Life After Death

WHILE WRITING THIS book on the afterlife, I kept being drawn back to stories that I’d heard in India as a child. Parables are a powerful way to teach children, and many of the ones told to me have lasted all my life. So I decided to weave the book around tales of the kind I heard at home, around the temples, and at school, hoping that the reader would be enticed by a world where heroes battle darkness in order to emerge into the light.

In this case the hero is a woman, Savitri, and the enemy she must defeat is Yama, the Lord of Death. Yama shows up in her front yard one day, waiting to take away her husband the moment he returns from his work as a woodcutter. Savitri is terrified. What strategy could possibly turn Death away from his inexorable mission?

I had no trouble imagining these characters. I was frightened for Savitri and anxious to find out how her battle of wits with Death turned out. Their world flowed easily into my own, because the India of my childhood was not that far removed from ancient India. I want to take a moment to convey what death and the world beyond meant back then. It may seem like a very esoteric place. If so, you can come back to it after reading the main body of the book. However mysterious and exotic, here is where I began.

What was most magical in my childhood was transformation. Death itself was seen as a brief stopping point on an endless soul journey that could turn a peasant into a king and vice versa. With the possibility of infinite lifetimes extending forward and backward, a soul could experience hundreds of heavens and hells. Death ended nothing; it opened up limitless adventures. But at a deeper level, it’s typically Indian not to crave permanence. A drop of water becomes vapor, which is invisible, yet vapor materializes into billowing clouds, and from clouds rain falls back to earth, forming river torrents and eventually merging into the sea. Has the drop of water died along the way? No, it undergoes a new expression at each stage. Likewise, the idea that I have a fixed body locked in space and time is a mirage. Any drop of water inside my body could have been ocean, cloud, river, or spring the day before. I remind myself of this fact when the bonds of daily life squeeze too tight.

In the West the hereafter has been viewed as a place akin to the material world. Heaven, hell, and purgatory lie in some distant region beyond the sky or under the earth. In the India of my childhood the hereafter wasn’t a place at all, but a state of awareness.

The cosmos that you and I are experiencing right now, with trees, plants, people, houses, cars, stars, and galaxies, is just consciousness expressing itself at one particular frequency. Elsewhere in spacetime, different planes exist simultaneously. If I had asked my grandmother where heaven was, she would have pointed to the house we lived in, not only because it was full of love, but because it made sense to her that many worlds could comfortably inhabit the same place. By analogy, if you are listening to a concert orchestra, there are a hundred instruments playing, each occupying the same place in space and time. You can listen to the symphony as a whole or, if you wish, put your attention on a specific instrument. You can even separate out the individual notes played by that instrument. The presence of one frequency does not displace any of the others.

I didn’t know it as a child, but when I walked around the crowded Delhi market where more humanity was packed into one bazaar than was possible to imagine, the world I couldn’t see was even more crowded. The air that I breathed contained voices, car noises, bird songs, radio waves, X-rays, cosmic rays, and an almost infinite array of subatomic particles. Endless realities lay all around me.

Every frequency in nature exists simultaneously, and yet we experience only what we see. It’s natural to fear what we can’t see, and since death snatches a person out of sight, we react to it with fear. I certainly wasn’t immune to this. The death of a pet made me anxious and sad; the death of my grandfather, which happened suddenly in the middle of the night, was devastating. My younger brother kept running around the house crying, “Where is he? Where is he?” It would be years before I realized that the correct answer was “Here and everywhere.”

Different planes of existence represent different frequencies of consciousness. The world of physical matter is just one expression of a particular frequency. (Decades later, I was fascinated to read that according to physicists, there is a background hum to the universe that is so specific as to sound like the note B-flat, although it vibrates millions of times lower than human hearing.) In India a child would never hear such a complicated quasi-scientific idea, but I did hear about the five elements, or Mahabhutas: earth, water, fire, air, and space. These elements combined to form everything in existence, which sounds crude to someone versed in Western science, but it contained a valuable truth: All transformations come down to a few simple elements.

In the twentieth century Western science came to understand that all solid objects are actually made of invisible vibrations. In my childhood, solid things were seen to have a large portion of the earth element. To put it another way, solid things had dense vibrations, or vibrations on a lower plane. Vaporous things had a fine vibration, on a higher plane.

