SOUL AND AFTERLIFE
“… I was going down a long black tunnel with a tremendous alive sort of light bursting in at the far end. I shot out of the tunnel into this light. I was in the light, I was part of it, and I knew everything—a most strange feeling.”1
This could well be a description of the culmination of the Greek Mysteries, in which, as Plutarch says, “the soul has the same experience at the point of death as those who are being initiated. First one is struck by a marvellous light, then one is received into pure regions and meadows.”2 In fact, it is the description of a modern Near-Death Experience (NDE), which may therefore be included in the kinds of experience I have been calling initiatory. In Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, Lucius describes the Mysteries of Isis in similar terms. “As I drew near to the confines of death … I was borne through all the elements and returned to earth again. At the dead of night, I saw the sun shining brightly. I approached the gods above and the gods below.”3
The spontaneous initiation of the NDE is less structured. “It was a dynamic light, not like a spotlight. It was an incredible energy—a light you wouldn’t believe … It was feeding my consciousness feelings of unconditional love, complete safety, and complete, total perfection … My consciousness was going out and getting larger and taking in more; I expanded and more and more came in. It was such rapture, such bliss. And then, and then, a piece of knowledge came in: it was that I was immortal, indestructible. I cannot be hurt, cannot be lost.…”4
NDEs belong to a family of religious experiences that include initiation into the Mysteries, such as those of Demeter and Isis; and the vision of God, which St. John of the Cross, for example, aptly describes in terms of God and the soul “in participant transformation”: “the soul seems to be God rather than a soul, and is indeed God by participation.”5
The light shining like the sun at midnight and, out of the light, the Presence of divinity, irradiating them with love and a sudden torrential access of understanding of who they are, where they have come from, what it has all been about—this is what the NDEers bring back to us like initiates from their Otherworld journey. They come back, as St. John says, balbuciendo, stuttering, “I can’t explain … there aren’t the words … it’s indescribable …,” but convinced beyond all doubt that the ineffable experience was absolutely and awefully real. And from then on, in spite of the naysayers who cry “temporal lobe epilepsy” or “chemical changes in the brain,” “wish fulfillment” or “defense mechanism”—they say the same about falling in love—the lives of the NDEers change for the better. They no longer fear death and they live more altruistically, knowing that their greatest good comes from serving others and heeding the gods.
As I suggested in the Introduction, it is likely that more people believe the NDEers—believe that when they die they will be gathered into Paradise by rejoicing relatives—than believe in a simplistic ideology that completely dismisses an afterlife. Perhaps most people do. We do not know, because they do not have an organized voice in a secular society. If they see their loved ones, plain as day, at the moment of the loved one’s death far away; if they go on sensing the real presence of a husband or wife after the death of their spouse; if they hear their partners speak to them, clear as a bell, after death—they tend to shut up about it. They do not want to be ridiculed for something so precious to them. They know what they saw and heard, and no amount of reductionist psychology or physiology will talk them out of it. I side with these people, just as Socrates, when asked about the learned opinion concerning a nymph of the Ilissus, said, “The common opinion is enough for me.”
Thousands of Near-Death Experiences have been so well documented6 that they have become a cliché: the initial out-of-the-body experience, floating up to the ceiling of the operating room, and clearly hearing what the surgeons are saying; the journey through the tunnel; the bright light that does not dazzle but engulfs you with love; the sense of detachment from the world, even from loved ones; the feeling of peace and joy; the appearance of dead relatives and/or a “being of light,” a divine Presence.
“I was standing next to a figure the same height as me,” said a young man who, after having his skull smashed in an accident on his bicycle, was not expected to live. “. he had his arm across my shoulders … I have since described this figure as a guide because I found it so hard to say I met God. But it was God—‘my’ God. As I looked at him he impressed on me that I was seeing the God I had been brought up to envisage … I knew that the grey-haired, white-robed, non-sexual (by that I mean he was man and woman or neither) being beside me would be everything to all ‘dead people’ …”7
The personal daimon, whom we at last meet face to face when we die, may look like a twin, an angel, a god, an ancestor, Jesus—we may not know its face but we will recognize it at once because we have unwittingly known it all our lives. Some will experience it as the personal aspect of an impersonal deity; others will experience it in an opposite way, as the impersonal aspect of the personal daimon.
