't stand for that. He would like me to call him Ever-Living Robert but that seems too grand. I'll call him Bardo Robert, aka imagining spirit, for now.
    Will Bardo Robert and I become one when I leave Earth? Step up to non-duality, and no doubt we find we are already one. A guide from a higher realm who proved to be no stranger once told me: We are one, but may talk as two. Is that what Bardo Robert and I have been doing?
    Right now, it feels more like a pas de deux, a soul duet. Watch the footwork. When I am dead like him, he is alive as me. 

1. Augustine FitzGerald (ed) The Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene. 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930)

2. Donald A. Russell and Heinz-Günther Nesselrath, On Prophecy, Dreams and Human Imagination: Synesius, De insommniis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. 2014)

 

Drawing: "Traveler" by Robert Moss

You are in the afterlife now

 

In this part of Manhattan, on a mild sunny day, you can imagine you are in a village, even seventy blocks north of Greenwich Village. I stop into an old-time two-fisted bar and order a martini, straight up, from an approving bartender. The couple who take the stools beside me are red from an island vacation, sporting sunglasses and bright prints. They ask for piña coladas.The bartender snarls, “We don’t serve none of them fruit drinks here.” This is precious, in an era when other establishments pretend that something made with chocolate can be called a martini. My drink is perfectly chilled. 
    I see across the Big Pond to a friend who is burning juniper in an old-time ritual on a hill above the Baltic Sea. The water gleams behind her, through pines and silver birches. An eagle owl soars overhead, searching. Her eyes are searching the juniper smoke. Can she see me in the shapes that form? Is she trying to call something through? 
     I toast her, and the Sisters, with the last of my gin. I give the bartender a $5 tip. I don’t know when I’ll see him again.
     I have an appointment on the other side of the island, at The Dead Poet. 
     I walk across the park. 
     On the corner next to The Dead Poet, a panhandler with black eyes, beaked like a crow, has come up with a creative line. He croaks at bypassers, “You are in the afterlife.” 
     A well-fed lady squeaks and hurries by. A man in a suit looks aghast. He pulls cash from his pocket and drops a large bill in the beggar’s cup.
      I lean against a mailbox, watching the pattern repeat. “You are in the Underworld,” the wild-eyed panhandler riffs on his theme. People either rush by, pretending not to hear, or they tremble and throw money at him, hoping to buy a Get Out of Jail Free card.
      It’s my time. They are waiting for me in The Dead Poet. 
      Crow Man is watching my feet when he caws, “You are in the afterlife.” 
      “Finally,” I say very clearly and distinctly. “It is a pleasure to meet a man who understands where he is.”
      Crow Man looks in my face and starts to tremble. He holds out his cup, but not for me to donate. He is offering me the payment for the Ferryman.

 

[from a 15 minute timed writng exercise]

Photos by RM

 

Life on the Moon

Who lives on Luna? 

Permanent residents in my realm are few, though some of us live here for millennia by human counting.

We receive dreamers and soul travelers in vast numbers.

We are a transit lounge for spirits on their way to incarnation on Earth, and for ex-physicals who come up from the sublunar planes. Some of those admitted to this realm after death on Earth  find solace for ages in our pleasure palaces and studios, before they are ready for another death and another birth. Some pursue their studies in our schools, where many things are created and discovered before they manifest on Earth. Some become interpreters and teachers for physicals.

I have heard that spirits transit this realm on the way to physical birth. Are there conditions for taking on a human body? Is a contract made before a soul goes down? 

You don’t get born into a human body without formalities. Everyone who is born on Earth has entered into a contract. A typical contract specifies the allotment of time-energy available to you in the life form you are entering. Time-energy is a package, not two different things. In the Assyrian language, we have a precise term, shimtu. The exact length of the life you are given may vary according to how carefully, or recklessly, you expend this time-energy. Living in balance, averaging a gentle cruising speed, you may manage a hundred years; treat your body like a hot rod and you can go to the junkyard early.

The life contract does not give ironclad protection again the events insurance companies call “acts of God”, or against criminal interference.

