Ghosts - By Hans Holzer Page 0,3

marked the gate to a higher consciousness, and it is because of this philosophy that the dreary aspects of funerals as we know them in the West are totally absent from eastern rites. They mark their funerals, of course, but not with the sense of finality and sadness that pervade the western concept. Perhaps this benigness has some connection with the strong belief in a hereafter that the people of the East hold, as opposed to the Western world, which offers, aside from a minority of fundamentalists to whom the Bible has spelled out everything without further need of clarification, faith in an afterlife but has no real conviction that it exists.

There is scarcely a religion that does not accept the continuance of life beyond death in one form or another. There are some forms of “reform” Judaism and some extremely liberal Christian denominations that stress the morality aspects of their religions rather than basic belief in a soul and its survival after death in a vaguely defined heaven or hell. Communism in its pure Marxist form, which is of course a kind of religion, goes out of its way to denounce the soul concept.

Not a single religious faith tries to rationalize its tenets of immortality in scientifically valid terms. Orthodox Catholicism rejects the inquiry itself as unwanted or at the very least proper only for those inside the professional hierarchy of the church. Some Protestant denominations, especially fundamentalists, find solace in biblical passages that they interpret as speaking out against any traffic with death or inquiry into areas dealing with psychic phenomena. The vast majority of faiths, however, neither encourage nor forbid the search for objective proof that what the church preaches on faith may have a basis in objective fact.

It is clear that one step begets another. If we accept the reality of the soul, we must also ask ourselves, where does the soul go after death? Thus interest concerning the nature of man quite easily extends to a curiosity about the world that the soul inhabits once it leaves its former abode.

Again, religion has given us descriptions galore of the afterlife, many embroidered in human fashion with elements of man-made justice but possessing very little factuality.

Inquiring persons will have to wait until they themselves get to the nonphysical world, or they will have to use one of several channels to find out what the nonphysical world is like.

When experience is firsthand, one has only one’s own status or state of being to consider; waiting for or taking the ultimate step in order to find out about the next world is certainly a direct approach.

Desire to communicate with the dead is as old as humanity itself. As soon as primitive man realized that death could separate him from a loved one and that he could not prevent that person’s departure, he thought of the next best thing: once gone, how could he communicate with the dead person? Could he bring him back? Would he join him eventually?

These are the original elements, along with certain observed forces in nature, that have contributed to the structure of early religions.

But primitive man had little or no understanding of nature around him and therefore personified all forces he could not understand or emulate. Death became a person of great and sinister power who ruled in a kingdom of darkness somewhere far away. To communicate with a departed loved one, one would have to have Death’s permission or would have to outsmart him. Getting Death’s permission to see a loved one was rare (e.g., the story of Orpheus and Eurydice).

Outsmarting Death was even more difficult. Everyman never succeeded, nor did the wealthy Persian merchant who ran away to Samara only to find Death there waiting for him. In these examples Death was waiting for the man himself, and it was not a question of getting past him into his kingdom to see the departed one. But it shows how all-knowing the personified Death of primitive and ancient man was.

The West African form of contact with the dead, which the people of Haiti still practice to this day, is speaking through the water; again it is a question of either avoiding the voodoo gods or bribing them. Communication with the dead is never easy in primitive society.

In the East, where ancestor worship is part of the religious morality, communication is possible through the established channel of the priest, but the occasion has to warrant it. Here too we have unquestioned adherence to the orders