After Death: How People Around the World Map the Journey After Life

by Sukie Miller with Suzanne Lipsett

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New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster 1998. 235 pp $12.00 16 pp. References

Sukie Miller has produced an excellent survey of beliefs and experiences relating to the afterlife. She distills from this collection four stages in the process of transitioning to spirit life. These stages go well beyond the merging with the Being of Light that is well known from the Near Death Experience.

Stage I is a Bardo state of waiting, as one adjusts to the transition from physical to spirit existence. Stage II is one of judgment and life review, an immersion in the deeper truth of the meanings of one’s total life experiences. Stage III is a less homogeneous collection of beliefs and reports (Miller does not distinguish between the two in this discussion), that may include heavenly realms, encounters with angels, and varieties of other visions. Stage IV is the return to physical existence, in another incarnation.

Far beyond the contributions of this book in cosmologies are the richly detailed anecdotes of Miller’s explorations and work with people who have had glimpses into the infinite in the last stages of their lives. She also shares the stories of others who, like her, work in these areas between life in the flesh and life in spirit worlds. Here are a few of these stories.

When my colleague Edmundo Barbosa is not accompanying me on interviewing expeditions around the world, he is practicing psychotherapy in his specialty: helping groups and individuals cope with terminal diseases. In his work, he has a special relationship with the truth. He seeks it, attempting to liberate his patients with its healing power.

“ I tell stories—stories of other people, stories from literature, stories and koans and small examples from the world’s- religious and spiritual traditions. Something of the Tibetaus. Something of the Cree Indians. Something of my neighbor down the street or-a client I knew.ten years ago, what he feared and what happened to him. These might seem like false constructions, nothing to do with truth. But the story goes into the mind,- and the person goes home and thinks of-it over the week, passes the story on maybe to a wife or a husband or a child. And very often the story itself breaks through the resistance to an acceptance of death.

“ For the stories-aren’t false constructions: They are carriers of thetruth. Telling them is a way to slip the truth inside the brain, wher they can—not always, but can—work against the denial of truth and suddenly bring down the walls.

“ What I have seen is this: Accepting the truth that you are dying enables you to achieve a state I heard described in Nigeria by this deeply evocative phrase: ‘This man is ripe to die.’ Ripe-to die. To-me, this phrase contains a sense of natural progression, and in the progression of nature is basic truth.

“Let me put it this -way. Think of a tree, a living system. A fruit on that tree is part of the system, and when the fruit is ripe- it’s at its fullest—flavor, taste; nutritional value: it is ripe to feed. And therefore it is ready to leave the system of the living tree to serve -the life around it. In my practice, a client who is ripe to die no longer resists but accepts the truth of his or her dying. Inevitably, then, that person takes practical action to ‘feed’ living loved ones with the fruits of his or her life—writes the will, pays the taxes, ties up the business, works out problems in the family. But more than that are the benefits to the dying person of stepping fully into the truth:

“Strife ends when truth prevails; one need no longer struggle. To resist truth is pain; to accept it is to enter seamlessly into reality. Many people suppress the knowledge of impending death out of fear of dying in the here-and now and fear of harsh judgment and punishment after death. But with truth comes the knowledge that the pain is in the resistance, not in the truth. And along with the struggle, fear can disappear as well.

“The second benefit is riskier to explain, for there is as far as I know no scientific confirmation of it. But my long experience with the dying has convinced me that denial increases the agony of death and, conversely, acceptance—readiness, or ripeness, and embracing truth—brings ease.

“One boy in a cancer group gave his voice to the significance of this possibility. ‘When I came here,’ he told us in the group, ‘my greatest fear was how I would actually die. Everything I had ever heard told me that there was great pain and suffering connected with dying of disease. I was terribly afraid of pain, but I was equally worried about my family seeing me in agony. And what I’m finding here, as people in this group die week by week, is that — well, one week we are here and the next week we’re gone. So death can come much sunpler, much easier than I thought. And to me that changes everything, and I am not afraid.’ “ (p. 105-106)

[Roger] Woolger tells this story of one of his subjects.

Winifred was a middle-aged woman who bad had chronic sinusitis since her early life During [a past-lives workshop] she relived the lonely death on a battlefield during World War 1 of a young man who had grown up in London as an orphan. The young man had made friends for the first time in the trenches during the campaign When he suddenly found himself choking on mustard gas, in the middle of a surprise attack, he realized momentarily, as he lay dying, how much he was about to lose in terms of his newly found friendships. But the gas blocked any possibility to weep and grieve. When Winifred relived this experience, she was able to realize how much grief the young man had never expressed and was at last able to let it go. Almost miraculously, her sinuses unblocked. And when she came back to a later session in the workshop, she reported that she had woken up that particular morning for the first time in over twenty years able to breath through her sinuses. (p. 154)

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