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

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.

The Midnight Library and the Café Jet-Lag

"Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you."

It's a great moment in Matt Haig's great novel The Midnight Library, when Nora, who is sliding between parallel lives, discovers there are others like her. This is what Hugo, the first to reveal himself, tells her. 

"We are sliders. We have a root life in which we lying somewhere, unconscious, suspended between life and death, and then we arrive in a place...A library, a video store, an art gallery, a casino, a restaurant..." 

And this place becomes the portal to a parallel world where you find yourself in the body and situation of your parallel self as they are in this same moment. You'll be challenged to catch up with their divergent biography, with a lover you never knew, a job you never held, songs you never learned, muscles you didn't know you had. 

The many worlds interpretation of reality, as it has evolved, makes sliding acceptable to theoretical physics. The architecture for transit - the library, the video store - is easier for human minds than theorems about quantum waves. 

Matt Haig's protagonist, Nora Seed, is exploring this territory while lying between life and death after overdosing. Her surroundings resemble an immense library, in the care of a lady who looks like her beloved librarian from elementary school. All the books in the midnight library are bound in green; to open any one is to enter a different parallel; life in which Nora made different choices.

We come to understand that the challenge for her is to find a life in which she wants to stay in a body in the physical world. She must white out volumes of her vast Book of Regrets. She can't take forever to do this. At a certain point the library of this limb will crumble and dematerialize.

The librarian tells Nora, "Every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irresistible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations...You have as many lives as you have possibilities. There are lives where you made different choices. And those choices lead to different outcomes. If you had done just one thing differently, you would have a different life story."

We are then informed that "Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can't be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try...But you are no longer within a lifetime. You have popped outside." 

The books in the library are near or far according to how near or far the alternate life is from the current one (in time as well as space since greater divergence seems related to earlier separation).

Nora learns to think of the life in which her body is lying in a coma as her "root" life, with all the others spreading and diverging like branches of a gigantic tree. I think of Sylvia Plath picture of  existence as a fig tree where you see the juicy fruit of other possible lives but can't get to them and must watch them rot. Here you can get to them but may leave them to rot. 

 So here is the friendly librarian's challenge: Which life would you like to try on?" 

 Choose to stay in another life and it will be as if it was always there. Your memory of the life you were living before - and of the midnight library- will fade and disappear. The book of that life will not be returned to shelves. 

 Nora starts by following her regret over not marrying a boyfriend named Dan and living his dream of running a country pub. The author teases us with his name for the Oxfordshire village where the pub is located: Littleworth. Nora lands in her slightly different body without knowing anything about the scene - she doesn't know where the loo is, or the name of the whiskery regular. A question not answered is: what happens to the Nora who was living at the Three Horseshoes pub while the "original" Nora is in her body and life?

Things don't work out at the pub, or with the boyfriend, now a surly dipsomaniac husband. Try again, and again. Each time there's the small problem of trying to catch up with all the things your parallel; self was doing before you slid into her body. Nora flunks a speech she is supposed to give, as an Olympic star, to a thousand people, because she can't remember the story of this alternate self.

When you check out another life, through a book from the midnight library, you start at the same exact time  00:00. In this other life you made other choices in the past. That is past history of which you may remember little or much or nothing in the body you are now in. You cannot touch that past. You can make choices in the present and future of the alternate life that will become your definitive life, unless disappointment throws you out of it. 

Among the infinity of parallel lives you may choose from, according to library rules, there is a category that is forbidden: lives in which you are already dead. We are told there are no books for such lives because the library is about possibilities and the dead don't have any.

This seems to me to be a wrongful restriction. The dead have choices, like the living, and plenty of possible futures. In exploring my own parallel lives I have entered worlds where I died years ago. Some I find quite enjoyable, even beautiful. For relaxation I sometimes go the penthouse of a Robert who died before me. I enjoy swimming in his rooftop pool, and foraging in his vast library, and watching dreams that play all around me, as if I have slipped into a virtual reality pod, when I stretch out on his bed.

 Nora's dialogues with the slider Hugo, who seems addicted to quantum jumping for its own sake, are marvelous and an effortless introduction to the Many Worlds hypothesis in physics which suggests that there are an infinite number of divergent parallel universes. "Every moment of your life you enter a new universe. With every decision you make." 

Sliders might be popping in and out of parallel worlds all the time. People around them generally don’t notice even when they say, "My mind went blank" or "I am not myself today."

