Memoir: The Life Beyond

While writing this book on the afterlife, I kept being drawn back to stories that I'd heard in India as a child. Parables are a powerful way to teach children, and many of the ones told to me have lasted all my life. So I decided to weave the book around tales of the kind I heard at home, around the temples, and at school, hoping that the reader would be enticed by a world where heroes battle darkness in order to emerge into the light.

In this case the hero is a woman, Savitri, and the enemy she must defeat is Yama, the lord of death. Yama shows up in her front yard one day, waiting to take away her husband the moment he returns from his work as a woodcutter. Savitri is terrified. What strategy could possibly turn Death away from his inexorable mission?

I had no trouble imagining these characters. I was frightened for Savitri and anxious to find out how her battle of wits with Death turned out. Their world flowed easily into my own, because the India of my childhood was not that far removed from ancient India. I want to take a moment to convey what death and the world beyond meant back then. It may seem like a very esoteric place. If so, you can come back to it after reading the main body of the book. However mysterious and exotic, here is where I began.

What was most magical in my childhood was transformation. Death itself was seen as a brief stopping point on an endless soul journey that could turn a peasant into a king and vice versa. With the possibility of infinite lifetimes extending forward and backward, a soul could experience hundreds of heavens and hells. Death ended nothing; it opened up limitless adventures. But at a deeper level, it's typically Indian not to crave permanence. A drop of water becomes vapor, which is invisible, yet vapor materializes into billowing clouds, and from clouds rain falls back to earth, forming river torrents and eventually merging into the sea. Has the drop of water died along the way? No, it undergoes a new expression at each stage. Likewise, the idea that I have a fixed body locked in space and time is a mirage. Any drop of water inside my body could have been ocean, cloud, river, or spring the day before. I remind myself of this fact when the bonds of daily life squeeze too tight.

In the West the hereafter has been viewed as a place akin to the material world. Heaven, hell, and purgatory lie in some distant region beyond the sky or under the earth. In the India of my childhood the hereafter wasn't a place at all, but a state of awareness.

The cosmos that you and I are experiencing right now, with trees, plants, people, houses, cars, stars, and galaxies, is just consciousness expressing itself at one particular frequency. Elsewhere in spacetime, different planes exist simultaneously. If I had asked my grandmother where heaven was, she would have pointed to the house we lived in, not only because it was full of love, but because it made sense to her that many worlds could comfortably inhabit the same place. By analogy, if you are listening to a concert orchestra, there are a hundred instruments playing, each occupying the same place in space and time. You can listen to the symphony as a whole or, if you wish, put your attention on a specific instrument. You can even separate out the individual notes played by that instrument. The presence of one frequency does not displace any of the others.

I didn't know it as a child, but when I walked around the crowded Delhi market where more humanity was packed into one bazaar than was possible to imagine, the world I couldn't see was even more crowded. The air that I breathed contained voices, car noises, bird songs,...

 

Shishir Kurup is a fine choice for narrating this wide-ranging book. This exploration of life after death grapples with everything from the nature of the soul to the multiple levels of existence, and Chopra approaches these topics with equally varied tools, including sharing a parable, sketching an anecdote from his youth, and quoting from a host of people who have been through near-death experiences. The result wanders a bit, but through it all Kurup's narration is fitting. He sounds approachable but learned when speaking as Chopra, and he emphasizes quotes by making shifts that depict the varying accents and socioeconomic levels of the speakers. Overall, the discussion is easy on the ears, even when Chopra moves past concepts too quickly. G.T.B. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

 

"A must read for everyone who will die."

 

"A penetrating and insightful investigation into the greatest mystery of existence. This is an important book because only by facing death will we come to a deeper realization of who we are."

 

"If I had any doubts about the afterlife, I don't have them anymore. Deepak Chopra has cast his inimitable light on the darkened corners of death. I think this is his greatest contribution yet."

 

"Deepak Chopra . . . takes us to the edge of our own deepest inner truth about life after death by sharing with us his vision and his wisdom, which, as always, is breathtaking, healing, and soul-opening."

 

"Deepak Chopra has written a masterpiece that is long overdue in our spiritual culture. Life After Death: The Burden of Proof is a bold and comforting guide into the afterlife."

 

"By marrying science and wisdom in Life After Death, Chopra builds his case for an afterlife in which our most essential self, the seer that observes our experiences in this temporary home that we call the self, uses the end of this lifetime to pass over into the next. This is an intellectual and spiritual tour de force."

 

Life After Death by Deepak Chopra
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