Just as there are different planes of material things, there are also different spiritual planes, a shocking notion to the pious Catholic brothers, mostly Irish, who were my teachers at school. To them the only spirit was the Holy Ghost that lived in heaven. We children were politic enough not to disagree, yet in our cosmos it only made sense that if the Earth was a dense spiritual world, there must be higher spiritual planes, known to us as Lokas, which in Western mystical circles became known as “astral planes.” There are an almost infinite number of astral planes, divided into a higher and lower astral world, and even the lowest ones vibrate at a higher frequency than the material world.

Long ago the West gave up trying to hear the music of the spheres, but in India it is believed that a person with finely tuned consciousness can go inward and actually hear the vibration of various higher planes. In the astral plane you can see your own body, for instance, yet it might change in age from moment to moment.

In the lower astral planes we find clairvoyance, telepathy, and other refinements of the five senses, as well as ghosts, disembodied souls, and spirits that for one reason or another are “stuck.” As a child I was certain that when a cat or dog paused to assess the air, it saw something I couldn’t. So it came as no surprise to later read, in various texts both Eastern and Western, that lower astral planes sometimes sensed by humans in higher states of awareness are often sensed by animals. Nor was I surprised to meet a psychiatry resident who told me that if the hospital room was dimly lit enough, he could see—on the very edge of visibility—when the soul left a dying person. Every Indian child devours comic books about the exploits of various heroes who fought their battles in faraway Lokas. Slipping in and out of material existence was our version of traveling to outer space. Our comic book heroes would come across thought forms and thought clouds, astral bodies traveling during sleep, astral colors and auras. All these are vibrations in the lower astral plane.

In the Indian tradition every physical body is assigned an accompanying astral body. Your astral body is a complete mirror of your physical body; it has a heart, liver, arms, legs, a face, etc., but since it operates at a higher frequency, most people are unaware of it. During life, the physical body provides a garment for the soul; it gives it the appearance of being localized in the material world. In death, as the physical body begins to disintegrate, the departing soul enters an astral plane that corresponds to its existence on the material plane, the frequency that corresponds most closely to its former life.

The general notion that you go where you belong rested easily in my mind back then. I imagined dogs going to dog heaven, and people who loved dogs joining them. I imagined bad people no longer hurting anyone except themselves because they were isolated in a kind of karmic jail. This was consoling, an assurance that the good people who loved me but were now gone lived in a place of goodness. But my view had limitations. I was never sure whether my wise grandfather met his wise grandfather in the hereafter, who showed him how to proceed, or if that job was carried out by angels, or enlightened spirits. Much later when I began to research karma I found that after we die, we remain self-motivated. A soul moves according to its desire from one astral plane to another, projecting as in a dream whatever sights and people, guides and astral entities it needs for its own advancement.

All these planes ultimately were imagined by Spirit, just as it imagined the material world. The Indian word for Spirit is Brahman, which is Everything, the one consciousness that fills every plane of existence. But Indians are relaxed about terminology, as befits a very old culture. We said God. Rama. Shiva. Maheshwara. The important thing wasn’t the name but the concept of a single consciousness that creates everything and continues to do so in infinite dimensions at infinite speed. On the astral planes Spirit continues to play roles.

There, one can actually see images of gods and goddesses, angels and demons. These are ultimately illusions, however, for each astral plane provides the experience of Spirit. Here, on our plane, we experience Spirit as matter, solidity. On the astral planes we experience subtle beings and the landscapes they inhabit—what we might call dreams.

The cosmos is nonlocal; that is, it can’t be mapped as a location. After death we gradually stop being local. We see ourselves as we really are from the soul’s perspective: everywhere at once. This adjustment is probably the biggest obstacle any of us will encounter in the astral planes. Right now you are at the center of the universe because infinity extends in all directions, yet someone on the other side of the world is also at the center of the universe, because infinity extends on all sides of him, too. If both of you are centers of the universe, you must both be at the same location. The fact that you appear to be in different places is a sensory artifact. It’s based on sights and sounds, which are local events. You are not a local event.