Hugo says, with admirable clarity, that "the human brain can't handle the complexity of an open quantum wave function so it organizes or translates this complexity into something it understands." Like librarian in a library. When Hugo goes sliding, his departure lounge is not a library, but a video store. Other sliders use different launch pads There is always a guide who resembles someone who was helpful in life.  

You don't need to be half-dead to explore this field for yourself, though we all exist somewhere between life and death. I use a very special library, and a cosmic video store, and an art gallery or museum often as portals for lucid dream adventures in parallel worlds and others. I open such spaces to adventurous dream travelers as departure lounges for group journeys powered by shamanic drumming. and play guide for groups that want first-hand experience of these things.

 I have made Matt Haig's novel recommended treading for the advanced dreamers who are engaged with me in exploring and mapping the multiverse. His sliders' varying choice of portals makes me reflect that, beyond a library and a video store, I could make more use of restaurants. I often dine well in my dreams and return with the taste in my mouth. I think I will see whether the Café Jet-Lag in Paris, where I would often stop for coffee or vin rouge after overnight flights, is a friendly transit lounge for interdimensional travel. The name matches my condition when I return from world-jumping. 

I am told that since my last visit the Café Jet-Lag has closed. This is not a serious obstacle to making a return visit. If in my root life the café is no longer there, I am pretty sure I can find it in a parallel continuum, maybe even one in which the old farmer's market is still in business nearby at Les Halles. 

Art: "Dream Library" by 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.

 

 

 

 

A Dreamer's Notes: Can You Remember a Dream in Which You Die?

January 7, 2023

Dream

Place of Leaping

This memory only surfaced hours after the sleep dream in which it took place:.

I am on a cliff hundreds of feet above the sea. It's a beautiful sunny day. I jump. I am dropping feet first, head up, in standing position. As I fall I am thinking I may have ended my life: that I won't be able to come back from this. I feel a twinge of fear and regret. I tell myself to relax into the fall and enjoy the beauty of the scene.

I splash down and am going deep. I have no trouble breathing under water. I feel no pain. I don't know what's coming next. Will I touch the sea bottom and bounce back up, as I did in another recent dream? Will I find myself in another world, as I have often done after a sea crossing and sometimes by plunging very very deep? I haven't touched bottom when I leave the dream - and forget it until later.

When the dream returns later, I feel a little chill, and thrill. I think this might be a splendid check-out at the end of physical life. I think of the traditional Maori itinerary for departing for the afterlife from a Place of Leaping, a high point of land above the sea, and of group shamanic journeys I have led from certain versions of this departure lounge. People have asked me: Can you die in a dream? My frequent response has been: what better way to leave? As the Lakota say, the path of the soul after death is the same as the path of the soul in dreams - except that you don't come back to your physical body.

If my dream can be tagged as "lucid", it is in a larger sense than the way that term is often used. I'm not telling myself, "It's a dream! It's a dream!" and certainly not that what is happening is anything less than entirely real. I am fully aware that I am traveling between different worlds and I'm not sure I can return to the one I just left. I don't delude myself that I am in control here. However I am ready to choose my actions and my direction according to what now unfolds in a reality that is no les real than my ordinary world and may be more so. If I am about to enter the afterlife, I am doing so consciously.

It seems I'm not quite gone yet, though I'm checking. A rehearsal for the Big Journey, early or late, is surely a good idea. I close my eyes, stretch out, and return to my own Place of Leaping in memory and imagination. I picture myself plunging to the bottom of the sea. I rise up like a sea bird. I am flying now, skimming the waves, to an island that is not on any ordinary map.

Journal drawing by Robert Moss: "Place of Leaping"

We are such dreams as stuff is made on

The concourse is longer than I remember, with more turnings and more choices. Maybe I turned the wrong way when I last had the choice. Walls and ceiling are covered with little white ceramic squares, like tiles in a bathroom. Or a morgue. There are movie posters on the walls, but graphics and titles are indistinct under a changing wash of murky colors, shifting from bruised purple to poison green.
      I slow to a stop, wondering whether I should turn back. In this moment, color drains from the scene. There is only black and white. Definition is sharper. Shadows are knife-edged. I can read a sign that says BARDO. It points forward and back. Underneath it, helpfully, is a second sign I know from roundabouts in France: TOUTES DIRECTIONS. I see that indeed I am at a kind of roundabout. Tunnels go off in all directions. As I spin to appraise my situation, I lose all sense of direction. I am not sure I can find my way back now. Which way should I take.