You may end your life prematurely. This is a serious contractual violation that has unhappy consequences, though not the eternal damnation invented by some churchmen. Suicide is never part of a life contract. However, facing conditions that may tempt you to destroy yourself is quite often an important clause.

The allotment of time-energy is one of the two key elements in the contract. The other is the definition of the life assignment you have agreed to undertake.

Contrary to appearances, everyone born into a human body has agreed to their situation, though not everyone has the same degree of choice and the choices that are made are often ill-considered.

One of the greatest acts of memory is to recall the terms of your life contract and who you were and where you were when you entered into it.

How long do spirits remain in the realm of Luna after physical death? 

Let’s be clear that this is a gated community. You don’t get in without paying your dues. There are many who are rejected at the gate, and some we have to throw out. They fall back into the astral slums below us that the Greeks called Hades.

Some discarnates spend the equivalent of many, many lifetimes here. They enjoy the social environment, they study and teach in our schools, they practice reality creation. Some become mentors and oracles for people on Earth. Some serve as messengers, zephyrs who carry dreams to sleepers.

If you earn the right to go higher, and choose to do that, you are given a new outfit and you are required to leave your current vehicle behind.  When you take off your astral body, you don’t want to leave it lying around for anyone else to pick up. Depending on the quality, that could be like leaving a fur coat in the street. Someone is going to pick it up. Even if your threads are worn, they might be attractive to a passing spirit that wants to put on a new guise, or impersonate you, as a prank or for deliberate deception.    

We have locker rooms where you can check your astral body as you would check your street clothes on the way to the gym.

Few of the graduates who leave astral bodies in these lockers will wish to retrieve them. Now equipped with celestial bodies – which don’t fit over or under an astral suit – they know the joy of liberation from lesser forms and the appetites and cravings that go with them.

However, there are other uses for left-behind astral bodies. In the Messenger Service, some couriers are licensed to use these outfits in their encounters with people down below. So the deceased lover or father who visits a survivor could be that person, dropping by in the astral body – or an actor who has dressed up in that guise.

The actors or guisers should not be confused with the deceivers and thieves who hijack astral bodies for malign purposes. Their operations have sown much confusion and darkness.

Drawing of a Daimon of Luna by Robert Moss

- Excerpt from "Conversation with a Daimon of Luna" in Mysterious Realities by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Dreaming with the Departed: First Responder

Drumming for a group to call up dreams of the departed, I found my mind going back to the produce section of a supermarket where I met Fireman Tom six months after he had come to a one-day shamanic workshop with me. He came to that class because he was hungry for contact with his departed wife. He had spent two years visiting psychic mediums and others and had received lots of messages but that wasn’t good enough. He needed direct contact. He was a one-woman guy who had married his high school sweetheart. No, he had not dreamed of her and rarely remembered dreams. I assured him that when we had set a clear intention and opened the right kind of portal, he would ride to his deceased wife on the shamanic drumming I would provide.

He came back from that journey beaming. He met a guide he thought was Gabriel but didn’t want to get too grand so they agreed Tom would call him “Gabe”. He escorted Tom to a pleasant green field where tables had been set up to welcome and process new arrivals. Tom recognized Mary working at one of the tables. She did not look up when he first approached her. When he got her attention she still seemed distracted by the papers in front of her.

“Don’t you love me anymore?”

“Of course I do. But I’ve got a lot of work to do here – work I love – and you have lots of years ahead of you down their Tom. Please go back and enjoy them”

When Tom shared his journey report in my workshop, he concluded, with a shy grin, “So I guess it would be okay to ask that girl from the church out now.”

The “girl” was sixty-five. They had both felt some chemistry but Tom thought he would be disloyal to his wife if he went with another woman – until he met Mary on the Other Side. He really was a one-woman man.

When I met him in the supermarket thirty years ago, Tom was tanned and fit, not only looking fifty pounds lighter but fifteen years younger,

I asked, “What happened to you?”.

“I just came back from my honeymoon in Jamaica. I married that girl from the church.”

Warm memories from that exchange, in front of the oranges and tangerines, washed through me as I listened in class to the sounds of bubbling spring water. I had asked everyone to allow a story or image to come from the well of dreams and memory, Was it only a wonderful memory that was coming to me now, or was there more of the story to be reveled?