Typically, the daimon—often just a voice coming out of the light—conducts a voluntary “life review.” “For me,” writes Phyllis Atwater, “it was a total reliving of every thought I had ever thought, every word I had ever spoken, and every deed I had ever done; plus the effect of each thought, word and deed on everyone and anyone who had come within my … sphere of influence whether I knew them or not (including unknown passers-by on the street) …” She surmises that we exist in a vast “sea or soup of each other’s energy residue and thought waves” where we are “held responsible for our contributions and the quality of the ‘ingredients’ we add.”8 In a modern reinvention of the world-soul, David Lorimer adds his commentary to the experience: “The only picture with which the above account makes sense is one of an interconnected web of creation, a holographic mesh in which the parts are related to the Whole and through the Whole to each other by empathetic resonance. It must be the sort of Whole in which we and the rest of creation live and move and have our being, a consciousness-field in which we are independent strands.”9 Here we have another modern retelling of the belief of the Neoplatonists: that our individual essence is grounded in that great consciousness they called the Soul of the World. We are drops in that supernal ocean; or, perhaps, snowflakes—each structured in the same way, yet each unique—in the blizzard of soul.
So, in the life review, we look down on the panorama of our lives; we observe causes and effects as simultaneous rather than separated by time and space; and we experience the consequences of our deeds—and misdeeds. This is inevitably painful, but we are not crushed by this pain, firstly because it is balanced by the joy of all the good we have done; and, secondly, because we are now detached from the conditions that would cage us in guilt, remorse, and self-recrimination. The life review is conducted, in short, by and in an ethos of truth, justice, beauty, and goodness. We have no word to describe our ecstatic participation in this ethos, this intimate yet universal divine Presence, except Love. We are glad to know the depth and extent of our guilt, because we want to participate as fully as possible in the Love that already bathes us; and, to do so, we have to acknowledge the truth of our transgressions in thought, word, and deed. Repentance and forgiveness signify the mutual desire of us and Love to remove the obstacles that prevent our union.
Moreover, the daimon shows us that our lives are not divided into chance events and more meaningful, destined events. Rather it is a single life that should be viewed through “double vision.” At once we see that chance and destiny are the outside and the inside of the same thing. It depends on our point of view. Events that look random in one way, look destined in another. Our lives are like a piece of embroidery: on one side, all loose ends, cut threads, and knots; but, turned around at death, a marvelous, coherent picture. The reconciliation of chance and destiny may be called Providence. When we marvel at the chance that brought our parents together in order that we may be conceived, we also feel that it was fate, because we all feel that we are unique beings destined to be born. Thus every birth is providential, an interweaving of chance and destiny that we do not have to separate but can embrace through imagination. Some religious doctrines try to rule out chance—for example, with the belief that we “choose” our parents before birth—just as some scientistic doctrines try to rule out destiny with the belief that everything happens randomly. But the truth lies in a reimagining of each as an aspect of the other. Analogously, free will is married to fate, whereby whatever is freely chosen is also forever ordained. Just as the absolute freedom of Love can resemble the absolute determinism of the Law, so we are both free and determined, as if (to use a Christian metaphor) the cosmos were in a constant state of creation through our collaboration with God—as if whatever we choose in time, He makes immutable in eternity.
The geography of the afterlife reported by NDEers is both indistinct compared to the precise landscapes of traditional peoples, and far more highly customized. This was not always so. Carol Zaleski has described the surprisingly uniform afterlife of medieval Christendom as reported by NDEers of those times. Their souls encounter a figure of light who leads them out of darkness and across the statutory narrow bridge, below which the souls of the damned are being tortured by demons. We see here how the dismembering daimons of traditional initiation have been converted by the Christian imagination into demons of punishment.
