Experiencing the Next World Now - Softcover

Grosso Ph.D., Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743471059 ISBN 13: 9780743471053

Publisher: Gallery Books, 2004

Synopsis

From the scientific underground of psychic research comes a stunning report on the evidence for life after death. But all the proof in the world is nothing when compared to actual experience with the place beyond. This book takes the reader to the next level -- and offers a more personal kind of journey. If there is a "next world," it must be nearby, and the path leads through the gateways of our own minds. Philosopher Michael Grosso shows us how to open these passages -- or at least peek through a keyhole -- and glimpse what may lie beyond. This is the guidebook for an adventure that nobody can refuse.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Grosso, PhD, studied philosophy from Columbia University. He has taught philosophy and the humanities at Kennedy University, City University of New York, and New Jersey City University. He is on the Board of Directors of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association. He is the other of five books.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One: Ecstatic Journeys

The discovery of the worm in the apple of my existence led, as I said, to my waking up, a heightened savoring of life. And I felt driven to discover something More, something Greater. The discovery of my mortality jolted me to seek enlightenment, to explore the mysteries -- it also threw a long shadow on my world. A shadow of "black bile," of melancholy -- the old term for that ill-humored state that nowadays we call depression.

It's hard to say just how many people suffer from depression. There are all kinds and grades of this affliction, running from occasional bouts of feeling "down in the dumps" to serious clinical depression and all the way to the kind of suicidal madness of depression described so graphically by William Styron in his memoir Darkness Visible. The causes of depression, no doubt many, are still hard to pinpoint in any one case, and Styron finds something disturbingly mysterious about it. Neurotransmitters play a role, as may genetics; and of course all sorts of life incidents, mainly centering on loss, could trigger the plunge.

"For the Neo-Platonist," according to classical scholar Charles Boer, "the soul does not want to be in the body, and melancholy is its cry for escape." The cause of melancholy may lie in our embodied human condition. We do not want to be in our bodies, according to the Neoplatonists, because our bodies are the cause of all suffering, pain, and fear, and the root of all our losses, including, it seems, the inevitable loss of our own existence. If so, the only cure for depression is ecstasy -- the experience of being out of the body.

An experience I had in my metaphysically agitated twenties may explain what I mean. It was my first out-of-body flight. I woke up one morning and realized I was floating above my bed, hovering before the bedroom window. The sun was streaming through a transparent blue curtain. The "I" I allude to was the same inner self I knew as me, except shorn of its usual bodily baggage. There I was! Ecstatic -- "standing outside" myself, a disembodied center of awareness. Exhilarated, self-contained, serenely poised to take off to parts unknown, I knew that I had only to will it, to think the thought, and I'd be off through the window on a galloping trip to Oz. But hold on, I reflected. What if I can't find my way back? The moment I had this thought, I snapped back into my body, like a paddle ball on a rubber string, my heart pounding like a jackhammer.

For a few memorable seconds I had tasted the elation of pure existence. My melancholy, born of being trapped in my body, had completely lifted. Still, something prevented me from going all the way. I held back. What I most needed, it now seems, was what I most feared. If being trapped in a mortal body is the cause of melancholy, leaving the body can cause terrible anxiety. It was an unfortunate paradox, a double bind not easy to escape. Luckily, there are exceptions, and some of us do escape.

Ecstatic Separation

A man was traveling to Damascus to arrest disciples of a Jewish prophet whom the Romans had crucified. Fourteen years later he wrote down an experience he had on the way. He had a vision and heard the voice of the man whose followers he was planning to arrest; he saw a blinding light and a voice said: "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" He said of himself in a famous letter: "And I know how such a man -- whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows -- was caught up into Paradise, and heard inexpressible words, which a man is not permitted to speak" (2 Cor. 12:1-4). This is perhaps the most famous out-of-body experience, for it converted Paul of Tarsus to the new Christian faith. It was the turning point in the apostle's life, an experience of ecstasy, which by its aftereffects changed world history.

Consider another, more recent but still well-known example. The Oglala Sioux warrior and medicine man Black Elk had a life-changing ecstatic experience when he was nine years old and very sick. He heard voices calling him. Lying down, and too sick to walk, the boy looked outside the tepee and saw two men descending from the sky toward him. They said: "Come! Your Grandfathers are calling you! Then they turned and left the ground like arrows slanting upward from the bow. When I got up to follow, my legs did not hurt me any more and I was very light. I went outside the tepee, and yonder where the men with flaming spears were going, a little cloud was coming very fast. It came and stooped and took me and turned back to where it came from, flying fast. And when I looked down, I could see my mother and my father."

