chapter 4

Life Between Lives

In the Irish-Celtic tradition, and also in the nineteenth-century theosophical conception of the afterdeath realm, there is the notion of Summerland as a kind of peaceful and beautiful transitional resting and recovery place—especially valuable for those who were dying from a body racked with pain and illness. In classical Greece, the name Elysium or the Elysian Fields conveyed a similar imagery of peaceful natural scenery where the souls of the deceased can rest. The essence of Summerland is that it is a resting ground where souls reflect on the life they led, to see if they learned the lesson they had intended to learn, and then try again in due course. Thus Summerland or Elysium were seen, not as a place of judgment, but rather of spiritual self-evaluation, where a soul is able to review its life and gain an understanding of the total impact its actions had on the world. It was said that the ecology and geography of Summerland is an amalgam of your religious beliefs and your personal dreams and visions.

In the modern autobiographical literature on NDE (near-death experience), we can recognize some of the same Elysian Fields or Summerland imagery of a peaceful, beautiful, transitional resting place, after the terrors and pains of dying. A consistent theme in the NDE accounts is that after an abrupt separation from the physical body and an OBE (out-of-body experience) perspective on the death scene (such as in an auto accident or during surgery), there is a profound change to a mood of painless peace and awareness of brilliant light—sometimes an entry into a tunnel with light at the end. The individual experiences the light itself as intelligent, emotionally soothing, and personally welcoming.

The last thing I remember was my doctor’s assistant standing by my bed and then I left my body, and I could see it down below on the bed. I don’t know how long I stayed above my body looking down at it, but suddenly I was in the most beautiful Golden Light, and I stayed there. I felt so loved, calm, peaceful, happy…the Golden Light was all around me, all within me. I was in the Golden Light with no separation whatsoever…Such powerful love, and so much love, so much beauty there. I felt love, compassion, understanding, knowledge (Ring, 1998, p. 34).

The light was round and it did get bigger and bigger very fast, so I could have been zooming through a tunnel…I was a little scared when the light first zoomed to me (or me to it), even though it didn’t hurt my eyes like I thought it would. In fact the more I looked at it, the more mesmerized I became with peacefulness…I clearly and instantly knew the light was not just a light but was ALIVE! It had a personality and was intelligent beyond comprehension…I knew the light was a being. I also knew the light being was God and was genderless (op. cit., p. 44).

The intelligent light emanation may be accompanied or followed by the appearance of previously deceased family members, like parents, ancestors, or loved ones. The individual may also see angelic, spiritual beings, who telepathically convey messages of total acceptance, wisdom, and peace.

There was a light toward the end of the tunnel, but before I could reach it, two figures appeared outlined in light. They communicated with me through my mind, telepathically. I recognized one of the figures as being my father. He confirmed and agreed with everything conveyed by his companion, who seemed to have great authority, like an angel or one of God’s helpers (Ring, 1992, p. 101).

“God” was within this brightness. I felt loved beyond all judgment…and completely accepted. This “God” communicated to me—no words, just kind of pushed knowledge into me—that I had a rough past but he/she was delighted at my handling of my life, and that I was okay…The God was gentle, but I knew I had to go back (op. cit., p. 103).

Many of the accounts of NDEs report a sense of some kind of life-review council, in which the positive and negative features of the life are seen and evaluated. The accounts agree that the life-review process, in the company of a council of guides, elders, and sometimes ancestors, is carried out in an atmosphere of loving kindness and compassion, without even a hint of punitive judgment. The deceased soul himself or herself participates in this life review—which has the quality of a shared evaluation of progress made or not made, and the lessons learned or not learned, in the life that just ended, and always in the context of total loving acceptance.

Scenes from my life began to pass before my eyes at superhigh speeds. It seemed as if I was a passive observer in the process, and it was as if someone else was running the projector. I was looking at my life objectively for the first time ever. I saw the good as well as the bad (Ring, 1998, p. 13).