Over the bridge, there is a boundary such as a river or wall that they cannot traverse without remaining permanently in the Otherworld—that is, dying. But the guide explains that the ideal country full of blessed souls they can just glimpse is not heaven but the earthly Paradise. In other words, there is an attempt to reconcile the soul’s idea of an immanent Paradise—this world transfigured—with the spirit vision of a heaven beyond this world.
And so they return to their bodies, repentant and converted and ready to convert others, much like the secular NDEers of today, but without the Christian terminology. The latter, too, report similar borders where they are often given the choice as to whether they wish to return to Earth or to “pass over.” All are amazed at how little they find themselves tied to Earth and even to their loved ones, and how reluctant they are to come back, so great is the sense of peace and happiness; but they do so out of a sense either of duty or of “the time not being right”—of having still to accomplish the daimonic plan. They are able to be so dispassionate because the daimon not only conducts our “life review” but is also, as carrier of our fate, indistinguishable from it. We see our past lives through its eyes. We see how our spouses and children, for instance, have destinies quite independent of the earthly affection and attachment we have invested in them and so we can let them go.
Reentry into the body can be terrible. “I had left without the slightest struggle,” writes Leslie Grant Scott, who nearly died during an illness in Ceylon in 1931. “I returned by an almost superhuman effort of will.” She had realized she was dying, yet felt comfortable and happy, her mind “unusually active and clear,” her consciousness increasingly acute—“[I] was aware of things that I had never contacted. My vision also was extended so that I could see what was going on behind my back, in the next room, even distant places.”10 Her anger at having to return to her body—“compressed, caged, in a small stupid prison”—echoes down the ages: the simile of the flesh as prison or tomb is used by Plato and, bitterly, by the even more dualistic Gnostics. Yet, from the point of view of William Blake—that spokesman for soul—it is not our physical condition that is the problem, for “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.”11 It is we who have betrayed the body. “For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”12
When we die, few of us go straight to heaven. We may have a taste of it, as Near-Death Experiencers report, when the full and interconnected meaning of the universe sweeps through us on a tide of love. But, as the NDEers also say, we are in a place of transition that can, just about, be described—that is, put in literal terms—because something of the literal world still adheres to us. It is a place that some Christians call purgatory, where the life review with its remorse and rewards is initiatory. Some traditional cultures, such as the Native American—as we shall see—are explicit about this. They not only have to cross the narrow bridge but they also endure such ordeals as brain removal. Modern NDEs seem smooth and unproblematic by comparison. Yet it may be that the “brain removal” stage of the transitional journey is taking place on the operating table, which is where most NDEers have their otherworldly experiences. Perhaps medical procedures are literal enactments of initiatory processes: what from the doctors’, and our body’s, point of view is an effort of curing, is from the soul’s point of view an initiatory wounding. Indeed, it may be that long illness prior to expiration is initiation—illness may even be brought on the body by the needs of the soul, especially if we have neglected the soul during life. Certainly we have learned that ease of entry into the Otherworld depends on our degree of initiation. No doubt the great mystics slip easily into a permanent union with the Godhead they had already united with on Earth. Socrates and the Buddha seemed to have had no trouble dying. Poets who have seen through the illusion of the literal world will step smartly into Paradise. For the sick and lonely, death will be a release, a flood of well-being and communal joy. But those who die suddenly or unexpectedly may find themselves bewildered and lost at first, even unaware that they are dead. They have only to ask for help, however, or even merely to desire it, for help to be at hand. More serious, of course, is the state of those who do not ask for help, or do not desire it, because it would mean admitting that the afterlife they did not believe in, exists.
NDEers confirm rather than contradict what the dead allegedly tell us directly through, say, spiritualist mediums or modern-day “channelers,” the echo of their voices growing fainter and more inarticulate as they approach the border of what can be described. Until that point is reached, however, the spiritualists do provide us with longer, more detailed narratives about the afterlife than the brief nature of NDEs allow.
