Life After Death

“I AM DEEPLY grateful for all that you have taught me,” Savitri said. It was getting late, and in truth she was beginning to lose hope of returning home. “I am resigned to living alone, and perhaps I can visit you to learn more.”

“Is anyone ever alone?” Ramana said. The forest was enfolded in purple shadows, and Savitri couldn’t read the expression on his face clearly.

Suddenly there was rustling in the bushes by the side of the path. Savitri jumped back. “What was that?” she exclaimed, feeling the return of her anxiety.

“Ghosts.” Ramana had stopped short. “It’s time you met them, for having traveled beyond this life, ghosts and spirits have much to teach.”

He stood still and beckoned her to keep quiet. Savitri froze in place, and a chill passed over her skin. After a moment someone emerged from the dimness of the forest—a little girl no more than two years old, toddling toward them but not looking their way.

“Don’t!” Ramana warned, anticipating that Savitri would want to run and hold the baby.

The baby looked around blankly, then it crossed the path and disappeared into the woods again.

“No, how could I? Is she lost?” Savitri felt confused and disturbed by what she’d witnessed. Instead of answering her directly, Ramana said, “There are more. You’re attracting them.” At that moment a second ghost appeared, this time a girl of four. Savitri was dumbfounded. “Do you know that one?” he asked.

At that, the ghost peered her way for a moment before wandering away. “And the baby was also me?”

Ramana nodded. “Every former self you have left behind is a ghost. Your body is no longer the body of a child. Your thoughts, desires, fears, and hopes have changed. It would be terrible to walk around with all your dead selves holding on. Let them go.”

Savitri could say nothing. One by one apparitions of herself appeared. She witnessed the girl of ten who sat by her mother’s side in the kitchen, the girl of twelve blushing to talk to a boy, the ardent young woman obsessed with Satyavan, her first love. The last ghost was the most startling, because it was like a mirror image, exactly her age and wearing the same shawl that Savitri had thrown on when she fled her hut.

When this last apparition had faded back into the forest, Savitri said, “What do they have to teach me?”

“That death has been with you every moment of your life,” Ramana replied. “You have survived thousands of deaths every day as your old thoughts, your old cells, your old emotions, and even your old identity passed away. Everyone is living in the afterlife right now. What is there to fear or doubt?”

“Yes, as real as dreams,” said Ramana. “But you are in the here and now, not in the past.”

Savitri had never seen herself in this way, and the sight gave her new courage. “I am still determined to defeat death, for I want Satyavan in my arms again. But if Yama is victorious, I won’t cling to ghosts. At least I have won that much wisdom.”

When people wonder if the personality survives death, the answer is that the personality doesn’t even survive while we are alive. We are not the same person we were five, ten, or fifteen years ago and it would be a sorry state if we were. Our personalities are constantly evolving, transforming, growing. If the question becomes, Does the individual survive death?, the answer is, What’s an individual? In reality what we call “me” is different from day to day, week to week, year to year. Which individual are you talking about, the young person who was in love and full of romance and desire, or the child who was full of innocence and wonder? Perhaps we must wait for the one who is senescent and dying. Which one would you survive as?

Perhaps none. Vedanta tells us that the afterlife brings the opportunity for a creative leap. As our choices continue to expand, we will experience a new reality that is far richer than the conventional notion of heaven. Heaven is an end point, whereby definitions, all transformation, stops. Souls lounge around in a blessed state that sounds, frankly, like eternal assisted living. Why should consciousness become inert? In the afterlife survival would be meaningless unless we continued to respond.

The biggest difference is that in the afterlife the input of the five senses no longer stimulates us. The furniture of the mind has been cleared away, leaving a space that is both inside and outside ourselves. This is why Jesus wasn’t being paradoxical when he sometimes talked about heaven “within you” and heaven “with the Father.” When you empty a room of furniture, the space left behind is empty, but the Vedic rishis say that mental space is different. It is full of possibilities. Anything can be born there. They called this pregnant space Akasha. The closest equivalent in English would be “dream space,” or at least that’s a good place to begin.

A dream is like a blank screen on which anything can be projected: any event, place, or person. Akasha is the same. When Vedanta says that every world is a projection of the mind, it is describing an Akashic dream. “Worlds come and go like specks of dust in a beam of sunlight,” declares a famous Vedic saying. In Akasha we realize the transience of all things and the immensity of the unknown. The Akashic dream is cosmic, unlike the personal dreams we have at night.

NDEs tell us that the stage of “crossing over”—the temporary realm preceding the full experience of the afterlife—still feels personal. People report seeing their deceased friends and relations, for example. The dying person continues to see the room in which his body lies, and memories and associations keep tying him back to physical existence. The possibility of taking a creative leap has yet to be realized. As long as you continue to feel like the person you were, you can’t experience the unknown. Let me give you an example.

On a speaking engagement a few years ago I met Gerald, a man who told me that he had become fascinated by the healing powers of shamans in the Southwest. What kind of healing did he need? I asked.

