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The Modern Book of the Dead: A Revolutionary Perspective on Death, the Soul, and What Really Happens in the Life to Come - Hardcover

Tompkins, Ptolemy

 
9781451616521: The Modern Book of the Dead: A Revolutionary Perspective on Death, the Soul, and What Really Happens in the Life to Come
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 145161652X ISBN 13: 9781451616521
Verlag: Atria Books, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

A modern, all-encompassing exploration of what happens after we die, combining spirituality with philosophy, history, and science, all of which guide us toward the timeless truth that human consciousness lives on after death.

Throughout history, Books of the Dead have provided comfort, hope, and insight into death and dying, uniting readers with those who have passed before them and shedding light on the process of death.            

 In The Modern Book of the Dead, Tompkins draws from the teachings and writings of major religious and philosophical traditions that comment of the afterlife, especially Christianity and Buddhism, but without adhering to one single philosophy. He blends Eastern models of death and rebirth with a more Western emphasis on personal identity and the soul of the individual, offering a comprehensive “map” of the afterlife.

 Writing in a clear and approachable tone, Tompkins proves himself to be just an average person trying to make sense of something that we all will face. With the advances of modern medicine enabling us to live longer, we have become increasingly distanced from death, and thus more fearful of the inevitable. Tompkins, however, argues that our experiences of growth and change do not stop at the moment of death, but in many ways only begin there.

 Like its ancient predecessors, The Modern Book of the Dead frames death not as an end but as a beginning, yet it also embraces science and demonstrates how the older books can be brought into line with twenty-first century perspectives. Tomkins’s rich, breakthrough approach gives us the first truly contemporary, enlightened look at death and the afterlife.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ptolemy Tompkins has been an in-house editor at Guideposts and Angels on Earth magazines and is the author of four books. His writing has been featured in Beliefnet.com, Harper’s, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in New York.

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1
A Long, Personal, but Necessary Introduction Explaining How I Came to Write This Book

Few kids like going to bed. But when I was a kid, I really didn’t like it. That each day should have to come to an end with the closing of the door of my room and the (usually) all too long wait for unconsciousness to arrive seemed not only unfair; it seemed downright absurd. The darkness and separation that night brought with it filled me with a pure childish anxiety that I can still conjure up today.

It was while lying in bed as a young child and waiting for sleep to come that I remember doing my earliest significant thinking about death. One night, at about age five, I awoke in a cold sweat from a dream in which the people I knew had appeared as one-dimensional paper cutouts. My father, my mother, my teachers—everyone was reduced, in the dream, to these simple paper shapes, each wearing a single, static expression, some smiling, some frowning, but all equally shallow, all equally empty of true human presence.

In its simple, straightforward way, this dream summed up all the deepest anxieties I had about life as a kid. The notion that the human world was really just a surface event with nothing real beneath it, that the people I knew and the world I lived in had, in fact, no true or lasting substance… Wasn’t that what the concept of death—impossibly remote and hard to understand, yet at the same time hugely, intimately close and ever-present—really suggested?

The more I thought about death as a kid, the more strange it seemed to me that most people in the world around me had so little to say about it—or at least, so little of any real usefulness. In 1970, when I was eight, my mother read E. B. White’s children’s book Charlotte’s Web aloud to me. At the end of the book, when Charlotte the spider died, I struggled to get my head around the idea that Wilbur the pig could have gotten any happiness or consolation from the fact that Charlotte had left a nest of baby spiders behind to keep him company. Babies or no babies, Charlotte was still gone. Wasn’t that what really counted?

That same year, I began suffering a new series of nightmares turning around the theme of being kidnapped. In most of these scenarios, a group of malevolent but otherwise unidentifiable men crept up on me while I was sleeping, stuffed me into a sack, and dragged me away to a cabin in the middle of a dark forest.