Some of the most famous spirit messages were those given to Emanuel Swedenborg. In 1745, he had a vision of Christ in a London café, after which he was able to converse freely with “spirits.” They were quite Neoplatonic in their ideas, telling him, for instance, that there is an underlying unity of life emanating from the one infinite source they called Love. Everyone is connected to everyone else and eternally united with the Source. But each person has a “proprium”—what we call an ego—that tries to live as if it were independent of the Source, or God. Our task is the more or less Christian one: to recognize the illusions and selfishness of our proprium and to repent, that is, to “turn around” and so reorient ourselves toward God and thus be worthy of redemption—the divine retrieval of the soul from the proprium’s hellish world. It is a combative view of psychic life, in which reality contends with illusion, heaven with hell, good spirits with bad. It is the proprium that separates us from the higher levels of divine emanation that are experienced within us, as a celestial level and a spiritual level. In the afterlife this inner world manifests itself outwardly, mirroring the conditions of heaven, hell, or the intermediate state of spirits, according to whichever of these states the dead person inhabited while alive—albeit unaware of his or her state because it was screened by bodily existence.13
There are two main sorts of spiritualist message. The first is personal and intimate; and, although it cannot provide absolute scientific proof of an afterlife, it can be extremely convincing. Even a stalwart materialist such as the American psychologist William James was persuaded of the authenticity of some mediums at least when he met Leonora Piper. Although he was repelled by the triviality of many of her communications from the spirit world—a common complaint against spiritualism—he could not in the end deny the accuracy of the details Mrs. Piper relayed concerning his private life and that of his friends. He became a spiritualist, but showed his grasp of the daimonic nature of the Otherworld when he concluded that God must have intended the spirits to remain baffling, “to prompt our curiosities and hopes and suspicions all in equal measure,” so that, “although they can never be fully explained away, they can also never be susceptible of full corroboration.”14
The second kind of message from the Beyond is of the Swedenborgian sort, describing the afterlife and its philosophical precepts. Both of these can be banal: the “spirits” often describe the same landscape of flowery meadows, lovely weather, colors we do not have on Earth, and so on; while the unexceptional philosophy—usually of a generalized “theosophical” kind—tends toward the wearisome sermon, complete with warnings not to cultivate atom bombs or to despoil the environment. Even Swedenborg’s description of the spiritual world is leaden. It resembles nothing so much as a vast bureaucracy of spirits, appropriate, I suppose, to the civil servant (an Assessor of Mines) Swedenborg had been prior to his vision of Christ. He influenced Blake; but it is a telling fact that, whereas Swedenborg saw spirits that he took literally, as revelations out of which a religion was formed, Blake saw daimons that he understood metaphorically, as insights out of which he made art. The spiritualists are as literal-minded as the materialists they mirror. Just as soul does not like to be trapped by the body, it equally does not like to be trapped by the spirit. Neither body nor spirit are actual traps, of course—the trap is the actual. The spiritualists like to see the spirit as casting off the body at death like an old overcoat; but, from soul’s point of view, it is the overcoat of literalism we have to cast off, to reveal the body as it always was: the subtle and immortal form of the soul.
