We are told that when each person dies, the guardian spirit (daimon) who was allotted to him in life proceeds to lead him to a certain place, whence those who have been gathered there must, after having been judged, proceed to the underworld with the guide who has been appointed to lead them thither from there.
—Plato’s Phaedo
The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were, but men and women are only half human.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
This last chapter is about last things. As I noted earlier, in the study of religion, we call this branch of religious thinking “eschatology,” from the Greek adjective eschaton for “last” or “final.” The word and notion carry more than simply a place in a list or group, though. “Last” or “final” here also mean the “end” of a thing, as both its final destiny and its ultimate purpose or meaning. So when scholars refer to a religion’s eschatology, they are really speaking about the ultimate end, purpose, and meaning of human life in a particular religious tradition. They are referring to who or what we might yet become.
Most developed religious systems have multiple visions of such ends, be it the end of an individual human life or the end of the entire universe. “Heaven,” “paradise,” and “resurrection” constitute such eschatological visions (although there are countless versions of heaven, paradise, and resurrection in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic history), as does the coming “Messiah” or “Messianic age” (again, countless versions), “hell” (again, countless versions), “purgatory” (you get the picture by now), “judgment,” “reincarnation,” “enlightenment,” “liberation,” the “end of the world,” and so on.
Elizabeth’s near-death experience and the messages that emerged from those two weeks on the alien planet constitute their own eschatology. Much of this “end” or “purpose,” however, needs to be drawn out or interpreted. Her visions do not constitute a systematic system in their own right. The meanings are largely implied or implicit. Such thinking is expressed mostly through images and story, not through any systematic thought, although Elizabeth freely and insightfully thinks out of her experiences and visions when asked a particular question. So much that I have to say in this chapter is my own interpretation or drawing out of what I think the images and stories of her visions imply, always, of course, in conversation with Elizabeth. I want to be clear about that (actually, I have tried very hard to be clear about everything).
I have grown more and more intrigued by the many spiritual pairs, doubles, twins, and doppelgängers of the history of religions (including the literature on telepathy between identical twins92). I was especially interested, then, when Elizabeth began talking about how everyone in the afterlife is paired up, and how the other half of the pair acts as a kind of guide both in this life and in the next. But I was also especially interested because I had been reading Charles Stang’s Our Divine Double on the same theme in the ancient world of the Greek philosophers, the early Christians, and some ancient religious communities.93 The shared details were remarkable and simply impossible to ignore.
The teaching of the divine double in Stang’s analysis of the ancient world is complex and nuanced, but the basic idea is that the human self or ego (“you” and “me”) is, in effect, a distant function or reflection of another form of human being that is transcendent, divine, and immortal. Different metaphors are used to get this idea across. The human being is said to be a “reflection” or “image” of this heavenly divine self, for example. Or the whole human system is likened to a giant tree growing upside down, with its roots in the heavens and its branches and leaves growing “down” into this world. Social and familial metaphors are also used. In the ancient sources, this other heavenly self is sometimes called our “angelic twin,” spiritual “guide,” or “companion.”
Like all religious expressions and experiences, there are many ways to read such claims. One would be to understand this comparative pattern of the Other Self or Divine Double as so many local traces of individuals who have been given access to some other dimension or aspect of the human who never really descends completely into this world. To borrow Elizabeth’s visionary language, this spiritual double is another dimension or aspect of us that remains “in the Garden.” In the ancient sources, as in Elizabeth’s visions again, such an angelic guide helps shepherd the little human self through a particular life cycle and then helps determine the next life cycle, that is, the next rebirth or reincarnation.
Stang is very careful here. It is not that we are “really” this Other Self and that our personal sense of self here and now is not real or unimportant. It is rather that we are both this named ego or individual person and this other Angel Self. In mythical language, each one of us is actually two of us. We are each a spiritual pair. The Human as Two.
It is probably relevant here that in the Bible God himself seems to have his own divine double, which is imagined in various forms, including under the mysterious figure of the “angel of the Lord.”94 I understand, of course, that the common understanding is that angels are not God, but this is not at all clear in numerous biblical texts, in the scholarship on those texts, or in people’s contemporary experiences of angels, which continue apace right down to the present. Much too briefly, we could say that angels are intermediary or both-and figures at once human and divine. They thus express God’s, and our own, twoness in particularly clear and dramatic ways. If I may express myself in my own poetic code, the angel sits somewhere in between the Human as Two and God as Two, linking and uniting all four, which are not really four but One.
Significantly, Jewish thinkers have often commonly linked both dream and prophecy to the presence of an angel. Two angelic species, for example, functioned in the Jewish philosopher Maimonides (1135–1204) as a way of speaking of the imagination and the intellect: “When man sleeps, his soul speaks to the angel, and the angel to the cherub. Thereby they have stated plainly to him who understands and cognizes intellectually that the imaginative faculty is likewise called an angel and that the intellect is called a cherub.”95
As the above quote makes clear, often this “link between prophetic vision and the angelic presence” could become extremely nuanced. For example, among the Rhineland German Jews called “pietists” of the early modern period, the angel was sometimes understood to be a form of God that appears within a person’s subjective experience but also “exists in a universe parallel to an individual’s mind” as a kind of doubling, as a kind of mirrored reflection, much as we saw above with Stang’s work on the Divine Double. In the words of Elliot Wolfson, “God’s volition is communicated through an angelic presence that corresponds to a person’s inner thought and its corresponding celestial angel (sar mazzal), which assumes the image of that person upon descending to the world.”96 This, of course, is uncannily close to Elizabeth’s teachings on the angelic guide or mentor who accompanies us into the world and into the next.
Other scholars have noted similar forms of human-divine twoness throughout the history of religions. Andrei Orlov has very recently written an entire book on the “heavenly double” motif in ancient Jewish literature through figures like Enoch, Moses, and Jacob. He begins with the ancient seer Mani (from whose visions emerged the ancient religion of Manichaeism and whom Stang also treats). Mani’s heavenly counterpart or spiritual partner first appeared to him at the age of twelve and continued to appear throughout the prophet’s life. At the moment of his death, Mani was beholding this heavenly counterpart with “eyes of light.” Orlov goes on to describe how such seers would acquire new “luminous bodies” on their celestial journeys and how, in the Jewish sources, these transformations and journeys were often mediated or guided by angelic presences, who would help the seer unite with his or her heavenly double or identity.97
Again, the comparative resonances are extremely precise. Although there is no way to establish this with certainty, I personally think that systems like those of the German Jewish pietists and Mani are based on out-of-body experiences and encounters with luminous beings similar to those of Elizabeth and the modern near-death experiencers. Or put differently, I think contemporary near-death experiencers are our own mystics and seers.
April DeConick, whose work on the “gnostic New Age” we looked at earlier, has also written about the Gospel of Thomas, a brief enigmatic text that many scholars think is as old, or older, than the four gospels that made it into the New Testament. Significantly, Thomas was known as the “twin” of Jesus. In this same context, DeConick writes about the guardian angel or twin as a Jewish version of a more ancient trope—that of the daimon or genius (both of which meant something like “guiding or inspiring spirit”) of the Greeks and Romans.98
We could go on and on here, and through numerous cultures. Really, the motif of the heavenly double, companion, or twin is everywhere in the ancient world, and it continues to appear again and again in the Jewish mystical traditions of Kabbalah, in Iranian Islamic mysticism, and in various modern paranormal notions like the German doppelgänger or occult double. In the contemporary world, angelic visits and apparitions are even embraced by conservative Christian communities that would reject almost every other form of the paranormal. The angel is thus a mediating figure again, linking or connecting that which we otherwise want to separate.99 The angel just never goes away, perhaps because, well, we never go away. We just keep coming back—as Two, it turns out.
As I listened to Elizabeth talk about the spiritual pairing that is so central to her near-death experience and subsequent convictions, I realized that what Elizabeth had “seen” in the Garden was too close to these historical sources to dismiss as coincidental or accidental, much less as some simple hallucination of her psyche or pure projection of her local culture. I realized, in short, that whatever set of experiences the ancient traditions were based on had been repeated in Houston, in the fall of 1988, in a Jewish woman mourning the loss of her beloved grandfather. I realized, to put it bluntly, that the theme of the spiritual pair is not a simple function of ancient culture and belief, and that it gives witness to something that is not simply historical. It is something that we can and do experience right here and right now. Charles Stang was correct to title his book Our Divine Double and not Their Divine Double. It is ours, too. It is us.
Both of us.
This is not some recent casual conclusion of mine. It lies at the core of all that I think and write. I have in fact captured and crystallized this same notion in multiple books since 2007. I call it the Human as Two. There are many aspects to this simple four-word poem that could be explained at this point. I will resist most of these, as I have done that elsewhere, and multiple times. But allow me to treat just a few of the historical precedents and spiritual implications of the Human as Two, as I think these, together, get at the very heart and final “end” of Elizabeth’s fantastic experience and subsequent convictions. I begin with the “soul.”
At the end of the day (and this book), what Elizabeth’s visions and experiences are about is the soul: its double nature, its fantastic abilities to know things outside or before the ordinary senses, and its multiple futures both in the other world (via biological death) and in this one (via reincarnation). “Soul,” to be sure, is an old-fashioned word, and one that has been on the defensive for some time. Indeed, most of modern science seems hell-bent on convincing us that there is no such thing.
And yet … and yet the soul returns, with a literal explosion in Elizabeth’s case. What I find so very interesting about these modern cases is that, when the soul appears in the modern world, it often looks very much like it did in the past, that is, it often brings in its wake entire theological structures and specific convictions that find clear precedents in the history of religions, even when the subject has no training or knowledge of this history. This makes sense only if we can move out of the naive assumption or belief that human beings are completely defined by their present place in the temporal stream; that, to employ the technical speak of the humanities, we are entirely “historical” and “conditioned” agents. The historian’s temptation here is to assume that this is so because a person like Elizabeth read this book or heard that teaching. In other words, the assumption is that we live in a purely materialist world in which ideas can only be passed on through material events, like reading books with our eyes and hearing things with our ears. Often, of course, this is the case. Sometimes it is not. The means of transmission are not always clear, and they seem to extend far beyond any simple “she read this” or “she saw that.” History is just weirder than that. So are people.
April DeConick again has the balance exactly right with respect to the history of gnostic spirituality, whose heavenly ascents, divinization of the soul, and claims to direct salvific knowledge bear more than a passing resemblance to Elizabeth’s “I just knew” experiences, as we have already seen. DeConick spends many pages explaining how gnostic ideas have been transmitted by specific texts throughout Western history, including in what she calls the “Trojan horses” of the Gospel of John and Paul’s letters of the New Testament, which glow with radical gnostic ideas once read outside their usual policed orthodox interpretations. As we have already seen, DeConick also turns to science fiction and film as especially potent sites of gnostic ideas and their transmission. But then toward the very end of her book, DeConick turns to another transmitter of gnostic convictions and writes of
another factor that most modern people are uncomfortable trying to explain, because it is irrational, but it has happened and still happens and will happen over and over again: rapture. The spontaneous religious experience. The sudden overwhelming revelation. The ecstatic encounter with transcendence, with ultimate reality, with the God Beyond All Gods.
