Life beyond life?

Who can fail to wonder about the mystery of the hereafter ?

Even those who do not believe in an afterlife feel driven to ask themselves why so many others do. Materialists, for example, view such a belief as a response to the travails of life on earth. The promise of a hereafter replete with everything that has been lacking in this earthly life compensates for an earthly existence bereft of hope and mired in poverty, ignorance and fear. In other words, the afterlife is a necessary illusion.

Most religions, however, regard the hereafter as the supreme reality - although they do not all visualize itin the same way. Monotheists link the soul to a single life on earth and see the hereafter as a place where a terrifying last judgment - ascent into Heaven or descent into Hell - is made on human beings. Animists regard the beyond as simply the other side of the here and now. They would maintain that life is a cosmic principle which both encompasses and transcends individual births and deaths, enfolding us all together in time and space. Believers in reincarnation, on the other hand, consider afterlife to be the one intemporal and omnipresent reality. They see the manifestations of existence as incomplete reflections of this reality, illusions to which we cling because of desire and fear and through which we must pass one after the other in order to reach the ultimate principle.

But experience of the beyond does not necessarily have anything to do with organized religion. Descriptions of the so-called near-death experiences (NDEs) undergone by millions of people in many countries who have been revived from "clinical death" are strikingly similar. Irrespective of their religion, most of those who "return" are convinced that they have seen a light beyond, which has removed their fear of death.

The NDE contains echoes of a more profound experience, the spiritual quest pursued by mystics since time immemorial. All mystics, whatever the religious tradition to which they belong, describe a state of beatitude that transcends not only religious particularities but all imaginable forms of expression. It exists outside ordinary awareness based on the five senses, a normally functioning brain, the use of language and the expression of an ego. And yet all those who have attained this state of grace testify to its manifest and incontrovertible authenticity. Incontrovertible yet surpassing all understanding because of its links to a Reality beyond time and space, a Life that flows eternally within us and joins us to the Whole which is also part of our innermost being.

This ineffable state, as Paulo Coelho suggests in this month's interview, may be revealed to the simplest of mortals as long as they remain true to themselves on a lifelong journey to self-fulfilment.

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