Zen has no other secrets than seriously thinking about birth and death.
— Takeda Shingen
I have worked with a number of people who have clinically died in this lifetime, then returned to earth. They usually remember it as a decision, and often the common element is that, in the out of body state, they are shown the beings on earth to whom they are connected. Then they are shown the ancestors or the spirits of members of family who have already died and they are asked to make a choice of who they want be with.
When newly dead individuals choose to come back into the body, their attitudes to life and death have changed radically and forever. They often express a much deeper faith and are much more open and loving; they have a profound sense of life in a way that they did not before. The return is sometimes painful.
There is a tendency even in Jungian literature to dismiss such descriptions as just mythology. As far as I am concerned, these are real experiences, not some kind of hallucination or imaginary event. The whole psychology of imagination needs to be revised in the light of these experiences.
If indeed consciousness or the soul or the subtle body somehow continues after the physical death of the being, then this opens the whole question of where does it go to, how many realms, other levels or “heavens” in traditional terms may it pass through? What are the rules? What are the guidelines? How does the consciousness that has left the physical plane progress? How does it get stuck?
Birth and death are part of a profound continuous cycle. As the fetus gets closer to the moment of birth and the compression that takes place within the uterus gets stronger, dark and painful memories are stimulated. The birth canal itself is a mirror image of the tunnel the soul leaves through when it leaves the body. Coming back into the body is a reverse tunnel and a painful one.
Regression work shows that we are born with all kinds of psychic residues from the previous history of our culture, if not all human cultures. Just as we may have physical deformities built into our genes, we have psychic deformities built into our psychic structure.
Past life therapy is trauma-based: we look for traumas in other lifetimes that may have caused psychic shutdowns and hence complexes of one kind or another. Phobias, for example, derive from residual fears of certain physically dangerous past life situations. Our fear of fire may have to do with being burned to death. Our fear of knives may have to do with being cut up in some way or attacked in battle. Fears of failure may have to with times when we’ve held positions of responsibility and let people down.
Some years ago, following an important hint from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, I started during regression work, looking very carefully at what people were going through at the moment they were dying in a past life. I found the death experience and the way people clung to death had a huge amount to say about their general attitudes to life.
People who died in a famine say that there wasn’t enough, there was never enough. Following betrayals some say it’s not safe to show what I really feel.
When consciousness leaves the physical body at death it takes with it another kind of body, often called the subtle or energy body. Imprinted on that energy body are all the memories from that lifetime, but particularly the impressions of trauma. In fact, all psychological and emotional states as well as physical memories are somehow imprinted in this energy sheath and this is what is carried over after death. Therefore, the Tibetans emphasize the importance of clear dying, dying in an open state of mind, as far as possible releasing and letting go of all the bad feelings that had accumulated. This is all very well if you are in a monastery or dying quietly with good friends around you, but millions of souls have not died in a peaceful way.
In the last fifteen years we’ve developed a very complex and broad picture in regression work of the many states of healing and release that can happen.
The first thing that people tend to notice when regressed to past life death transitions is their unfinished feelings. Particularly strong feelings will drive the soul or the entity that has left the body back into another incarnation to complete what was not completed. Some souls do not leave the body easily. They remain earthbound, clinging to the events they remember on the earth, obsessively holding the spirit trapped in between worlds, unable to progress or reflect.
The first thing that needs to happen with a spirit that is stuck on the earth plane is it needs to be aware that it has died. With the help of the therapist or guide the confused spirit can be reminded that life is over and he or she can leave now. Sometimes they have to create a funeral or ritual to be complete.
Sometimes the soul experiences states of self-punishment for doing things that it is ashamed of. Such souls feel they deserve to suffer. They say “I’m in this dark space, I’m all alone, and I deserve to stay here because I’ve done terrible things.” This has parallels in Tibetan literature where hellish places are places of deliberate self-punishment. We may spend what seems like a long time in those places, but eventually some kind of penitence takes place. Acknowledging how they are punishing themselves may help those souls to move through.
Sometimes there is a need for those who are in a hellish state to encounter those that they have tyrannized, brutalized, or killed. We had a very powerful example of a woman who remembered having been an Aztec priest sacrificing many children. After death, she was in a state of huge confusion, seeing blood and knives all the time. Eventually we were able to bring her out of this horror and then she saw the spirits of the children that she had killed. She did not want to look at them at first, but eventually they started to speak to her and she found that they were very loving and forgiving. Slowly, with the interaction of the spirits, she was able to release a lot of her guilt and move on.
When there is a guide or therapist who is accompanying the travelling spirit, we can make decisions to go to a particular place by intent. Patterns can be broken simply by asking certain questions, or by calling upon the elders. The Tibetans talk about how the mental body is stuck in its own patterns, which is why the most difficult work is often to break out of obsessive and compulsive patterns such as guilt or self-doubt. It is extremely valuable for the person to talk to the spirits of those that have been harmed. We can encourage all kinds of dialogue in the spirit world, effectively doing therapy at the spirit level. And many of the techniques we use come from familiar psychodrama, Gestalt, or Jungian active imagination protocols.
Often there are helpers and guides in spirit realms that may appear quite spontaneously when deep work is being done. Sometimes religious figures may appear, such as Jesus, Mary, or Kali. It’s as if the experiencer, when opening to the deeper meanings of their story, calls upon and opens up to these higher powers. Sometimes the guides take animal forms at points where physical healing is needed. These follow all of the patterns we know from Native American and totemic animals. Extremely subtle and helpful advice is often given.
When a piece of work is done in the spirit world, often the spirit can move onto another level. There are hierarchies of understanding at different levels. When a soul is traveling in these higher planes, it will be attracted to areas that are like their own problems. If a soul is contemplating suicide, it is attracted to other suicides. Peaceful souls are attracted to other peaceful souls, angry souls to angry souls, and so on.
So what is this healing about and what does it help us to understand? When we do this work in the after-death realm, we are actually performing a kind of healing ritual, integrating a part of the soul which has been stuck in an unfinished death process.
Such work often engenders deep compassion. We learn to die to our old selves, shedding old patterns because we see they do not belong to this life. Eventually we learn, as the Tibetans say, that birth and death are all one cyclical process, and they are all of the mind. We come to know what the Sufis call “the oneness of worlds” (Ghalib) and the transience of our being.
If we can die consciously, if we can die first to the self, we can become lighter and less dense psychically. The process of birth is simply to let go of habit patterns which do not belong to us. And as we shed more, our whole energy field becomes lighter and we become closer to our essence, which is essentially that of beings of light. This is why the Tibetans have wisely seen that conscious dying is the greatest healing of all. Whatever we can let go of at death will not be passed on.
I end with one of the loveliest pictures of a peaceful death process that I have come across, one of the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss, in which he set to music a poem by Herman Hesse “On going to sleep,” written as the poet was anticipating his own death.
Now wearied by the daily race
A tired child, so full of yearning
For the starry night’s embrace
In kindly arms, the heavens turning
Hands now cease all busy making
Brow let go of chasing thought
Now every sense is full of aching
To be received in heaven’s court
Now the soul quite freed by sleep
Longs to soar on wings of light
To live a thousandfold and deep
The magic circle of the night.
This is an edited version of a longer talk given to the 1998 Conference of the Association of Humanistic Psychology in Britain. The entire talk can be found under resources at www.Rogerwoolger.com.
Roger J. Woolger is leading a workshop January 11-13. Click for more details.
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