“I don’t want to give you any background just yet,” Gerald said. “I flew down to New Mexico and found myself in a group outside Santa Fe, about twenty of us. I’d never met a shaman before. Ours was Hopi, but he didn’t wear any religious symbols. He was just a very pleasant older man with shoulder-length hair. He greeted each of us as we entered the meeting room in a motel.”

The shaman began by asking everyone to pick a partner. “We were asked to pair off with the person in the room whom we felt most comfortable with. I picked a guy about my age who was standing next to me. I was as comfortable with him as anyone else, considering how bad I felt anyway.”

Gerald now revealed that he had been through a debilitating course of treatment for prostate cancer, including surgery and chemotherapy. He had been cancer free for two years but was haunted by fears that the doctors hadn’t gotten everything. His anxiety kept on growing even though he kept being reassured that he was in the clear. Finally, on the advice of a friend, Gerald reluctantly sought out a shaman.

“Once we’d picked our partners we formed a circle. The shaman walked into the middle and began to chant. He didn’t ask us to do anything but observe. After fifteen minutes he turned to the first pair, a man and a woman. The shaman looked into the man’s eyes and muttered something. Immediately the man’s body began to tremble, then he fell down in a kind of mild seizure.

“In an insistent voice the shaman said, Speak to me! The man’s eyes had gone blank. He began to mumble about being freezing cold, lying on the ground in winter. He’d passed out from alcohol and was dying.

“The shaman nodded. He turned to the woman, who looked pretty shaken. ‘Are you an alcoholic?’ he asked. ‘Is that why you’ve come here?’ Turning red, the woman nodded. ‘Well, you have a spirit in your family line, someone who died of alcohol. We need to free him.’ He helped the woman’s partner to his feet and told him he’d done a good job. And that’s how it went, one pair at a time going around the circle.”

Gerald watched as each partner was used to invoke a departed spirit. In each case the spirit would talk about a problem—depression, cancer, addiction—which turned out to be a perfect match for the problem that the other person in the pair had come about. No one had talked to the shaman before meeting in the motel. Gerald was astonished when his partner brought in the spirit of Gerald’s grandfather, who had died of lung cancer when Gerald was a small child.

“Not everybody recognized their spirit, and it wasn’t always a close relative. In my case I had heard a lot about my grandfather, who had been a prominent citizen. It was spooky hearing him beg to be released from his pain, very spooky.”

For some of the people in the room clearing the departed spirit, which the shaman proceeded to do, marked the end of treatment. Gerald stayed in the Southwest and underwent a series of medicinal sweat lodges, accompanied by rituals and chanting. After several weeks the shaman told him that his grandfather’s spirit was now at peace.

“When I got back home I almost went back for a medical checkup, but I had stopped feeling anxious. I quit having nightmares or waking up in a sweat. It was over, just like the shaman said.”

I’m recounting this story to open our perspective. Being raised in a Christian culture doesn’t automatically mean that a dying person will see himself arriving at the pearly gates greeted by Saint Peter. (This isn’t one of the common scenarios reported by near-death patients, either.) One might find oneself in the spirit world of Native Americans instead. The soul’s passage follows links that we don’t foresee.

Gerald’s story has a curious addendum. A month after returning home he went with his wife on vacation to the upper Midwest where his family originally came from. “We checked into a renovated Victorian hotel. Our room was done up in flowery wallpaper and a four-poster bed. But what caught my eye was a framed newspaper hanging on the wall. It was from the turn of the century and showed a picture of a volunteer fire brigade. Right in the middle staring out at me was my grandfather as a young man.”

“No, to me it was a sign that the shaman was right. I’m glad my grandfather was set free, wherever he’s gone.”

In all the tales of ghosts who want to be set free, what holds them back is memory. They continue to remember what physical life was like, and the unfinished business of those memories has a grip. The unsettled spirit can’t escape into the next stage of existence. What this means, strangely enough, is that when the afterlife has become real, the physical world has become the dream. It’s just a matter of perspective. When you are in a physical body your perspective makes physicality real. When you are dreaming at night, the dream state is real. When you are “crossing over,” both waking and dreaming are unreal, and Akasha—the field of consciousness—is real. What causes this change of reality? Vedanta holds that consciousness is convinced by its own creations. Therefore, nothing we can see, hear, and touch, whether in waking, dreaming, or beyond both, is ultimately real. They represent shifting perspectives.

To be completely free means waking up from all dreamlike states, and reclaiming who you are: the maker of reality. One cannot say that all dying people will achieve this kind of absolute freedom. They may glimpse it only for a fleeting second; they may sense the possibility of breaking away from one dream and yet be seduced into the next one that comes to mind.

I knew a woman who as a child had come home from school, and as she entered the door she saw her young cousin from Chicago standing in the corner waiting for her. Both were about eight at the time. The cousin didn’t speak, and the girl ran to tell her mother that they had a visitor.