It proceeded to show me every single event in my twenty-two years of life, in a kind of instant three-dimensional panoramic review…The brightness showed me every second of all those years, in exquisite detail, in what seemed only an instant of time. As I relived my life, there was no judgment being placed on it by anyone. No one pointed a finger at the horrors, or blamed me for any of my mistakes. There was only the overwhelming presence of complete acceptance, total openness, and deepest love (op. cit., p. 165).

These encounters and afterdeath visions occur in a realm completely outside of time—indeed the whole NDE experience often lasts only a few minutes, as measured in real or clock-time—although they may take hours or many written pages to describe afterward. The complete transcendence of time in the afterdeath realm was dramatically illustrated by the experience of a man who had an unexpected NDE while under the influence of LSD. This story was told to me by a witness of this occurrence.

The man in question had taken a fairly high dose of LSD, together with some friends, at night, on the rooftop of an apartment building in Detroit. On the roof were some ventilator shafts, about two feet in height above the rest of the roof. In the profound absorption of his LSD-induced trance, as the man stepped off the ventilator shaft on which he was standing, he thought he had stepped off the edge of the roof, and was therefore about to die. In the second or less which it took for him to “fall” down the two or three feet, a quick succession of scenes from his life flashed before his astonished eyes (Metzner, 1998, p. 144).

The complete transcendence of time as in this account is found in many accounts of NDEs and especially the life review. The NDE researcher Kenneth Ring has suggested that in such experiences, time is spatialized. He cites the following account of a woman who had an NDE as a child and another one as an adult.

With regard to the question of time, everything happened instantaneously. The whole thing happened all at once but we are bound by the restraints of language…When my life went before my eyes, it was not from my earliest memory of thirteen months. There was an enormous TV screen in front of me…Way over on the left was my memory at thirteen months, and way over on the right was my memory at thirty-eight. Everything in between was right there and I could see the whole thing, all at the same instant (Ring, 1998, p. 150).

Some devout or fundamentalist Christians who have experienced NDEs report a sense of compassionate revelation of the truth of one’s life—not the punitive separation of “sheep” and “goats,” nor the condemnation to eternal punishment or long-term purgatory found in fundamentalist dogma. Indeed, in the NDE account of a devout Catholic, she mentions that she first resisted the angelic guide visions due to her mortal terror of “dying in sin,” until she was finally able to take in the compassionate acceptance of the saintly figure who appeared to her.

The recognition of an afterdeath meeting with compassionate guides and supportive ancestors can also occur in the context of past-life therapy, where it can be immensely liberating.

A woman-physician of my acquaintance had repeated disturbing visions, in dreams and altered states of consciousness, of being pursued by a raving mob of men and women, armed with sticks and pitchforks, who screamed, “Kill the witch, kill the witch.” The visions always ended with her running, alone and terrified, and the screaming mob running after her. I guided her, in a therapeutic trance-state, to stop running, turn around, and face the mob. Immediately, she knew and accepted that it was a past-life dying memory. As she lifted off from her body, she was met and welcomed with love by her mother and aunt, fellow wise woman healers who had died before her.

The fear associated with traumatic deaths may function to fixate the memory of the trauma, causing it to carry over into the next life—in much the same way that traumas can lead to compulsive repetitions within one lifetime. For the reincarnated “witch,” the attack visions did not recur.

Communication Between the Living and the Spirits of the Dead

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the West, the inherent spiritual need for communication between the living and their deceased loved ones was afforded through psychically gifted spiritual mediums. One of the most astonishing was Emily French (1831–1912), a frail, deaf woman in Rochester, NY, who in her consultations, manifested the very loud, male voice of her Indian guide “Red Jacket,” in what was called “direct-independent voice communication,” which gave detailed and elaborate answers to questions about the afterlife. Her teachings, which were researched and recorded at the time by the attorney Edward Randall, have recently been reissued in a compilation by N. Riley Heagerty called The French Revelation (Heagerty, 1995).