I knew in that moment that Tom had died since I last saw him. His honeymoon was thirty years ago and he was in his late sixties at the time. How was he getting on now?

Immediately, I found myself looking in on another scene. Its vividness scared away any doubt that this was absolutely real.

I saw Tom in an old brick firehouse, in his blue fireman’s uniform. The siren had just sounded, and he sprang into action. He wrapped his legs round the pole and slid down to the ground floor where the engines were waiting. He looked as he had done as a young man, hearty and strong, maybe thirty years old. Tom was a first responder again.

I saw him rush to the scene of an accident. A man’s body lay on the road. Above it, half-formed of smoke-like substance, was a second body, leaving him from the abdomen. His consciousness was in the second body but blurry. He had no idea what had happened. There was a real risk that as he settled into his dense etheric body, he would confuse it with his physical body and fail to understand his situation. Those who have died suddenly, without preparation for conditions after death, often get lost or confused in this way.

Tom acted decisively, as first responder for a victim of sudden death. I observed him comforting and steadying the spirit of the man who had been killed on the road. I knew he would soon lead him to the guides who would escort him on the next stage stage of his journey to his new life. I wondered whether Tom would still call one of them Gabe.

Drawing: "First Responder" by Robert Moss

Wakeful Ecstasies of Swedenborg

 

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was the son of a Lutheran bishop attached to the Swedish court. Living at the dawn of modern science, he mastered all the sciences of his day. He was driven by a passion for knowledge. He became fluent in nine languages. He made his own telescope and produces designs for a submarine and an airplane. He published a whole library of scientific treatises on subjects ranging from algebra to fossils, from hematology to the brain. In the words of one of his biographers, “he exhausted all the known sciences after founding several of them.”

Then he brought his towering intellect and his experiential approach to the study of the unseen. He was called to the new work by his dreams. In his fifties, he began keeping a dream journal in which he was wholly frank about erotic dreams as well as spiritual adventures. In twilight states, between sleep and waking, he found himself being drawn into experience of a deeper reality. Surfacing from sleep, he found himself entering “wakeful ecstasies.” 

I lay awake, but as if in a vision; I could open my eyes and be awake if I wanted to, but yet I was in the spirit — there was an inward and sensible joy through my whole body. 

In the city of Delft, on the night of April 6, 1744, Swedenborg experienced the vision that transformed his life and work. Retiring early, he wrestled with an entity he described as the Tempter. After his struggles, he heard a noise under his bed, which he interpreted as the departure of this dark being.

He started shivering uncontrollably.  He was at last able to snatch a few hours’ sleep. Then: 

I trembled violently from head to foot and there was a great sound as of many storms colliding, which shook me and threw me on my face. In the moment I was thrown down I was fully awake and saw how I was thrown down. 

Terrified by this wholly vivid experience of being propelled outside his physical body, Swedenborg prayed for help. As he held up his folded hands — the hands of his subtle body — “a hand came which clasped mine hard.” He found himself in the presence of a radiant being he took to be Christ. 

I saw him face-to-face….He spoke to me and asked if I had a certificate of health. I answered, “Lord thou knowest that better than I.” He said, “Well, then act.” 

Afterward, Swedenborg found himself traveling far and deep into nonordinary reality in a state that was “neither sleep nor wakefulness.” He conversed and interacted with beings in the spirit would “the same as with my familiars here on earth, and this almost continuously.” He conversed with dead people “of all classes,” including many people he had known during their physical lives. They gave him information he was able to verify and put to use. 

These encounters gave him a firsthand understanding of the conditions of the afterlife. Previously, his religious faith had convinced him that the spirit survives physical death. Now he could begin to study how it survives.

He gained important insights from encounters with departed people he had known before their deaths. He discovered that dead people are frequently confused about their situation because they cannot distinguish between the physical body and the subtle body. During the funeral of Christopher Polhem, one of his former teachers, Polhem “came through” to Swedenborg, “asking why he was buried when he was still alive.” The dead man was puzzled by the fact that, while the priest sermonized about the resurrection of the dead at the Last Judgment, “he was still alive” and “sensible of being in a body.”