And the result of such spontaneous ecstatic encounters? “The ecstatic experience of an all-encompassing transcendent reality, a source of being that is goodness and love, prompted many Gnostics to seek religious truth beyond their ancestral and regional religions.”100 To speak anachronistically, the gnostics were the original spiritual seekers, the ancient New Agers or “spiritual but not religious” who sought God beyond any religion or culture.
We can debate whether or not Elizabeth should be described as such a gnostic. I think there are good reasons to affirm and qualify such a distinction. But that is not my point here. My point is that the ultimate sources of Elizabeth’s experiences do not lie solely or exclusively in anything she read or heard in her own family and personal history. They lie in her ecstatic visions, transtemporal nightmares, and those key moments in which she “just knew.”
And none of these ecstatic moments are simple or singular. In each, a kind of doubling takes place. There is an Other speaking to Elizabeth or showing her things. In her own experience, she is not the one generating the precognitive nightmare or projecting the visionary 3-D display. An Other is doing all of this. If we want to express this obvious fact more simply, we might say that there are many different forms of consciousness implied in Elizabeth’s story. The soul here appears to possess many dimensions or, if you prefer, “levels” (although that doesn’t sound quite right—it sounds too much like a department store in a mall).
In any case, I count at least four. There is Elizabeth Krohn whom I talk to in this world and know as a friend. That’s one. There is the subtle body that floated just off the ground in the synagogue and sat on the bench in the heavenly garden for two weeks. That’s two. There is the spiritual double or angelic guide in the Garden who appeared to be other or “not Elizabeth” but with whom, we learn, the soul must eventually merge. That’s three. Finally, there is the glow on the other side of the mountains, the unseeable and unspeakable realm of the near-death vision that nevertheless functions as the final destiny and, we assume, ultimate nature of the soul. That’s four.
Similarly, the Jewish kabbalistic tradition often identifies five different dimensions or levels of soul. There is the “body-soul” or animating principle of the human form (nefesh). There is “spirit” (ruah), the Hebrew term commonly used in the Torah for the “spirit” of God, as well. There is the “true soul” (neshama). There is the “life force” (haya), which is usually taken to mean something like the divine life force and is understood to be that level of soul that achieves divine “attachment” or “cleaving” to God (devekut). And, finally, there is the “soul of the soul” or literally the “complete unity” (yehida), which is sometimes identified with the Godhead itself. As Moshe Cordovero put the matter most simply: “Man is a part of divinity above.”101 These are different systems, but it is not difficult to place Elizabeth’s own story in them. One suspects—I do anyway—a common experiential background.
I recognize, of course, that many readers generally assume that there is only one soul, one person, one form of consciousness. But this is clearly not the case even in our ordinary experience. Consider dreaming. When you dream, who is it exactly that dreams? Okay, but then who is it that is telling you all those crazy stories each night? You again? So some aspect of you is telling some other aspect of you stories in your sleep? Tell me, which one is you? Both of them, of course. See what I mean?
And that’s just dreaming. This doubling of human consciousness is even more extreme in reincarnation systems. Just which person are you if you are reincarnating through many lives as different persons? Something similar is true in ecstatic religious experiences, where the soul commonly doubles, triples, quadruples, sometimes even “becomes God.” It looks very much like we split up like subatomic particles in some grand physics experiment, spinning off here, flashing off there, before we realize that we are a part of, well, everything.
But alas, such a splitting and uniting often require a great deal of violence. One of the most basic aspects of the human experience of soul is that, generally speaking, this realm of soul is not apparent or even accessible to the person unless the “container” of the body-ego is somehow broken, compromised, punctured, or temporarily taken offline. This is why so many of us have no experience of being Two, of being a public persona and a secret soul. We have not been sufficiently broken, pierced, or cracked open. Perhaps this is also why so many eschatologies, so many visions of the “end of the world,” are so violent and destructive: to make something new, one must first destroy that which is old. An eschatology in this symbolic reading is a vision of human suffering writ large onto the cosmos, a vision that sees the breaking as a breaking open.102
People can be broken open, or just broken, in all sorts of ways. Such “little ends to the world” can happen, for example, in aesthetic, erotic, and psychedelic states. But probably the most common situations are those that we might gather under the general umbrella of trauma. Physical and/or emotional trauma, of course, normally does tremendous damage to the person. I do not wish to romanticize or idealize anything here. Many people struck by lightning are not changed in a flash. They are instantly killed. But it would simply be dishonest not to observe that in rare cases trauma can also open up an individual to other levels and dimensions of human being.
This is obviously the case in the near-death experience, which is nothing if not a traumatic event. By definition (“near-death”), are we not in the realm of physical trauma? Whatever psychospiritual mechanisms kick in to allow a near-death experience also appear to be functioning in many traumatic events. Among these mechanisms is what the psychiatric community calls “dissociation.” To dissociate is to split into two (or more) personalities, usually in order to endure some unbearable situation. The person “splits” into two (yet another mode of the Human as Two) so that she or he can survive a particularly terrible situation, be it a car accident, an illness, extreme anxiety, political torture, a beating, a rape, or too many other horrible things that human beings routinely suffer. This, of course, is how the psychiatric community would generally read a near-death experience: as a massive hallucinatory dissociation. That explains something, but not much.
When I explained this “traumatic secret” to Elizabeth, it made immediate sense, and she quickly incorporated the idea into her own self-understanding. But I did not bring the subject up. She did. It is important to realize that Elizabeth basically started our conversations with the story of the childhood abuser. This was no tangential side story. This was the beginning of her story. Here is a snippet from our conversation about the same, where one can actually see Elizabeth take up my reading in a kind of “Aha!” moment. Recall that Elizabeth had been sexually abused by a male babysitter for six years, from the age of six to twelve, and that she had not told her parents about these horrors until much later. Listen:
J: Was [the early childhood sexual abuse] connected to the NDE in some way? Did you feel somehow that you had some kind of need to tell your parents after the NDE?
