Experiencing the Next World Now by Michael Grosso

Author:Michael Grosso
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paraview Pocket Books
Published: 2004-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Imagining the Next World

Since the day I bumped into my mortality I have been traveling in odd circles. The shock drove me toward inward exploration. What I’ve found from my own experiences, and learned from others, has reminded me how puzzling is the nature of consciousness, and how little I know of myself. I’ve had a few brief glimpses of anomalous realities—the gong-ringing ghost that pounced on me in a haunted house, was one. A modest number of impossibles; more graces, I guess, than most of us normally receive. Just enough to jump-start me on a voyage of self-exploration.

I should say a few words about the philosophical funk, the paradigm paralysis I’ve had to work through. Even if our evidence succeeds in fighting off normal explanations, eludes our mythmaking genius, and manages to escape the demon of superpsi, the idea of an afterlife still faces daunting problems. Plenty of puzzles and conceptual irritants linger on.

So back on my head goes the skeptical hat, for I still wonder whether the very idea of personal survival makes any sense. Does the idea of a person surviving without a body make any sense at all? Take away the social, biological, and environmental context of what we understand to be a human person, and what’s left that could survive? Psychic fragments, mental shards? Could our purposes, skills, and talents endure the blast of change we call death?

All sorts of practical questions come to mind. Will life after death be a lonesome drag or will our social life pick up? Will I be able to find a psychotherapist on the other side? And what about the equivalent of money and, of course, shopping? Are there jails in the other world? What about climate? Will it be humid like New York in August or temperate like April in Monterey? What will happen to our old earth life sidekick called time? Will there be clocks in paradise, calendars in hell? What about sex, good food, music, smells, colors? And if not these, what? A long embrace with the light? What will we do in the next world? Questions are plentiful, and it would be fun to speculate, but I don’t think we should dwell too much on them. I prefer the evidence, however piecemeal, to dictate the possibilities. I also have a sneaking suspicion that if you make too many assumptions about what’s possible in the next world, your experience there might be seriously constrained by those very assumptions. The French poet Arthur Rimbaud once said: “I think I am in hell; therefore I am there.” Very likely, especially if you’ve died into a mind-dependent world.

Still, a few words about these brainteasers might be useful. After all, the idea of a person, or of a world, that lacks the solidity of matter does call for some comment. Lacking my old body, for example, how will I be identified, tagged, recognized as the person I am? What—in the next world—will be the basis of my personal identity?

People usually identify me by my bodily appearance.

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