Similarly, each moment is the center of time, because eternity stretches around each moment in all directions. Therefore every moment is the same as every other. The cosmos, being nonlocal, has no up or down, north or south, east or west. These are only points of reference for our convenience at our particular frequency (i.e., inside a body). The transformational process after death is not a movement to some other place or time; it is just a change in the quality of our attention. You can only see what you vibrate to.

I had an uncle who loved to travel and visit the various saints and sages who so densely populate India. Sometimes, to my fascination, he brought me along. I saw renunciates who sat in one posture for years at a time; others who barely breathed. I know now that my eyes were deceiving me. I only saw a chrysalis, inside of which marvelous transformations were taking place. Silently, these figures were tuning in to different frequencies beyond the outside world. Through a shift in attention they could speak to Rama (or Buddha or Christ, though that was less likely in India). Deep meditation wasn’t an inert state; it was a launching pad for consciousness. In the ER when someone dies of a heart attack, only to be resuscitated with reports of a near-death experience, he or she uses a different launching pad. In both cases there was a shift in the quality of attention.

The big difference is that when a cardiac patient goes into the light, the journey is involuntary. Those silent yogis from my past were exercising an intention. By having a desire at a deep enough level of awareness, they went through a process that parallels death. The senses fade one by one. (The last one to leave when a person dies is sound, which was the first to come in at birth. This fits the Indian notion that the five elements come and go in a specific order; since sound is the equivalent of vibration, which holds the body together, it makes sense that it would be the last to go.)

As the gross senses become duller, the subtle senses sharpen. We still see and hear after we die, but now the objects aren’t physical. They consist of anything we want to see on the astral plane: celestial sights and sounds, heavenly beings, and brilliant lights. In near-death experiences the most typical manifestations are faces, voices, or an emotional presence. In other cultures people might expect to encounter ghosts or animals. Often a dying person feels something subtle around him—a certain warmth, a faint form or sound before leaving the body. Somehow these can be accessed on the dying person’s vibrational frequency. Anyone who has spent time with the dying knows that they may say that they’ve been joined in the room by a departed spouse or other long-dead loved one. Some kind of astral contact is being made in the transition zone from physical to subtle.

At death the astral counterpart of the physical body separates from it. According to Vedic teachings, the departed soul then sleeps for a time in the astral region, which I translate as its incubation period. New ideas percolate in the mind before they lead to action, and something similar happens with the soul. Normally the soul sleeps peacefully, but if a person dies suddenly or prematurely, or has many unfulfilled desires, this sleep may be restless and disturbed. The horrors of a violent death would continue to reverberate, and so would more mundane torments like unrequited love or grief. Suicides experience the same inner pain that led them to take their lives.

Unfulfilled desires don’t have to be negative. A longing for pleasure also represents an inability to let go. My uncle the spiritual devotee heard many detailed accounts of souls stuck in lower astral planes. Days, months, and years aren’t the yardsticks of the soul’s perspective. When people die suddenly or unnaturally, they haven’t had time to work out their personal karma; until they fully process their attachments and obligations, they will remain drawn to this denser plane.

Saints and sages have the advantage of being able to travel freely through astral planes, unrestrained by desires. Disturbed souls remain caught between two worlds, and if loved ones left behind keep calling to the soul through prayers, grief, unfulfilled love, or attempts to contact the dead, the soul will continue to be perturbed. The soul is meant to sleep in the astral body as it did in the womb, and peaceful death makes this possible.

Then there is the matter of seeing your life flash before your eyes. Since this is experienced by people on the brink of dying, such as drowning victims, it must be part of a transition, not actually connected to death per se. I was never told about this as a child, although I did meet a doctor later on who told me that he had nearly drowned off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. He described it as a peaceful experience accompanied by a rapid sequence of images spanning his whole life—more like a slide show than a movie, he said. (I wonder if he would have become a restless soul had the lifeguards not reached him in time.)

Swamis talk extensively about the afterlife, and according to a number of them, seeing your life flash before your eyes is a specific karmic process. Karma is wound around the soul like thread around a spindle. Whenever a person is exposed to the possibility of sudden death, the thread unwinds rapidly, and one sees images of the events that have already occurred. In this sequence only significant karmic moments become visible.