To my mind, one of the most fascinating insights from this work is their account of the role of mediumship or “spirit suggestion,” as it was also called, in the creation of works of literature and art. The authorship of the works of William Shakespeare, so brilliant in their diversity and their understanding of the human psyche, and their knowledge of the ways of many cultures and times, has often been disputed. How did this working-class, simple country fellow and actor come up with these extraordinary works? In The French Revelation, the spirit-authors channeling through Emily French and Edward Randall are quoted as asserting that

all the Shakespearean works were, beyond a doubt, the product of his pen, but the conceptions, the plays, the tragedies were the work of many minds, given Shakespeare by spirit suggestion. He was the sensitive instrument through which a group of learned and distinguished scholars, inhabitants of many lands when in earth-life, gave to posterity the sublime masterpieces of the Bard of Avon (op. cit., p. 261).4

It is perhaps a sign of a change in the collective consciousness in Western society that in the period since World War II, there has been a notable increase in documented, verifiable communications between the living and the dead—unmediated by a third person. Contemporary gifted psychics such as Kurt Leland and Sylvia Browne have also contributed to the literature describing the afterdeath realms, as have hypnotherapists such as Michael Newton, who has specialized in deep trance inductions that take people to the life between lives (Newton, 1994, 2000).

In dreams and visionary encounters with the spirits of the dead, people have consistently remarked that when they did finally overcome their grief and guilt enough to be receptive to the departed loved one, they appeared—not in the aged, diseased, or wounded form of the time of death, but in the prime of life, healthy and glowing. It is my sense that such visions of a rejuvenated form may appear when some time has elapsed since the dying—and the deceased soul will have gone through some kind of healing and purifying adjustment to life on the other side. It may also be that the survivor needs to have come to terms with their grief (and sometimes residual guilt at not having done enough for the deceased) to be receptive to such visionary encounters.

In his book Reunions: Visionary Encounters with Departed Loved Ones, the psychiatrist Raymond Moody, who was one of the first to investigate NDEs, describes his pioneering research with what he calls a psychomanteum, a specially created room with a tilted mirror that can facilitate visions and conversations with the souls of the dead. Moody related that the dead generally appeared healthy and spoke in a kind but firm manner, educating their survivor loved ones about the reality of life in the spirit world, often encouraging them to get on with their life.

I had not really been planning to meet up with my nephew while I was there in the apparition room. I sat there for what seemed like a long period of time…All of a sudden I stopped trying to force it and just sat back and relaxed…This is when I suddenly had a very strong sense of the presence of my nephew, who had committed suicide. I was close to this nephew, who was named after my father and me. There was this very strong sense of his presence and I heard his voice very clearly. He was talking to me. He greeted me and he brought me a very simple message. He said, “Let my mother know that I am fine and that I love her very much.” The experience was very profound. I know he was there with me. I didn’t see anything, but I had a very strong sense of him and his presence. This voice is different from just having a thought, and it is not exactly like the regular experience of hearing a voice. It is like being spoken to mentally…I feel sure that I was in communication with my nephew (Moody, 1993, p. 91–92).

Moody reported several general observations from his research with this mode of afterdeath communication. One was that people often encountered a different deceased family member than the one they expected. Another was that the apparitions, when they did appear, could also leave the mirror and stand near the subject. Some people even felt touched or hugged by their relative in spirit form—though with others, touching was expressly discouraged. Although Moody had not expected it, in about half the cases actual conversations took place, usually of a reassuring and clarifying nature, sometimes with the actual hearing of a voice, other times more directly telepathic.

Moody and others in the psychomanteum received the impression from such encounters that there was some difficulty involved for the deceased souls in making themselves visible to the living. Yet all the subjects insisted emphatically that the reunions were with the “real” persons—not fantasies and not imaginary—and the experience was spiritually transformative, changing forever the survivor’s outlook on the meaning of life and death.

After my son Ari died, it was more than ten years before I was able to dissolve enough of the grief and guilt to be able to have meaningful conversations with him, in a waking meditative state. These conversations did not, however, involve my “seeing” his form (which would occur spontaneously only in dreams—usually in the form of memory images). Most often our communications were a kind of subtle inner “hearing” where I would ask him a question and then directly receive a response.

