Part II

Glimpses of the Beyond

“There is the fear that there is an afterlife but no one will know where it’s being held.”
- Woody Allen

I don’t know if heaven exists. But if it does, then some part of it must look a little like central Virginia on a warm September evening. Though I saw more of the countryside than I had planned to as my rental car and I tested the precision of Google Maps, in the end I did make it to my destination. Situated in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains is the cluster of red-roofed buildings that make up the Monroe Institute, an organization that probably is unique in terms of both its founding and its mission. The Institute was started by Robert Monroe, a former business executive whose name, in the 1970s, became almost synonymous with the idea of astral projection, or what is generally referred to as out-of-body experience (OBE). It is a phenomenon, now well documented, where one temporarily experiences oneself as being disconnected from one’s physical body. Monroe’s first book, Journeys Out of the Body, was a fascinating and mind-bending voyage through his many years of experimenting with this unusual state of consciousness, and it caused a minor sensation when it was released in 1971. His second, Far Journeys, was a travelogue through his subsequent explorations and included his own conclusions about the nature of what he began to call the nonphysical world. Monroe’s initial OBEs were spontaneous and unexpected. But he was eventually able to develop the capacity to leave his body almost at will and pursue his own adventures in nonphysical dimensions. Monroe, who died in 1995, was more of a bold explorer than a spiritual practitioner, but the maps of the nonphysical world he constructed from his OBE journeys are full of intriguing similarities to near-death experiences as well as some traditional metaphysics—in particular, the Tibetan Buddhist bardos. While I had long been curious about the out-of-body phenomenon in and of itself, my visit to the Monroe Institute was inspired by the relationship I saw between OBEs and reincarnation.

I had begun to notice that in many accounts from those who remember past lives, there are intriguing descriptions of time spent in the afterlife, or the “interlife,” as some have called it—meaning the time spent between lives. These accounts may give us a tantalizing glimpse into the nature of what lies beyond the physical veil. What I wanted to know was: Are those who remember an interlife referring to the same dimension or realm as those who are having out-of-body experiences? Dr. Carlos Alvarado, a researcher at the University of Virginia who studies the out-of-body phenomenon, confirmed the possible link:

Reincarnation is a form of survival of bodily death, but whatever comes back must have existed at some point and there must have been a point of transfer between personality one and personality two. So we could speculate that at some point when you die, you have to be out of your body and survive before you reincarnate again. Where you are at that moment may be the same as what people experience as an OBE or out-of-body experience. In fact, spiritual traditions talk about death as basically a permanent out-of-body experience. So if you accept these types of ideas, then there is a clear link with phenomena such as reincarnation.

Monroe’s initial explorations were done before near-death experiences (or NDEs, as they’re often called) became such a widely discussed phenomenon. But the similarities between the two states are clear. In some respects, NDEs are simply OBEs that occur when a person is close to death. Moreover, descriptions of both OBEs and NDEs do have many similarities to the interlife descriptions from reincarnation research. Indeed, Dr. Bruce Greyson, who studies near-death experiences, informed me that there have already been some studies examining these connections:

One of the medical students who was working with Jim Tucker last year compared the reports of Burmese children who remember the interval between lives with the reports of Buddhists who have had near-death experiences. And she found that the descriptions were very similar. There’s a period of hanging around the body, often watching the funeral; there’s a period of waiting around while you’re being reassigned or waiting to choose your next life; and then there is the period of entering into the next life.

Now if that doesn’t sound like your idea of a heavenly afterlife, you’ll be glad to know that there is some variation in the reports—in fact, tremendous variation. And yet, “waiting around” in some way, shape, or form does seem to be a popular theme. In his recent book Life Before Life, Tucker writes that out of 217 children in the Virginia files who remembered time spent in an interlife period, 112 recalled existing at least temporarily in “another realm,” 45 spoke about memories of their conception or rebirth, and 69 said that they had witnessed their “previous personality’s funeral.” Most of the memories are just brief snippets, bits and pieces of information, fleeting descriptions of an existence before birth.