In cases where someone is dying over a period of weeks and months, karma unwinds slowly. The person may become intensely absorbed in the past, reflecting upon it. At the moment of dying, entering into the astral plane is accompanied by a quick karmic review, with images unwinding like a film unspooling off its reel.

However, purists in India might see this image too as pure illusion. The phenomenon of seeing your life flash before you in a split second, they say, is a demonstration that every second contains the whole of eternity. During the deep sleep of the soul between births, all the memories of past events in the physical body get impressed onto the soul, forming the karmic software that will give rise to its future life.

One spiritual practice that I still perform is to lie in bed before falling asleep and review the events of the day. I do this in backward order, for the same reason karma unspools in this way: to understand and come to peace with what has happened to me. My own feeling is that a dying person must be given the same opportunity.

The period of the soul’s slumber varies according to how evolved the soul is at the time of death. The main reason for the sleep of the soul is to shed its attachments. The strength of its attachments will determine how long it takes to shed them. When the soul awakens it can only enter a plane of existence that is familiar. If you were to enter a plane higher than your level of evolution, you would become confused and uncomfortable. Likewise, you cannot go backward in your evolution: you can only progress.

A kind of cocoon surrounds the sleeping soul. When it wakes up it sheds this shell, which eventually fades away. During the astral journey souls meet other souls vibrating at a similar level of evolution. You may meet some souls that you encountered in the physical world if they are on your frequency. Most people deeply desire to join their loved ones in the afterlife. Their souls aren’t drifting through the astral atmosphere but are directed by love itself. Love is a vibration, older than humanity itself. But the principle of directedness is very human: we go where our deepest desires take us.

When Spirit moves in the world of physical objects, its vibration is very slow and dense, almost stilled by the physical casing of the body. When it operates at a very high vibration, Spirit is also still because it experiences only pure awareness—in other words, itself. In between those two extremes lies the whole range of creation. In the astral world, the soul can visit planes of vibration lower than itself at will, but can only visit higher planes through evolution, much the way when you pass particles through finer and finer sieves, any particle can always pass back to a grosser level but can only advance when it has reached the correct level of refinement.

The Christian brothers who taught me loved to talk about what life would be like in heaven, and for them God’s home was as real and solid as any building in Delhi. The swamis and yogis agreed with that, but only because they believed that Spirit permeates every plane of existence. Depending on your level of awareness, you project your own heavens, hells, and purgatories, to work through on the physical plane as well as astral planes. In the physical world, if you want to build a house, you need to collect the bricks, put them on top of one another, and so on. In the astral world you could just imagine the house the way you want it, and it will appear seemingly as real and solid as the one in the physical world.

In the astral plane suffering and enjoyment occur in the imagination, even though they appear to be real. Ironically, someone who has been a skeptic in this world will likely be a skeptic in the astral planes; he won’t realize that he’s in the very place he doesn’t believe exists. The body you inhabit in the astral world is the one you’ve most identified with in the previous physical life. Since this is an imaginary body, you can keep it or change it during your astral life. Evolution on both the physical or astral planes is gradual—it takes time.

My Christian schoolteachers relished the idea that every desire would come true in heaven, and once again the swamis agree in their way. Desire is still crucial after death. Evolution is really the process of fulfillment of desire. In the astral world you fulfill and refine desires left over from your last physical life. You also refine your knowledge and experiences from the material world. The astral is like a graduate school for your previous physical incarnation. Here the soul also stores up energy for its higher, more evolved desires so that they might be fulfilled on its next visit to the physical plane when it inhabits a new body.

I wasn’t sure why people died in the Christian scheme. Some who died were loaded down with sin, it seemed, like criminals who have come to the end of their bad actions, while others died to meet God, eager that their time had come. In India someone dies after reaching the maximum evolution allotted to that lifetime; they have come to the end of what their karma can teach them. The same holds true in the mirror of the astral world. The cycle closes on itself to produce a rebirth, which seemed totally natural to me as a child. So natural, in fact, that it didn’t occur to me how mysterious the process must be. Somehow the soul finds a set of suitable parents so it may be reborn to continue its evolution. Thanks to what has taken place on the astral plane, reincarnation occurs at a higher level than where one left off. The specific calculations are made by the universe itself or, as some scriptures claim, by the lords of karma.