     Ask Ka.
     The statement is made in a precise and neutral voice, classless and accentless. I am not sure whether it comes from inside or outside my head. I don’t know what it means until something is illuminated in the tunnel ahead of me, as if caught by the flash of a camera. It looks like an old-time phone booth.
     I walk towards it and more light comes on – a crescent of brightly colored bulbs on top of the booth, a warm syrupy light inside. The sign on the box, next to a slot for coins, reads ASK KA. Behind the glass is a round-bellied figure with curling mustaches and a turban. His eyes swivel to look at me. The illusion is remarkable. There is life – or lively death – in those eyes, and in the smile lines around them, and in the rise and fall of torso and belly.
     I have seen figures like this at fun fairs and outside magic shops. The last time was on the subterranean level of Pike Place market in Seattle, when I popped a quarter in the slot and a fortune-telling dummy named Zoltar decanted a scroll that – as I recall – was on the money if rather generic.
     I fish in my pocket for a quarter to see what Ka can deliver.
     Your money is not currency here, says that neutral voice.
     Ka is staring at me.
      Think of something that makes you want to be in a body.
     This is crazy stuff, but it gets pictures moving in my mind. Sex. Love. The kids. Swimming in the lake.
      Ka’s tongue come out of his mouth and lolls over his chin whiskers, pink and plump and obscene. He points at his tongue and I hear the word
      Bacon.
      “Bacon?” This is insane. But Ka is nodding his head vigorously.
      I look more closely at what I thought was a coin slot. It is actually designed to take something else.
       “Get your tokens here,” says a voice behind me. I turn to find a vendor on a tricycle. The handlebar supports a platter of crispy bacon.
      “How much?”
      “Just one strip for now.”
      “I mean, what is the charge?”
      “You mean, what is your charge. You are charged with eating one strip of perfectly crispy bacon for Ka every day you are in the body.”
       “But I don’t usually eat breakfast.”
       “Bacon is not only about breakfast. It is a religion.”
       “I’ll see what I can do.” I don’t want to miss the chance to ask Ka. I detach a strip of crisply bacon from its fellows, resisting the temptation to grab another for myself – I am suddenly ravenously hungry – and feed it into the slot on the front of the fortune teller’s booth.
       I watch Ka’s white-gloved hands come down to collect the bacon. As he raises it to his mouth, a second pair of hands appears. He is sprouting limbs like a Hindu deity. With his extra hands, he smooths out a piece of paper, writes on it carefully, rolls it into a scroll and drops it into a chute. The scroll comes out the bottom, neatly tied with a thread.
       I retrieve it. As I untie the thread, I glance at Ka. His jaws are definitely working. Some of his hands are now making mudras.
       I open the fortune scroll and read the impeccable Copperplate:

We are such dreams as stuff is made on.


Drawing: "Ask Ka" by Robert Moss

The path of blue lotus petals

We don’t need to wait for death to remember what the soul knows: how and why we came into our present bodies, and where we will go when we leave them. Dreaming, we remember. We dream, perhaps, of death as a wedding, a cause for celebration as we move towards union with the beloved of the soul. Dreaming, I remember a funeral that preceded birth.

I hear the high, keening voices of the mourners achingly beautiful. I have never heard music so lovely on Earth; I have heard its melancholy matched only in a fado café on an old cobbled street in Lisbon. As I hear the voices, I see again the path of blue lotus petals. I suffer again the knife of regret as I share the last passionate embraces of those I must leave behind. I feel naked and cold when my garment is gently removed from me, leaving me skinless and fluid, glowing softly like a wandering light over the waveless sea. I look back and see a lion robe, lined with a sky full of stars.

    I pass before the High Ones, on their high thrones. They approve the choice I have made, and its price. They counsel me with sweet sternness not to drink too deep from the cup of forgetfulness on this side or the other. They bring forth the envoy who will track me, and will speak to me in my dreams, to help me not to lose my memory and purpose in the miasma of the Earth plane.

    She escorts me to the Pivot of the Worlds. I enter the portal and descend, quick as thought, to a place on Luna I have used many times before. The Moon priest greets me with his archaic smile, unreadable in that pale, moon-round face. There are armed guards everywhere, with the heads of jackals and the muscled bodies of armored baboons. It seems conditions have deteriorated since my last visit. Luna has always been a mixed environment, a place of illusion and swirling cross-currents. It has now become an active theater in the contest between rival forces contending for the soul of the Earth.

