The 1970s marked the beginning of the end of the age of denial. In 1969, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross asked the question: What happens to us as we die? Her landmark book, On Death and Dying, invited readers to reflect, open-eyed, on the dying process. A second pioneer in this dark, unexplored landscape took the next step by describing the threshold of the afterdeath experience. Raymond Moody has documented the near-death experience, reported by 15 percent of Americans–people who have clinically died but in a variety of circumstances have returned to life. Like Kübler-Ross, Raymond Moody created a language for perceiving what had previously been invisible.

Nineteen-ninety-four brought a fascinating variation on our hide-and-seek with death. "I have written this book to demythologize the process of dying," wrote Sherwin B. Nuland in his book How We Die. The question Nuland took on was: What happens to us physically when we die? "It is by knowing the truth and being prepared for it that we rid ourselves of that fear of the terra incognita of death that leads to self-deception and disillusions."

I am interested in asking what seems to me the next question following Ross’, Moody’s, and Nuland’s: What happens to us after we die? When I was growing up, my father, a physician, had a way of talking about his patients that raised as many questions as it answered. "Mrs Nelson has crossed over," he once told me. "But where?" I asked. "She’s someplace else," came the answer. Because my father’s responses always left the question open, I credit him with fostering in me an enduring curiosity about and sense of safety surrounding the phenomenon he called "someplace else." Decades after those dinner-table conversations with my father, as a psychotherapist with a busy practice and an abiding interest in the questions and issues that shape our psychological reality, I had occasion to consider that someplace else on a professional basis.

Like many therapists nowadays, I found that a large number of my clients were people with chronic and terminal diseases seeking comfort, meaning, and ways to allay the anxiety related to their illnesses. That’s when I found that even people at the brink of death frequently could not look at, ask about, reflect on, or wonder what was to happen to them after they die. These questions were all around me, and yet to a great extent they remained unexpressed.

I began to wonder what other cultures, those more comfortable with the idea of death and freer about asking such questions, could teach us about the value of consciously contemplating the afterdeath. I knew that almost every culture throughout history has encompassed in its belief system an idea of an afterdeath. Wide reading on the subject brought me into contact with detailed landscapes beyond life as we know it. I wondered what aspect of the human psyche was responsible for and responsive to this information. Then I wondered if there were common threads, universal themes, that run throughout all cultures.

I assembled a group of researchers around the world committed to the concept of retrieving diverse versions of the afterdeath. Together, over the course of eight years, we collected detailed data in Asia, India, Indonesia, Brazil, the United States, and West Africa. People who live in close contact with their dead give us conceptions of a world in which the border between life and death is highly permeable—where there is often no border at all. The goal has been to gather images and attitudes, beliefs, and possibilities from around the world that might push back the limits on our view of the universe, bringing to our pragmatic Western viewpoint the often matter-of-fact view of the afterdeath that others have been experiencing for centuries.

I employ a natural history approach analogous to the methods used by basic scientists who collect specimens as fodder for their eventual theories. By collecting "samples" of afterdeath beliefs and experiences, we—like those who employed this method before us—can lay a basis for further study of this new field of the afterdeath. Such examples and anecdotes are presented in my work not as scientific proof of the power of the world’s wisdom, but rather as illustrations of ways in which images and ideas of the afterdeath can deepen our appreciation of other perspectives on the human mysteries we all share.

Over the course of our field work, my colleagues and I have collected, if not a river, then perhaps an inland sea of material on what happens to us after we die. I found that most systems described spirits moving through detailed geographies. Even more exciting as I reflected on these journeys was the fact that despite their diverse cultural origins, most of them consist to a greater or lesser degree of four separate aspects, or stages:

In many afterdeath systems the first place described—the first "stop" after death takes place—is a Waiting Place. Dying is acknowledged to be a profound crossing into a new reality. The greatness of the changes that occur requires that there be a stopping, a waiting. In Brazil, for example, our Guarani Indian senior researcher described the crossing this way: "When a soul arrives near its destination, it must wait for Nhanderu to open the ‘door.’ This is a waiting or resting place. Also, when a soul succeeds in entering, it first goes into the opy [prayer house], then rests in a hammock, smokes a pipe, and receives a ‘child’ body."

In some afterdeath systems, not only are the physical details of the afterdeath familiar, but the people are, too. Among the dead on the other side are those who have died recently as well as revered ancestors—all with the habits of existing, thinking, and believing that the living have known all their lives. In more complex systems, images of the afterdeath are usually more exotic, differing dramatically from the known life and often requiring radical, if involuntary, adjustments on the part of the dead. Most often in these complicated systems, the afterdeath journey is reported as taking the dead toward a goal or even many different goals such as:

• a goal of reunion with loved ones, described in the near-death experience; a goal of reunion with God, as in Christianity;
  
• a goal of being rewarded with endless pleasures of heaven, as in Islam; a goal of escaping the burdens of this life, as in Hinduism;
  
• a goal of achieving a form of Nirvana—blissful integration with the whole—if not in this life then in death; a goal of returning to life in a higher, more comfortable caste or station, held by Hindus not yet close to escaping the Wheel of Life; and
  
• a goal of learning from one’s mistakes in order to return to a high level of consciousness, as in the Bahai religion and different forms of esotericism.
  

• When the traveler has emerged from the chrysalis of physicality, the next stage of the journey begins. In many systems, though by no means all, an implied deity, a representative of one, or even somehow the system itself scrutinizes, evaluates, and judges the spirit according to the life just ended. That spirit’s destiny in the afterdeath is irrevocably, inarguably determined. Although some systems entail no judgment, the many that do rest on one or more types of method: Tallying, Karmic, Evolutionary, and Challenge.
  