 Swedenborg’s observation of the condition of other spirits in the afterlife led him to formulate the important observation that “when a man dies, his soul does not divest itself of its peculiarities.” He observed the condition of the executed nobleman Eric Brahe and reported that two days after his death “he began to return to his former state of life, which was to love worldly things, and after three days he became just as he was previously in the world.”

The departed follow the path of their desire and understanding. In his soul journeys, Swedenborg tracked them into many regions in the Otherworld. He encountered an angelic guide who told him that the “other members of his society” were appalled by the “crass ignorance” of the real conditions of the afterlife that prevailed among Westerners even after they took up residence in the spirit world.       
Swedenborg’s mentor told him that “angels” of his rank are instructed to gather newly arrived spirits, find out their ideas about heavenly joy — and give them what they desire. “You know that everyone that has desired heaven…is introduced after death into those particular joys which he had imagined.”

For example, there is a heaven for big talkers and another for big eaters. There is a paradise for those who believe the promise that they will rule with Christ forever; they see themselves enthroned as kings and princes. If you think of heaven as a beautiful garden, you get to smell the roses. But in all cases, according to Swedenborg’s mentor, you will be bored to distraction within two days. 

Now that you are ready to move beyond your expectations, the guide assigned to you can begin to instruct you on further possibilities. By one means or another, you will learn that happiness requires “doing something that us useful to ourselves and others.” Swedenborg’s angel explains that heaven is not a fixed environment or program of events, but a state that corresponds to — or is actually created by — the spiritual condition of its inhabitants.

The local clergy were not enthusiastic about Swedenborg’s road maps, or the fact that his example might encourage others to go exploring for themselves. Inflamed by Swedenborg’s observation that few priests (“that order of which very few are saved”) seemed to prosper on the other side, a Swedish minister plotted to have him judged insane and committed to a lunatic asylum.

Swedenborg’s geography of the afterlife was the gift of experience, which invites us to go beyond his maps, just as he went beyond the maps of previous explorers. His basic travel techniques will be recognized by active dreamers. They include: 

Deep relaxation: He would close his eyes, focus his attention on a single theme or target, and slow his breath. He first practiced this approach, especially breath control, in childhood during morning and evening prayers. He spoke of the “passive potency” of his meditation practice. The heart of it was to “withdraw the mind from terms and ideas that are broken, limited, and material.”

Experiment in the twilight zone: The half-dream state on the cusp between sleep and waking was Swedenborg’s favorite launchpad. He described this state as “the sweetest of all, for heaven then operates into [the] rational mind in the utmost tranquility.” He worked with both spontaneous and familiar photisms. For example, he writes of an “affirming flame” that would appear on his inner screen at the start of a journey or in the midst of a writing binge, reassuring him that conditions were favorable and that he was on the right track. 

Soul journeying: Swedenborg developed a fluid ability to shift consciousness and travel beyond the physical plane. “When I am alone my soul as it were out of the body and in the other world; in all respects I am in a visible manner there as I am here.” 

Night and day, he lived and worked as an active dreamer. His banker friend Robsahm observed that Swedenborg “worked without much regard to the distinction of day and night. Swedenborg himself noted, “When I am sleepy, I got to bed.” He kept a fire going at all times, drank large quantities of coffee with a huge amount of sugar. His dress at home was a robe in summer, a reindeer coat in winter.

Across the centuries, his words echo as a clarion call to new generations of explorers who refuse to settle their accounts with possibility and just do it: 

I am well aware that many will say that no one can possibly speak with spirits and angels so long as he lives in the body; and many will say that it is all fancy, others that I relate such things in order to gain credence, and others will make other objections. But by all this I am not deterred, for I have seen, I have heard, I have felt.