One time, an unexpected communication took place: I was sitting meditating in my room, when I suddenly clearly heard a child’s voice say, “Dad.” At first I thought it was my daughter, but I knew she was not in the house. Then I thought it was my stepson—but I realized it couldn’t be him, since he didn’t call me “Dad.” So then I realized that it was Ari, trying to get my attention and initiate a conversation. He proceeded to encourage me, just with telepathic thought transfer, to talk about the myths of Odin and his son Baldur in the talks I was planning to give on an upcoming trip to Germany. I had been reluctant to do so, because those stories touched me almost too close to home.

After I had read Raymond Moody’s book Reunions, when I was on a vision quest in the California Desert, I inwardly asked Ari if he would show himself so I could “see” him, as people did in the psychomanteum. His response was immediate, and it seemed to enter my mind from a place right next to my heart: “What do you want to know—I’m right here?” His response confirmed my impression that manifesting a visual apparition was indirect and somewhat difficult for those in the Spirit World. Their preferred mode of communicating appears to be a kind of telepathic communion with direct thought transfer.

Another mode of facilitated therapeutic communication with the deceased was unexpectedly discovered by the psychologist Allan Botkin, in the course of working with traumatized war veterans at a Veterans Administration clinic in Chicago. Botkin was using the EMDR (eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing) method to assist Vietnam and Iraq War veterans in healing from PTSD reactions. The EMDR procedure, in which the client is instructed to follow the horizontal hand movements of the therapist with his eyes while recalling horrific trauma scenes, has a proven track record of success in alleviating trauma reactions.

Some of the soldiers who had witnessed or caused another’s death (a fellow soldier or civilian), suddenly found themselves in an encounter with the soul of the dead—and a communication of forgiveness and peaceful healing. Allan Botkin, who was as surprised as his veteran clients at discovering the reality of postmortem consciousness and communication, has described his method and results in his book Induced After Death Communication (Botkin, 2005).

The following postmortem conversation between a man and his twenty-two-year-old son, who was killed in a street-gang assault, was related to me by the father, who was a client of mine and a friend. I had shown him how to establish a communication ritual with his deceased son by entering into a calm meditative state in a peaceful setting. I suggested he record the answers he received in writing. The father first asked to know what the dying process was like for his son. He got the following reply:

I was alone for a little while. Confused; wondering what happened. I saw light, went toward it. I was met; I was warm, bathed in love. I felt sure again; I knew where I was. There were people I love, all taking care of me, helping with the shock. They held me. I just took it all in. It was like sitting in the kitchen with you guys. Safe, familiar, just being cared for, people paying attention to what I needed right then. I was all right very soon. My soul still hurt for a while from what happened. The violence. The loss. Not being able to go home to my girlfriend. But I was all right.

The father then asked what the transition is usually like and what happens in the process. The reply clearly shows that the dead son’s soul picked up on the living father’s own anxiety about dying and responded to it with compassion and reassurance.

Disorientation, disconnection. Seeing things from above. Untethered. Then something guides you and there’s a sense of direction. A place or some distant point beckoning. Like a lighthouse in the night. Then you are greeted. It depends on what you need who shows up. If you were really broken by your life, some healers come. They take you in hand, shower you with love. Caress you—yes, you still get caressed here. Then you go on to the familiar ones. Soon. And then you know everything’s alright. You’re home. It didn’t take long for me. You’re more afraid, so you might need a bit more caressing, being taken care of. We’ll see. But you’ll be alright. We’ll be here waiting. I’ll be here. Don’t worry. It’ll be fine. We’ll pull you through the hole.

