Experiencing the Next World Now - Softcover

Grosso, Michael

 
9780743471053: Experiencing the Next World Now
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0743471059 ISBN 13: 9780743471053
Verlag: Gallery Books, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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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...

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Verlag
Gallery Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0743471059
ISBN 13 
9780743471053
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
328
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande