After Death: How People Around the World Map the Journey After We Die

by Sukie Miller, Suzanne Lipsett (Contributor)

A cross-cultural study of attitudes toward the afterdeath identifies four distinct stages--waiting, judgement, possibilities, and return

Genres: Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published April 23, 1998

Reviews

[Shane · Rating 3 out of 5]

After my father’s death I had a wholly unexpected and intensely vivid experience of his presence. Having had no preconceptions re the probable destiny of his soul or spirit, but alive to possibilities, I read this book, which I found remaindered, and promptly forgot about it. Maybe at that time I needed greater immediacy from my reading than this well-balanced, thoughtfully structured cross-cultural study could offer. Above all, it highlights the relative nature of cultural perspectives and, depending on where we’re from, the arbitrariness of the beliefs we inherit. An academic and psychotherapist with an accessible style, Sukie Miller often refers to imagination. For those who seek comfort through certainty this book won’t supply it, but it may help to open readers’ minds.

Passages that resonate with my own experience of either life or death include:

People didn’t simply think up and describe the afterdeath; some faculty – a particular way of apprehending – linked them to these landscapes and ideas. The work of eminent philosopher and Islamic scholar Henry Corbin and others inspired by his writing helped me to focus on this capacity of the human psyche, difficult as it is to define and describe. This function, I began to understand, offered a way of considering the afterdeath, regardless of its particular content. I call this psychic function the vital imagination (p. 20).

The journey itself is part of a barrier between worlds (p. 40).

“The voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new vistas but in having new eyes,” wrote Marcel Proust… Corbin made the now classic distinction between an imagined realm and what he called an imaginal one. […] The imaginal realm is a real world, apprehended not by the five usual senses alone but by a highly sensitized, transformed imagination that functions in and of itself as an organ of perception. In other words, not fantasy, not dreaming, not hallucination, but the perception of an aspect of a greater reality not ordinarily seen. […] Most suggest that this capacity to apprehend the hidden is identical to the powers of the shamans of tribal cultures – after intense training – to cross the borders limiting ordinary experience (pp. 46–47).

The vital imagination is both … the vessel and its contents (p. 48).

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A CROSS-CULTURAL SURVEY OF AFTER-DEATH BELIEFS

Sukie Miller is a Jungian psychotherapist and a former director of the Esalen Institute, and the founder and director of the Institute for the Study of Afterdeath. She wrote in the "Acknowledgements" section of this 1997 book, "I had long researched the afterdeath in interviews with experts and years and years of reading. My fascination with 'what happens next' never diminished, but the work I was doing never came close to satisfying me or answered my deepest questions... The Institute for the Study of the Afterdeath engaged many people around the world to gather its data... It was in 1987 that I first had the idea to investigate the question 'What happens to us after we die?' I knew without doubt that pursuing this question was the logical step in my own journey both as a psychotherapist and as a human being." ((Pg. 7-8)

She observes, "Extensive literature searches have revealed a distinct scarcity of studies designed to prove that exposure to ideas and images of the afterdeath actually brings benefits to the seeker. More such empirical research would be welcome, and given the changing environment in science, where old prejudices are giving way to a new openness to possibilities, I hope that such work is not far off." (Pg. 34)

She notes, "no religious or cultural system on earth describes the afterdeath as an amorphous blob, a nothing. Quite the opposite: These systems acknowledge and mitigate the disorienting, anxiety-producing effect of emptiness by rendering in more or less detail a definite PLACE beyond death, complete with landscape, inhabitants, climate, colors, routes through it, its own pleasures and dangers... in short, the very opposite of the sudden nothingness that haunts those who fear there is not 'more.' The systems vary as greatly as belief systems vary on this side of the border, but in no case is the afterdeath vague." (Pg. 62)

She concludes on the note, "Hope is nothing less than the fullest expression of life itself---life without borders, life after death, the infinite possibilities open to us as we prepare to journey beyond the existence we know. Like any travelers, we yearn for smooth passage for ourselves and each other and ardently wish each other well. We prepare as best we can for a destination whose name we cannot know---and whose true nature, from this side of death, we can only imagine." (Pg. 166)

This book will be of interest to persons wanting to study different conceptions of life after death.

[Simon James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I brought this book because of working within palliative care and also I guess of being a mortal being myself. It is of course a heavy subject, but the book is written with so much first hand experience and knowledge of assisting her many patients during their dying process, that it comes across with an effortless care and compassion.
The book made me often view death in several different ways in which I had never before, one in particular in which has stayed with me prior several years after last reading this.
It is a book which will need to be read by some with a some what open mind, due to the writer describing a couple of her own mystical experiences during her travels in South American, these are very fantastical! But the passion and love this woman has for her work really shines throughout, making an often difficult and fearful subject, viewed from some unique perspectives, in a some what pleasurable read.