Death and Beyond Part 4
by Tony Crisp
This feature was originally part of a series written for Yoga and Health, and published in the early 70's.
Heaven and Hell
I SUPPOSE we have all at some time awoken, terrified, from a dream where a bull is chasing us. Or maybe our nightmare is one in which an evil old man or woman grabs at us. Or we open a door and see an awful monster in the shape of a deformed animal or human.
Most of us now know enough about dreams to realise that such terrible creatures are our own fears or guilts, hates or sexual urges, given shape and character in our dreams. In the dream we see, as if outside of us, all our inner world of angers, loves, hates and desires. In the dream our innermost feelings, creativity, problems and triumphs are acted out in dramatic form before our gaze.
Joan Grant, in her book 'Winged Pharaoh', describes her trials of Initiation. She had left her body, and in the world of the dead was facing her worst fears. In one of them she says:
'There before me in the mountainside I saw a cave, and from it a passageway led steeply down into a darkness piercing with bats that swept about me with their leathery wings lit by a faint phosphorescence, which came from bodies whose putrefying flesh fouled the scant air with heavy sickening stench, the shaft slanted more steeply down. It narrowed, until I had to crawl and further, until I lay upon my face and could only drag my body through the cleft by digging my fingers into the rock. I went forward in a darkness closer than a tomb, and I thought that I should be entrapped to linger eternally in the crushing shroud of a mighty mountain, cleaving to the earth. Here time stood still, yet seemed eternity. I found my way barred by solid rock, but with my will I drove my desperate hands to claw their way against it. And not until my fingers were stumps of splintered bone did it yield before me. Then I fought myself into the freedom of the outer air.
Here again, as in dreams, we see the exteriorisation of inner fears or attitudes. Of course, such exteriorisation can also be of the positive, loving or balanced side of self.
In my out-of-the-body experience already described, my unconscious desires to be a civilian exteriorised into civvy clothes instead of pyjamas or RAF uniform. Lilly, and the other two people instructed by an outer 'voice' had exteriorised their transcendental self into a wise voice. Visions of Jesus, saints, gurus, God, or gods, are often a similar exteriorisation or projection outward of our own innermost nature.
In Spiritualism, this process of exteriorisation and projection is very pronounced. The voices heard, the personalities contacted, heaven or hell experienced after death, are nearly always seen as something other than or outside of self. But as in dreams, this heaven or hell is an exteriorisation of our own inner condition. Our inner hatred will be experienced as outer malicious creature or demons jabbing at us. Our love and wisdom will be seen as an outer wise man or Christlike figure.
But it is important to remember that like our experience on Earth, our experience in Heaven or Hell is a collective one. Just as the love or hate of individuals, their genius or ignorance, their creativeness or destructiveness, together have created the world as we know it - so the collective mind of the dead create, even more intensely, the condition, even though subjective, they experience.
Life in the World Unseen
In 1954 Anthony Borgia published a book which he said was dictated to him by a man who had died some years earlier. He was able to write this book, he says, due to being able to communicate easily with those in the bodiless existence, much as our previous experiment suggested. The book is called 'Life in the World Unseen'.
Describing his travels in the 'Dark Realms', the bodiless author says 'At close view it became clear that these dwellings were nothing more than hovels. The people living within these hovels were not necessarily those who upon earth had committed some crime in the eyes of the earth people. There were many who, without doing any harm, had never, never done any good to a single mortal upon earth. These people had lived entirely unto themselves, without a thought to others ... The denizens of these lower spheres built up the appalling conditions of their spirit life ... Their bodies presented the outward appearance of the most hideous and repulsive malformations and distortions, the absolute reflection of their evil minds...
In the higher spheres the beauty of mind rejuvenates the features, sweeps away the signs of earthly cares, and presents to the eye that state of physical development we call the 'prime life'.
The author goes on to say that neither the higher or lower spheres are places of reward or punishment. They are simply reflections of the people themselves. If it is punishment, it is only self inflicted. Any person at any moment, if they change their attitudes or state of mind, immediately experiences a changed environment.
What we have gathered from our own experiments, and the experience of others, can now begin to be put together in a greater pattern of understanding.
First, the formless foundation of our being we enter each night in dreamless sleep, experiences the limitations and forms of physical existence in waking life. Out of the sense impressions and subjective experiences, out of language and the arising self awareness, we built a sense of self or personality. This personality is, without attempting a too complex definition, the essence of the countless experiences gathered.