When she entered the kitchen her mother was crying. The little girl asked why, and her mother said that there had been a sudden death in the family. It was the cousin from Chicago, who had died that morning. Did the girl see her cousin as a vision, a premonition, or merely as a coincidental act of imagination? As she tells the story, she saw her cousin “for real.” Yet what do we mean by “for real” except that something is convincing? This encounter with a departed relative can be judged as either hallucinatory or deeply spiritual, depending not on the event itself but on who is looking at it.

In the afterlife a person wakes up from one extremely convincing perspective—physical existence—and faces the possibility of freedom. Akasha isn’t any particular perspective; it’s a wide open playing field waiting for players to enter it. Who will the players be?

They could be the same players we are already used to.
They could be players we have imagined and are eager to see.
They could be otherworldly beings.
They could be emanations of ourselves.
They could be embodiments of abstract ideas.

In world culture all these variations have been reported. Christian heaven is a specific Akashic play, a drama of redemption with otherworldly beings in it, along with familiar people from the past and an abstraction that we call God. To the extent that all these images materialize in the mind, a dying Christian accepts that she has arrived in heaven. Vedanta says that the deeper truth is that the dying person has arrived in a creative space, Akasha, which produces whatever is wanted.

But how does a person know what he wants? The answer gets complicated. Let’s take it back down to earth and ask the same question. How do you know what you want right now? Until your next desire appears, you won’t know. It’s certain that you will want something, because the mind is a continuous stream of desires. However, this doesn’t make the mind predictable. You may be a creature of habit who always wants two scrambled eggs for breakfast, while I may be restless and want a different breakfast every day. Both of us could be thrown out of our accustomed pattern by a sudden stress, such as having a death in the family, losing our jobs, being diagnosed with heart trouble. Suddenly we aren’t hungry; our minds want to grieve, not eat. The unpredictable tug-of-war between old patterns and new situations makes it impossible to pin down desire.

In the same way, Akasha is elusive because it’s so open-ended; it’s as unpredictable as a dream and just as convincing. Even so, the Akashic field can be navigated. In fact, it must be navigated if we are to take advantage of the creative leap that the afterlife opens up.

We have a chance to open up the possibilities beyond what our culture has conditioned us to believe. One experience can’t fit everyone. Our eyes continue to see what they expect, even when we use the eyes of the soul, but the Akashic field isn’t a swirl of random images. It is more structured than a dream; it has a kind of invisible landscape. The structure of Akasha cannot be described in physical terms, yet if we look inside ourselves, the seemingly random flow of our minds also obeys a kind of invisible structure.

Let’s say someone walks up to you and greets you by name. The person is smiling; there’s an expectant look on her face. How do you come up with a response? Your mind does several things at once. It consults its stored picture files for familiar faces. It looks for a name to attach to the right face. If neither can be found immediately, the mind doesn’t feel stymied yet—it has backup resources. It rummages through faces that could fit this person but are younger or fuzzily recorded. It tosses up sample names that might jog your memory. It runs through recent events that this apparent stranger may have played a part in. If all this doesn’t work, the mind starts thinking of what to say to cover up your memory lapse.

We’re all familiar with such situations, and we are so accustomed to matching names and faces that we don’t marvel at how astonishing the whole process is. Not only can the mind Google itself for information with incredible swiftness, it performs multiple operations with backup plans if they fail. This implies an amazingly complex but invisible structure.

In the afterlife the same structure continues to exist. In near-death experiences the dying person, suddenly confronted with an unknown situation, searches inside for familiar landmarks: deceased relatives, recognizable voices, a divine light, the presence of a fatherly (or motherly) God. In other words, we all have a built-in map that we consult. This map prepares us to convert any unknown experience into something meaningful. (As I was writing this chapter a TV special about heaven came on, and one woman being interviewed was certain that she had been to heaven. Her near-death experience occurred when she was giving birth, had a crisis, and fell briefly into a coma. Describe heaven, the interviewer said. The woman’s face grew rapturous at the memory. She described an endless stairway going up to the sky, and along the stairway happy animals pranced around. She added that the blue of the sky was like no color that could be found on earth. To me, she chose to interpret her experience by drawing from a scrapbook of childhood images.)

Psychologists have conducted experiments that illustrate how we automatically create meaning. In one, a group of subjects sits in a room before a tape recorder. They are told to listen to a tape of someone talking and to take notes on what’s being said as best they can. They are also told that the voice on the tape will be very soft, since the experiment is testing how well the brain can register the faintest spoken words.

The tape is turned on and is barely audible. The subjects crane forward and take their notes, which are then collected. What they haven’t been told is that the voice is speaking nonsense. Only random words are coming out of the machine. Yet each subject will take notes that make sense, because an expectation of hearing meaningful words leads to the creation of meaning.

In the afterlife the creative possibilities are enormously expanded. Instead of asking one question—What is the voice on the tape saying?—the mind has a host of questions to ask: Where am I? What’s happening to me? Who have I become? What lies ahead?

In the afterlife the mind is multidimensional. Akasha takes us out of all time-space limitations. In truth we always were multidimensional, only we were so convinced by inhabiting the material world that we conformed to its rules. Now we need to adapt ourselves to Akasha, where there is structure without rigid rules and creative possibility without cultural dogma.