For example, there is the child who remarked to his parents one day that “when you die, you don’t go right to heaven. You go to different levels—here, then here, then here,” and he moved his hand up as he referred to each level. Or there is the four-year-old girl who announced to her family that “when you go to heaven, you have a little time to rest, kind of like a vacation, but then you have to get to work. You have to start thinking about what you have to learn in your next life. You have to start picking out your next family. . . . Heaven isn’t just a place to hang around forever. . . . You have work to do there.” Some speak of other planets, other realms; some remember seeing a light, going toward it, and then being reborn; some remember going through a tunnel and then “meeting God”; some talk about time spent in “heaven” and describe their activities while there.

One of the most common themes in afterlife accounts is what is often called a “life review.” Kenneth Ring, author of Heading Toward Omega, analyzed NDEs from all over the world and noted that a life review was one of the most commonly reported features. It usually consists of an almost instantaneous retrospective of one’s entire life, sometimes in fine detail. It has been described as being similar to “viewing a three-dimensional hologram of your life in full color, sound, and scent” or “viewing hundreds of television screens with each screen showing a home movie of one event in your life.”

Life reviews are common in NDEs and in past-life regressions but are only hinted at in reports from children who remember an interlife existence. The experience can be positive and it can also be unpleasant, even hellish. Most report that during the life review one is unable to employ the usual ego-defense mechanisms. There is no self-deception or pretense possible. The life review echoes, in many respects, traditional accounts of the individual soul facing some sort of judgment after death, though in this case the judge is one’s own self. The Tibetan Book of the Dead even mentions the “Mirror of Karma” that is held before the soul in which the previous life’s actions are reflected clearly. “It is, in a sense, remorseless,” explained one person after a powerful NDE. “Nobody judges you; you judge yourself. You cannot lie; you cannot cheat. Not there, you can’t. You just cannot. You’re faced with it . . . and you have to accept it. Nobody says ‘you’ve been bad’. . . . You do it. You know. You know better than anyone, because it’s your thoughts and your motives. . . . And one gets precisely and exactly what one deserves. It’s utterly fair.”

Another common element reported in the interlife state is the experience of being in the presence of a higher power or intelligence. Sometimes that presence takes the form of light or a feeling of love or a “being of light.” Sometimes it’s a review board composed of masters or elders—three Egyptian gods, twelve wise men, three forms of Jesus or Krishna, several Native American elders, etcetera. They are very common in past-life regressions, children’s interlife memories, and NDEs. These review boards, we are told, assist individuals in reviewing their karmic situation and choosing their next birth.

One has to tread very carefully in drawing any conclusions about this data, especially given that there seems to be a highly subjective element to these experiences. Christians often see Jesus; Native Americans may experience a review board of their “ancestors”; New Agers tend to talk about light beings; Indians see Krishna. There is also some evidence that reports of the afterlife have changed dramatically over the years. In the recent book The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife, scholar Jan Bremmer tours some of the more notable examples of NDEs throughout history and concludes that individuals tend to report afterlife experiences that are consistent with the beliefs of the time they live in. For example, during the Middle Ages, NDEs were filled with heaven-and-hell images and souls being tortured for their sins. Some contemporary Christian accounts contain similar images.

Another reason for caution in drawing conclusions about this data is that even if we could be confident in the veracity of all the reports, we may still only be seeing a narrow slice of the death/reincarnation process. Crucial pieces of the picture may still be missing because of the limited scope of our vision into this other world. Yet I don’t think the highly subjective nature of these accounts nor the limited nature of our perception means that there is nothing objective to glean from the stories. In fact, the more I learned about the afterlife or interlife realm, the more I realized that the subjectivity of the reports may be one of the keys to understanding how this subtler dimension of reality actually operates.

Creative Thinking

“You and I sit in this room and we call this reality, because we have a common experience of a chair and a couch. What if people are having common experiences in some nonphysical place? Does that make it real?” The person sitting across from me nonchalantly talking about nonphysical realities was Skip Atwater, director of research at the Monroe Institute. A former army counterintelligence officer, Atwater has spent the last several decades working closely with individuals exploring the limits of the human capacity to perceive subtler realms of reality beyond our normal three-dimensional existence. The Monroe Institute has published many scientific papers on this topic, and they pursue a rational, left-brained approach to experiences that would leave most of us pinching ourselves to make sure we weren’t dreaming. Reincarnation is not a focus of their work, but Atwater told me that many of the people who participate in their programs do at some point “become aware” that they have lived during other time periods.