Death is what you make it
We have also seen though, that people receive a positive input of experience not only through their senses. In many dreams, death experiences, or during prayer and meditation, there often comes, objectified as a voice or Teacher, a comment on, explanation of, teaching about, our outer life experience from the transcendental aspect of self.
The waking personality can therefore not only receive an experience of physical life through the senses, but can also be aware, in a dream, or in meditation, the transcendental self's comments on its 'life'. But perhaps we turn away from such comments. People very often objectify these intuitive insights and look upon them as arising from something other than themselves. God is looked upon as something distinct and separate from self, and perhaps worshipped or ignored. Nevertheless the commentary of the transcendent on our everyday experience generally leads not only to a synthesis or unity of our uncountable life experiences, but a uniting of self with a greater whole.
Perhaps J. W. Dunne's explanation of life and death can help us to take the next step in understanding. Dunne was a scientist who carried out research into dreams and the consciousness of time. His best known book is 'Experiment with Time'. But this following description is from 'Nothing Dies'. I will try to simplify it.
Dunne asks us to imagine the experiences of our life, from birth to death, as a piano keyboard. We pass through experiences in sequence. This is like playing the notes in sequence one at a time from the left. He says however, that the transcendent aspect of self is beyond this sequence, and can look at the whole vast array of keys, or any mixture already experienced. But our ego consciousness perceives only each note in turn.
wild jumble of dreams
There are, however, Dunne says, gaps in the keyboard where our ego is withdrawn from experiencing sequentially through our physical senses. In this condition we stare at all the keys we have already experienced and perhaps even those not yet reached by us. Instead of playing the notes in sequence, we now, like an untrained child, bang them here, there and any old where, making a hell of a noise. Thus, out of our stock of forms, experiences and emotions, we can create a wild jumble of dreams. We may have, in our sequential physical life, at one time seen an elephant. Years later we saw a steam roller, and now in the dream we have an elephant driving a steam roller.
A point Dunne did not make in this example is the part our preferences and fears play in this re-creation of images. Certain keys we may have a great preference for, others a great disgust or fear. Thus our personal likes and dislikes largely direct what keys we choose to play.
Dunne goes on to say that if the person now loses his sequential experience of the keyboard for good - i.e. they die - and gain control of their discordent key thumping, they can create MUSIC. 'Think of what you can do!' he says,
'The whole range of musical composition lies before you, and this with an instrument, the keyboard of which is a lifetime of human experience of - every description. Do not fear or shirk the experience. The more varied it is, the finer becomes your instrument, and the richer the possible effects. There are great notes to be produced. - There are sombre tones. And there are other players operating other instruments giving the possibility of orchestral effects - effects which must increase in complexity and magnificence as agreement is reached between more and more performers; until, I am now scientifically certain, the Hand of a Great Conductor will become manifest, and we shall discover we are taking part in a Symphony of All Creation. The magnitude of your own share does not matter; for the smaller it may be, the better you will hear the whole. But, to hear that symphony, while playing your own part therein, is absorption.
Shortly after writing this book, Dunne stopped looking at his own sequential keyboard. Perhaps he is, even now, absorbed!
Unfortunately Dunne seems to be leaping ahead of our story, and quoting some of the later chapters at the beginning. In other words, he takes it for granted -
(a) that we realise what the score is when we die.
(b) that we know how to play the piano without practising or training.
(c) that we can, without having learned, co-operate harmoniously with the other players.
(d) that we recognise and follow the hand of the Great Conductor, even if we have denied such a thing all our life.
The point I am making is; why, when we flounder and 'drown' in our dreams during life, should we suddenly become great pianists or dreamers, as soon as death arrives? If we create a hell on earth in our family, social or national life by the expression of our lusts, hates, opinions and emotions we cannot, or do not wish to, control, will death suddenly make us a saint who can now direct every mood, face every fear, play every nuance of feeling?
hell is of our doing
If we have not reached the point of maturity where we can admit that the hell we may experience here on earth in our marriage, our job, our family, our health, our society, is of our own making - and can only be changed by changing ourselves - how can we avoid creating a hell in the subjective experience of death?
If every manufactured thing is an expression of thought or desire, or even hatred or fear - such as bombs - we have to admit we make nine tenths of our physical experience by our individual and collective thoughts and emotions. It's no good, like thousands do, crying out 'why did God make this war'. God didn't create the war, we did. Every shell, every rifle, every plane, every bomb: and if we fight hand to hand, we even initiate it with our nationalism or hate.
