The Transcendentalists view of the afterlife

“In the second half of the nineteenth century, when the Romantic period in Europe was in its waning years, this new Romantic revisioning and retelling of the old Western idea of fall and redemption started occupying the minds of a very different group of thinkers on the other side of the Atlantic. When it did, and idea that was constantly present in the background in the musings of the European and British Romantics came to the foreground—for in truth, the whole Romantic cosmic vision couldn’t really work without it.

“This idea was, of course, the doctrine of reincarnation. Owen Barfield, a British barrister and writer who early in his life became a student of the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, was one of the twentieth century’s most eloquent advocates of the Romantic philosophy. Barfield felt that the ideas of the Romantics were not dusty literary relics but were still vital and living. New age thinking, as its sharpest and most responsible, is, Barfield would suggest, really just, to use the term he was fond of, ‘Romanticism come of age.’ But to really take those Romantic ideas seriously, Barfield felt, we also need to take seriously the idea of what he like to call ‘repeated earth lives.’

“If the idea of [spiritual] evolution . . . has become attractive to many minds,” Barfield wrote, “there is nevertheless one awkward obstacle in the way of its acceptance; and particularly of its acceptance as a ground for believing in my own existence.” This belief, said Barfield, is “that the self really evolved, not just the vehicles of it.” In other words, if we are to take the spiritual/developmental worldview initiated by the Romantics seriously, we must realize that this also entails taking seriously the idea that the personal being we experience ourselves to be right here and now did not come into existence with the birth of our present bodies, but has been around for a much, much longer time.

“This was precisely what that new group of thinkers on the other side of the Atlantic was beginning to suspect. In the life we know here on earth, we find ourselves, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘on a stair; there are other stairs below us which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.’ Emerson is using a poetic image here, but he is not doing so just because the image sounds pretty. He very much means, with this came-from-somewhere, going-somewhere imagery, what he says, just as he does in another, more direct passage from his writing on this subject. ‘The soul,’ wrote Emerson, ‘comes from without into the human body as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it anew. . . . It passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal.”

“Emerson viewed our true larger life as a kind of forward-moving yet also spiral drama in which one life follows another, each to some degree imitating the shape and trajectory of the one that came before yet also introducing new material. And this, of course, meant that Emerson accepted an extremely personal and individual version of the concept of repeated earth lives. For if the soul is really and truly to grow over time, if it is on a genuine journey through the temporal and physical dimensions, then in order for that journey to lead somewhere really valuable, not only must the same individual soul keep on returning, time and again, but it must bring with it all the accumulated memories of what happened to it in lives past, even if while on earth, they typically remaining unavailable to the conscious portion of the mind, appearing only in otherwise inexplicable likes and dislikes, and various and sundry other quirks of character."

Ptolemy Tompkins, The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria Books, 2012), 133-35.

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.

Afterlife may be more imaginative and creative

“All experience is, to one degree or another, ‘generated’ experience. Everything in the world that we see ‘out there is actually manufactured by us, at least in part, through a collaboration between the secret, creative part of our minds and the unprocessed, blooming, buzzing raw material of the physical universe: a universe that is in fact not even made up of solid stuff at all, but rather of relationships between patterns of energy that in themselves, if we look deep and hard enough at them, dissolve from energy into something even more indistinct and hard to pin down, something that some scientists have suggested is itself akin to or even identical with consciousness. The only world that we can truly know is the world we know personally. The completely impersonal, completely objective, completely ‘out there’ world just isn’t there.

‘But what if, granting that this is the case in life, it is even more the case in death? What if in death, too, a world is waiting to encounter us, and that it too is partially independent of us and partially in need of our participation . . . but to a greater degree than it is in life? It may be that unlike the world we encounter ‘down here’ in earthly life, the world up there is infinitely more malleable to our directing imaginations, infinitely more ready to take on the shape and nature we want it to. In this transphysical dimension, perceiver and perceived may interact in such a way that the mark of the observer lies much more strongly upon what he or she observes—even though in both cases, it remains true that there really is an observer, and there really is a world that he or she is observing.

“In other words, it may be that just as we cannot live in the physical world in anything but a completely personal way, neither can we live in the world beyond this one in that way. Just as there is no such thing as a generic path through life—just as each life takes place in the first-person singular—so there is no such thing as an impersonal path through the worlds waiting after the death of the body. It is a journey that individuals take, and individuals alone.”

Ptolemy Tompkins, The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria Books, 2012), 100.

Is the afterlife a real dimension of imagination?

According to William Blake, who got many of his ideas on this subject from the seventeenth-century scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, the imagination is ‘the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the Vegetated body.’ This statement is hard to get much of a purchase on until we realize that what Blake is talking about is not ‘imagination’ in the sense of our ability to create unreal images within our minds, but rather a whole dimension of being: one which we enter when we leave the physical body, and which is less dense, less stubbornly immovable, but equally real.