E: Yeah, I did. It was within a year after the NDE that I felt like I had to tell them. And they honestly had no clue and felt really guilty about it. Because I had tried to drop hints when I was little, like, “I don’t want him to babysit,” “I hate him,” “He’s mean to Debbie,” and so on.
J: Yeah, the way a six-year-old would talk. As soon as you said something about your childhood and how good it was, my immediate unspoken guess was that there was something else, like this. And I think it’s significant. I don’t think we need to talk a lot about it now. Whitley [Strieber] is the same way.
E: What do you mean?
J: Well, he describes how he had some incredible trauma as a little boy on a military base in San Antonio. Apparently, his dad volunteered him for some kind of experiment on the base. Whatever they did to him was so bad that his immune system collapsed. He had to be hospitalized for weeks.
E: What did they do to him?
J: We don’t know. He has no memory of it. But he thinks that his later visitor experiences were made possible by this early trauma. He does not think that they are the same, or that the early trauma “caused” the later abduction events. He thinks that what trauma does in some cases is “crack open” the psyche, as it were, so that it can “let in” these other kinds of experiences.
E: I can tell you that when I was being raped, I went somewhere. I didn’t stick around and hover. I left. I would go walk on beaches. That was my thing. As a six-year-old, I would go to the beach.
J: You disassociated.
E: I totally was not there.
J: Yeah.
E: I couldn’t be there.
J: Right.
E: So I think that when I had the NDE I was already accustomed to leaving. I knew how.
J: Right. See, that’s the point. That’s the observation that Whitley has made.
E: I never even thought about that until you brought it up.
Elizabeth went on to explain to me that she had always felt “different.” She felt different “because of what he was doing to me.” So when she had the near-death experience, her reaction was, and still is on one level: “Yep, there I go again just being weird. Of course this weird thing happened to me, because I’m weird.” That is the “one big reason I never talked about it in public. That’s why I kept it secret.”
If I might translate here, one major reason that Elizabeth did not talk about the near-death experience in public was because she intuitively linked its strangeness with the weirdness of her earlier sexual trauma. She could not speak about the sexual trauma, so she could not speak about the near-death experience. They were linked. So here again we have a sexual secret become a spiritual secret. We also have a horrible trauma become revelation, a breaking become a breaking open.
Elizabeth speaks of the long cosmic process by which the human soul becomes its own double, becomes an angel, in two different vocabularies that have become historically linked in Western culture in the last century and a half. She speaks of “spiritual evolution” and of “reincarnation.” Here we are in a situation not unlike the one above when we tried to relate the physics of the light encountered in mystical and near-death experiences and the various electromagnetic effects of paranormal events. There we addressed the rather shocking phrase: the “physics of consciousness.” Here we address an equally shocking expression: the “evolution of the soul.” Obviously, we are in the double structure of the paranormal again, that third language somewhere between and just beyond the languages of science and religion.
Do such ways of speaking make any sense at all? What does an expression like “spiritual evolution” have to do with the chromosomes and DNA of contemporary genetics? Is such a way of speaking and thinking simply a series of misplaced metaphors, a kind of fuzzy spiritual speak that is best ignored and left behind? Or are there genuine insights to be had here? These are big questions, obviously, and we are not going to answer them in any adequate way here. But we can at least raise them and honestly describe some of their complexities.
Again, I will lay my cards on the table. For my own part, I think that these ways of speaking and seeing are nothing more, and nothing less, than modern modes of acknowledging the profound connections that really do exist between those two realms of the human experience that are otherwise (falsely) separated in our thinking and speech—the spiritual and the sexual, the mystical and the erotic, the paranormal and procreation, mystical forms of consciousness and evolutionary biology. I understand that none of these expressions are precise, and that they are jarring when placed next to one another, as I have just intentionally done. That is my point.
These same jarring connections are particularly obvious in the manner that Elizabeth invokes the horrendous account of being raped as a young girl for six years. It was in these traumatic conditions, she tells us, that she learned “to leave,” a psychospiritual skill that she again drew on when she was struck by lightning and had her all-loving near-death experience. She even speaks of the earlier dissociative skills as “saving” her in the lightning strike. They were, in a word, adaptive. So, clearly, there is a connection there between sexual trauma and spiritual transcendence, at least in Elizabeth’s mind. I have found the same connection between early sexual trauma and later adult mystical prodigies in other contexts, really in almost every literature in which I have looked.
As we have already noted above, these sex-to-spirit connections are again apparent in one of the major reasons that Elizabeth chose to come back from the afterlife: to have a daughter, which of course requires a sexual act and an entire invisible universe of genetic processes. There are profound sexual and genetic implications again in Elizabeth’s observations about what she once called in my presence her “weird, crazy family,” an affectionate and not inaccurate descriptor of the four generations of people whose lives have been consistently inspired and awed by a whole spectrum of uncanny events.
What do we do with the implicit genetic components of Elizabeth’s family lore and the remarkable spiritual gifts that run through her generations? The haunted necklace, the office plant gifted by the beloved grandfather that died on the day he died, the son who became an Orthodox rabbi in the Chabad movement, the mother who believes in reincarnation and was radiated by a comforting light from the sky on a cruise ship, and the female ghost both mother and son saw in their home. There is no getting around it: this family has spiritual mojo.
