The Soul After Death by Fr. Seraphim Rose

Author:Fr. Seraphim Rose
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: St. Herman Press
Published: 2014-11-23T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

The Meaning of Today’s

“After-Death” Experiences

If they hear not Moses and the Prophets,

neither will they be persuaded, though

one rose from the dead. —Luke 16:31

1. What do Today’s Experiences “Prove”?

THUS we have seen that the “after-death” and “out-of-body” experiences which are so much under discussion today are quite distinct from the genuine experiences of the other world which have been manifested over the centuries in the lives of God-pleasing men and women. Further, the contemporary experiences have been so emphasized and have become so “fashionable” in recent years not because they are actually “new” (there were whole collections of similar experiences in 19th-century England and America), nor necessarily because they have been occurring with more frequency in these years, but chiefly because the public mind in the Western world, and especially in America, was “ready” for them. The public interest seems to be part of a widespread reaction against 20th-century materialism and unbelief, a sign of a more widespread interest in religion. Here we shall ask what the significance of this new “religious” interest might be.

But first, let us state once more what these experiences “prove” about the truth of religion. Most investigators seem to agree with Dr. Moody that the experiences do not corroborate the “conventional” Christian view of heaven (Life After Life, pp. 70, 98); even the experiences of those who think they saw heaven do not hold up when compared with authentic visions of heaven in the past; even the experiences of hell are more “hints” than any kind of proof of the actual existence of hell.

One must therefore qualify as exaggerated the statement of Dr. Kubler-Ross that contemporary “after-death” research “will confirm what we have been taught for two thousand years — that there is life after death,” and that it will help us “to know, rather than to believe” this (Foreword to Life After Life, pp. 7–8). Actually, these experiences may be said to “prove” no more than a minimum doctrine of the bare survival of the human soul outside the body, and of the bare existence of a non-material reality, while giving decisively no information on the further state or even existence of the soul after the first few minutes of “death,” nor of the ultimate nature of the non-material realm. From this point of view the contemporary experiences are much less satisfactory than the accounts given over the centuries in Lives of Saints and other Christian sources; we know much more from these latter sources — provided, of course, that we trust those who have given this information to the same degree that the contemporary researchers trust those whom they have interviewed. But even so, our basic attitude towards the other world still remains one of belief rather than knowledge; we may know with reasonable certainty that there is “something” after death — but exactly what it is, we believe rather than know.

Further, that which Dr. Kubler-Ross and others of like mind think they know about life after death, based on “after-death” experiences, is

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