Changing Perspectives on Life After Death

People used to debate whether there was an “afterlife” without mentioning the “beforelife” or much debate about what this discarnate “life” might be like. But today, the sophistication of information about the life of the spirit -- and the desire for such information -- has increased greatly

books: The Case for an Afterlife by Roy Ald (1968), Life Without Death? by Nils O. Jacobson (1974), Journey of Souls (1994) by Michael Duff Newton; Ultimate Journey by Robert Monroe (1996)

It’s a curious fact that even our perceptions about what constitutes evidence of whether we exist before or after our earthly life changes with time. The Christian religion teaches that there is an afterlife, but is silent on the subject of where we are before birth. It also provides little insight about what the life after death must consist of. In the early years of Christianity, many believed in reincarnation, but that belief was outlawed at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. In the Jewish religion, there is no requirement of any belief in an afterlife, but the Hasidic Jews, who study the Kabbalah, do believe in reincarnation. For most people growing up in the 40s, 50s, or 60s, the whole subject was a big question mark with few places to turn for information. They could either just accept whatever their church told them, or they could look at stories about paranormal happenings and consider it proof of survival of death.

An Author’s Experience
I have two older books that deal with this topic. The oldest, from 1968, is called The Case for an Afterlife by Roy Ald. Ald was a writer who got interested in the subject through an extraordinary personal experience that convinced him that the spirit survives death. He tell us the following story. He was supposed to get on a plane but had an overpowering urge to go back to a restaurant in the terminal where he thought he might have left something. It was irrational because he could see he had his bag and his ticket. Back at the restaurant, he found he had left nothing there and began his way back to the gate, walking at a slow pace despite having very little time before the plane left. As he forced himself to walk faster, he felt a restraining hand on his shoulder. He turned to find no one there. The delay caused him to miss his plane. Soon afterward, he learned the plane had crashed. What made the story remarkable was his insight about who the mysterious hand might have belonged to.

The author had a friend, a talented artist, who had passed away after a long illness. The author had once saved the man’s life by responding to a sudden urge to call his friend at home. Getting no answer, he was worried and went to the man’s apartment and found him passed out on the floor. The author located the pills the man took when he got these dizzy spells and got him to take the medication, bringing the man back from certain death. This man told Ald that in gratitude, he would take care of him.

But that’s not the end. The man that Ald saved had himself had a similar experience of being saved from a fatal accident. As a young man, he had fallen in love, but his lover had died. He faced life too discouraged to pursue his talent as an artist until one day he was about to board a train, but was late. As he ran to catch the train and was about to jump on, he felt a hand grab him and pull him back. The train left without him, but it soon suffered an accident and all onboard were killed. The man who had almost gotten on that train was sure it had been his departed lover whose hand had saved him. This gave him the courage to face life and pursue his talent as an artist. He felt all his life that his departed lover watched over him, so when his friend, the author, saved him he promised to reciprocate. And naturally when the mysterious hand grabbed the author at the airport and saved him from dying in a plane crash, he felt it was his departed friend taking care of him.

True Stories of Strange Experiences
Roy Ald’s book is full of stories of similar happenings. In one of the most incredible, an old lady who is at a cemetery with a funeral party disappears, then is found to have taken a cab to a stranger’s apartment and assumed the identity of another woman. In her new identity, she had taken on the personality, gestures, and knowledge of the departed woman who had lived in the apartment with her niece, the niece’s husband, and her retired father, a Jewish scholar who went each day to the synagogue. It was the belief of the older man that this woman could have been taken over by the spirit of his departed sister. The woman lived in their home for seven months as “Aunt Tessie” before one day going to the laundry room and suddenly returning to her right identity. She walked out to the street and took a cab home and remembered nothing about the time she had spent in the other home. This case is interesting because "Aunt Tessie" seemed unaware she had taken over someone else's body and there is no indication as to why she did it or why she suddenly left.