There are similar genetic or evolutionary implications embedded in reincarnation systems, of course, although we seldom think of it in quite that way. Both reincarnation and evolution take a lot of sex to happen. Sex is the biological mechanism of rebirth. No sex, no reincarnation, no enlightenment, no release, no spiritual advance. But it’s way sexier still. Just think about it. In a world defined by reincarnating souls, in some profound sense beyond any of our present temporary selves, everyone is always becoming everyone else, and so everyone is having sex with everyone else all the time everywhere. It’s one big cosmic orgy.
I always think of a funny song when I read the reincarnation stories, be they traditional or contemporary. I think of a little ditty called “I’m My Own Grandpa,” originally performed by Lonzo and Oscar in 1947. The song is sung by a young man who marries an older widow with a daughter, who then marries the young man’s father, which makes the man’s father also his son-in-law (since his stepdaughter just married him). The two families then begin to have children, which confuses all of the family relations further, until the singer eventually, somehow, becomes his own grandpa. I doubt a first-time listener can follow the familial complexity of the humor (I certainly didn’t, and still cannot), and that, I am sure, is the point. But here is something I do understand: the same can happen in a reincarnation story, and in a much more clear fashion. A dead grandfather can really become a future grandson or granddaughter. It’s that twisty.
If one wants to be rescued here from the sexual, gender, and familial rabbit hole you just fell into, I suppose one could think of all of these reincarnation stories as one long metaphysical meditation on human identity, a meditation with a single moral lesson: We are not who we think we are. Each of us, spread out over countless lives, is everyone else.
Just think about that.
As you think about it, it is important to also understand that the meaning and experience of something like “reincarnation” shifts dramatically from culture to culture and time period to time period. Numerous cultures assume some kind of reincarnation process, and most of the models differ profoundly—the nature of the preexistence of the soul before it takes on a body; what spiritual or moral mechanisms determine the future birth; how long a temporal “gap” the soul waits between births; the nature of the intermediate world one encounters at death; whether this process is something to embrace or escape from; whether one can reincarnate as an animal, an insect, or a simpler life form still; and finally, what the point of it all might be. To put the matter bluntly, reincarnation is not one thing. Models of what it is and how it works are extremely diverse, and they are still morphing, still changing right in front of our eyes up to this very day.103
Such morphing models, then, are in no way restricted to the famous and ancient karma theories of the Asian religions, as is often assumed. Moreover, even the different Hindu and Buddhist traditions differ profoundly on key points, like the nature and permanence of the soul or self that reincarnates and the presumed goal or purpose of all of this living and dying. These beliefs and convictions also differ profoundly within the Hindu and Buddhist traditions themselves, which are not one thing either. To complicate things further, reincarnation belief systems are also apparent in ancient Greece, in early Christianity, in some of the mystical branches of Judaism, in numerous indigenous traditions of the Americas and Africa, and in an immense swath of twenty-first century individuals often collected under the rubric of the “spiritual but not religious.” And that, no doubt, is just the beginning. Really, reincarnation beliefs (and experiences) can be found pretty much anywhere we choose to look.
Seen in this broader historical and comparative perspective, Elizabeth’s insistence on the reality and centrality of reincarnation is not particularly surprising. Actually, it makes very good historical and cultural sense, even in her own religious environment. Reincarnation is not at all foreign to the history of Judaism and is quite common in those mystical schools within the Jewish traditions often gathered under the general umbrella of Kabbalah. Known as gilgul in Hebrew, reincarnation or transmigration is a central teaching in some of these esoteric schools. It can be found as early as the ninth century and is widely discussed in the tradition, from the kabbalistic masters of the Italian Renaissance to modern mystical traditions like the Chabad-Lubavitch movement inspired by the remarkable “Rebbe,” Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson (1902–1994).104
There is nothing necessarily “non-Jewish” about reincarnation, then, although it is indeed an esoteric or undiscussed teaching within many mainline strands of Judaism today. I do not want to suggest that it is somehow common or required in Judaism. That is simply false. But neither should we think that it is entirely foreign or out of place. If we want to stick to a historical and local framework (although I have no idea what a “local historical” framework might mean when reincarnating souls in many systems can effortlessly hop families, societies, continents, and even species), Elizabeth’s own understanding of reincarnation could easily be traced back to Jewish kabbalistic and mystical roots.
Having said that, the present shape of reincarnation in her thought and experience probably owes as much to modern esoteric, Theosophical, human potential, and New Age strands as it does to any medieval or modern kabbalistic ones, particularly in its embrace of “evolutionary” language, which did not really appear until after Darwin, in the second half of the nineteenth century.105 Having said that, it is even more important to keep in mind that nineteenth-century Theosophy (the real granddaddy, or grandmother, of the later New Age) was itself influenced by Jewish Kabbalah, and that the Hebrew term for “reincarnation” (gilgul) actually means “revolution,” as in a “turning round,” a meaning which, of course, is also embedded in the English “evolution,” a “rolling out,” and in the Sanskrit samsara (the “cycle of birth and death”). What we appear to have here is a kind of esoteric history of evolution before evolution, if you will.106
It is also crucial to understand that the modern revival and global renaissance of Kabbalah is in deep conversation with the same modern esoteric and New Age currents (including counterculture, trance techniques, and Asian religions), and that this revival of Kabbalah is taking place on a scale that is far greater than in any previous historical era, including the alleged “golden ages” of Kabbalah in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.107 At no point in Jewish history has the Kabbalah enjoyed such widespread enthusiasm and attention. We may not yet have an adequate theory about why, but there is no getting around the fact that the New Age is often shaped by the Jewish tradition, and much of modern Jewish mysticism is shaped by the New Age. The two should not be facilely separated, then, but neither should they be equated or conflated. They are different, and they are connected.108
What to make of all of this, here at the end, not of the world or of a life, but of this little book? What follows are my thoughts—obviously speculative, but also entirely sincere.