As a child I imagined a scene rather like a courtroom in which wise judges sit and consider every case—so wise, in fact, that they know every lifetime a soul has ever had. With complete impartiality they mete out the events that will arise in the next lifetime. Their aim isn’t to reward or punish, but to lay out opportunities to evolve. Later on in life, it occurred to me that there is no need for lords of karma, since the universe is already correlating not just every lifetime but every event in nature. The courtroom scene stands as a symbol for our own clarity of judgment. Between lifetimes we are perfectly capable of making our own evolutionary choices for the future. For the great sages and saints none of this happened unconsciously. They recalled their own past-life experiences as clearly as you or I might evoke yesterday’s events. But for those of us without their liberated awareness, only a faint memory remains of what has gone before.

Being born means arriving at a new level of insight and creativity. The process repeats itself over and over, each time progressing to a slightly higher plane. When your karma has been sufficiently worked out, you reach the maximum limit for that plane, your soul slips back into slumber, and the cycle continues.

The soul’s trajectory is always upward. Any suffering on the astral plane, even the most tormenting hell, is only a temporary detour. By working itself out, your karma sees to it that your actions will always be better next time. I know this contradicts the popular belief that reincarnation can demote a person to the level of an animal or even an insect if one’s actions merit it. India is a very old, complex culture, and when I grew up I was astonished to discover how contradictory its spiritual teachings could be—beliefs changed from town to town like the food. Indians are omnivorous. At one time or another they have believed everything. My Catholic schoolteachers were just the latest item on a centuries-old menu. Eventually I concluded that the only way to learn anything about spiritual matters was to experience and read as much as I could.

According to the India of my childhood, we don’t choose our next incarnation voluntarily, but an element of choice does come into play. The degree of choice you have depends on how clearly you can view yourself in the astral plane. This faculty, called witnessing, is comparable to what we experience here and now. Those who have the least freedom of choice are driven by obsessions, compulsions, addictions, and unconscious impulses. To the extent that you become free of these, you have more choice. The same is true of a soul contemplating its next physical incarnation.

Saints and sages are clear witnesses in this lifetime. The Buddha was said to be able to close his eyes and in an instant see thousands of his past incarnations in complete detail. By contrast, most people are so preoccupied with desire that when they try to see themselves truly as they are, they see only fog or blankness.

By developing your ability to witness, to be aware of your situation, you will be able to influence the lives you incarnate into. You will also be able to speed up the process of working through your karma. In the same way, you can also develop skills and talents on the astral plane. (This explains, among other things, how great artists and musicians can exhibit their abilities at uncanny ages, often before they turn three; being born with a talent is no accident.) When you are born, you bring along the talents you have developed from all your previous existences.

Soul bonds occur on the astral plane just as they occur in the physical world. Relationships in the astral plane mean that you are vibrating in concert with someone else’s soul and therefore feel a heightened sense of love, unity, and bliss. It is not a relationship in spatial or physical terms, because the astral world is populated only by thought forms. When the disembodied soul tunes in to the frequency of a loved one back on the physical plane, that person may feel the presence of the departed; two souls can commune even though one is vibrating in the material plane and the other in the astral plane.

The soul’s motivation to keep coming back to the material plane is twofold: to fulfill desires and to rejoin with familiar souls. We relate now to those people whose souls we related to in the past; we end relationships with people whose souls no longer vibrate with ours.

When I was a boy the only thing that really troubled me about this scheme was how the story ended. In the West it has been a long time since people longed for the next life more than they did this one. Since the Middle Ages we have become firmly entrenched in the desirability of being here. India has always been more ambivalent. There’s enough pain in life that the prospect of repeating it forever creates anxiety. How does one get off the wheel of karma?

In one version of Indian belief, once a soul has completely worked out all its karma, it loses all earthly desires. It has transcended material objects and attachments to become enlightened. And once it is free of karma, there is no need to be reborn on either the physical or astral planes. Such a soul continues to spiral upward in its evolution, but on planes we cannot imagine. In Eastern philosophy these are known as causal planes; here, consciousness takes on such a subtle form that it offers no visual image for us to cling to. We will know the causal world only when we are ready to experience it, and that time is different for each person. We may glimpse it in an epiphany, but we will dwell there only when the soul’s vibration is high enough to sustain it.