• The Tallying Method is analogous to the balancing of a checkbook: quantifiable units of good—good works, good thoughts, good behavior, good beliefs—are added up and weighed against quantifiable sins. Once the judgment has been made, there are no arguments, no questions, no explanations. The judgment is quick, to the point, and icily quantifiable. Yet eternity doesn’t always claim the sinner forever. As with an overdraft at the bank, under certain circumstances there are ways to work things out.

The Karmic Method resembles a computer manipulating a near-infinity of interrelated details. How many thoughts, actions, intentions make up a life? This method determines the sum total of all these possibilities of human endeavor and their ethical consequences, resulting in a single judgment of the nature of the next life to come.

In what I call The Evolutionary Method, the universe is seen as constantly evolving, and our lives are judged with respect to how we contribute to this evolution of the whole. Here, the spirit itself reflects on the life it has just led as if watching it unroll on a screen. This self-evaluation can be excruciating. We experience not only the memory but all the hurt we have caused; feel our heartbreak at our own selfishness; perceive with no rationalization our indifference to others; and see, acknowledge, and boldly feel through empathy the terror and chaos we may have created for others.

The Challenge Method of judgment consists of a series of events that seem brilliantly designed to make the spirit lose its way. Failure here can mean rebirth in a lowly form, and only a string of successes in the face of increasingly terrifying challenges reward the spirit with escape from the Wheel of Life to Nirvana.

In some afterdeath systems, there is no judgment at all. For many Mexican Indian groups, the only difference between life and the afterdeath is the skeletal form we take. And the Yoruba Hunters of Nigeria see the afterdeath as identical to the lived life; after death one steps into the landscape and takes on a familiar existence. Yet, in the majority of afterdeath systems, as we pass through the Judgment Stage we reach a closure, and the traveler is propelled forward on the journey.

 Stage III: Possibilities

It is in Stage III where the possible goals of the journey are revealed, that the world’s cultures offer up the greatest array of possibilities. From a starry emptiness in the sky to a jeweled paradise aflow with milk and honey, from a lonely path through a spooky forest to a baroque hell of perpetual tortures—the realms of the afterdeath to which spirits travel are nearly infinite in their topographies, inhabitants, and qualities. It is here, along the spectrum of possibilities, that the full potential of the vital imagination is expressed.

Some accounts of Stage III of the afterdeath are idealized versions of life on Earth. For example, many of those interviewed among the Yoruba of Nigeria (the source of the Candomble beliefs in Brazil) described a beautiful, brightly illuminated community that "is like Earth in shape and form but is better than the world of humans." "In heaven"—a Christian missionary term absorbed into the Yoruba vocabulary—"in heaven, as on Earth, people farm, hunt, and do business. . . . The environment is peaceful and the vegetation green and flowery. There is perfect peace—no thieves, no quarrels, no fighting, nothing to threaten the natural order of existence." This Yoruba saying captures the small difference between the worlds of life and death: "Earth is a market, heaven is home."

In all the possibilities described worldwide, few human spirits are left to find their way alone through the afterdeath landscape. Some are, though: Sulawesans seem to seek their way to Soulland with the aid of only a good strong buffalo, and Fon spirits have little help in searching for their family areas in the "country of the dead." Aztec travelers who were poor or who died of disease—considered an unnatural death—had to try to reach their destinations in the afterdeath by themselves and faced awful obstacles on the way.

In most conceptions, though, guides or guardians and both comforting and challenging beings populate the afterdeath or cross travelers’ paths at certain points along the journey. Particular kinds of characters recur—ferrymen, for example. Charon was the boatman in Greek mythology who ferried spirits across the river Styx. The Ijo of West Africa have ferrymen as guides, too: "They are responsible for ferrying people from the land of the living to the land of the dead," one Ijo senior researcher told us. "If adequate sacrifices are made to them, it is believed that they can return some dying people back to life."

 Stage IV: Return

That one reincarnates after every physical death is a basic premise of cultures ranging from Tibetan Buddhism to that of the Yongu Aborigines of Australia and the Krenar Indian tribe of Brazil, to the ancient Vedic tradition of India. "In the olden days," writes an expert on the Igbo culture of West Africa, "as soon as a child is born, the fortune teller is invited to divine which ancestor has come back into the family. . . . As soon as the correct name is divined, a welcome sacrifice involving a ram for a male ancestor—hen or a she-goat for a female ancestor—is performed. Certain types of ancestors (e.g., warriors) would return to the spirit world (die) after causing the family a lot of hardship if this ceremony is not performed soon after their re-birth."

On a visit in Africa, I found that my Western expectations clashed with Nigerian realities when my colleague Edmundo Barbosa and I were invited to an elegant meal at the home of a well-known professor. "Ah, here comes father," the man announced as we were having drinks, and we all stood up, expecting, judging from the professor’s age, a frail old man in his eighties. Into the room scampered a three-year-old, full of energy and curiosity. My host, noticing my confusion, showed me a mark on his son’s forehead—a little mark, to be sure—and explained that his father had had the very same mark in the same place. "He is a part of all our family meetings, all our decision making, sitting where my father sat. He is my father," he told me. "The return of the spirits who leave us through death is not a concept as you would call it," said the professor, "but a reality in our lives. They leave and they return. It is a cycle."

Is there always the possibility of meeting others from another life in order to complete, fix or resolve a long-past situation? As with all the descriptions of the afterdeath presented here, one cannot hope for absolute proof, but one can be disposed to accept possibilities. Stanislav Grof writes, in The Holotropic Mind, "So convincing is the evidence in favor of past life influences that one can only conclude that those who refuse to consider this an area worthy of serious study must be either uninformed or excessively narrow-minded."

http://www.noetic.org/ions/archivelistingOld.asp