There is not enough space here to amass the necessary evidence, but humankind even creates conditions in the animal, vegetable - and mineral kingdoms, by their own state of thinking and feeling.
In dreams and in the death world, we can see immediately how we create our own heaven and hell by our state of soul. As I said earlier, it takes longer to impress the material world with our desires and plans - but this is what every house, every car, every tank and atom bomb is - an exteriorisation of our inner condition. And a family, a marriage, a nation, a war or peace, an earthly heaven or hell, are no less exteriorisations of our - yours and my - inner condition.
changing our attitudes of mind
In The Book, it promises a new heaven and a new earth. We have begun to see, tentatively as yet, how we can create a new heaven from a hell, by simply changing our attitude of mind. But can you yet see how a new earth can be made? For earth can be transmuted as quickly as heaven. This so solid physical world is not quite what it seems, as science with its discovery of worlds beyond the atom has proved. This reality can metamorphose as quickly as a dream.
You may find this hard to believe, so let me give a few cases, all from one easily verifiable source - Kathryn Kuhlman's book - I Believe in Miracles (published by Lakeland).
Kathryn Kuhlman holds regular services at Carnegie Auditorium in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Seven thousand people crowd in regularly. The sick are carried in helpless on stretchers, and walk out. The maimed are healed, the dying given life. Take
Paul Gunn, for instance; his case is on records at the Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh. When he was dying of advanced cancer of the lung, he attended a Kathryn Kuhlman service, and says, 'Suddenly the power of God came down. It hit me and just for an instant the sensation of burning fire in my lung was more intense than it had ever been before. And then it was all over - just like that.' Back at the hospital fresh X rays, lab tests and bronchoscopy showed no cancer whatsoever.
Kathryn Kuhlman often asks the vast assembly of people to concentrate their love and prayers on just one person. If mankind creates much of the physical world, their body included, with the power flowing through their mind and emotions, think of what is happening when 7,000 people all hold one idea for one person. The so called solid physical reality metamorphoses under the impact.
Kathryn Kuhlman also has a daily radio broadcast praying for the sick. Thousands listen and add their prayers to hers. Here is the story of Richard Kichline dying of transverse myelitis. His case is also on record at the Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh.
power of directed prayer
Richard's family and a group of friends made a habit of listening to the daily prayer broadcast, and praying for Richard. One morning at 10.55, with a doctor by his side, the power of their directed prayer hit Richard. He says:
I felt the power of God go through my whole body I began to shake violently and uncontrollably (this shaking occurs in many of these healings). I suppose this lasted for four or five minutes. Then it stopped, and almost immediately I began to have sensation in my legs.' Before this Richard was paralysed and without sensation. 'The next day', Richard says, 'I was struck again by the Power at exactly the same time'. Shortly after this Richard was well and back at school. Another crack in reality?
Edith Erskine, dying of cancer of the liver, whose case is on record at Tarentum Hospital, Pennsylvania, is another of countless cases. Dr. Cross told her children, 'Her liver is like your grandmother's old lace curtain.' A prayer request was sent to Kathryn Kuhlman's radio programme. Her daughter Louise was with her in hospital listening to the broadcast as the request was read. She says:
In the middle of the prayer, the Power went through mother, and I couldn't hold her in bed, so violently was she shaking and crying. A nurse came running in, and they began giving her hypodermics. They didn't know what was wrong with her. But within a matter of days she was out of hospital. The doctors, having previously already decided on an operation, later opened her and found no trace of cancer, only scars on the liver where it had been.
Is this yet another crack in reality?
In her book 'God can Do It Again', Kathryn Kuhlman lets people tell their own stories. Three doctors are among those who testify to the miraculous healings. Having carefully read the cases, maybe you will agree with me that the thousands of people praying with Kathryn Kuhlman, are creating a new earth. Having changed their inner state, the outer world is cracking up to reform itself. And if the majority of the world's population directed their prayers and love and thought in common purposes, the whole world with its present deserts, wars, rampant diseases and famine, would metamorphose.
releasing the power
I realise this may be impossible for most people to believe. But let us approach it experimentally again. Try it first of all on just a tiny part of the physical world - your own body. Find someone who can help you release what Kathryn Kuhlman calls 'the Power', and see what happens. I have tried it and it works. My old 'reality' is metamorphosing as my inner condition changes. I am not asking you to believe. You don't need faith. All you need, and all I am asking you to do, is to try the experiment.
Remember, you may not have an immediate miracle. There are also slow miracles.
Death and Beyond parts One - Two - Three - Four - Five
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