I asked Atwater if he thought there was a common experience of what happens after death. “We just pose a model,” he replied. “It’s like we’re saying it might be helpful to think about it this way. We’re not saying this is the way it is. But there seems to be something like a ‘reception station,’ and it can be different for different people. It can look like a transit station, an auditorium/gathering place, or some sort of healing/regeneration center. It might be a library where you can look things up and review past lives or a planning center where you decide what the next course of action is.”

In the literature of survival research, there are numerous accounts in which a person describes exactly the sort of place Atwater is talking about. “It was like a train station,” said one person after returning from a near-death experience. A man who witnessed his grandfather’s passing in a lucid dream recalled, “We ascended through a blue mist until we came to a huge, beautiful campus in the sky. . . . We walked . . . to a gigantic dome-shaped auditorium.” He woke up to find that his grandfather had indeed died. Another man who underwent a dramatic near-death experience remembers: “The heavenly structure resembled an amphitheater similar to those found in ancient civilizations.” Therapist Roger Woolger similarly describes how one of his patients told him that she reviewed her past lives in the interlife state: “[She] reported being taken by . . . a luminous being to a celestial temple, where she was shown a huge book in which the life she had just remembered and ‘many more’ were clearly written.”

So does that mean that a celestial temple or an amphitheater or an auditorium or a bus station really exists? Well, remember that we’re navigating a world in which reality, if most accounts are to be believed, is very plastic, almost in the same way dreams can be. As the great religious scholar Huston Smith once wrote, “Everything we experience on the bardos is a reflection of our own mental machinations.” Dr. Alvarado confirmed that most OBE accounts report something similar. “A lot of people say that their thoughts and their expectations and their fears can create astral reality or phenomena in the out-of-body state,” he said. “They say that it is a real dimension, a different plane, but that it interacts with the mentality of the individual.” Professor Chris Bache also echoed those descriptions when he told me that “a number of teachers have said that your experience of the bardo is self-generated. It’s psycho-plastic.”

This potentially explains the subjective nature of the accounts we hear about this in-between world. No wonder Buddhists often experience Buddhist realms and Christians often see Jesus. In fact, in Monroe’s cosmology of the nonphysical world, there is a place he calls the “Belief System Territory” where all of the afterlife experiences that correspond to various belief systems around the world exist as possible destinations for individuals after death. “I was given a tour of all the heavens that have been created,” claims one well-known NDE account. “The Nirvanas, the Happy Hunting Grounds, all of them. I went through them. These are thought form creations that we have created. . . . I saw the Christian heaven. . . . Some heavens are very interesting, and some are very boring. I found the ancient ones to be more interesting, like the Native American ones. . . . The Egyptians have fantastic ones. It goes on and on.”

The great Indian philosopher-sage Sri Aurobindo constructed an elaborate metaphysics of the nonphysical realms. In his system, the “mental” plane was a place in which the “stuff” of reality is very malleable to thought. He wrote:

This world contains not only the possibility of large or intense or continuous enjoyments almost inconceivable to the limited physical mind, but also the possibility of equally enormous sufferings. It is here therefore that there are situated the lowest heavens and all the hells with the tradition and imagination of which the human mind has lured and terrified itself since the earliest ages.