 

 

Text partly adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and LifeBeyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Illustration from Swedenborg Foundation

The Other Bollingen

 

Carl Gustav Jung, the great dream shaman of Switzerland, built a personal sanctuary near the village of Bollingen on the northern shore of Lake Zürich and called it his Tower. He was partly inspired by childhood fantasies of a castle on an island on a lake.  As his project expanded, he envisioned it as an architectural model for the structure of the psyche, and an inner stronghold. He started construction of the first tower in 1923 after the death of his mother. He added an upper story to the main house in 1955 after the death of his wife Emma.  He wrote that “these two dates are meaningful because the Tower is connected with the dead.”
     Shortly before his death, Jung dreamed of the “other Bollingen”, its counterpart in another world. The place was suffused with sourceless light. The deep voice he had come to trust told him his new home had been completed and was now ready for him to move in. Then he saw a mother wolverine teaching her child to dive and swim in a stretch of water.
     In her beautiful biographical memoir of Jung, infused with her intimate knowledge of him, Barbara Hannah recalls that he had often dreamed of this Other Bollingen, in various stages of construction, and had always understood that he was seeing a location on the Other Side of death. The new dream made it clear to her that he would soon be leaving to go to the Other Bollingen. “In fact, it may have been this dream that loosened his strong tie to his earthly Bollingen.”* 
      What has he learned and accomplished in his new home in the Imaginal Realm? What does he now know about soul and its transformations? Has he composed a new book? Has he raised the Tower higher? I provide possible answers to these questions in my story "The Other Bollingen" in Mysterious Realities.

* Barbara Hannah, Jung, His Life and Work: A Biographical Memoir (Boston: Shambhala, 1991) 344

Dream visits with the dead

 

I am often among the dead in my dreams. They are always alive. Sometimes I remember that they died on an event track we shared, other times I don't. Sometimes they come calling. My father has come many times since his death with helpful advisories for me and the family. 

Sometimes my dream travels take me to new environments on the Other Side were the dead are enjoying new lives. They show me around and I learn first-hand in this way about lifestyle and real estate options available after death. Then there are the dream encounters in which I am with someone who died on the event track we shared in in this world but seems to be alive in a physical body on an alternate event track, in a parallel world.

Contact with the deceased, especially in dreams, isn’t weird or unusual or even truly supernatural. It comes about for three reasons: the dead are still with us, or they come visiting, or we travel to the realms where they are now living. The number one reason why people who are not accustomed to sharing dreams decide to tell one is that they have dreamed of a close friend or family member who died but is very much alive in the dream.

One of the most interesting things I have learned is that the living may be called upon to play guides and counselors for the dead.  My narrative “The Silent Lovers” in Mysterious Realities is a just-so story – shocking to me as it unfolded – about how I was called to play advocate for a dead man, otherwise a stranger, going through his life review on the Other Side. I can confirm that Yeats  was absolutely right when he said, with poetic clarity, that the living have the ability to assist the imaginations of the dead.

Illustration: "Alive Among the Dead". Journal drawing by Robert Moss with digital colorization

Hungarian Swallow

Nandor, an elderly Hungarian man, wept uncontrollably when he attempted to describe the recent loss of his son, who had died a few weeks earlier of leukemia, aged only 25. Nandor had had no contact with his son – in dreams or otherwise – since his death. Despite his terrible grief, Nandor clung to the materialist perspective that had guided him as a scientist in his native country under communism, distrusting anything that could not be experienced and tested with the physical senses. He said he never remembered dreams.

He had come reluctantly to my workshop at his wife’s insistence, expecting nothing, or less than nothing. His sadness filled me with compassion.

I stood near him during a drumming session and found his son. I found something more: a pleasant room overlooking the Danube in Budapest, a space where Nandor might be able to have direct contact with his boy. After the drumming, I sat with Nandor. He told me he had seen nothing during the drumming. I told him, “I have a dream for you” and asked his permission to share it. “Yes, yes,” he said quickly. I gave him this dream: 

I see you meeting your son in a salon overlooking the river in Budapest. You are drinking something warm – is it tea? – in glasses with silver surrounds. Your son is bookish and deeply interested in the history of Hungary, its epics and literature. He is telling you he has made exciting discoveries now that he can have direct contact with authors and heroes from the past. He has discovered something from medieval times, maybe the eleventh century. The word “Magyar” and the history of the Magyars come up again and again. You can come to this room to talk to your son any time. There is a small bird in the landscape that is connected to you and can be your dream ally. It has black and white plumage, like a magpie, but the tail is a different shape. I got the word “Zoltan” in connection with this. 