    The Moon priest helps me into my body suit. Part of me recoils from this limiting, this confinement to such a primitive form, with only one organ of generation. Yet this body suit is flexible and moves with my thoughts. If I want to be a lion, it will take lion form. If I want to sprout wings or extra limbs or suckers, it can do that. It pulls back into its default mode – that of a biped that cannot eat and talk safely at the same time – when my attention wavers. But this confinement is nothing to what it will be to take on a body of flesh and bones in the world below.

    I relax for a while in the pool on the high terrace. I look up at the blue-white star, high above in the sky. It is eons since the experiment on Earth began, and it is constantly imperiled. We keep coming, because we helped to begin the game and must play until the final round.

    I wonder how much of this I will be able to remember this time, in an Earth body. I swim down to the bottom of the pool. The water streams faster and faster, sucking me into a funnel. I am on my way.

This is a case of what Joan Grant called "far memory" of another life, and a space between earthly lives. Experiences of this kind  have made me understand that. I am in an afterlife situation - a bardo of becoming -right now. I died to another world in order to come here. At a certain point I will die to this world in order to be born into another. Such things are too important to take on trust, from some hand-me-down belief system or even the reports of previous soul travelers. We need first-hand experience and far memory of other lives, the kind that enables us, on clear days, to appreciate the divine comedy of it all. 

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

Plutarch in the Light of the Moon

For Plutarch (c 50-120 AD), the realm of the Moon assumes huge importance as the residence or way station for some (though by no means all) spirits of the departed, and the base for a variety of daimons (many of them formerly humans) who take a close interest in Earth affairs.

Plutarch knew what he was talking about. He was not only a marvelous historian and philosopher, but a Mystery initiate, who spent his last thirty years as a priest at Delphi, communing with the gods and traveling between the worlds. He traveled in Egypt and wrote a treatise on Isis and Osiris that has a continuing influence on our understanding of ancient Egyptian religion.

He knew the importance of dreams. He wrote in his essay "Amatorius" that “Since [the soul’s] arrival in the world, it is by means of dreams that it joyfully greets and gazes upon that which is most beautiful and most divine.”

In hies essay "On the Divine Vengeance" Plutarch describes a journey to a locale in the sphere of Luna where three daimons sitting together in the shape of a triangle are mixing dreams in a cosmic krater (or mixing-bowl). Different streams flow into it, one “whiter than sea foam” another “the violet of the rainbow”. The lighter and whiter the dream that is mixed up, the more true it will be. “This is the source from which dreams derive.”

The source of this account is an ancient NDE. A dissolute man of Soli who is told by an oracle that he will do much better when he dies. Soon after he falls from a height and is believed to be dead until he revives at his burial place three days later
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Plutarch explains how after death spirits that are able to rise beyond the lower astral plane may enjoy a pleasurable afterlife in the realm of the Moon. They may live on there for a great length of Earth time, or graduate to existence on a higher plane, leaving their astral bodies behind. Or they may become Moon-based daimons, closely engaged with human affairs, playing far-from-infallible guides to people in the physical world.

In a most remarkable tract titled" Concerning the Face that Appears in the Orb of the Moon" Plutarch gives a comprehensive account of the role of the Moon in relation to the soul history of humans. The Moon is here described as the portal through which spirits travel on their way to birth on Earth, and to which they ascend, if they pass certain tests, after physical death. Some of these spirits of the departed may be promoted to the status of daimons, with permission to interact with the living.

"Not forever do the spirits tarry upon the moon; they descend to take charge of oracles; they attend and participate in the highest of mystic rituals; they act as warders against misdeeds and chastisers of them, and they flash forth as saviors manifest in war and on the sea." [1]

These spirits of the Moon, far from omniscient or infallible, are on probation.If they act unfairly, giving in to wrath or envy, they are cast out and again confined in human bodies on earth.

Plutarch shakes up our mythic geography when he tells us that Earth is the realm of Demeter, the Moon of Persephone, and everything between Earth and Moon is the realm of Hades. Entry by the departed into the realm of Luna requires the ability to travel beyond the temptations, fears and distractions of the lower astral (Hades) and go through a clean-up, effected by “scrubbers” (maybe resembling scarab beetles).

In summary, this ancient shaman-philosopher confirms that It is in the realm of Luna that spirits take on and take off the astral body before birth and after death. And that the Moon, as an astral realm, is the base for a large population of daimons (many formerly human) who have a close engagement with human affairs.

[1] Plutarch, De facie quae in orbe lunae apparet [“Concerning the Face which appears in the Orb of the Moon”] in Moralia XII trans Harold Cherniss and William Helmbold

Image: Detail of the Moon from Donato Creti, "Astronomical Observations" (1711) in the Vatican Museum