Nevertheless, I am as disinclined to write off spiritualistic communications as delusional or false, as I am to take them as gospel. One should be in two minds about them, in concert with the perennial ambiguity of the daimonic. They are revelations of a sort. Their very literalism makes them straightforward and appealing to many people. They constitute a kind of “folk religion” that, as with all religions labeled “folk” or disparaged as “superstition,” we do well to stand up for, because all beliefs are true, or, as Blake said, “an image of truth,” even if none are literally so. Besides, there are many interesting spiritualist writings. Stainton Moses’s Spirit Teachings are all the more impressive for having been communicated through the medium of a conventional clergyman, who was by no means happy with the unchristian teachings his spirits dictated to him via “automatic writing” (that is, when the spirit takes control of the medium’s inert hand while he or she is entranced). Stewart Edward White’s The Unobstructed Universe15 anticipates the physicist David Bohm’s celebrated distinction between the implicate and explicate order of the world. One of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, Frederic W. H. Myers, was skeptical about life after death, and thought that psychic phenomena came from the “subliminal mind”—the unconscious—until he was forced to concede that many spirit communications displayed a knowledge that the medium could not possibly have, even unconsciously. Colin Wilson is surely right when he says that no one can read Myers’s classic of psychical research, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, with an open mind and not be convinced of the reality of an afterlife. The trouble is, as he also remarks, almost no one does read with an open mind—we are all confined to our own viewpoints. Worse still, Myers’s book is difficult to read at all: a little under fourteen hundred pages in two volumes of dense argument and evidence couched in turgid scientistic language tends to numb the mind more than illumine it.16
To provide a better idea of the spiritualists’ afterlife, I will summarize the narrative, published as Post-Mortem Journal, given to the medium Jane Sherwood through “automatic writing” between 1938 and 1959. It is worth a rather extended look, not only because it expounds many of the spiritualist axioms, but it is more interesting than most communications, because the spirit in question is far from being a happy soul in heaven. In fact, he purports to be the troubled spirit of T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), who died in a motorcycle crash. Secondly, the account gives me the opportunity to comment more fully on such questions as the “laws” of the afterlife and the nature of reincarnation.
Through the hand of Jane Sherwood, then, Lawrence (as I will call him) writes that his sudden death left him in a kind of stupor. He sets off through a shadowy world, surprised that his existence is continuing and that his body feels like flesh. He finds that he is being drawn to wherever his thoughts stray—to a town, for example, where mean-looking, vaguely menacing people live in murk. Alarmed, he flees from the town with a new realization: “My own desire could lead me towards its fulfilment if I knew clearly what I wanted.”
At once he hears a voice, asking him if he needs help. Lawrence replies that he does; and the voice then manifests as a light, which leads him to a brighter landscape. This presence introduces himself as “Mitchell.” He explains how the hateful town was created by the emotions of those who live there; how, in fact, emotions cannot be hidden as they can on Earth, but show up immediately in your body and so have a direct effect on whomever you are with. This is painful for Lawrence, who has always repressed his volcanic emotions—but even more painful for Mitchell, who is on the receiving end of Lawrence’s resentment and despair. Seeing the instant effect his emotions have on others helps Lawrence to control them.
Mitchell takes him to a sort of “sanatorium,” where he is encouraged to release some of his forbidden desires. He embarks on a sexual relationship with a woman whose condition exactly complements his own. Each supplies the other with the kind of sexual experience they need. It is more satisfactory than earthly sex, because their bodies can be interfused in a bliss unavailable to physical bodies.
Lawrence continues to be drawn as if automatically to those who are at the same level of “development” as himself, and who complement his needs, such as his need to overcome distrust and resentment of others and to cease feeling superior to everyone. He sees the damage this does to himself as well as others, and learns humility, especially when he sees the suffering of the lovely, clear soul of Mitchell as it absorbs and transforms the bursts of hatred and anger his “patients” are prey to. If this sounds a bit like psychotherapy, we might remember that psychotherapy was born out of the demands of the unconscious, the soul itself; and it can therefore be read as an earthly attempt to replicate an archetypal—an otherworldly—pattern of purgation.
Almost since his first moments in this new world, Lawrence has been aware of his past life unfurling before him. It is like the “life review” but in his case it is extended over a long period. It is not until he is much “stronger,” for example, that he begins as if physically to feel the injuries he has done to others and to accept them in all their fullness. He likes the way that Mitchell offers no palliative measures: he has to suffer the consequences of his actions and, as a result, over time, his own pain decreases.