Nandor became quite excited as he listened. He told me that he had taken his son on a journey to Budapest to visit places and people that had been important in his earlier life, and that they both had a keen interest in the early history of Hungary. He announced with a broad grin that they would have been drinking “wine” rather than tea in those glasses chased with silver.

He readily agreed to try to enter the room I had described in a subsequent drumming journey, and returned with tears streaming down his cheeks. He told me he had had a vivid encounter with his son who had quoted lines from a “lost” epic of the eleventh century. In the dreamspace, he found and identified the bird I had described. It was a kind of swallow that is found in the Hungarian countryside. Its name sounds like “Zoltan”, though the word is slightly different.

“I know now there is life after death,” Nandor told me at the end of the workshop. “This changes everything.” When he gave me his card on leaving, I saw that the name of his company includes the word “Magyar.”

We can grow a dream for someone who needs a dream. It may become a passage to another world and reunion with a departed loved one. 

Text adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books. 

 

 

A Yogi Learns about Astral Worlds from his Dead Guru

 

One of the most valuable pieces of life counsel in Autobiography of a Yogi comes from the author's guru, Sri Yukteswar: “Forget the past. The past lives of all men are dark with many shames. Human conduct is ever unreliable until anchored in the Divine. Everything in future will improve if you are making a spiritual effort now.” This is said to have been Paramahansa Yogananda's favorite passage in his book.

Though his whole life practice had prepared him for death, Sri Yukteswar was nervous as the moment approached. While talking to Yogananda about his impending death, the guru "trembled like a frightened child". The great yoga teacher Patanjali wrote that "attachment to bodily residence, springing up of its own nature, is present in slight degree even in great saints." Before his last days, Sri Yukteswar, in similar vein, often compared a human approaching death to a "long-caged bird" that "hesitates to leave its accustomed home when the door is opened."

After burying his master, Yogananda grieved and meditated in the Regent hotel, a classic pile in the city of Bombay, now called Mumbai. One afternoon he saw an immense golden glow rise above the buildings across the street. It took the form of Lord Krishma.

A week later, sitting on his bed on the third floor of the hotel at three o'clock in the afternoon on June 19, 1936, Yogananda saw a golden light flower inside the room. In this "beatific light" Yogananda found his room transformed into "a strange world". Sri Yukteswar, appeared before him in "flesh and blood form". His guru assured him, "I am in truth resurrected-not on earth but on an astral planet."

Yukteswar proceeded to give a detailed account of the geography and physics of the astral worlds, the causal realm beyond the astral, and the higher realm where forms dissolve into a sea of light. This fills chapter 43 of Autobiography of a Yogi, and is of perennial interest. Some key revelations:

* "Astral beings dematerialize or materialize their forms at will. All astral beings are free to assume any form, and can easily commune together."

* "The recently physically disembodied being arrives in an astral family through invitation, drawn by similar mental and spiritual tendencies."

* "The span of life in the astral world is much longer than on earth. A normal advanced astral being's average life period is from five hundred to one thousand years,." 

* There are multitudes of astral realms, from astral prisons where the evil dead are confined to gated communities for the holy evolved like the one where Yukteswar said he had taken up residence. The residency status of the population of the astral worlds ranges from "temporary visitor" - someone who has not worked off earthly karma and will need to go through reincarnation, maybe again and again and again - to "long-term resident", who will eventually be able to doff their astral body and ascend to a home on the higher causal plane - to "savior", someone not obliged to remain on the astral (and not required to reincarnate on earth) who stays to help others on this level.  

* Astral beings "have the privilege of costuming themselves at will with new, colorful, astrally materialized bodies. Just as worldly men don new array for gala events, so astral beings find occasions to bedeck themselves in specially designed forms."

* "Friends of other lives easily recognize one another in the astral world."

* "The intuition of astral beings pierces through the veil and observes human activities on earth, but man cannot view the astral world unless his sixth sense is somewhat developed."

* "The advanced beings on Hiranyaloka [a higher astral realm] remain mostly awake in ecstasy during the long astral day and night, helping to work out intricate problems of cosmic government and the redemption of prodigal sons, earthbound souls. When the Hiranyaloka beings sleep, they have occasional dreamlike astral visions."