One of the most basic questions that any eschatology must answer is what happens to us after we die. Respectfully setting aside the materialist answer for just a moment (that is, “Nothing happens”), there are two basic, seemingly competing models at work in the modern mystical literature: a one-life model and a multiple-life model. On one level, the question seems easy enough to phrase: “Do we live once, or do we live many times?” On another level, it is not at all so clear.
In the spring of 2016, I visited the Department of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. It was a visit long overdue. I have known and interacted with many of the faculty there for some time. Bruce Greyson is a psychiatrist, now retired from the university, who is the doyen of near-death studies in the United States. Bruce showed me an entire wall of files of near-death cases that he has been studying for decades now—about a thousand in all, give or take a hundred. One is marked “Elizabeth Krohn.”
Jim Tucker is on the present faculty. He is a child psychiatrist who also specializes in studying CORT or Cases of the Reincarnation Type. These involve young children, usually between the ages of two and five (at the onset of language but just before full socialization), who claim to remember previous lives. The details can be eerily precise, and many can be corroborated with coroner reports and historical research. This research project, now in its seventh decade, was begun by the psychiatrist Ian Stevenson (1918–2007), also formerly of the University of Virginia. Jim showed me two walls of file cabinets of such cases—about 2,700 in all. And they are still collecting them.
The file cabinets on the near-death experiences and the file cabinets on the cases of the reincarnation type are not twenty feet apart. I mention this not to dwell inappropriately on office spaces but to make a very important point: the modern near-death experience and the phenomenon of past-life memories are clearly related historically (the same individuals have studied and written about them), institutionally (the University of Virginia has played an outsized role here, since both Bruce Greyson and Jim Tucker have been on the faculty and even Raymond Moody, the coiner of the modern near-death experience, received his PhD in philosophy from the same university—what is in the water there?), and conceptually (since both forms of human experience suggest the postmortem survival of some aspect of the human person).
And once again, Elizabeth’s experience fits in extremely well here: the file on her own near-death experience is just a few feet from the files of the reincarnation memories. One cannot help but sense that it is all somehow related. There are even files on precognitive dreams of plane crashes in the same archives.109
But all of this begs the questions: What is the relationship between the near-death experience and reported memories of a previous life among small children? How do we relate these two sets (or file cabinets) of human experience? Or, if you prefer, how do we keep them apart?
At the end of the day, these two literatures confront us with serious questions that individuals and cultures have struggled with for millennia. We are not likely to solve them in these last few pages. There appears to be a basic contradiction here, after all. In one set of stories (the near-death literature) we have what looks like a one-life model—we live once, we die once, we encounter some being or presence, and then we go “into the Light” or some other afterlife state or place. In the other set of stories (the past-life memory literature), we have an unabashed multiple-life model—at least some of us (an important qualification) live many times, die many times, and pass through some intermediate state from death to birth, hopefully toward some sort of enlightenment, release, or other unspecified end or goal. We usually associate the former with the monotheistic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and the latter with the Asian traditions (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism). Elizabeth’s story reminds us that this division is too easy and not always accurate.
What are we to make of this apparent dilemma or seeming contradiction? It seems to me that, again, we basically have three options here, each of which lines up with one of the models of the imagination explained above: the hallucinatory, the literalist, and the translational.
First, we can adopt a reductive explanation and argue that all of these experiences are fundamentally shaped (and so entirely bound) by culture. There is no real contradiction here, since there is no afterlife. The differences are all traceable to the differences of culture. This lines up perfectly with what we called the hallucinatory model of the imagination outlined above.
Certainly there is much to recommend such a view to us even within a Western historical frame, as Carol Zaleski’s artful comparisons of near-death experiences in medieval Europe and modern America suggest. Medieval souls, for example, often reported seeing such Catholic realities as purgatory, saints, the Virgin Mary, and the punishments of hell, whereas modern ones tend to see more abstract white lights and loved ones and seldom emphasize postmortem punishment or intermediate states (like purgatory). But even here we must be careful, as Zaleski also points out, for there is also much that is similar between the medieval and the modern, including the life review and the powerful and positive aftereffects of the visions.110 Zaleski’s comparative balancing of similarity and difference within the Western narratives is admirable, but it does not yet resolve for us the cross-cultural problem, since she does not treat the reincarnation memory cases, which can be found in Asian as well as Western and numerous indigenous cultures around the world.
Second, we can adopt some literalist position and argue that one or the other of the models of the afterlife is the correct one, and that the others are false, heretical, diabolical, in error, and so forth. Many a monotheist (not all) will want to argue that the “true” afterlife is the single-life model defined by judgment and reward, whereas the Hindu, Buddhist, or Daoist will want to argue that the “true” afterlife is the multiple-life model defined by some form of karma or other similar moral mechanism. Even here we must be careful, though, as we can also find monotheistic traditions, like Sikhism or mystical forms of Judaism, that will combine reincarnation and judgment in different ways, and much of ancient Greek religious culture (presumably “Western”) assumed reincarnation. In reality, there is no easy “West”/“East” or one-life/multiple-life division here. Nevertheless, the point remains solid enough: any such religious traditions will usually argue that its own model is the correct one, and that everyone else has it more or less wrong. This religious sensibility lines up well with the literalist model of the imagination outlined above.
Third, we can incorporate elements of both of these positions but reject their final conclusions. We can posit that reported experiences of the afterlife are often just that—experiences of a real afterlife—but that their specific content or visionary displays are clearly products of the cultural religious imagination. The religions are all in some sense correct, and they are all in some sense incorrect. None of them should be taken literally. The science fiction movie can always be written and directed in different ways. This, of course, lines up with the translational model of the imagination outlined above, as well as with my general thesis here that “we are changing the afterlife.”
