When we were kids, there was no doubt about what happened after death. There was Heaven and there was Hell, and you were going to one of them. Oh, there was a vague depot called Limbo, but that was a lot like Nebraska; it was possible to go there but nobody did.
Naturally, all of us wanted to go to Heaven because the pictures in our Catechisms were to die for. Heaven had all the bells and whistles, a long-bearded benevolent God sitting on a golden throne, angels playing harps, your long-dead relatives greeting you at the elevator (except maybe for your naughty Uncle Eddie, who might have had a little bit too much fun on Earth).
Hell, on the other hand….well, what can you say? Going to Hell was a lot like living in Pascagoula, Mississippi in the dead of Summer. Wicked red devils poked you with 200-degree pitchforks while you broke rocks in the hot sun, there was noplace that sold tanning supplies and everyone had to eat chitlins for dinner.
Now God didn’t get to be God for nothing. He knew that under the circumstances everyone would want to end up in Heaven and that would be a logistical nightmare. So he set up a list of Standards for Admission to whittle down the population. There was a Code of Conduct involved and offenses to the code were called Mortal Sins and Venial Sins. Venial Sins were things like intentionally farting in church or stealing a cherry off the shelf in the supermarket. Mortal sins were like blowing up the rectory or hiding a camera in the nuns’ bathroom. Somewhere in the middle were the real stumpers, like kissing Mary Beth Lebreque on the mouth. If it was a Venial sin, we were doing it, if it was Mortal….well, Mary Beth was awfully pretty.
“Friendly kissing is alright,” ruled third grade Sister Mary Albert, “but PASSIONATE kissing is a Mortal Sin. Okay, so what’s “passionate” mean, Sister?
“That’s for fourth grade.”
The Fire Next Time
We worried a lot about going to Hell when we were kids The first time you burn your finger on the stove you realize that living in a firepit is as bad as it gets. And you can’t even commit suicide because you’re already dead. There is, however, an escape route from retribution. If you confess your sins to a priest just before you die, perform the assigned penance and receive Holy Communion, you will go directly to Heaven without even passing Go or collecting two hundred dollars. Wow---such a deal!
“Let me get this straight, Sister. I rob a bank, shoot the teller, stash the loot and go right to church for absolution. Then the cops shoot me. And I get to go to Heaven?” Yes.
“But Joey Poszlusny over there leads a perfect life for seventeen years, not one mortal sin, then boinks his girlfriend and on the way home gets run over by a bus. He goes to Hell, right?” Yes.
What is wrong with this picture? Kids are outraged by the injustice of it all. What kind of God would allow this sort of shabby business? The earliest doubts about religion creep into the developing brains of intelligent children. They have learned from their radio heroes about Truth, Justice and The American Way and this doesn’t sound like it. If the Church is wrong about this, maybe they are incorrect about other things. Maybe there is no Hell, or Heaven either. Perhaps there is another destination after death.
If there is, nobody has been able to find it, though many have tried. We’ve all heard tales from the near-dead about lighted tunnels and loving grandparents waiting, hands reaching out for us, but that could just be the brain dancing the polka on the verge of extinction. Nobody, including Houdini, who promised otherwise, has come back to alert us as to what waits behind death’s scary door. Maybe it’s just The Abyss. Maybe Joe Brown’s billboard is correct---WHEN YOU’RE DEAD, YOU’RE DEAD! Or maybe one of the entities below has it correct. When you’re headed for the land of Octogenaria, you’d appreciate a little tip.
Reincarnation
'I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna."---Mark Twain
I had an extremely intelligent girlfriend in 1968 named Claudine Laabs. Claudine thought that in a previous life she had been Cleopatra’s housecat, so I guess being a college student was a small step up. I would have laughed this off without a second thought if Claudine wasn’t as smart as anyone I knew. Besides, how else do you explain Bridey Murphy?
Bridey Murphy was a purported 19th-century Irishwoman whom U.S. housewife Virginia Tighe claimed to be in a past life. Hypnotist Morey Bernstein put Tighe in a trance in 1956, using a technique called hypnotic regression, and she immediately started spitting out revelations of a past life in Ireland starting in 1806. When Bernstein attempted to take Tighe back before birth, she began talking as if she were Bridey Murphy.
