An imaginal view of the afterlife

Ptolemy Tompkins writes: “Though imaginal doesn’t appear in most dictionaries, the word has been around since at least the seventeenth century. However, it first began to be used in the distinctively modern way that I intend it only in the late nineteenth century, by a poet and classical scholar named Frederic W. H. Myers. In the sense Myers used it, the word imaginal describes a kind of perception not defined by the simple distinctions between real and unreal, actual and imaginary, that we members of the materialistic modern world so often unconsciously let govern the way we think. It describes, instead, a state of things in which what we see in front of us is neither entirely real nor entirely imaginary, but both at once.

Tompkins suggests that the domain of the imaginal is: “a plane of experience that is every bit as real as the physical world we experience while ‘down here’ in our physical bodies, but that is also much more elastic; a world that blooms and buzzes a hundredfold more vividly and intensely—and personally—than the one we are in right now.”

Therefore, Tompkins concludes: “We have, now, a concept (the imaginal dimension) and an idea (the brain doesn’t necessarily produce thought) that, when brought together, give us an entirely new perspective on the fate not just of consciousness, but of our particular, individual, personal consciousness after the body has been left behind. A perspective that allows us to continue to believe in the existence of the spirit in the age of science, and that allows us also to appreciate different spiritual perspectives without insisting that one be right and all the others wrong.

‘If we can at least provisionally accept this pair of ideas, we become able to see that many of the things that before seemed obtuse, hard to understand, or just plain silly about what the peoples of times past have had to say about the afterlife are not so obtuse or silly at all. They allow us to take the afterlife descriptions of, say, a Brazilian Indian and an Inuit Eskimo seriously and respectfully, without having to literally envision the afterworld as a thick tropical jungle or a snow-covered stretch of northern tundra.

They are, in short, the key to understanding in a truly modern way the life that awaits us beyond death.”

 

Ptolemy Tompkins, The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria Books, 2012), 97, 113.