In another Indian variation, karma is infinite and is constantly being renewed. Trying to get to the end of your karma would be like emptying water out of a boat with one hand and pouring it back in with the other, so evolution works somewhat differently in this scheme. When you achieve self-realization, you no longer identify with your body, mind, ego, or desires. You become a pure witness, and in that state you can choose to transcend karma. The end of karma isn’t the end of life, however. It’s like getting out of debt and being left with the freedom to spend money without constraint.

The impulse to be liberated has waxed and waned in me, as it does in everyone. In the Indian tradition, we are reborn, after all, for a positive reason, to express and exhaust the force of desire. Even as a boy I knew that the Christian brothers didn’t agree, since the only good reason to be born into their world of sin was to find a path to Jesus. The ideal Christian would be in such a rush to be redeemed that he would renounce this world altogether, as many Christian saints did—and many Indian ones, too.

India has imbibed from ancient cultures that long preceded the rise of Hinduism, and even under the influence of Islam and Christian conquerors has kept its eye on eternity. In the Indian mind there is no end to the celestial realms that belong to higher frequencies of existence, but as we’ve seen, at a certain high level of evolution, some souls may choose to complete their path. Once a soul has reached these levels it would not normally want to take another human birth except to provide a particular service, but these souls are exceptions. Buddhism calls these souls bodhisattvas, those who don’t return to Earth driven by the force of evolution, but choose to come instead to serve the cause of enlightenment. When I asked a Tibetan lama what a bodhisattva was, he said, “Imagine that you are no longer dreaming, and although you enjoy being awake, you also enjoy helping others who are still asleep.”

Of course most people are unaware of all this, and for them the karmic cycle continues spontaneously. Right here and now we are surrounded by an infinity of planes. If you could shift your awareness into a higher frequency, you could be with the angels this very minute, if you so desired. In the field of infinite possibilities you exist on all these levels at the same time, but at the level of experience you exist on only one. According to some Indian teachings, we all yearn for these other planes so much that we travel to them at night in our sleep. Then the astral body actually leaves the physical body, remaining attached by a filament that brings it back again. If the filament gets severed, the way back is lost. It is also dangerous to flirt with the lower astral planes if you don’t understand them. However, once you truly realize that the whole scheme of worlds is imagined by Spirit, from the lowest to the highest, from demons to angels, there can be nothing dangerous about creation.

In this overview I have tried to immerse you in the world I found myself in sixty years ago. This was the Vedic perspective as I understood it. It was a vast spiritual ocean, and in typically Indian fashion you were invited to dip your cup in and take as little or as much as you wanted. It’s nearly impossible for a society to embrace infinity, and India is no exception. People remain as troubled there about death and dying as do people here, and there are those who have completely turned their backs on the ocean of knowledge that laps at their feet. In the West we have our own version of this phenomenon. We deny that anyone could know what lies beyond death, which conveniently closes the door on our anxiety for a time. Or we say that spiritual knowledge is relative; all that matters is faith, not the thing you have faith in.

It is these limitations that this book strives to overcome. Ultimately the question of “What happens after we die?” comes down to “What happens after I die?” The issue becomes personal, emotional, and inescapable. If a devout Muslim landed in a Christian heaven (or vice versa), he’d be very unhappy: eternity wouldn’t meet with his expectations. I was fortunate as a boy, because the simple scheme I was presented with—and which I’ve elaborated on in this overview— allows for every soul to find the home to which it belongs.

What has also remained with me are certain themes that will figure prominently in this book:

The afterlife is a place of newfound clarity.

The afterlife isn’t static. We continue to evolve and grow after we die.

Choice doesn’t end with death; it expands.

Earthly images carry us into the afterlife (we see what our culture has conditioned us to see), but then the soul makes creative leaps that open new worlds.

I set out to see how credible these premises are, since they go far beyond the Christian story of heaven and hell that most children learn in the West. An old culture makes room for love and death together, not as enemies but as entwined aspects of one life. The great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote,

The afterlife I grew up with is open-ended, like life itself. The old spiritual wisdom has stuck with me for decades, modified by experience and reflection. The only conception of death that makes sense to me allows us to experience everything. Now I hope to give readers a chance for that same freedom, here and in every world to come.