Death and God

Having watched Richard Dawkins on television last night one could not but help be struck by his insistence that religion was false and science true. By science he meant a reductive materialism and not an examination of the evidence for the existence of life beyond the physical world, or the continuation of consciousness. There was of course nothing scientific in his apparent lack of knowledge of the evidence in these areas. Today I came across the following quote from Albert Camus's Notebooks  which seems to speak to 'the Dawkins' dilemma' - the insistence by some, but certainly not all, scientists (sceptics) on the absolute rightness of their position without the need to produce evidence to support it:

There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible. I cannot force you to believe in God. Believing in God amounts to coming to terms with death. When you have accepted death, the problem of God will be solved - and not the reverse. 


I do not worry about whether people believe in 'God' as the term means so many things to so many people, but I am concerned by the fear of death in our society, in our world, as it distorts the way we live. Fear of death and the freedom to embrace life cannot coincide as fear casts a shadow over life. In understanding the psychology of avoidance or denial I like the following passage from 'Scott' (T.E. Lawrence) channelled through the mediumship of Jane Sherwood (The Country Beyond, 1969: 48-9):

Perhaps psychology can help us to understand this tendency. it is surely a kind of masochism, a stoic resolve to punish the wishful thinking one suspects is behind the belief in immorality. It feels very stern, strong and noble to deny the thing one secretly longs for, and so to prove that one is quite able to do without it. It is easy to find arguments to support this denial and see how superior it makes one feel to say "I, at least, do not need to believe in such things".


'Scott' found, as it seems we all do in our time, that whatever made him who he was had 'escaped' from his body at the moment of death. What he would have denied a short time before became self-evident, that there is change, but no snuffing out of existence. The scientific law of the conservation of energy applies to life itself and not just to inert matter.


More on Jane Sherwood, 'Scott' and the relationship between vital and non-living matter to come in my Exploring the Afterlife blog.

To Cause a Death

Frances Zammit kindly sent me a copy of Kelly Connor's book, To Cause a Death: The Aftermath of an Accidental Killing (Clairview, Forest Row, 2004). It was a gripping read - as a  17 year old Kelly Connor accidentally knocked down and killed an elderly pedestrian. Finding no comfort or understanding from her family, religion, the medical and psychiatric profession, she coped alone, or at times failed to cope, with the question 'Do I deserve to go on living, having taken another life?' For a while after the accident she was subject to nightly visions in which angels and demons argued over her soul. She understood that they were interested in her everyday intentions, how much she loved. Having no religious context in which she could discuss these visions she kept them to herself. The next couple of decades included endless travel around Australia (where her family had emigrated from Manchester, UK), time in psychiatric hospitals, failed suicide attempts (she felt the need to talk to the woman she had killed and see if she was forgiven), a change of name and a brief marriage and birth of her daughter Meegan.
There was a glimmer of understanding when staff at the women's refuge she was living in at the time recommended a therapist to Kelly (originally known as Brenda). While previous attempts to come to terms with her 'crime' had been met with an attitude of denial and failure to engage, this therapist launched into a story in which a young man on a horse knocked over and killed his younger sister. He was banished by his grieving mother, who had witnessed the accident but had been unable to prevent it. She was the mother, the therapist explained, and her mother the young man who had been forced to experience the pain of banishment. She had to forgive her mother for her inability to comfort her in the present life. Kelly was not able to connect with this story at the time, but when through sending her daughter to a Waldorf school she came to read and study the works of Rudolf Steiner, the notion of karma and the need to make amends in this life for injuries caused in past lives fell into place. Everything about the accident seemed contrived to ensure that Brenda Connor and Margaret Healy met when they did so fatefully on a zebra crossing in 1971. Neither were on their usual path and had taken diversions to be at that spot at that time. Kelly came to believe that the 'accident' that had so shaped her life and that of those around her was pre-planned, and that there was a working out of grace and purpose through it all.

