An afterlife of specific things and particular people

We tend to assume that, in the highly unlikely event that there really is a world beyond this one, it is airy and misty, not solid and concrete. But why is this necessarily the case? The widespread traditional idea that we live in a graded universe that moves form the material up to the immaterial (a perspective that, in a degraded form, has given us our cartoonish modern idea of a heaven of clouds above the earth) does not necessarily carry with it the idea that the higher you go in these worlds the vaguer they are. In fact, for most of the authors who describe these ascending realms, what is lost as one moves up is not concreteness but density. The objects one encounters in the worlds are still objects, and the persons one encounters are still persons, but they are so in something like the way a tree in a Cézanne painting is a tree. Through Cézanne’s ability to present the tree in terms of its multivalent inner core, the tree has become more than the single image that appears to the ordinary, mundane eye. And yet . . . it is still a very specific object. An object that, while remaining itself, has opened itself so that its inner, essential being unfolds for whoever views it with the proper eyes. 

 In his book Spiritual Body and Celestia Earth, the French author Henry Corbin described what the Iranian mystical tradition calls the “Earth of Visions,” a world “above” this one that appears to those who travel to it as an “external world” that, at the same time, is not the physical world we know. “It is,” Corbin wrote, “a world that teaches us that it is possible to emerge from measurable space without emerging from extent, and that we must abandon homogeneous chronological time to enter that qualitative time which is the history of the soul.”

It is this difficult but essential idea that when we leave the body, we “emerge from measurable space” without “emerging from extent” that we need to keep in mind when we come upon the disconcertingly physical details that pervade the "accounts” by modern tellers of the after-death story. They tell us the world beyond this one is crowded with very specific things and particular people. But those things and people are free from the tyranny of the purely physical perspective that material existence forces upon us. In the world beyond the physical, both time and space are recalibrated, so that we can appear as the people we are now, yet also, paradoxically or not, the people we used to be as well, and we can be perceived in such a way that our subjective essence shines forth rather than hiding invisibly beneath our (in this world) all too-solid flesh.”

 

Ptolemy Tompkins, The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria Books, 2012), 205-06.