The father in this story is the clinical psychologist and educator Matthew McKay, PhD, who has since written a book, together with his son Jordan in the afterlife as a true “ghost writer.” The book, entitled Seeking Jordan: How I Learned the Truth about Death and the Invisible Universe (McKay, 2016), is a significant paradigm-expanding contribution to our understanding of the soul’s life-cycle transitions. In that book, there are many profound and moving conversations between father and son about such topics as landings, recovery, review, reunions, the lessons of loss, how spirits help us and others. There is a kind of parallel between this book and the book Proof of Heaven (Alexander, 2012), which describes a near-death experience by neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, MD. Alexander is a recognized and influential authority in his field of medicine, as McKay is in the social and psychological sciences. Their authoritative accounts of the reality of individual life and consciousness beyond the veils of mortality are important expressions of the expanded worldview that is emerging in our time.

In such communicative exchanges, as indicated earlier, the deceased typically appear to be radiantly healthy, and convey perspectives of expanded understanding. This kind of communication occurred for me in an extremely vivid dream I had exactly one year after my mother had died. Sleeping in my home in California, my dreaming self saw my mother lying in the London funeral home where I had seen her when she died. As I gazed at her face I was struck, again, by the contrast between the cherished familiarity of the features and their absolute stillness—so different from their constant motion when she was alive. As I was contemplating this paradox, her face changed suddenly to that of a radiantly beautiful young woman, who opened her eyes and smiled at me. At that instant, there was a distinct pop in my brain, dissolving and releasing the thought-form I had been unconsciously holding of “that old lady my mother,” and reminding me of her immortal essence-soul.

The Life Review in Egyptian Afterdeath Teachings

In the complex afterdeath teachings of pharaonic Egypt, which date back to a far earlier time than either the Greek myths or the Christian teachings, we can recognize certain elements that were taken up by these later traditions. We saw already in the last chapter, how Ammit the crocodile-dog, situated near the throne of Osiris, Lord of the Underworld, devours the residues of evil and deceitful actions in the physical body—in much the same way as the hellhound Cerberus devours the fleshly remains of the deceased.

In numerous Egyptian temple paintings, we can see the postmortem meeting with Osiris, the Lord of the Underworld, portrayed. In Egyptian mythology, Osiris has three forms—green, black, and white. In his green-skinned form he is the vegetation god, from whose body lying on the ground, the nourishing grain sprouts upward. In his black skin-robe, he is the god of fertility, consort of Isis, the Black Goddess, associated with the rich black earth of the River Nile when it has flooded the land. The black color was associated in ancient Egypt, and in the cultures of Old Europe, with life and fertility; and not with death, as in the later Indo-European (including Greek, Germanic, and Celtic) cultures. The White Goddess on the other hand, and the white-robed Osiris, were associated with death and symbolized in sculptured figurines of white marble or bone.

In the Egyptian view of the afterdeath journey, the soul of the deceased is accompanied by the ibis-headed deity Thoth, the wise and incorruptible record-keeper of the gods, who has recorded all of the good and bad deeds of the deceased. It was the role of Thoth to present the soul of the deceased with the scenes of the life review, clearly and objectively registering the good and bad deeds—as has been reported in NDEs in modern times.

The soul of the deceased is also accompanied by the falcon-headed Horus and the black jackal (or jackal-headed) Anubis, who was the patron deity of healers and doctors and those in charge of the mummification process.

After being escorted by Anubis, Horus, and Thoth to stand in front of the white-robed Osiris, the heart of the deceased was weighed against the feather of truth in the scales of the goddess Maat. The deceased had to answer, truthfully, the questions posed by the Forty-Two Assessors—who are also painted on the tomb walls, seated in rows.

The questions were posed in such a way that if you falsely denied having done impure, unjust, or selfish things, each falsehood would add to the weight of your heart. The heart heavy with falsehood went into a realm where its toxic impurities were devoured by Ammit the crocodile-dog. If you answered truthfully all the questions, your heart would stay balanced with the feather of truth—and you would be able to pass on to the bright road to the realm of the stars and the high deities.

Joan Grant (1907–1989) was a psychically gifted English woman who wrote six posthumous autobiographies, based on her detailed recall of her past lives. In Winged Pharaoh (Grant, 1985) she describes an Egyptian life in which she was both priestess and queen and underwent painstaking training in what was called “far memory.” She describes the pharaonic dying ritual and going through the afterdeath experience, the weighing of the heart and the questioning by the forty-two assessors. Here, for example, are five of the questions, as she transcribed them:

And the first shall challenge him, saying: Hast thou treated thy body wisely and considerately, even as thy creator cherished thee in the days of thy youth?

And the fourth shall say: Hast thou lain only with the woman whom thy spirit loveth also?

And the thirteenth shall say: Hath thine heart been untorn by the claws of jealousy?

And the twenty-third shall say: Hast thou given bread to the poor and the fruits of thy vineyards to the weary?

And the fortieth shall say: Hast thou remembered the plants, which were once thy brothers, and quenched their thirst and tended them so that they flourished?

The teaching of this mythic image from ancient Egypt represents, in some ways, a prefiguration of the judgment scene portrayed in later Christian iconography. However, in its depiction of an impartial assessment or evaluation by a council of beings, rather than a dualistic judgment of good versus sinful and subsequent punishment, and the emphasis on truth-telling, it more closely resembles the reported experiences of NDEs.

We cannot of course know for sure what we will encounter in the hereafter. Perhaps the Egyptian teachings, and the reports of NDEs, were all based on the experience of spiritually developed people—and the experience of ordinary, unprepared people is different.

The Second Bardo in the Tibetan Buddhist Afterdeath Teachings

In the Bardo Thödol, the deceased, if not able to pass on to the unobstructed pure land realms during the bardo of dying, due to insufficient concentration and preparation, wanders through the “intermediate realms” of the second bardo realm. In this phase the dominant features are dramatically contrasting visionary encounters with peaceful, angelic beings and ferocious, demonic ones. There are also encounters with “knowledge-holding deities,” whose flame-surrounded bodies burn off the false images obstructing and distorting true knowledge.

The deceased is repeatedly reminded, by the attendant lama-priests, not to be overly attracted by the heavenly or frightened by the hellish visions. Both the beautiful and the ugly visions, he or she is told, are the reflections and projections of your mind and life, as seen in the mirror held up by the death god Yama. If you can stay centered in the middle path between the extremes of dualistic judgment, you will still be able to pass through to the pure light realms of the higher dimensions.

Here is the encapsulated teaching, from the Root Verses concerning this second afterdeath phase, which the Evans-Wentz translation calls the “bardo of experiencing reality.” Since it deals essentially with the heaven-and-hell visions that one may encounter in this phase, I am calling it the bardo of visions.

Now as I enter into the bardo of visions,

I will abandon all awe and terror that arises.

Recognizing whatever appears as my own thought forms,

As apparitions and visions in this intermediate state.

This is a crucial turning point on the path.

I will not fear the peaceful and terrifying visions in my mind.

However, due to lack of training or preparation on the part of most ordinary people, the bardo traveler, after repeatedly lapsing into unconsciousness due to lack of concentration and fear, then finds himself in the third phase, the bardo of seeking rebirth, in which he wanders about seeking to orient himself again to ordinary existence. We shall discuss this rebirth phase further in the next chapter.

The Council of Ancestral Souls and Guiding Spirits

The modern traveler into the afterdeath realms, whether in meditative, psychedelic, or NDE states, is probably unlikely to encounter figures from Egyptian, Tibetan Buddhist, or any other mythology unless he or she has specifically, through prior interest or practice, cultivated a connection to these deities and recognizes them by their appearance. To my mind, in the earlier part of my life, such figures were constructions of the mythic imagination. However, after many years of study of these ancient cultures and explorations in meditative, shamanic, and entheogenic states of consciousness, some of these figures have at times assumed a certain vividness and unmistakable reality.

The reality-recognition involved in such visionary encounters is not unlike that of a dream vision in which you may recognize a deceased member of your family or a friend. You may come to realize that the dream encounter with your deceased ancestor or loved one is not a fantasy construction, but a real encounter with a real being—now existing only in the spirit world. While we do of course create all kinds of fantasy beings in our imagination and our dreams, it may also happen that we encounter spirit beings we call guides or deities, and that we receive teachings and guidance from them with direct relevance to our lives.