Black Elk traveled in this visionary world, and met the "Six Grandfathers," wise old men who taught him spiritual secrets and warned of the coming destruction of the Indian way of life. "For the nation's hoop was broken like a ring of smoke that spreads and scatters and the holy tree seemed like dying and all its birds were gone." Returning to his body, Black Elk said: "Then I saw my own tepee, and inside I saw my mother and my father, bending over a sick boy that was myself. And as I entered the tepee, someone was saying: 'The boy is coming to; you had better give him some water.'"

Black Elk's vision differs notably from Saint Paul's. Paul's experience signaled the rise of the new Christian age; the apostle was guided by his dreams to bring the "good news" to Europe. Black Elk's experience was a funeral dirge for the native way of life in North America. Content and context aside, both men experienced an ecstatic separation of consciousness from the body, a journey beyond the melancholy of embodied existence.

A Widespread Experience

Not every out-of-body flight is a world-shaking event. Most are pretty mundane. I've been asking students about their out-of-body adventures for about two decades; in an average class of twenty, about two usually report having the experience. Not every one is as deeply touched as Black Elk and Saint Paul were, but some are sufficiently impressed to feel their customary sense of reality affected. The experience can undermine the belief that our minds are totally wed to our bodies. The implication is obvious: If we can separate from our bodies, maybe we can survive the death of our bodies.

I recall a student in his mid-fifties who had been working himself to the bone with three jobs, trying to make lots of money but not knowing quite why. He never enjoyed what he did and was generally miserable. One night, after a particularly stressful day, he dropped down on his bed, weary with despair: With pain in his chest, he blacked out, and found himself above his body, looking down on his pale, drawn face. (Later it was determined he had a mild heart attack.) In a moment of exaltation he saw what a lethal farce his life had become, and he made up his mind on the spot to reduce his workload and return to school.

Or this: "I was a United States Navy scuba diver at work off the coast of Florida and temporarily lost consciousness while performing an underwater operation. All of a sudden, I found myself out of my body, watching my wife who was at home miles away. I could see what she was cooking, and I heard the phone ring and watched her answer. After I was rescued and rejoined my wife, I told her what she was doing at home. I repeated some bits of conversation she had over the phone. I tried to explain my experience, but she was so upset that I knew what she was doing that she accused me of spying on her. For a while we went through some rough times because she refused to believe my story."

Finally, from a twenty-three-year-old woman: "One morning I was startled from a deep sleep by a loud sound outside my window. I raised my head, looked around, leaned back, and seemed to fall asleep. Suddenly I was floating near the ceiling; I looked down at my body, my face squeezed between two crumpled pillows. My mouth was open and I looked stupid. Feeling totally light, I looked around, and saw on the molding near the ceiling what looked like a small bug. Then I snapped back into my body. I wondered if it was a dream, so I got out of bed and climbed a small ladder to see if anything was on the molding. There was. I saw a small, dead spider."

The last two stories seem to have been, in some informational sense, objectively real.

The Core Phenomenon

In a sense, this experience is the core phenomenon of afterlife research: an experience of what it might feel like to exist without a body -- of what it might be like to be a "spirit." If there is a life after death, the out-of-body experience may give us a foretaste, a dress rehearsal for the final act.

Such experiences have powerfully shaped myth and religion, as we saw from the historic examples of Saint Paul and Black Elk. Ecstasy is also central to shamanism: "The shaman specializes in a trance during which his soul is believed to leave his body and ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld," writes Mircea Eliade, adding, "The ecstasy is only the concrete experience of ritual death." Shamanic ecstasy is a form of ritual death, a way of gaining power and knowledge of the next world by direct communication with the spirits. "'Seeing spirits,' in a dream or awake, is the determining sign of the shamanic vocation."

So we already have a model for experiencing the next world now. The traditional shaman understood this for whom leaving the body was, as Eliade points out, an experience of "ritual death." In the out-of-body state, you become like a spirit; you see and interact with actual deceased spirits. Figuratively speaking, it's like stepping into the "vestibule" of death. It represents a state of temporary disembodiment -- temporary death. In Part Four, we will describe some procedures for inducing this experience of entering the "vestibule" of death.

What's Really Going On Here?