There is a further payoff here with this third model, since, once we adopt it, we might also begin to wonder whether there are certain “stages” or “levels” of the death process. We might wonder whether the further one gets into the death process, the less translation is necessary and the more the movie is absorbed back into the projecting Light.
An important figure like Robert Monroe, who helped bring into the English language the expression “out-of-body experience,” otherwise known as the OBE (which bears close descriptive and historical connections to the near-death literature), is suggestive here. Having experimented with hundreds of out-of-body experiences during his own lifetime, Monroe believed that there were in fact stages in our spiritual journeys after death, and that in the early stages an individual could well dwell in a world shaped by whatever his or her religious beliefs happened to be. He called these “belief system territories.” There were many further realms beyond these, whose complexities involved numerous teachings, such as a distinction between the “I Here” (the individual in this lifetime) and a cosmic continuum of personalities involving thousands of lifetimes that he called the “I Theres,” as well as the existence of various intermediate realms and beings.111
We need not dwell on Monroe’s system here. I am not asking you to sign your name to its details. That is not my point. My point is that we could well imagine a model of the afterlife that features something like his “belief system territories” early on in the death process, but that also displays features or realms that are less and less cultural and more and more universal the further one journeys “in” (or “out”). Culture and religion might eventually fall away and a person, any person, could experience the same afterlife realities as any other person (whatever a “person” or personal identity might mean in such a far-death state and its continuum of consciousness).
If we were to adopt such a stage theory, as a thought experiment if nothing else, this third option could rather easily coordinate the two afterlife models—that of one life and multiple lives. Such a model, after all, begins by observing that the modal Western near-death experience does not seem to be a full death experience. It is rather a near-death experience. The researchers are fairly consistent in their consensus that the person does not actually die in these events. He or she, after all, always comes back. Otherwise, we would have no story of a near-death experience. The past-life memories, on the other hand, clearly represent or at least claim to represent, a death that was complete and carried all the way through. There can be no rebirth without an actual death.
The easiest way to synthesize both the one-life and the multiple-life models, then, is to adopt an “Asian” model of reincarnation as the more complete one and assume that the “Western” near-death experiences are just that—near-death experiences, which, if carried through, would have led, in some cases at least (for there is no way to know if all souls reincarnate), to a next-life scenario, perhaps more or less similar to what we find reported or remembered in Asia but no longer bound to those particular cultural framings and assumptions (around karma, caste, purity and dietary codes, and so on). Those cultural framings, after all, are also culturally determined and local, and so relative. They are not absolute or universal.
This third option, please note, cuts both ways. It gives us something very powerful (a way of coordinating the afterlife experiments of different cultures), but it also takes away a great deal, including the primacy of the one-life model and the typical interpretations of the many-lives models that the Asian religions profess. If we choose to take up this thought experiment, we should not underestimate that gift or those costs.
There is another way to say this. We might want to insist on making sharp distinctions between ancient scriptures and modern identities in our social or religious lives (as if the past is somehow more holy or authoritative than the present, and as if the “they” of the past were not actually the “we” of the present), but whatever or whoever is writing the scripts and projecting the movies of extreme religious experiences like those of Elizabeth Krohn obviously cares little for such quibbles. It simply does what it does, and one of the things it does is combine and recombine ideas, traditions, and persons from the store of memory and culture (wherever that is). Again, we might want to draw distinctions, but it wants to link, compare, and (con)fuse. We might want to be stable and individual religious egos and pretend that we are all separate from one another, but it knows that all such egos are temporary and finally illusory, and that every little ego flows seamlessly into another from life to life, like one whirlpool or current flowing into another within a single giant ocean.
Again, I am speculating here. Please remember that. Please do not misread me as claiming that I somehow know this, or that I think that this must be the case. I am not saying that. Still, it is true, perfectly true, that I think these things, and that I find them plausible given the total witness of the history of religions (as opposed to just this or that religion, community, or individual). I also honestly think that much of this speculation on my part is already carried in Elizabeth’s visionary experience in the afterlife.
Consider the visionary fact that everything she experienced was “in the Garden,” which may have been on another planet but which also looked, smelled, and sounded just like the natural world of this earth, only more so. It was a deeply ecological vision of the afterlife. But it also encoded its own transcendence. The Garden was not the ultimate destination of the visionary landscape, after all. The other side of the mountains in the distance carried this particular symbolic function. The mountain path was the path that moved away from both near-death and a return to this life and toward some kind of ultimate truth or final transcendent state that was never actually given in the experience.
This all makes good sense in both a comparative or global and a local or Jewish context. Comparatively speaking, mountains have long functioned as a place of revelation and epiphany, as the place closest to the sky and so to the gods who dwell there (this, of course, presumes a naive version of transcendence as the third dimension in relationship to a flat, two-dimensional plane, that is, as “up”). So too in the Jewish tradition, God is most directly encountered in a burning bush by Moses on a mountain, Mount Sinai. If the Garden, then, carries a sacralization of the earth and the natural world, the mountains signal transcendence and a movement beyond the human toward God and, well, we do not know because we are not told.
It is in this way that Elizabeth’s near-death experience can well be seen as an intuition of a kind of stage-theory of the afterlife. The dead see the movies of their own cultural myths and personal inclinations first “in the Garden” (or in whatever setting they choose to see) before they move on to some transcendent state beyond all of this “on the other side of the mountain.” It is entirely possible that the latter transcendent or ultimate stage is universal, the same for us all, whereas the former near-death stage is always local and relative, unique to each of us.
