"I'll make a toast to sudden doom..."
A silent hush came over the room.
"To death, blood, a vampire's kiss
To eerie nights such as this...
Close encounters to the dominate kind,
People who invade your mind...
Diving into someone's soul
To fill the void in your black hole...
somehow forgetting about yourself
Realizing then - "there is no one else"
A universe eternally filled with gloom...
To you, my toast of sudden doom."
Elizabeth Evans
Private Eye Weekly, 4 May 1994
Salt Lake City, Utah
"There are seven planes...seven through which we must pass before we are returned. One of them is the plane of transistion. There you wait. In that plane it is determined what you will take back with you into the next life. We will all have a...dominant trait. This might be greed, or it might be lust, but whatever is determined, you need to fulfill your debts to those people. Then you must overcome this in that lifetime. You must learn to overcome greed. If you do not, when you return you will have to carry that trait, as well as another one, into your next life. The burdens will become greater. With each life that you go through and you did not fulfill these debts, the next one will be harder. If you fulfill them, you will be given an easy life. So you choose what life you will have. In the next phase, you are responsible for the life you have. You choose it." Catherine fell silent.....
I was acquiring a systematic body of spiritual knowledge. This knowledge spoke of love and hope, faith and charity...It included past lifetimes and spiritual planes between lives...it talked of the soul's progress through harmony and balance, love and wisdom, progress toward a mystical and ecstatic connection with God.
There was much practical advice along the way...perhaps most of all, the unshakable knowledge that we are immortal...We are the gods, and they are us.
(c)1988 by Brian L. Weiss
Simon and Schuster, Inc.
What is perhaps the most incredible common element in the accounts I have studied, and is certainly the element which has the most profound effect upon the individual, is the encounter with a very bright light. Typically, at its first appearance this light is dim, but it rapidly gets brighter until it reaches an unearthly brilliance. Yet, even though this light (usually said to be white or "clear") is of an indescribable brilliance, many make the specific point that it does not in any way hurt the eyes, or dazzle them, or keep them from seeing the things around them (perhaps because at this point they don't have physical "eyes" to be dazzled).
Despite the light's unusual manifestation, however, not one person has expressed any doubt whatsoever that it was a being, a being of light. Not only that, it is a personal being. It has a very definite personality. The love and warmth which emanate from this being to the dying person was utterly beyond words, and he feels completely surrounded by it and taken up in it, completely at ease and accepted by the presence of this being. He senses an irresistible magnetic attraction to this light. he is ineluctably drawn to it.
Interestingly, while the above description of the being of light is utterly invariable, the identificatin of the being varies from individual to individual and seems to be largely a function of the religious background, training, or beliefs of the person involved. Thus, most of those who are Christians in training or belief identify the light as Christ and soimetimes draw Biblical parallels in support of their interpretation. A Jewish man and woman identified the light as an "angel." It was clear, though, in both cases, that the subjects did not mean to imply that the being had wings, played a harp, or even had a human shape or appearance. There was only the light. What each was trying to get across was that they took the being to be an emissary, or a guide. A man who had no religious beliefs or training at all prior to his experience simply identified what he saw as a "being of light."
...Shortly after its appearance, the being begins to communicate with the person who is passing over...people claim that they did not hear any physical voice or sounds coming from the being, nor did they respond to the being through any audible sounds. Rather, it is reported that direct, unimpeded transfer of thoughts takes place, and in such a clear way that there is no possibility whatsoever of either misunderstanding or of lying to the light.
Furthermore, this unimpeded exchange does not even take place in the native language of the person. Yet, he understands perfectly and is instantaneously aware. He cannot even translate the thoughts and excahnges which took place while he was near death into the human language which he must speak now, after his resuscitation...
...some support for my own feeling that everyone is trying to express the same thought comes from the narrative of one woman who put it this way: The first thing he said to me was, that he kind of asked me if I was ready to die, or what I had done with my life that I wanted to show him.
(c)1975 by Raymond A. Moody, Jr., M.D.
Mockingbird Press, Inc.
Whatever happens, it's totally beyond the realms of possibility that we'll discover absolute proof in my lifetime, and probably for the rest of human history. As long as there's no evidence, "belief" is an outmoded term; "belief" signals the end of thought. As the Principia Doscordia says, "Convictions cause convicts."
"Cheech Wizard"
Sir Toby's Den BBS
Portland Oregon
I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) was precisely nothing: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in "the High Countries." In that sense it will be true for those who have completed the journey (and for no others) to say that good is everything and Heaven everywhere. But we, at this end of the road, must not try to anticipate that retrospective vision. If we do, we are likely to embrace the false and disastrous converse and fancy that everything as good and everywhere is Heaven.
But what, you ask, of Earth? Earth, I think, will not be in the end a very distinct place. I think Earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself...
The last thing I wish is to arouse factual curiosity about the details of the after-world.
"Where are ye going?" said a voice with a strong Scotch accent. I stopped and looked. The sound of the unicorns had long since died away and my flight had brought me to open country. I saw the mountains where the unchanging sunrise lay, and in the foreground two or three pines on a little knoll, with some large smooth rocks, and heather. On one of the rocks sat a very tall man, almost a giant, with a flowing beard. I had not yet looked one of the Solid People in the face. Now, when I did so, I discovered that one sees them with a kind of double vision. Here was an enthroned and shining god, whose ageless spirit weighed upon mine like a burden of solid gold; and yet, at the very same moment, here was an old weather-beaten man, one who might have been a shepard - such a man as tourists think simple because he is honest, and neighbors think "deep" for the same reason. His eyes had the far-seeing look of one who has lived long in open, solitary places; and somehow I divined the network of wrinkles which must have surrounded them before re-birth had washed him in immortality.