Do people really leave their bodies? Really know true ecstasy? The consensus of mainstream science today may find this incredible, even meaningless, but in light of the data gathered by psychical research, shamanic claims of ritual death and soul travel acquire an added dimension of truth. Experiencers report changes in their perception of reality. They feel they now "know" that an Otherworld exists. As we explore the different kinds of afterlife evidence, we will keep returning to the idea of direct experience, which I believe is the key to tipping the balance toward resolving the afterlife enigma.

When thousands, if not millions, keep reporting the same kind of experience, it seems wise to pay heed. According to one survey, 95 percent of world cultures believe in out-of-body experiences, which may occur in perfect health, deep relaxation, acute stress, or near-death. Many well-known writers had the experience, for example, Goethe, Ernest Hemingway, and Guy de Maupassant. Jack London wrote a novel called Star Rover about a prisoner who learned to consciously induce these psychic voyages. London's star rover defies his cruel jailor to place him in a straitjacket and brags he can leave his body at will. The story was based on the real case of San Franciscan Ed Morell.

It would help to gain a sharper sense of what the experience is like. The main thing is that consciousness seems to become detached and located outside its customary bodily envelope. You might be sound asleep or near death, totally calm or wildly aroused, meditating on your navel or racing a motorbike. In fact, there are so many ways to slip out of our bodies that one wonders how we manage to stay inside them in the first place. The conscious mind certainly hangs around the body, but doesn't seem all that attached or terribly loyal to it. Consciousness, I think it fair to say, likes to wander.

Otherbodied Environments

Sometimes the out-of-body environment is perceived in a realistic way and everything appears perfectly normal. The clock is above the mantelpiece and the moon is shining through the window. But sometimes, on closer inspection, the environment seems more like a dream. Psychical researcher William Roll described his out-of-body experience in a moonlit room. Roll floated out of his body and found himself in a part of the room where moonlight cast shadows on the floor; he memorized the location of the shadows in relationship to the carpet pattern, returned to his body, got out of bed and examined the carpet. No shadows at the location he recalled. Roll concluded he hadn't really left his body; the experience seemed more like a realistic dream. But in a survey conducted by parapsychologist John Palmer, about 15 percent of people claiming to leave their bodies were able to verify their experience.

Otherbodied environments vary. Sometimes things appear transparent or suffused with light. In rare cases, the experiencer senses nothing in the environment, or finds himself afloat in a black void, but most of the time perception is detailed, realistic, and more vivid than usual. The environment often consists of the familiar world, but sometimes it takes on the appearance of a vestibule, doorway, or tunnel leading to another world.

The Out-of-Body Body

Most sacred traditions speak of a "subtle" body. Thomas Aquinas describes the speed, lightness, and translucency of the resurrection body, but let's see what modern research has to say. English parapsychologist Celia Green found that subjects may occupy a subtle body, a replica of the physical. The new body isn't bound by laws of physics, but passes through solid matter, is luminous and gravity-free. This sounds like the radiant body that Saint Paul and the Neoplatonists spoke of and that Aquinas made into Catholic doctrine.

Sometimes, the experience is "asomatic"; subjects sense themselves as points of light or luminous vapors. Some observe a so-called astral cord connecting them to their physical body, others don't. Some can control their out-of-body capers. In brief or emotionally disconcerting experiences, control is difficult. Loss of control may stop the experience, as in my first out-of-body transport. Some report being aware of leaving and re-entering. Now and then you hear of a person projecting to some location and appearing to others. A young woman wrote: "I had several out-of-body experiences when I was in my late teens. One night I fell asleep as soon as I hit the pillow and had a vivid dream of being at my girlfriend's house. I was standing outside her room watching her arrange her clothing on the bed. She looked up in my direction. Then the dream ended. The following day my friend phoned me to say she had seen me standing outside her room, looking at her." I have found other cases of people dreaming of places where they were seen. I guess you could call these examples of living ghosts.

Here is a case Saint Augustine described fifteen centuries ago. "I believe that a person has a phantom which in his imagination or in his dreams takes on various forms through the influence of circumstances of innumerable kinds. This phantom is not a material body, and yet with amazing speed it takes on shapes like material bodies; and it is this phantom, I hold, that can in some inexplicable fashion be presented in bodily form to the apprehension of other people, when their physical senses are asleep or in abeyance." And he gives a good example. "Another man reported that in his own house, at night-time, before he went to bed, he saw a philosopher coming to him, a man he knew very well. And this man explained to him a number of points in Plato, which he had formerly refused to explain when asked." Later, the man who saw the vision confronted his philosopher friend, and a...

About this edition

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0743471059
• ISBN 13: 9780743471053
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320