Virginia---or Bridey---gave a long synopsis of her entire life, which was very convincing. Then she described her death and watching her own funeral, gave a description of her tombstone and the state of being in life after death (neither one of pain or happiness). Somehow, she was reborn in America 59 years later, though the author was unclear as to how this happened. Tighe, herself, was born Virginia Mae Reese in the Midwest in 1923, had never been to Ireland and did not herself speak with any hint of an Irish accent.
Morey Bernstein’s book caused a sensation. Reporters from all over the world descended on Ireland, most of them eager to disprove Tighe’s tale. They found discrepancies, but nobody could argue with Virginia’s description of the coast of Antrim, which was very accurate, or her account of a journey from Belfast to Cork. She recounted that Bridey shopped for provisions with a grocer named Farr, who did, in fact, exist. Many more of Tighe's recollections were right on the money.
Ultimately, skeptics tagged Virginia Tighe as the victim of a critter called “cryptomnesia,” which is defined as occurring “when a forgotten memory returns without its being recognized as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original.” Could be. Anything’s possible. But it sounds a lot like those old U.S. Air Force explanations of mysterious lights which darted through the heavens at supersonic speeds, then suddenly disappeared. Those were apparently the fastest weather balloons in recorded history.
“My Name Is Joe Bananas, But I Used To Be King Farouk.”
"...so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other more real life....and then return after death."---Leo Tolstoy
A LOT of people believe in reincarnation, even though you think it’s silly. Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism and Jainism all subscribe to reincarnation and karma. Reincarnation is even an esoteric belief within many strains of Judaism, though not an essential tenet of traditional Judaism. And get this, in a 2009 Pew Forum poll on Religion & Public Life, 24% of American Christians expressed a belief in reincarnation. Put that in your hookah and smoke it.
Dr. Ian Stevenson, former professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and former chair of the department of Psychiatry and Neurology, dedicated the majority of his career to finding evidence of reincarnation until his death in 2007. He might be out there still in some altered human form pursuing the same agenda. Alternately, he could be a fine giraffe at the Lincoln Park Zoo. In any case, Dr. Stevenson compiled over 3000 examples of reincarnation during his studies and shared them with the scientific community.
In a study titled “Birthmarks and Birth Defects Corresponding to Wounds on Deceased Persons,” Stevenson used facial recognition to analyse similarities between reincarnation claimants and their alleged prior incarnations, while also studying birthmarks. He wrote, “About 35% of children who claim to remember previous lives had birthmarks and/or birth defects that they (or adult informants) attribute to wounds on a person whose life the child remembers. The cases of 210 such children have been investigated. The birthmarks were usually areas of hairless, puckered skin; some were areas of little or no pigmentation. Others were areas of increased pigmentation.
The birth defects were nearly always of rare types. In cases in which a deceased person was identified the details of whose life unmistakably matched the child’s statements, a close correspondence was nearly always found between the birthmarks and/or defects on the child and the wounds of the deceased person. In 43 of 49 cases in which a medical document (usually a postmortem report) was obtained, it confirmed the correspondence between wounds and birthmarks or birth defects.”
In a separate study, Dr. Stevenson interviewed three children who claimed to remember aspects of their previous lives. The children made 30-40 statements each regarding memories that they themselves had not experienced, and through verification he found that up to 92% of the statements were correct. In an article published in Scientific Exploration, Stevenson wrote, “It was possible in each case to find a family that had lost a member whose life corresponded to the subject’s statements. The statements of the subject, taken as a group, were sufficiently specific so that they could not have corresponded to the life of any other person.”
“I’m Not Kidding, Mom, Genghis Khan Is Working At The Tastee-Freeze.”
"I am certain I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand times."---Goethe
In his book, Someone Else’s Yesterday, Jeffrey Keene theorizes that a person in this life may strongly resemble the person he or she was in a previous life. Keene believes he is the reincarnation of John B Gordon, a Confederate General of the Army of Northern Virginia, who died on January 9, 1904. As evidence, he offers up photos of himself and the general, for whom he’s a dead ringer. Beyond sharing physical similarities, Keene says that individuals and their past incarnations often “think alike, look alike and even share facial scars. Their lives are so intertwined they appear to be one.”