In my book The Well of Remembrance (1994), I related how in the course of working on the stories of the Norse gods, I several times had the distinct impression that the insights and understandings I was receiving were coming to me from Odin, the knowledge-seeking shaman god of the ancient Germanic people—whose mythology I was researching. After several journeys to Egypt and intensive immersion in Egyptian death-rebirth teachings, I unexpectedly received a visionary confirmation of the reality of Anubis.

I was guiding, while seated, a small group of travelers lying in two rows in what we call our “spirit canoe” on a deep, inner space journey. I was leaning over to one side, to lay a comforting hand on one of the travelers who was weeping, when I suddenly became aware, out of the corner of my eye, of a large black dog sitting next to me, on the other side. I was simultaneously startled by the enormous size of the black dog, which reached as far as my shoulders, and immediately calmed by the realization that the spirit-dog was perfectly still and emanating an atmosphere of peace and protection. Then I realized, with awe and gratitude, that Anubis had in fact appeared to assist and guide us in our meditations on the after-death journey—just as he would have, perhaps, to the priests of Anubis ministering to the initiates in pharaonic Egypt.

In our divination work on connecting with the ancestors in the prenatal phase, we have sometimes found other, higher-dimensional spirit beings together with the council of ancestors. In other divinations, I may guide people directly to a council of souls that includes ancestral souls and also higher-dimensional spirit guides or divinities from a realm far beyond the ordinary earthly human world, but connected to us in a spiritual way. With continuing meditative attunements to these soul dimensions, people may begin to identify and name particular beings who guide us across many lifetimes.

The man who, in a prenatal divination (see page 372) remembered the painful rupture between his parents immediately after his birth, said that, when guided to the council of souls,

I kept getting images of other beings, spirit beings whom I had connected with before. I did recognize them from previous sessions. And they were back again, they were light beings. They weren’t human. And it was about an agreement I made with them…before they would answer my questions about what was my purpose here, in this incarnation. It was very clear. And there was a celebration, when I remembered that agreement with the soul council. It was to live my truth with integrity and be that light being that I am—open and loving…in service.

In a parental reconciliation divination, a woman psychiatrist was reviewing her fateful karmic connection with her mother, and getting the guidance from her ancestors to look for her destiny beyond that relationship. Following that guidance, she found herself in a higher council of elders beyond or behind the ancestors.

I am dissolving, until only essence or soul is left. Behind the council of ancestral souls I find myself with a higher council of elders, and a vision of an order behind the order. At this point absolute freedom arises from the acceptance of that which is. I can see these orders graphically and see this higher order in the connections between the planets. I am seeing what happens when a soul chooses a human incarnation. I’m seeing how the human soul enters into the cells, how it expresses itself, and how parental qualities give that expression a distinctive character. I see how I’ve received everything from my parents and how the soul then expresses that which is my destiny to bring into expression.

From there I arrive at a state in which all oppositions fall together, yet it is not some kind of homogenous mush. I recognize the holistic principle of body-soul-oneness. I recognize that in the last resort there is only one Great Soul, from which I emerge and into which I return. The soul has an “ego”—she is that ego, not in the psychoanalytic sense, but in the sense that she has that indivisible, unchanging identity, which incarnates into different bodies. The incarnation is chosen through the ordering principle.

I have come to understand that this soul council, made up of ancestral souls and guiding spirits, is our support and guiding team throughout our life and in the worlds beyond. The souls of our genetic ancestors can assist us with their knowledge of our personal, familial antecedents—in the society and for the times in which we live. With the council of elders and guides we become aware that we have soul connections that span many lifetimes in many worlds, and they may give us teachings relating to our life purpose, karma, and destiny.

In the following account, a man relates how the council of elders and ancestors helped him to see the karmic negativity in his ancestral lineage and guided him to choose not to continue that line by not having children.