 

When we die, in this view, we go to another real place. But the rules of this place are different from those that govern the material one we are in right now. Our active imaginations, after a lifetime of collaborating with physical reality, and doing so as the less powerful partner in the alliance, are suddenly much more free, much more in charge of things; they are in a realm of being in which, whether they want to be doing so or not, they are able to actively create much more of that reality than they did when they were in the physical world.

 

The afterlife is a place where, as the poet and student of afterlife philosophies William Butler Yeats put it, ‘Imagination is now the world.’ As such it has a novelistic depth and subtlety to it. The afterlife is, quite simply, as complex as we are. This is terrifying, but it is also the single most fantastically positive piece of news we could ever hear, and the cure for every variety of modern despair. For if the world beyond the body is a place where our full and fathomless interior complexity is allowed to emerge and truly exist, it means that we might actually be the secret larger beings that humans have, since the dawn of history, hoped to be.

 

Ptolemy Tompkins, The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria Books, 2012), 102 and 105.

On her way to heaven until called back

I woke up from surgery in the intensive care unit (ICU), looked at my husband and squeaked out, 'I never dreamed before while under surgery.' He thought that was a strange statement because I dream frequently. When the anesthesia wore off, I was able to tell the whole story. The doctor happened to be at my beside While I told the story to my husband.

Before when I had undergone surgery, it was like going to sleep and then waking up with no knowledge of time having passed. This time was different.

I was suddenly in a hallway. It was as if the walls, ceiling, and floor were made of light. It was as of love was a tangible thing, and I literally breathed it in and out. It was the most amazing feeling ever. I suddenly knew where my granny G was, so I started hurrying down the hallway, I was eager to go see her.

Suddenly, I heard someone scream, 'KIM!' I turned around and thought, 'I forgot my kids.' Then, I woke up in ICU.

The doctor's face went white as a sheet. He said that the surgery had been going perfectly. Then for no reason at all, my oxygen dropped to 60 percent, which is brain death. He tried everything to get me back, but nothing was working. Finally, he said that he grabbed my shoulders and screamed, "KIM!" in my face. Then, everything returned to normal.

I know I was on my way to heaven. Had I been allowed to actually see the other side, I don't think I would have wanted to return.

NDERF.org 

The spiritual: Steal Away Home

Steal away, steal away, steal away home to Jesus.


Steal away, steal away home.
I ain't got long to stay here.

 

My Lord is calling,
is calling by the thunder.


The trumpet sounds within-a my soul.
I ain't got long to stay here.

 

Steal away, steal away, steal away home to Jesus.


Steal away, steal away home.
I ain't got long to stay here.

 

My Lord is calling, is calling by the lightning.

The trumpet sounds within-a my soul. I ain’t got long to stay here.

 

Steal away, steal away, steal away home to Jesus.


Steal away, steal away home.
I ain't got long to stay here.

 

Umoya Gospel Journey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL93GqQiiDg

A near-death experience of Unconditional Love

I remember the four hours it took to get me to surgery. My wife said I was in excruciating pain but I do not remember any pain. I remember telling her I couldn't feel my legs anymore and then I couldn't feel my left arm. I knew I was dying. I remember signing my own consent form. I finally was wheeled to the operating room.

I then left the earthly realm and entered into an alternate reality. I saw a lagoon that was surrounded by beautiful plants. Everything was soft to the touch. There were 4 or 5 entities who were present, but I could not see them. They assured me that everything would be all right and that I could leave anytime I wanted. They told me that this place was for me and it contained all the Unconditional Love I had for others and that they had for me.

I did leave that place once but then came back. I asked why everything was soft and was told that the energy that binds matter here is that of Unconditional Love. I laid down on the ground. The energy embraced me and the profound healing power of Unconditional Love healed me.

One of the doctors on the team that worked on me came to see me once I was alert. The doctor was very nervous around me and told me that she felt like she was in the presence of a saint because I should be dead and nobody can explain how I survived. In surgery, I had a dissected aortic arch that ruptured into my chest. During the aortic repair my brain was completely drained of blood and filled with cryogenic fluid. They used a new technique that is recommended for 60 to 90 minutes maximum. Yet, my brain was frozen for 100 minutes. I suffered ten brain clots and stroked at some time during surgery. My entire frontal lobe was a continuous bruise.

After a thorough brain scan, the doctor asked me how I was doing. I told her that I was home from the hospital and starting to do a lot of things. The doctor informed me that people with as much brain injury as I had, don't even get out of bed. Yet, I felt fine except for some dizzy spells.

It has been 5 months now and I can run 12 miles. I'm a bit emotional but doing very well. I feel I have gained great insight into the nature of the universe, life and its purpose. 

 

NDERF.org