Many small children who claim to recall past lives express knowledge that could not have come from their own experience. Such cases are documented in Carol Bowman’s “Children’s Past Lives,” including this one:
“Eighteen-month-old Elsbeth had never spoken a complete sentence. But one evening as her mother was bathing her, Elspeth spoke up and gave her mother a shock. ‘I’m going to take my vows,’ she told her mother. Mom was shocked and questioned the baby girl about her queer statement. ‘I’m not Elspeth now,’ the child replied. ‘I’m Rose, but I’m going to be Sister Teresa Gregory.’” Though Bowman is an internationally known author and respected in her field, it would have enhanced credibility if the child’s full name was published; also some reckoning of a Sister Teresa Gregory. Nonetheless, similar stories abound.
Indian researcher Vikram Raj Singh Chauhan believes that proof of past lives may be demonstrated by comparing the handwriting of a living person to that of the deceased individual he or she claims to have been. Chauhan’s findings have been received favorably by the National Conference of Forensic Scientists at Bundelkhand University, Jhansi.
A six-year-old boy named Taranjit Singh from the village of Alluna Miara claimed since he was two that he had previously been a person named Satnam Singh. The other boy had lived in the village of Chakkchela, and Taranjit even knew Satnam’s father’s name. Satnam had been killed while riding his bike home from school. An investigation verified that many details Taranjit knew about Satnam’s life, but the clincher was that their handwriting was virtually identical.
I’m Ba-a-a-a-ck!
"And as to you, Life, I reckon you are the leaving of many deaths; no doubt I have died myself 10,000 times before."---Walt Whitman
Kevin Christiansen died of cancer at the age of two. Six months prior to his death, when he began to walk, his parents observed a noticeable limp. One day, the boy fell and broke his leg. When testing was performed, including a biopsy on a small nodule in his scalp just above the right ear, it was discovered that Kevin had metastatic cancer. Soon, tumors were found growing in other locations. One such growth caused an eye to protrude and eventually resulted in blindness in that eye. Kevin was given chemotherapy, which resulted in scars on the right side of his neck. He eventually died of his maladies three weeks after his second birthday.
Twelve years later, in 1991, Kevin’s brother Patrick was born by Caesarean section in Michigan. At birth, Patrick had a slanting birthmark with the appearance of a small cut on the right side of his neck, in exactly the same location as Kevin’s chemotherapy scars. He also had a nodule on his scalp just above the right ear and a clouding of the left eye, which was diagnosed as a corneal leukoma. When he began to walk, it was with a distinct limp. Are we in the Twilight Zone or what?
When he was almost four-and-a-half, Patrick told his mother he wanted to go back to his old orange and brown house, the exact coloring of the place the family had lived in 1979 when Kevin was alive. He then asked if she remembered him having surgery. When she replied that this never happened to him, he pointed to a place just above his right ear. His stunned mother jumped up, ran to her phone and called the Reincarnation Police. Wouldn’t you?
The Last Word
We all have our preconceptions, our prejudices, many having been carried with us from youth. It takes a little work for someone who has survived 8-12 years of Catholic school inculcation to thoroughly dispense with Heaven and Hell. It’s not easy for a person buried under a mountain of fire-breathing evangelical doctrine to dig out. Judaism is so intertwined with race-loyalty and a difficult history that few Jewish people ever manage to totally abandon the religion. Most of the above either accept the traditional afterlife their religion teaches or totally reject the entire notion. Most never go looking for alternative possibilities. The Flying Pie has no such inclinations. We start with an empty slate and an endless supply of curiosity. Maybe the entire notion of an afterlife is poppycock, but what if it isn’t? And if not, what awaits us at the hour of our death? The Pie will pursue this in future editions. From a purely selfish perspective, however, we kind of hope the light at the end of the tunnel is a popsicle truck.
That’s all, folks. Or maybe not….
bill.killeen094@gmail.com