There are several other characteristics, described in Monroe’s books and confirmed by Atwater, that are near-universal when it comes to describing the nonphysical dimension—descriptions that apply across almost all accounts, from OBEs to NDEs to children who remember their past lives, and even to mystics like the eighteenth-century Swede Emanuel Swedenborg. One is the nature of communication in these realms, which is described as being nonverbal or telepathic. For example, Monroe, in his book Far Journeys, explains that in his travels through the nonphysical worlds, the primary method of communication was a powerful version of mental telepathy. He writes that “NVC [nonverbal communication] . . . is direct instant experience and/or immediate knowing transmitted from one intelligent energy system and received by another.” Swedenborg, in his classic Heaven and Hell, described “heaven” as being a place where “people actually speak directly from their thought, so that we have there a kind of thoughtful speech or audible thought.” And that description from a mystic philosopher in the eighteenth century dovetails neatly with a description from a five-year-old child in the twenty-first century who remarked one day to his parents that “when you die . . . you don’t talk in words. God doesn’t use words like English or Spanish. He hears thoughts.”

Another important element that we find corroborated across many accounts is the description of the way navigation works in the nonphysical world. As Atwater explained:

When we think about navigating in the physical world, if we want to go someplace, we have to go in this direction for this amount of time at this speed to get from here to there. But in the afterlife or the in-between life or at the level of the bardo immediately after death, navigation has to do with the relationship and interconnectedness we have with people. Some people call it the “realm of the line of forces” where you and I now have a permanent string between us, because we will always remember this conversation and each other. And so navigation after death doesn’t become, “How do I find Mike again? Do I have to travel east for five hours at a walking pace to get to Mike?” All I have to do is to think of Mike. Navigation becomes a matter of the interconnectedness between people and not a matter of physical dimensions.

Dr. Eric Weiss, a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, is one of the few scholars alive today who has made the study of nonphysical worlds the focus of his professional career. Like Atwater, he told me that travel in these subtler realms is a matter not of locomotion but of attention. “I don’t move through the astral world by putting my legs one in front of another. Rather, I move in the astral world by refocusing my thoughts and feelings,” he explained. “I can focus on the overall ‘feel’ of my memory of [a person], and then I would immediately either be in communication with that person, or else I would find myself in their presence.” Dr. Weiss is also working on an entirely new geometry that he feels can begin to explain the nature of form and movement within these realms, one that is fundamentally different from the basic Euclidian system that defines our everyday experience of the physical three-dimensional world of space and time. He hopes that understanding the geometry of these nonphysical worlds will help us to discover more about how they work. “Understanding the spacetime of a world is the key to understanding its causal interactions,” he told me, “and thus is the key to forming a scientific understanding of what is happening there.” Indeed, the laws of the nonphysical world may be mysterious to us now, but then again, so were the laws of the subatomic world just a couple hundred years ago.

This kind of cross-discipline, cross-tradition, cross-experience analysis is in its most preliminary stages, but already the results are intriguing. I have listed only a few of the corroborating stories here, but there are many, many more. They indicate realms that are being experienced independently by multiple witnesses. The overall landscape they are describing and the characteristics they report paint a remarkably consistent picture across different types of experience, different ages, different cultures, and different belief systems. There is therefore compelling evidence for the existence of these nonphysical worlds, but . . . where? Where are they? How do you speak of a “place” when these realms exist outside of normal spatial realities? Indeed, it may be more accurate to think of the interlife realm not so much as a place that exists separate from the physical universe, a place where one goes after death, but rather as a dimension that interacts with and is interrelated with the physical dimension. In this paradigm, death would be less a journey into another world than a falling away of the physical body, revealing deeper structures of reality and levels of consciousness that are in some sense always present. Integral philosopher Ken Wilber echoes this conception of the subtle worlds when he writes, “We see that the energy fields thought to be hovering metaphysically beyond matter actually [exist] in intimate correlation with . . . matter. These subtle fields cannot be reduced to matter, but neither are they ontologically disconnected from matter.”

For the most part, however, there is simply so much that we don’t know about the nature of the nonphysical world. Like prehistoric humans witnessing the phenomenon of lightning, we may recognize that there is a dimension of reality that we do not yet understand. We may know some of its effects and observe that it interacts with the physical world in significant ways. We may even be able to understand many of the characteristics of this phenomenon through anecdotal accounts of its occasional appearances. But we are still infants in comprehending its true nature. Indeed, whatever knowledge may be emerging through recent investigations of the nonphysical realms, there is little doubt that we are still at the beginning stages of our education.