It is little known, even to many Orthodox, that there is a theology of postmortem states that rivals in detail the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Moreover, the Orthodox teaching is practical and based on experiences, not idle speculation. Fr. Seraphim Rose authored a book by the title The Soul after Death that gathered these teachings, while relating them to contemporary descriptions of near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, not to mention the tales of Emmanuel Swedenborg and even the Tibetan Book of the Dead .

Although Fr. Rose is said to have been influenced by Rene Guenon at one point in his life, precious little of that shows through in this book, even when discussing the spirits, a topic to which Guenon dedicated a book-length treatment. There is possibly a faint echo when Fr. Rose decided not to use the Egyptian Book of the Dead because there is not a living tradition to explain its symbolism. That is unfortunate, since some basic metaphysics would have made some difficult points clearer. So before reviewing the book, it may be useful lay the groundwork.

The Psychic Realm

The experiences Fr. Rose describes belong to the psychic realm, that is, soul experiences, between the material world and the spirit, properly speaking. This is the realm of images, visions, feelings, and so on. In other words, it is that part of our experience that cannot be explained by the five senses. Guenon and Fr Rose take it for granted that such a realm exists and pace the materialists, it is independent and not reducible to physics.

On the other hand, it is not the “spirit”, either, although moderns, following Descartes, tend to classify everything that is not material as spiritual. The spirit is transcendent, not only to the material world, but also to the psychic world. But is this psychic realm totally subjective or is there an objective reality to it, i.e., something that is not-I, yet participates in “my” psychic or soul experiences.

The Dream World

Since we all have had experiences of dreams, it will be beneficial to analyze them first. Guenon explains that a dream is a creation of the I, which creates all the characters, places, and events; or put another way, it could be the projection onto the undifferentiated state of deep sleep. If post-mortem experiences are “like” these, we can ask the question of exactly where they occur.

This is the same as asking where a thought occurs. Thoughts have a temporal component, since we think one thought after another, which can all be related sequentially. However, there is no “where”; i.e., one thought is not to the left of another, or across from it, etc. Yet, images in a dream do have a spatial aspect; in the dream, we “go places”, there is different scenery for different places, and so on. Furthermore, since we “see” things, that brings up the question of a “body”; do the figures in a dream have an “astral body” that we then “see”?

Space and time are strange in that they are not metaphysical principles, yet they are not objects of sensory experience. That is why we can speak of God being beyond time and space. However, they are required in order to even have sensual experiences. Specifically, for example, I can see a tree or a desk among all the objects that are not those things; but I don’t see space one place and not-space somewhere else. Space and time, then, are conditions of manifestation but not the principle of manifestation.

Now Guenon tells us that space and time may be quite different experiences in different states of being. In a dream, space can be traversed instantly just by thinking of or visualizing something else. Curiously, space is different in a dream, but time seems to be related to our earth time.

Knowing and Seeing

Another issue to explore is to be clear about how we “know” something. According to metaphysical teachings, there are three ways: subject-object perceptions or sensations, discursive thought, and non-dual intuition. When I “see” something, how do I know what it is? It the hoary example, the sage and the ignorant man both have the experience of something in the grass. The latter is startled, since he sees a snake, but the sage is calm because he knows it is a rope. The ignorant man is projecting onto his experience, whereas the sage is intuiting the real nature of the thing. It is naïve realism to assume that we know what something is, just by looking at it. No, the external thing and our sensation are united in the intuition of the idea. That is why it is said that to know and to be are identical. When I see a squirrel, for example, I have the idea, or form, of it in my mind. To that extent I am a squirrel, although just in form, not in matter.

So that leads to a conundrum. When I experience a being in the psychic realm, how do I recognize it for what it is? With intelligent beings, this gets tricky. For example, if I see two men, one holding a gun pointed at the other, exactly what am I seeing? Is it a mugger accosting a tourist? An FBI agent capturing a criminal? A scene from a movie being filmed? Here the senses are clearly lacking and I need to understand the interiority of the other beings in order to grasp the full nature of the situation.

This will come up in Fr. Rose’s discussions. In an out-of-the-body experience, how do I really know what I am experiencing? That is why Tradition is so important. The Tibetans prepare the dying one to understand what he will be experiencing in the days after death. Likewise, Fr. Rose is offering the same type of preparation.

⇒ Part 2 will deal with the actual content of the book.

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