In the afterlife, “like attracts like.” There are many who cannot face the consequences of their actions at first and they live in diminished circumstances. But nothing is rigid, everything is based on affinity and sympathy, so that a single pang of remorse or a single selfless thought brings immediate relief and “higher” conditions. Lawrence is aware of other spheres both “below” and “above” his state. Both are painful to approach as if they had “natural” barriers—the first because it has a dark and damaging atmosphere; the second, because its light is too dazzling and intense. Life is “indestructible.” Each soul goes to its own place and “no one is damned however he may be warped by evil but that by effort and suffering he can free himself from it.”17
Next, Lawrence joins a sort of “university” that is very congenial to him, having been a scholar as well as a man of action on Earth. He participates in lively and humorous debates—about reincarnation, for example. He finds that, when he thinks, he is not alone but part of a conference that includes one soul still on Earth, two on his own “plane,” and one on a higher plane—all communicating through mental affinity.
Lawrence begins to realize that he has been “trying to complete my Earth experience; to fill in the gaps and make good some of its deficiencies … I am now very alive to the defensive egoism which spoilt and wasted my years on Earth … But nothing can compensate fully for what I have missed; nothing here can parallel the all-and-everything condition of close human relationships on Earth.”18 As we sow, so shall we reap—this law prevails in the Hereafter, as it does, if we did but know it, on Earth. The importance of incarnation is that it is “the formative stage when alone any real growth in essence takes place.” In the afterlife the law of affinity ensures that conflict is removed and so “there is no struggle for existence. Our work here is a kind of mopping up operation” (a characteristic military expression). However high we ascend through the planes, however much we purify ourselves, there is still no actual growth in the “essential spirit.” What we bring from Earth remains our all, so our fate is bound up with our earthly experiences; only in the struggle and turmoil of life are we able to make any real difference to our spiritual stature.19
The post-mortem story of “T. E. Lawrence” cannot of course be taken too literally, but it is a worthy attempt to translate the foreign conditions of the afterlife into earthly language. It does not contradict other accounts of the afterlife, nor what we know about the soul, imagination, and the Otherworld. Yet we notice how strongly Lawrence brings a “spirit” perspective to the afterlife. Everything is depicted in terms of hierarchical planes; of growth, development, and progress; of strength, ethics, and intellectual “university” life. His very desire to go on communicating with this world is an indication of the way he is interested in making a “study” of the afterlife. He can describe it in more or less literal terms because he is still existing in those terms. At the same time, all the anomalies of his situation work on him from the outset as if in a long process of deliteralizing. All his learning experiences can be read as attempts by soul to reflect and thereby dissolve the dominant spirit perspective, acclimatizing Lawrence to the Otherworld of imagination. Already he has begun to see that we not only occupy the same space as those for whom we have an affinity, but that space itself is defined by the imaginative state of our souls. He sees that what was inside is now outside. He is still poor at self-reflection, so he sees his own emotions grossly reflected by another. He faces the consequences of his earthly misdemeanors only gradually because they are too grievous to confront all at once. But increasingly he suffers the results of his transgressions or omissions as if we were punished, not for our sins, but by our sins. He understands that the oppositional conditions of earthly life are essential for soul-making, because desire is immediately gratified for better or worse in the Otherworld, where there are no barriers of matter, space, time, or causality against which the soul can be abraded and honed.
While we exist on Earth, we are also living in the Otherworld. It is just that we are not usually—or, at least, continuously—aware of this fact until we die. Incarnation is a “forgetting” of our eternal origins, and anamnesis is the recollection of them—a recollection that is for most of us at best shadowy, fleeting, and vague as a dream. The life review given to us by the personal daimon is a full remembrance, both of our divine origins and of our temporal existence.
Reincarnation makes literal and successive what is really metaphorical and simultaneous. It is often envisaged as the return to Earth of some part of ourselves rather than the whole personality. For instance, Eastern beliefs tend to maintain that it is not our “essence” that is reincarnated but only our wrong attitudes and desires—our karma—which cross lifetimes until they are extinguished in Nirvana. Plotinus thought something similar: that our “higher soul,” our original and sinless essence, is separable from our “lower soul,” which is drawn down after death toward a state dictated by its desires; and which reincarnates at a level of existence appropriate to that state. Alternatively, the soul has been pictured as a fragment of a larger, collective soul—a fragment that has to reincarnate in order to become fully itself before rejoining the whole. All such ideas are attempts to reconcile the image of the soul as indivisible and eternally complete, with the need to see it as capable of transformation. They are attempts, that is, to smooth over the paradox that, as microcosms, our souls are individual wholes, yet parts of the collective macrocosm of the world-soul. They are both divisible and indivisible, mutable and immutable. Their contradictions cannot be resolved by thought but only by imaginative vision, something that will present itself to even the most unimaginative of us when we pass over into Imagination itself.