"I - I don't quite know," said I.
"Ye can sit and talk with me, then," he said, making room for me on the stone.
"I don't know you, Sir, " said I, taking my seat beside him.
"My name is George," he answered. "George Macdonald."
.....
"Sir," said I, "...It is about these Ghosts. Do any of them stay? Can they stay? Is any real choice offered to them? How do they come to be here?"
"...the damned have holidays - excursions, ye understand?"
"Excursions to this country?"
"For those that will take them. Of course most of the silly creatures don't. They prefer taking trips back to Earth. They go and play tricks on the poor daft women ye call mediums. They go and try to assert their ownership of some house that once belonged to them: and then ye get what's called a Haunting. Or they go to spy on their children. Or literary ghosts hang about public libraries to see if anyone's still reading their books."
"But if they come here they can really stay?"
"Aye. Ye'll have heard that the emperor Trajan did."
"But I don't understand. Is judgement not final? Is there really a way out of Hell into Heaven?"
"It depends on the way ye're using the words. If they leave that grey town behind it will not have been Hell. To any that leaves, it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had better not call this country Heaven. Not Deep Heaven, ye understand." (Here he smiled at me.) "Ye can call it the Valley of the Shadow of Life. And yet to those who stay here it will have been Heaven from the first. And ye can call those sad streets in the town yonder the Valley of the Shadow of Death: but to those who remain there they will have been Hell even from the beginning."
I suppose he saw that I looked puzzled, for presently, he spoke again.
"Son," he said, "ye cannot in your present state understand eternity: when Anodos looked through the door of the Timeless he brought no message back. But ye can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all this earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, 'No future bliss can make up for it,' not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say, 'Let me but have this and I'll take the consequences:' little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasures of their sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say, 'We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,' and the Lost, 'We are always in Hell.' And both will speak truly.... Hell is a state of mind...but Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly..."
...I noticed scents in the air which had hitherto escaped me, and the country put on new beauties. There was water everywhere and tiny flowers quivering in the early breeze. Far off in the woods we saw the deer glancing past, and, once, a sleek panther came purring to my companion's side.
The Great Divorce
C.S. Lewis
(c)1946 by The MacMillan Company
Hot Dogs
Karl Grossman, March 1977
A Bell Ringing in the Empty Sky:
The Best of The Sun, Vol. II
edited by Sy Safransky
(c)1987 Mho & Mho Works and THE SUN
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
...Reincarnation is very big, it exists in some of the Eastern religions, but it's big in America too. But everyone was someone like Cleopatra, Frederick the Great, Moses, hardly anyone was this poor schmuck that was building a pyramid, or a peasant, or a murderer, hardly anyone was reincarnated like that. Some of this is pie-in-the-sky. This is a standard part of religion - you delay all your satisfactions until the next life. This is a religion for slaves.
...I have this book by a Greek who was captured by Romans and taken back there, sold out and became a historian at their service. This is 125 BC: "Since the masses of the people are inconsistent, full of unruly desire, passionate and reckless of consequence, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the believe in punishment after death." So that's the afterlife.
Tuli Kepferberg, December 1982
former member of The Fugs
Looking Back
interview with Howard Jay Rubin
A Bell Ringing in the Empty Sky:
The Best of The Sun, Vol. I
(c)1985 Mho & Mho Works and THE SUN
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Tales of Trickster
David Citino, December 1980
ibid
Birth and death is a continual cycle. Like corn, you have a season. You grow, flower, give seed, fade away. But the energy within you keeps going - like the energy of corn. Have you ever been in a cornfield and felt that energy?
No? You say no?
The thing about birth and death is not to have too much of one and not the other. You have to keep birth and death about even in your many lives.
In my first incarnation (at least the first one I can remember) I (or the energy within me) was an Egyptian. I recall this quite clearly.
I was the son of the Pharaoh at that time in Egypt, Pharaoh Irving, and I was being forced to marry my sister, Ethel, who was a creep.
My father, the Pharaoh. I remember him crystal clear to this day, white silk robe swirling in the Egyptian wind, posing for a statue being carved by 2,000 slaves, screaming at me, "You're going to marry your sister or we'll kill you."
So there I was in bed in my little room in our splendorous palace and a bunch of eunuchs come in carrying Ethel and dumped her on the rug in front of my stereo set.
Between birth and death is life. But what is between death and birth? This is the BIG question.
I remember trying to be a famous man in the sixteenth century. I worked forty hours a day, I sweated, I slaved, I became a very rich lawyer and cheated thousands of people, but what did it get me? Fame, yes, but nobody remembers the names of ANY sixteenth century lawyers these days.
In the eleventh century, I met the prettiest woman of any of my lives: Baroness Betty Boomis. She was a very wealthy lady, she had many horses and carriages...This was a great life because Baroness Betty Boomis was so dazzling, I didn't think of anything else, her energy was so strong...
If you want to remember your former lives, it is quite simple. This is not something you can do while driving your car around or while not being totally, totally serious.
It is best to sit on a box, any kind of a box, on the floor of your favorite room. Then recite the words: ktora gozina teraz?
This will usually bring it on. You have to have absolute quiet. Nobody can be running around the house or playing the saxaphone or otherwise playing music loud. This would distract you.
When you can see your past lives, you can see your present in proper perspective. I know one man who can trace way back to when he was a cave person.
Of course, I know people who don't remember past lives at all. If this is your case, there are two possibilities: (a) you didn't have a past life, this is your first or (b) there are no past lives for anybody and this whole theory is wrong.
That would mean that this is it, buster.
Karl Grossman, April 1976
Lou, Turn Up Your Hearing Aid
ibid