The final chapter digresses from the autobiographical to an explanation of Steiner's teachings on kamaloca, the astral plane on which the dead work out their karma and review their lives. According to Steiner's anthroposophical teachings the dead spend roughly three days in a kind of half sleep before awakening in kamaloca. The time spent there is roughly one third of their earth life, with the review process taking place at the ratio of one year in kamaloca for every three spent on earth, working backwards from death to birth, so that someone who died aged 90 would spend thirty years in kamaloca. During this time of review the deceased relive not only their own part in events but the effects of their actions on others. Those who participated in these events are often consciously or subconsciously aware of what is happening and may think or dream about the deceased person at that time. If the dead are not to carry the unresolved karma into another life they can be forgiven or helped to shed any burdens by the actions of the living.
Anthroposophy is broadly in line with other sources in terms of recognising a period of rest for most following death, and one or more past-life reviews, as well as the possibility of continued interaction between the living and the dead. He is unusual in being prescriptive about the timing of these events. Other sources tend to stress the variability in the time a soul spends in kamaloca or on some similar plane, depending on the speed of their spiritual advancement. Bruce Moen in Voyage to Curiosity's Father (Hampton Roads, Charlottesville, 2001), for instance, describes an out of body visit to the mother of a friend he had been asked to check up on after her death. Sylvia had died in a confused state and he had helped her move on. She had not by all accounts been a particularly holy or spiritual person during her last lifetime, so Bruce was surprised to learn a short while later that she had already 'graduated' and become a 'Being of Light' (in Steiner's terms, had completed her time of review in kamaloca). Moen was shown that once Sylvia knew she was dead her religious upbringing told her that Jesus would come and take her. When Sylvia was asked by a guide if she wanted the love of Jesus to fill her heart she replied that she did, and the negative energies she carried from her former life was successively washed away until she reached a stage at which there was simply nothing to hold her there any longer, as she had become filled with pure unconditional love - no punishment, no divine retribution, just a rebalancing of her energies. I guess this is what Christian teaching means by grace and the undeserved nature of our reception of it.
Whether or not one wishes to engage with the spiritual journey and anthroposophical conclusion, To Cause a Death makes an excellent read.             

Negative attachments

In my current reading I repeatedly come across sources that talk about the ways in which immoral behaviours and 'low' vibrations open us to negative influences. Valerie Mason John, for instance, in her semi-autobiographical book Borrowed Body, republished by BAAF as The Banana Kid spoke of people with depression and a destructive life style, including herself, as having a creature like a furry cat sitting on their shoulders. The cat could urge someone to yet more destructive behaviours such as suicide. Galen Stoller was motivated to write his posthumous memoir, My Life After Life, partly to warn others about the realm of 'misanthropes', creatures parasitic on humans who allow them to feed off their energies. Bruce Moen in his Exploring the Afterlife series speaks of ghosts of those who were attracted to a certain life style, who had failed to move away from the earth vibrations, being drawn to a house where people were taking drugs. When one lot were exorcised, another lot moved in - echoing the Gospel narrative of sweeping a room of spirits, only to leave room for more to arrive (Matt. 12, 43-5). Moen also visits the "hells" for people who are attracted to such places by their vibrational frequency when they die. There is a thiefs' hell, an emotional sadists' hell, a liars' hell, and so on. An individual isn't condemned to such places after death but is attracted there, and can leave as soon as they learn or desire to change their dominant vibration. These were the thoughts running through my mind in response to the scenes of violence on the streets of some of England's cities in the last week. The opposite of all these vibrations, or their cure, is pure unconditional love. Those of us fortunate enough to have experienced unconditional love have a responsibility to extend it to those we meet. Who knows how many 'hells' it can help dispel. 