In another story in this book, a New York cab driver picks up one of his regular fares, an older lady who has been an actress all her life and is currently appearing in a play. The cabbie had not been driving his regular customers for a few days because he had been sick, but this day he went back to his routine and looked for the lady where she usually waited. He sees her there and lets her into the cab and drives to the theater. But when he arrives at the theater and stops the cab, there is no lady in the back seat. Puzzled, he goes back over part of his route. Failing to find her, he goes back to the theater and asks the doorman if the lady showed up, only to learn that the lady had passed away a few days ago. He had apparently driven a ghost to the theater.

In other stories, a soldier killed in Viet Nam on his way to get a plane home for his mother’s funeral shows up at the funeral home, seen by all family members who did not know of his death. In another story, a dead prostitute continues to see clients (talk about having sex that is “out of this world!!”). And a Holocaust survivor is saved from being lowered into a pool of sewage by the materialized arm of a man recently killed who had protected her while he was alive.

The ghosts in these stories do not just appear, they interact with living people. In one story a ghost with an ax kills several people, and in another story a “haunted” jail cell is the scene of several murders by a former occupant who died after a severe beating in that cell. The author attempts no explanation of these things, but does provide information on how they were documented. He included only incidents where he personally interviewed those involved. I find it interesting that he classifies these as “evidence for an afterlife.” Today, we would probably classify them as psi phenomenon, very interesting events that show us we might not understand reality as we think we do.

Is There Really Any Evidence for an Afterlife?
But as “evidence of an afterlife” these stories tell us little or nothing about what it's like in the other realm. Don’t bother looking for the Roy Ald book as it is so long out of print it doesn’t even show up in Amazon.Com as an “out-of-print” book. I got my yellowed copy at a used book store.

Also unavailable is another book I have that really got me thinking about survival of the spirit after death. This book is Life Without Death? by Nils O. Jacobson, M.D., a translation from Swedish published in 1971. It takes a much more sophisticated approach, connecting the paranormal with the idea of survival of death, but going beyond that to examine the meaning of consciousness and to formulate some theories on how survival works. The book examines possession, telepathy, reincarnation, astral travel, clairvoyance, and precognition, along with possible explanations of what might happen at birth and death. It looks at both unusual events of the sort reported in Roy Ald’s book as well as scientific experiments. It is an ambitious look at the whole subject.

Dr. Jacobson’s book covers a lot of territory, but some of the information jumped out at me. In one section, he talks about an experiment done a hundred years ago by Duncan McDougall with people who were dying. He placed their bed on a weighing platform and took measurements. As they neared death, they lost weight as was expected. But at the moment of death a sudden and unexplainable loss of 21 grams was registered. This held true for each dying person. These experiments have never been repeated (at least they hadn’t as of the writing of this book) and I have never seen a report of this experiment anywhere but in this book. In other experiments, people photographed or saw a misty substance above the dying person’s body, or saw a silver cord break. In other experiments, Dr. Jacobson talks about strange voices heard on tape recordings that turn out to be messages from the beyond. This phenomenon was studied by Konstantin Raudive who published a book on it in 1968.

Beyond the Physical Senses
Dr. Jacobson’s book presents many hypotheses about how life after death might work and how consciousness could be separated from the brain. The perceptions of those who have passed over are not based on physical senses, but the same is true of the sleeping state in which we see things clearly and vividly. He has much information about the mystical experience, which can be considered a glimpse into another realm, where seeing and knowing are not from physical senses. Here is a quote from a Canadian doctor in 1872, describing a mystical experience: “…there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence…”

Dr. Jacobson’s description of a OBE (Out of Body Experience) is very similar to that of Robert Monroe in his book, Ultimate Journey. Dr. Jacobson writes: "In isolated cases, it has appeared possible to remove the self from the body’s presence to regions which do not seem to belong to the physical plane." But Monroe goes way beyond the confines of this earthly plane in his OBEs. His spirit travels the "interstate" and meets other souls, even taking a task on himself of helping others who have just crossed over. He gives us a picture of souls who pass over and don’t understand their situation without help. Most newly-deceased are met by souls they know but some remain in a location where they don’t belong, or just fail to move on as they should. He talks about a place where people stuck in certain belief systems go to be with others who believe as they do. These belief systems retard their growth and keep them in the same spiritual realm for many lifetimes until they can move beyond.

What is the Other Realm Like?
Monroe’s world of souls is very similar to the spirit world revealed in Journey of Souls. In this last book, written by psychologist Michael Newton, each soul who passes over is met by a guide. These guides have been watching over the souls in their care for many lifetimes. The guides are sometimes people still living, or they may be people who were not part of the soul’s last life. But the guide is a compassionate being who has the task of helping the souls entrusted to him to reach enlightenment. Through the interviews with subjects recalling past lives, we learn that new souls are always being created and the people alive now comprise many newer souls.

Robert Monroe’s book is in many ways more credible than Newton's, but it is not for anyone who has no exposure to the spirit world. It is tough reading because Monroe is writing about a realm most of us have not seen (or at least that we don’t remember). He travels in this spirit realm with total assurance, but with a seeker’s yearning to find the ultimate truth. Robert Monroe founded the Monroe Institute which offers seminars and does research into remote viewing and out of body experiences. I believe Monroe really took the journeys he writes about and has tried through his Institute to bring the knowledge of these realms to others. His experiences are real and not happenings recalled under hypnosis, but of course, we have only Robert Monroe to tell us they are real.

What emerges in these books is that after death we remain who we are, bringing our hopes and fears with us. We never escape problems by dying and our concern for those still in the material world remains. However, our capacity to know and learn is greater in the spirit world, and we can move up to higher levels where our interest in our last life will wane and our joy will increase. We will return to the earth in a new body to learn more lessons or to make up for past sins, but as we advance in spiritual wisdom, we will not want to return. We will take on more tasks connected with helping other, less experienced souls.

The cases in Journey of Souls are all based on hypnosis. They have a fantastic internal consistency that makes me wonder if there is an influence from the hypnotist. Does everyone really have a guide who meets them at death? Monroe’s experiences in that realm would seem to indicate otherwise. The stories in Journey of Souls give us a hopeful picture of this world and the next. Our spirit guides, we learn, are with us all the time, helping us behind the scenes while we are on this earth and helping us directly when we depart. After each life, they conduct an informal review of how we lived and what we should have learned. Life, in this picture of reality, is about learning and improving and reaching higher levels of awareness. More advanced souls help the less advanced. It's an inspiring picture and I hope it's true, but the method of obtaining the information -- hypnosis -- leaves me with a shred of doubt.

What Should we Believe?
Where Roy Ald used interviews to track down incidents that seemed to indicate survival of death, Dr. Jacboson tried a more scientific approach using hypotheses that he tried to test, and Robert Monroe, like the mystics, used direct experience. But Michael Newton relies on hypnosis and the now faddish "treatment" of past-life regression. Which of these are valid? The evidence given under hypnosis is interesting, but how do you compare it to events with real witnesses? How do you weight the insights of a mystic? It appears the concept of the spiritual realm has gained more adherents and many are willing to believe the evidence of hypnosis. Certainly, we learn far more from the people who go back to the period before this life and tell us what the other realm is like. But is it believable?

Hypnosis is just the latest wrinkle in what people will accept as "evidence." I am reminded that a hundred years ago séances were popular and many people believed they communicated with the dead through mediums. Today, we have a show on TV -- Crossing Over, With John Edward on the Sci Fi Channel -- in which a modern medium nightly puts members of an audience in touch with people who have passed over (“passed” is the preferred word for “dead” on this show). Instead of using a darkened room with a crystal ball, it's done in a brightly-lit glitzy studio; maybe the TV cameras give these mediumistic performances the update they need to be acceptable. What we regard as acceptable evidence has changed over the years, but the search, as always, goes on.

For more insights on life after death, read my review of Letters From the Other Side, a collection of letters received through automatic handwriting, written by a loving brother and sister to their still-living sister. Also read my review of The Stars Still Shine, the after-life journal of "Michael." I also recommend:

• Fringe Dweller on the Night Shift: True Stories from an Afterlife Paramedic. This book is testimony from a woman who spends her sleeping time helping those who have crossed over.
• All of Robert Monroe's books

To The Seeker Books book reviews