In an effort to find out what lay at the root of these fantasies, my father enlisted the help of a Scientologist friend of his named Rebecca. For several months in the spring of that year, I made regular visits to a small office in downtown Washington, DC, where Rebecca hooked me up to an E-meter—a lie-detector-like device that Scientologists use to measure electrical fluctuations at the surface of the skin. Over the course of half a dozen of these visits, Rebecca attempted, through a series of questions and a close study of the E-meter’s reactions to my answers, to lead me back to my previous lifetimes on earth. For, my father maintained, it was during one of those lifetimes that the event or events that were secretly causing my kidnapping anxieties had actually occurred.

A writer who specialized in occult and esoteric subjects (1971’s Secrets of the Great Pyramid and 1973’s The Secret Life of Plants are, today, his chief enduring claims to fame), my father wasn’t a card-carrying Scientologist. But he was a great believer in the idea—common to Scientology, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and many of the other new or semi-new spiritual movements that seized so many people’s attention in the sixties and seventies—that the human soul preexisted the body, and will outlive it as well. My father revered the great early architects of new age thought. People like Helena Blavatsky (the controversial Russian mystic and founder of Theosophy), Rudolf Steiner (the Austrian philosopher and educator and founder of Anthroposophy), Edgar Cayce (the American clairvoyant famous for predictions he made while in a state of trance), and Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, came up on a daily basis in our household. Different though the teachings of these thinkers were in certain of their specifics, my father believed that they had all made important contributions to a new way of looking at human beings and their place in the universe: a way that was, he felt, going to have a growing influence on the hopelessly confining antispiritual view of the world that more and more people in the West had been abiding by ever since the scientific revolution had occurred three hundred years earlier.

Like many early enthusiasts of what was just then starting to be called new age thought, my father was strongly suspicious of conventional science, believing that most scientists spent most of their time covering up the real truth about the world rather than revealing it. He distrusted the proponents of traditional religious faith—most especially Christianity—even more, and never missed an opportunity to warn me against believing what the more conventional voices of wisdom in the world I lived in (teachers, school friends’ parents, people on TV) had to say about the way things really worked. To my father’s way of thinking, conventional science and conventional faith were both roadblocks to experiencing who and what each of us really is: a free spirit living in a cosmos that is not purely material, but material and spiritual: a cosmos that humankind was on the verge of seeing and experiencing in a new and infinitely larger way.

At the center of this new picture of the universe was a vision of the human being as an essentially spiritual entity: a being that had taken on a physical body as part of a process of growth, or evolution, that had begun far in the past and would continue far into the future. That humans were more than their present physical bodies wasn’t simply interesting news to my father, it was revolutionary news. For when one took this view, human life was transformed in a moment from the painful, puzzling, and generally pointless exercise it so often seemed to be into a story that is going somewhere. When you held to the kind of worldview that my father and his new age friends did, at no single moment, no matter how futile and pointless life might seem, was it ever really so. Even on the bleakest days and in the lowest of circumstances, one need never feel totally lost or totally without hope. Instead, even at those points when life seemed to make least sense, one was simply like a football player so disoriented in the confusion of a scrimmage that he has momentarily lost sight of the end zone.

“We’re not bodies,” my father liked to say, summing up this entire new view of life and the human place within it: “we have bodies.”

My father (correctly, I would later discover) pointed out that the basic notion of reincarnation—that is, that we are souls, not bodies, and that as such we have each inhabited more than one of the latter over the course of time—had been the norm rather than the exception for most of human history. It was still an accepted reality for the cultures of the Far East, and even the more mystical elements of Judaism and Islam continued to make room for it as well. When you got down to it, it was really only Christianity—that most ideologically thorny of all the world religions—that had said a definite “no” to the possibility that we are born more than once upon the earth.

And yet it was possible—indeed, said my father, even probable—that in their earliest days even Christians had embraced this...

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Verlag
Atria Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
145161652X
ISBN 13 
9781451616521
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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