When I went to my father’s side, my great mentors were always my grandparents…For whatever reason, all the kids that they had were probably actually crazy. So I stood before them and communicated to them that I was where the buck stopped, that I wasn’t continuing the lineage. To which my grandmother and my grandfather smiled and my dad really blew up. Because I think they knew that it had produced a lot of real craziness. For me, the insanity is when you go out and kill people and do property damage and be damaged, and this inability to manage sanity…So that was really good.

I realized that I came from a lineage of warriors and warlocks and berserkers, who came to disrupt humanity, to cause change, to develop honor, courage, and lessons of sacrifice and compassion, and to turn the earth up on its edge, to turn humanity on its side, and to have the kind of expansion and contraction that would cause humanity to grow out of it in a very powerful way, or to totally self-destruct and not waste any more time. I have been experiencing a shift into that warrior heart. In discovering that lineage it was really fulfilling because I had been at odds with having been a warrior. I had been at odds with having killed so many people, and I had been at odds with having been killed so many times. I was more conscious and aware of being last night than, perhaps, in any other sitting over these past twenty-five or thirty years. I was just ecstatic.

I realized that I have nothing to say about how the world is and I have everything to say about how I interpret or how I’ve framed the world. That really doesn’t give me much power to go down the path of pessimism. There really is a developing plan and a developing humanity, and in that my role or my intention or my purpose, as the creator of my life and of this life, is to bring myself fully to each moment and to stop turning my back and walking away when it doesn’t fit my judgments or my opinions or when it doesn’t go my way. I think, in short, that I had an initiation.

As we have seen, in modern hypnotic and entheogenic explorations of the afterdeath realms, as well as in the accounts of past-life therapists, we learn of the soul’s meeting with a council of guiding spirits (or spirit guides)—a council that we meet with after a life has ended, to review and evaluate the lessons learned; and that we meet again as the choice is made to incarnate, to preview a new human existence.

Of course, we may also meet with them and consult with them in meditative, spiritual journeys during life—and this kind of practice is described in Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. This council, which seems to consist of about a dozen or so identifiable spirit beings, functions as a kind of guiding and support team for the myriad journeys and challenges of our life. Perhaps this council is the contemporary equivalent of the meeting with Thoth, Maat, Osiris, and the Forty-Two Assessors in Ancient Egypt, and the “Knowledge-Holding Deities” of the Tibetan Buddhists.

In my experience, the beings of this council convey an attitude of total acceptance, compassion, and objectivity—while making clear that it is we who are also making the choices and evaluations. The council of ancestral and guiding spirits is not in a superior, judging position toward us—we, as souls, are members of the council and participate in its deliberations. As the Bardo Thödol repeatedly reminds us, the “knowledge-holding deities” are emanations of our own thought forms—which doesn’t mean they are fantasy constructions, but rather they exist within us in the inner dimensions of our own multidimensional beingness.

In one past-life regression, in which I was guided by Winafred Lucas, PhD, a psychologist who has perhaps done more than anyone to open up the modern mind to the reality of the spiritual dimensions, I was shown how the life-review council inwardly connects with the life-preview council for the following incarnation.

In the regression, I recalled a life as a woman in sixteenth or seventeenth-century France, who was seduced, made pregnant, and abandoned by an aristocratic military officer—and then shunned by family and community and condemned to a life of isolation and poverty. Immediately after reliving the release of the dying and in meeting with the life-review council, I at first wanted not to be reborn as a woman—so that henceforth I could be the one in the favored position in patriarchal society. However, as the council of guiding spirits considered the process of choosing the next life, I was shown that it would be better to not take the vengeful compensating position of becoming a dominating male—but instead to undo the curse of patriarchal conditioning which led to my misery in the life just passed. So I was guided to choose again to be born as a woman, but this time into a family and community where female and male children (and adults) were respected and cherished equally.

In the following pages, I will discuss how the life between lives (second bardo) ends with the process of choosing another human incarnation. This incarnational choice then begins the phase that includes conception and the entire prenatal journey—what The Tibetan Book of the Dead calls the bardo of rebirth.