* "The undeveloped man must undergo countless earthly and astral and causal incarnations in order to emerge from his three bodies. A master who achieves this final freedom may elect to return to earth as a prophet to bring other human beings back to God, or like myself he may choose to reside in the astral cosmos."

Picture: "Astral Seminar in Bombay" (c) Robert Moss

Those who die and come back, Tibetan style

 

Who knows what happens after death?

Those who live there, those who visit, those who have died and come back.

The Tibetan language has a word for those who have died and come back. The word is delog (“DAY-loak, with the stress on the first syllable). There is also the term nyin log, for one who dies and returns in one day.

Delog Dawa Drolma [d. 1941] recorded a detailed account of her travels in “realms of pure appearance” under the guidance of White Tara while her teenaged body lay seemingly lifeless for five days. These higher realms, like the lower ones, are understood to be “the display of mind”. The pure realms are the display of enlightened awareness, while the bardo state and the six directions of rebirth are “the display of delusion and the projection of mind’s poisons.” In the presence of the Death lord Yama Dharmaraja, she sings (with Tara) a song:

If there is recognition, there is just this – one’s own mind.
If there is no recognition, there is the great wrathful lord of death [Delog xi]

Sogyal Rinpoche discussed delog phenomena in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. He reported that “In Tibet this was an accepted occurrence, and elaborate methods were devised for detecting whether d´eloks [alternate transliteration] were fraudulent or not” (Sogyal, 1993, p. 331)

The Tibetan Library of Works and Archives in Dharamsala, India,  houses at least a dozen accounts of delogs.

A pioneer work of French anthropologist Françoise Pommaret was published in 1989 as  Les revenants de l’au-dela dans le monde Tibetain: Sources littéraires et tradition vivante. She traveled often to the Himalayan highlands and  discovered historical records of ten delogs from the 11th to the 20th century. She interviewed a delog in a village in Nepal and three in Bhutan. Pommaret’s studies of  texts included a detailed story of a delog whose biography was based on a 17th-century manuscript.

"At first, the delogs may not realize that they are dead, when the spirit separates from the body, leaving it seeming like an animal in the delog’s clothing. As the disembodied spirit roams about the home, the delog may not understand why the rest of the family is acting so strangely and unresponsive to the delog’s efforts at communication. The experience of Gling Bza’ chos skyid is typical:

"'Then when I saw my own bed, there was the cadaver of a big pig covered with my clothing. My husband and my children and all the neighbors of the village arrived and began to cry.:::They began to prepare for a religious ceremony and I thought, “What are you doing?” But they did not see me and I felt abandoned. I did not think that I was dead.'" (Pommaret, 1989, p. 70)

When Chos ’dzom met her protective deity (yi dam) and guide, he said, “Don’t you know that you are dead? Don’t show attachment to your body of illusion; lift your spirit towards the essence of things. Come where I will lead you” (Pommaret, 1989, p. 32). Then she met terrifying minions of Yama shouting, “Execute!” but was protected by her yi dam and her mantra.

I wish we had a suitable word in English to describe one who died and came back. "Revenant" is too creepy. Raymond Moody's coinage "near-death experience" has been valuable in facilitating discussion of this kind of phenomenon, but it doesn't quite embrace what happened to me after I was pronounced clinically dead as a boy. On the first of those occasions, the doctors told my parents, with perhaps some embarrassment, when I returned, "Your boy died and he came back". That still sounds right. .

 

References

Bailey, Lee W., “A ‘Little Death’: The Near-Death Experience and Tibetan Delogs”  in Journal of Near-Death Studies, 19(3) Spring 2001

Drolma, Delog Dawa, Delog: Journey to realms beyond death trans. Richard Patterson.  Junction City, CA: Padma Publishing, 1995.

Pommaret, Françoise , Les revenants de l'au-delà dans le monde Tibetain: Sources littéraires et tradition vivante  Paris: Editions du Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique, 1989

Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (New York: Harper Collins, 2002)

Art: "Storm Bird Brings Me Back" by Robert Moss. Published in The Boy Who Died and Came Back.