Multiple after-death bodies are transitional

“However many or few spiritual bodies we may actually possess is not so essential a question as it may first seem, if we remember that the extraphysical dimensions can appear differently depending on who is looking at them. A spiritual tradition that describes the human being, for example, as having eight bodies (as a number of North American tribes do) is looking at human extraphysical experience form its particular earthly perspective, with that perspective’s particular assumptions and traditions. But whether four in number, or five, or eight, these extrapysical bodies always convey the idea of a central being who manifests through a number of more exterior bodies, each of which is appropriate to a particular level of the multistoried physical-material universe.

“What all these perspectives have common is the insight that, no matter how few or many of these bodies there may be, once each has served its purpose it is no longer a tool but an obstruction, and the core identity seeks to escape from it with the kind of immediate intuition of its uselessness that the Reverend Bertrand so vividly displayed that day in the Swiss Alps. Each body is first a tool and the, if not discarded, a hindrance and an anchor, holding back from where we are supposed to go and preventing us from becoming what we are not supposed to be.

 

“To leave one body behind is, again universally and regardless of the fine points, to undergo a death that is, at the same time, a birth. When, on the earthly plane, we see an animal emerge from a shed skin, or a butterfly emerge from a chrysalis, what we are seeing is the earthly version of a process that continues to occur in the dimensions beyond this one, an idea that Henry Corbin explained by saying that the world beyond our own symbolize with this world. What this means—and it’s an idea that while at first seemingly alien actually makes a deep intuitive sense—is that the stuff that goes on in the dimensions above this one bears similarity to this one, even when that stuff appears at first glance to be completely unrelated to it. Different as the worlds are, they are levels of one single cosmos, so that what first appears strange will, if we linger with it, eventually cease seeming so.”

 

Ptolemy Tompkins, The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria Books, 2012), 212-13.

Would the dead be dressed as they choose?

"The fact that the newly disembodied dead seemed often to find themselves not only dressed, but dressed in items of clothing they’d possessed in life, early on struck critics of this kind of narrative as final and irrefutable proof of their absurdity. For consciousness to survive death in any form is, from this perspective, absurd enough. To survive it personally, with one’s entire earthly sensibility intact, is more so. But to survive it in one’s favorite slacks and T-shirt is the last straw. As psychologist David Fontana, in a discussion of the related phenomenon of apparitions appearing in familiar clothes to people in this world, writes: 'people often seem more surprised by the references to clothes than they do to the references to the apparitions themselves, and use the idea of clothes as a reason for dismissing everything as the observer’s imagination.'

 

"Like it or not, though the clothing issue is just too widespread to be ignored. Scientist Robert Crookall, who wasn’t one to look away from a consistent theme in afterlife material no matter how ridiculous it might strike others, even devoted an entire monograph to the subject (titled, appropriately enough, ‘Ghost Clothes’). He there writes the following: 'If the physical body has an objective etheric double, then presumably all other physical objects, including of course clothes, must have etheric doubles.'

"Etheric derives from ether, a word that, before its modern use in organic chemistry, referred to a mysterious intangible substance that ancient philosophers hypothesized permeated the entire universe. The spiritual body closest to the physical body (the one described in narratives like the ones above, that acts as a kind of battery supplying transphysical energies to the physical body before the “cord” connecting the two is severed) is often called the etheric body.

"By positing the existence of a world just as real as or even more real than ours, but more susceptible to our unconscious perceptive/creative abilities, the imaginal can help us see that the world we enter at death might hold not just things like ethereal, semiphysical cords and threads but far more familiar and personal items as well. The basic idea here (and it is an idea stated again and again in postmortem literature both ancient and modern) is that when we die we remain, first and foremost, ourselves—with our same habits and limitations, our same quirks, and our same strengths. We have bodies, we have perceptions, we are capable of movement and decision and indecision . . . And, because the doors of the fantastically intricate treasure house of earthly memory are thrown open, every object we ever came into contact with while alive is capable of being resuscitated.”

 

Ptolemy Tompkins, The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria Books, 2012), 209-11.

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.

The near-death experience of Rev. J. L. Bertrand

Another mountain climbing narrative with many classic NDE features comes from a clergyman named J. L. Bertrand. While on a journey up a mountain in Switzerland, Bertrand, who was not a young man at the time felt tired and decided to stop his ascent and allow the younger members of the party to pick him up on their way back down.

 

“I sat down,” recalled Bertrand, "my legs handing over a precipice, my back leaning on a rock as big as an armchair. I chose that brink because there was no snow, and because I could face better the magnificent panorama of the Alpes Bernoises. I at once remembered that in my pocket there were two cigars, and put one between my teeth.” Bertrand lit the cigar, sat back, and considered himself “the happiest of men.”

 

Suddenly a kind of paralysis came over him. The match he had lit for his cigar burned down to his fingers, but he was unable to release it. Though his body was immobilized, Bertrand’s thoughts were crystal clear. “If I move,” he reported thinking to himself, “I shall roll down in the abyss; if I do not move, I shall be a dead man in twenty-five or thirty minutes.”

 

Unable to do anything else, Bertrand studied the sensations he felt as his body temperature slowly dropped. First his hands and feet froze, then “little by little death reached my knees and elbows. The sensation was not painful, and my mind felt quite easy. But when death had been all over my body my head became unbearably cold, and it seemed to me that pincers squeezed my heart. I never felt such an acute pain, but it lasted only a minute, and my life went out.”

 

“’Well," thought I, "at last I am what they call a dead man, and here I am, a ball of air in the air, a captive balloon still attached to earth by a kind of elastic string, and going up and always up . . ."

 

Looking down, Bertrand saw his half-frozen carcass sitting on the snowy ledge. “What a horrid thing is that body—deadly pale, with a yellowish-blue color, holding a cigar in its mouth and a match in its two burned fingers. . . . If only I had a hand and scissors to cut the thread which ties me still to it!”

 

With the feeling of joy and lucid calm that are also so often mentioned in the context of these experiences, Bertrand felt his vision expand, so that he could suddenly see far beyond the mountain his body was on. He saw his wife traveling to the village of Lucerne—though Bertrand recalled that she had told him she was not going there until the following day.

 

“My own regret was that I could not cut the string. In vain I traveled through such beautiful worlds that earth became insignificant. I had only two wishes: the certitude of not returning to earth, and the discovery of my next glorious body, without which I felt powerless.

Then Bertrand suddenly felt a tug. “Something was pulling the balloon down.” The guide had discovered Bertrand’s body and was rubbing it with snow to shock him back into consciousness.

 

“I felt disdain for the guide who, expecting a good reward, tried to make me understand that he had done wonders. My grief was immeasurable.”

 

Ptolemy Tompkins, The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria Books, 2012), 197-99.

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.