The Shiva-Sumitra Possession Case – Notes on the frustrations of a quick return

On 12^th May 2011 I attended the Gwen Tate Memorial Lecture organized by the Society for Psychical Research in London. The introductory blurb for the lecture with a summary of the study and background to it is reproduced below. The case basically involved a young Indian woman who was probably murdered, who apparently took over the body of a similarly aged woman from a different caste and village who had been very ill in a coma. While Dr Mills gave a very reasoned and factual account of who said or wrote what to whom, it was in the subsequent question and answer session that questions of motivation and speculation as to what might have happened at a non-material level arose. Possession cases of this type, in which one personality seems to have been completely and permanently replaced by another are rare, although there are parallels with cases of (apparent) rapid reincarnation. In this case of possession the woman who was killed was both angry at her sister-in-law and husband’s family for murdering her and covering up the murder, and concerned about her two young children who were left with her husband, who cut them off from her family. The motivation, sudden violent death and extreme concern for others, especially for surviving children, that often seems to generate rapid reincarnation, was similar in this case. Taking over the body of a woman whose spirit had left, could plausibly have been an opportunistic decision, agreed or not between the two women (in spirit) or even, less plausibly, part of some pre-birth plan (see Robert Schwartz on Pre-Birth Planning). The frustrations and futility of attempting to return in another’s body became apparent through the lecture and subsequent discussion. If an adult returns (reincarnates) as an infant they may be able to remember and identity their former family and this may even be accepted and details verified, but a baby or child cannot look after others, and the original desire to continue with the previous life is not possible. The search for and identification with the previous life can pose limitations on living the current life in the new body (see, for instance, Jenny Cockell’s account of her search for ‘her’ children in a previous life; Yesterday’s Children, Platkus 2004).

            In the possession case described here the husband and family of the woman who had been in a coma, Sumitra Singh, were understandably upset to have their wife/daughter/mother claim to be someone else, and to say that she didn’t belong with them. While both she and they came eventually to accept the situation, and the new Sumitra re-learnt to live her life as a rural Khastiya woman, it was not a happy solution. For the murdered and reborn Shiva Tripatri the situation was arguably even worse. As her former husband’s family had seen to it that her body had been rapidly cremated to remove any evidence there was no way the police, although suspicious, could actually press charges for Shiva Tripatri’s murder. Not surprisingly they refused to recognize the revived Sumitra Singh as Shiva Tripatri, maintaining that she was a fraud. She was never able to see ‘her’ children again, who remained with her husband’s family, although she never stopped trying. Sumitra’s own natal family did accept her as their daughter/sister/relative in a different body, but that gave little comfort to any of the parties involved and did not change the situation for the better. The lesson one might draw from this and other similar cases in which a strong sense of unfinished business leads to a quick return to earth, is that whatever the circumstances of death one needs to detach and move on. Any help that can be given will need to be from the ‘other side’, and that little is to be gained by trying to relive or regain a life that has passed.

Athropologist Dr Antonia Mills gives the Gwen Tate Memorial Lecture. Dr Mills will report on her recent follow up investigation of the Shiva-Sumitra possession case originally studied by Ian Stevenson. The talk will include photographs, letters and new assessments made by various members of Sumitra and Shiva's families. The speaker will argue that the case presents strong evidence of the survival of Shiva's consciousness after her bodily death.

Antonia Mills received her PhD in Anthropology & Child Development from Harvard University and has been engaged in studies of Cases of the Reincarnation Type since 1984, both among North American Indian peoples and in India. She was a Research Assistant Professor in Ian Stevenson's Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia from 1988-1994 and since has been teaching First Nations Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada. Ian Stevenson and Satwant Pasricha, researched and reported on the case of Sumitra Singh, a young woman of the Khastiya caste, who apparently died and then returned to consciousness but experienced herself as Shiva Tripatri, a young college-educated Brahmin housewife and the mother of two who had died under suspicious circumstances. The two families were unknown to each other. Sumitra had never gone to school although she had learned how to write somewhat from her cousin. Stevenson and others documented that Sumitra and her family had no knowledge of Shiva and her family, and yet Sumitra recognized Shiva's father when he came to see her, and other family members when Sumitra and her husband went the 75 kilometers to the Tripathi home. Last year, Dr Mills and Dr. Kuldip Dhiman conducted a follow up study to translate and assess letters written by Sumitra/Shiva and to compare them with a letter written by the original Shiva.  Dr Mills will argue that the case presents strong evidence of the survival of Shiva's consciousness after her bodily death.

Ian Stevenson compares cases of reincarnation and possession at the end of his book 20 Suggestive Cases of Reincarnation, University of Virginia Press 1974.