My central contention throughout these pages has been that we are changing the afterlife. In light of the above, I probably need to qualify this outrageous claim. I need to say that the afterlife we are changing is likely the near-afterlife, the imaginations that we die into and often return from. To speak in the mythical terms of Elizabeth’s visionary landscape, I suspect that we can and do change the Garden, but not the glowing Presence on the other side of the mountains.
To switch metaphors and return to one of the central ideas of this second half of this book, the immediate afterlife as a supermovie, we might guess that it is somewhere “in the mountains” that the same projecting movie turns back on its own Light and returns to the projector projecting it. The colorful scenes, characters, and special effects all “enter the Light.” Maybe that turning around to the projector at the back of the room is more than a metaphor. Maybe it is closer to the truth than we think. Hence the famous tunnel image and the loving Light shining at its end. Maybe such souls are zooming “back” into the Projector, from which they were originally projected.
Elizabeth’s visionary narrative thus encodes in mythical form both the movies of our religions and the Light behind them projecting it all. Hence the (Jewish) Garden and the (transcendent) Light beyond the mountains. As such, Elizabeth’s visionary narrative encodes in ecological or geographic form what I have called the Human as Two.
And the Human as One. Please also note Elizabeth’s convictions that, at some point, when the reincarnating soul is mature and awake enough, it realizes that its angelic companion is also itself (and this is a fine and accurate gloss on what the kabbalistic tradition calls the yehida or the fifth and highest level of the soul as “complete unity”112). It becomes one with its own divine double. At that point it then takes on a new cosmic purpose. It becomes a twin, companion, counterpart, double, or angel to another soul toward the same unifying end or eschatological purpose. Elizabeth does not say it, perhaps because she has not thought quite like this, but what this entire vision seems to suggest is that we are all one (remember Arrival?), that we become one another (or one another’s double) again and again throughout countless lives, and that each of us is, has been, and will be everyone else’s double before we finally become ourselves and enter the Light from which we all originally emanated or shone.
Probably the most famous instance of the garden motif in Jewish lore occurs in the second and third chapters of Genesis, the famous Adam and Eve story. But there are other gardens in the Jewish tradition. For example, the Song of Songs describes a “locked garden” (4:12), an image and even title that later kabbalistic traditions take up to name an esoteric space or realm that is not fully accessible to us here, much as Elizabeth describes her own experience of the Garden: “Many things about my visit to the Garden I now struggle to describe. They are simply not imaginable or thinkable. We simply cannot perceive the Garden ‘where’ and ‘when’ we are now. And so the words to describe them do not yet exist here. Maybe they never will. Perhaps they are not supposed to exist here.”
I should add that the same Song of Songs tradition is infused with a deep mystical eroticism, of which both the Jewish and the Christian mystical traditions were keenly aware and engaged in a variety of symbolic and physiological ways. To take just one of numerous examples, a common metaphor for spiritual enlightenment in the Jewish mystical tradition is hitorerut, which literally means “awakening” or “arousal,” which takes us straight back to the profound links between mystical awakening, reproduction, and an erotic evolutionary impulse.113 We also find the garden in early Jewish commentaries on the Bible. Here we often encounter the term pardes, which is normally translated “paradise” but literally means “orchard” or “garden.” The word is Persian in origin (yet another little sign of how misguided it is to separate cultures and religions or to imagine them as unconnected or incomparable).
As such a Persian “paradise” suggests, the garden or orchard was an ancient Middle Eastern trope that was likely in place for centuries, if not millennia, before the arrival of monotheism and Judaism on the scene. Kings built gardens. Gardens were the place of royalty, wealth, power, pleasure, and privilege. Perhaps these allusions to the power and privilege of kings are reasons gardens were also considered dangerous in Jewish lore. Consider the Garden of Eden—things didn’t exactly work out very well there for the lovely couple.
Another garden story that emphasizes danger is the Jewish story of the four rabbis who went to pardes. The story is ancient, dating back at least to the first century, and probably before that. It is considered an aggadah, which we might translate as “instructive legend” or “sacred story.” Another form of religion as “true fiction” or “fictional truth.” There are many versions of the story, but all involve four rabbis who went to paradise. The first looked and died. The second looked and went mad. The third “destroyed the plants” (a metaphor, in some readings, for becoming a heretic or losing the correct faith114). Only the fourth entered and left paradise “in peace.”
I do not want to get into the specifics of the ancient, medieval, and modern interpretations of this story. These historical complexities are not my concern here. I want to do something else. I want to advance my own interpretation. I want to suggest that it does not seem too much of a stretch to engage this story as a commentary on ancient and modern near-death experiences, that is, on the garden of paradise and its potential dangers and gifts.
I hope you, oh reader, have not looked and died, or looked and gone mad. But I certainly have not sought to leave you “in peace” either, that is, unmoved or content in your particular movie we call a self or a religion. And I am not the least bit concerned if you have become a “heretic,” not because I am not concerned about you, but because I do not believe in heretics. To label someone a “heretic,” after all, one must assume a single correct faith from which this person has somehow strayed, an exclusive, universal way of imagining and entering paradise. I have no such single correct faith for one simple reason: because there is none.
Perhaps you understand that now. Perhaps you do not. Either way, if this little book has moved you in any way, I hope that it has shocked you into the realization that, although paradise and an afterlife there almost certainly are, there is no such single or correct way to get there, no one vision or experience of that paradise and afterlife, no singular movie or imagination into which we die for a time. These are countless forms of paradise and the afterlife, just as there are countless forms of human beings and cultural imaginations. And all of these, individually and collectively, are changing paradise itself each day, little by little, death by death, near-death by near-death, book by book. As fantastic and unbelievable as it might sound, we are all, together, really and truly changing the afterlife.