Perhaps we can try to reimagine reincarnation. Its succession of lives might be a literal interpretation of the way soul circulates through a succession of perspectives, or, rather, holds different perspectives simultaneously as if in the retinue of all the gods, while highlighting now one, now another. We know how easily the deity who is presiding over our lives can be suddenly usurped by another whenever we are seized by a new idea, a religious conversion, a craze for art or fly-fishing, or a passion for someone we could never have dreamed of fancying. Even if a new deity does not storm the parapet of consciousness, it is operative in the unconscious, where we live other lives or other versions of the same life, as we do in the permutations of a recurring dream: the divorced man dreams that he is reconciled with his wife, that he is killing her, that they never got divorced, that they are living happily together, that they are torturing each other, that she is pregnant by the US president, and so on, perhaps over years of dreaming. Our actual life may not be our only life or even our real life. We may be living other lives in the Otherworld of the Imagination, lives of which we are hardly aware until, as it may happen, they burst forth and we find ourselves taking a completely new direction. But the new life does not have to become actual to be real, though latent, in the unconscious. So, if we portray such lives as past or future incarnations, it is more a reflection of our proclivity to turn myth into history, to make literal what was always real, but in an imaginative fashion.
Analogously, once we have passed over into the world-soul, it is not always possible to separate our lives from the lives of others, so complete is our empathy. “Reincarnation” could be a metaphor for the way our souls participate in the experiences of other souls. For the Soul of the World is also what W. B. Yeats called the Great Memory, where all experience eternally lives on, so that we can take on the memories of others as our own. In this scheme we do not live one life after another but, as Heraclitus enigmatically said, we are “mortal immortals” always “dying each other’s life, living each other’s death.”20 We are dissolved in the world-soul and condensed out of it as if by turns, for these “turns” are actually what the liberated soul experiences simultaneously, like circular breathing. The wheel of samsara, which carries us out of life and into death, and back into life again, can be read as a metaphor for soul’s circular motion as it distills itself out of itself, manifesting now as spirit, now as matter, in the endless imaginative reconfiguring that constitutes soul-making.
When Lawrence discusses reincarnation with his pals in the afterlife, he concludes that we have to live again in order to “overcome our weaknesses.” As long as we fail these tests of strength, the same pattern will recur and we will not “progress.” We see here how the doctrine of reincarnation is viewed through Lawrence’s very Protestant—even puritanical—spectacles. The emphasis is all on willpower and passing tests, as if a stronger ego were the key to success in life. Perhaps the very recurrence of “tests of strength,” as he envisages them, is precisely due to his inability to cease treating them as tests in which the ego remains intact, and to begin treating them as caustic solvents of that same ego. Reincarnation may only be the lot of those who cannot embrace the polymorphous soul but remain wedded to spirit’s single viewpoint. They have to act out—act out on Earth—what others can participate in through imagination.
Yet we must not forget, too, what Lawrence reminds us of: the paradoxical importance of spirit’s literalism. Without it, soul would have nothing to “see through,” nothing against which to contend in the stretching of imagination to its fullest extent. Reincarnation can also be read as a metaphor for the encasing of soul in “single vision” and all its apparent absolutes, from the opacity of matter to the obduracy of space, time, and causality. In its own imaginative realm, soul cannot get a purchase on itself. Only through earthly life can it transform itself.
