Albert Heim's near-death experience in the 1880s

Near-death experiences (though not yet called such) undergone by mountain climbers were so common that in 1893 a Swiss geologist named Albert Heim published an entire collection of them called Notes on Deaths from Falls. Heim has suffered such a fall and was astonished to discover, in the few brief seconds it took to occur, that his frame of reference shifted gears dramatically, allowing him to suddenly see his entire life as if from the position of a spectator: a spectator who was at once completely involved, and just as completely disinterested, in what was happening.

"I saw my whole past," wrote Heim in classic NDE fashion, "take place in many images, as though on a stage at some distance from me. I saw myself as the chief character in the performance. Everything was transfigured as though by a heavenly light and everything was beautiful without grief or anxiety, and without pain. The memory of very tragic experiences I had was clear but not saddening. I felt no conflict or strife; conflict had been transmuted into love. Elevated and harmonious thought dominated and united the individual images, and like magnificent music a divine calm swept through my soul."

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

African American spiritual: By and By

We are often tossed and driv’n on the restless sea of time,
somber skies and howling tempest oft succeed a bright sunshine;
in that land of perfect day, when the mists have rolled away,
we will understand it better by and by.

Refrain:
By and by, when the morning comes, when the saints of God are gathered home,
we’ll tell the story, how we’ve overcome, for we’ll understand it better by and by.

We are often destitute of the things that life demands,
want of food and want of shelter, thirsty hills and barren lands;
we are trusting in the Lord, and according to the Word,
we will understand it better by and by. [Refrain]

Temptations, hidden snares, often take us unawares,
and our hearts are made to bleed for any thoughtless word or deed;
and we wonder why the test when we try to do our best,
but we’ll understand it better by and by. [Refrain]

 

An African-American congregation singing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0IJ9aLBkcE

African-American composer, Charles A. Tindley (1851-1933)

This spiritual was written in 1905; the tune is known as By and By

Why Transcendentalists embraced reincarnation

“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.

“The difference here from most Eastern versions of reincarnation is that with the Eastern models, it is the ethical residue of a life that lasts from one life to the next. That is, if you did something bad in one life, then you’ll have to pay for it in the next. This is a hugely important insight, of course, for the idea that the universe actually possesses an ethical component that is as real as the energy patterns of which it is made up is perhaps the central insight of all Eastern philosophy. Not only that, but the thinkers of the East didn’t just hypothesize this fact: through intensive meditative techniques, they experienced it as a living reality. If the first and greatest shock that an individual experiences at death is that they are ‘still here’—still themselves—the second, more gradually dawning shock is that the universe is a place where good and bad exist as more than simple cultural designations but actual metaphysical categories; in other worlds, that the goodness of badness of an action is as real as an atom collision.

“But this insight tended, in the Eastern visions of the reincarnation drama, to remain focused purely on the ethical side of things. Still, if the universe is capable of retaining and remembering our every thought and action, this also might mean that the more personal aspects of our existence can survive, too. The atmosphere of a certain summer afternoon, the particular words of a particular person, spoken on a particular day, when a particular tree was moving in just a certain way outside a half-open window, the pain on which was ever so slightly chipped . . . in this vision of the reincarnation drama, this stuff survives as well. The kind of things that, in our day, are included in poems and novels and treated there usually as magical but tragically singular ephemera: the glimmering bits that float on the surface of a universe that, seemingly for no real reason, gives birth to them for a moment and then gobbles them up forever. All these tiny, complex, and hugely mysterious details of an individual personal life, lived once and once only . . . In this new vision, this is all saved, too. Human meaning, in this view, isn’t just a distraction to reentry into the divine, or sunyata, or whatever one might choose to call it, but in large part the reason for the journey. We are born, and born again, not because we are stuck in a pointless circular honey pit of fear and desire, but because each of us is a complex being, growing and changing not in spite of but precisely by means of the very real individual experiences that happen to us. This doesn’t change the key Eastern idea that the universe is a moral place, but it adds something crucial to it: something that changes the reincarnation process from a trap and a machine of despair into a process productive of, rather than antithetical to, true human meaning.

 

Ptolemy Tompkins, The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria Books, 2012), 135-36.

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.