Beyond Death: Transition and the Afterlife - Roger Woolger

He who dies before he dies, does not die when he dies

Abraham of Santa Clara

Zen has no other secrets than seriously thinking about birth and death

Takeda Shingen

We are not dealing here with irreality. The mundus imaginalis is a world of autonomous forms and images…It is a perfectly real world preserving all the richness and diversity of the sensible world but in a spiritual state

Henry Corbin

By way of introduction I should say that I am a psychotherapist trained in Jungian psychoanalysis and various other modalities and that my current practice uses what is called “regression” to early childhood, past life, interlife and other transpersonal or “spiritual” experiences. (In other contexts-see below-the word “regression” can equally refer to what shamans call “journeying”)  But I also hold degrees in the comparative phenomenology of religion, a subject that greatly illuminates the kind of areas which we are here today calling “beyond death.”

Our starting point today has been the, by now, quite extensive documentation of so-called Near Death Experiences (NDEs); you have heard the detailed reports discussed by Dr Fenwick and Dr. Powell’s reflections on similar experiences. It will already seem apparent that the scientific paradigm that seeks to fully explain these phenomona in materialistic terms is stretched beyond it limits. Not long ago I saw a tape of a major British television program where a woman suffered a clinical NDE during an operation and reported, while “out of her body” seeing an instrument in the operating room she could not possibly have seen while in her body and alive. Interesting and provocative as the discussion was, it was entirely limited to interviewing medical staff; no informed authorities on parapsychology (except a materialist sceptic), spiritualism, religious phenomena or metaphysics, specialists in thanatology, or experts from religious traditions were interviewed. Later I was told this is a policy decision of the television company! It was like a political discussion where only one party is invited to participate.

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