Nevertheless, this notion does not stop Lawrence from believing that, although we may not be able to transform ourselves essentially, we are able to change in the afterlife, by becoming fully aware of the state of our souls. If we, so to speak, unpack everything we are and all that we have become, attaining self-knowledge, we are able to progress to “higher” planes. This is also very much part of spirit’s perspective, part of its liking for hierarchical systems and ascending trajectories. Most people who imagine the afterlife think of it as some sort of system of planes ascending toward the One, or God. We should take these schemes seriously, because they are archetypal and therefore integral to the Otherworld. But we should also remember that systems of levels, rungs, planes, and so on are only real providing we take them as images, as ways of configuring the imaginative space of the Otherworld, rather than taking them at face value.
Accordingly, if we were to imagine the afterlife in a hierarchical way, as a set of rungs on the ladder of “development” or “progress,” we could follow J. N. Findlay’s quasi-Neoplatonic map, sketched out in his book Ascent to the Absolute. We would expect the first rung of the ascent toward the One to be similar to our world of the senses. But sensory experience would be subject to the imagination so that perceiving and imagining would be simultaneous, our vision shared by other souls as we share theirs. On successive rungs, meaning will be more and more concentrated in the instant, as if it were music, and will not need drawn-out explanation or demonstration. We will become less embodied, yet retain a form of ourselves recognizable to anyone we are drawn to. Spatial separation will become insignificant, because we will arrive wherever we desire at the speed of thought. Our identity will coalesce with that of others so that it will become less and less important, and less possible to say exactly in whose experience something is occurring. We will be introduced by our daimon to our presiding deity, who is likely to be the daimon itself but unmasked. At any rate, we will experience the deity either spiritually and abstractly, as an impersonal Form; or bodily and concretely, as a personified image; or both at once. And we will be led via this deity to another, and another, all interrelated, until we begin to see the One who underlies them all, the unspeakable Void that is yet an absolute Plenitude where the goal of spirit is fulfilled.
The attempt here is to reconcile the many gods of soul with the One of spirit; but because it is a linear, progressive model, spirit has the last word, so to speak, unless we stipulate either that the One is not the end but that it fountains forth again in the multiplicity of soul; or we come up with a model of the afterlife that combines soul and spirit, the One and Many—something I will attempt in the next chapter.
Meanwhile, I will end on another hierarchical scheme of afterlife development: Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave from Book VII of The Republic. It is ostensibly about the path of the philosopher to enlightenment, but it might equally apply to the passage from this life into the next. It is a spiritual ascent that also takes soul into account through its emphasis on the importance of reflection and seeing. In one way, that is, it is a long journey; in another, it is a short step if we but see truly. The allegory is a clever one because, knowing that enlightenment and the afterlife are equally difficult to represent, Plato supposes that our own natural world is the heavenly one whereas our earthly condition is, by comparison, to be chained up in a cave, facing a blank wall with a fire behind us. As people and objects pass to and fro in front of the fire, we see only their shadows, and the shadows of ourselves, cast upon the wall. We think these shadows are reality, just as if we were to mistake the projection of a film on to a screen for the real world. To achieve a truer perception we have to turn around—in a sense, to reflect; or take a point of view opposite to everyone else’s. At once we see the fire and the things in front of it directly; and this is as near to a vision of reality as most of us ever come.
But we are only at the beginning. Whereas we believe that the fire is the only source of illumination, the initiate or philosopher leaves the cave altogether. Suddenly to see the real world in the light of the sun is as different from the cave as sight is from blindness. It looks strange at first, even unreal, until our eyes grow accustomed to the different kind of light; but soon we begin to discern this new world truly, in all its gorgeous and various forms. (Indeed, really we are in the intelligible world of the Forms, which provide the models for our shadow world.) Finally, we are able to look directly at the sun, by which all things are illuminated (a symbol, of course, for the One Form of the Good).
And what would happen if we went back to our old position in the cave? Our eyesight would be impaired by the return to darkness; we would see less of our old world. Everyone would say that our trip to a so-called upper world had ruined our vision and that only a fool would attempt the same journey.…