I shudder every time I see or hear someone wishing that a recently departed loved one or friend “Rest in Peace.” They often abbreviate it to “R.I.P.” My guess is that the term originated from the fundamentalist idea that we “sleep in the grave” until the Day of Judgment. I don’t want my departed loved ones and friends to rest in peace. I want them to awaken quickly and remain active (A.Q.R.A.).
Those of the RIP mindset are usually opposed to any discussion of the matter. “One life at a time for me,” is a common reaction. The psychical research and afterlife studies supporting the “awakening” process in the afterlife are, they have been told, demonic sources. For the nihilist, of course, there is no awakening. It’s simply extinction and nothingness.
Based on credible psychical research and afterlife studies, there are apparently many degrees of “awakening” on the Other Side – difficult to put in earth time, but ranging from a day or two for the spiritually enlightened to many months or years for the unenlightened and the evil. Countless references talk about how many souls on the Other Side remain “earthbound,” not even knowing they are dead, or in a stupor, sometimes realizing they have departed the physical world and other times thinking they are still in it. Our various sleep states give us some indication as to the range of consciousness.
The belief that we sleep in the grave until Judgment Day is likely based on indications that many souls remain totally unconscious after death. It’s as if they are in an endless dream – a “hellish” nightmare for those who transition with what has been called a low “moral specific gravity (MSG),” to a somewhat drab or gloomy environment for those a tad higher but far from advanced on the MSG scale. For many it is said to be like being absorbed in a good movie and forgetting that it’s only a movie. Consciousness can wander and deceive itself.
Charlotte E. Dresser and Fred Rafferty come across as credible reporters in two books recently republished by White Crows Books – Spirit World and Spirit Life and Life Here & Hereafter, originally published in 1922 and 1927. Dresser was an automatic-writing medium and Rafferty, a member of her circle in Southern California, the editor of her books. The two seem to have been properly skeptical and well aware of the part the subconscious can play in automatic writing, making every effort to discern between actual spirit messages and the creation of imagined messages as well as the coloring of actual spirit messages by the medium’s subconscious. It was continually stated by the communicating spirits that their messages were being delivered primarily by thought-transference and that it was up to Dresser to give words to them. There were some ideas that the spirits could not convey as they were clearly beyond earthly comprehension. The spirit group was from what might be called the middle realms of the afterlife – not low but not especially advanced and still looking to higher realms for their education. Many of them were assigned to work with the newly arrived souls in helping them adjust and adapt to the transition from the material life to the spirit life.
All that may not be evidential for strict scientific purposes, but their consistency among various mediums and mystics lends itself to a belief that suggests there is something to it. Dresser received messages from various unnamed spirits in a group, although Rafferty’s deceased wife “Dee” was among them while the leader of the spirit circle gave her name as “Mary.” Most did not give their names as they deemed it unimportant. Some evidential facts were communicated to Dresser and Rafferty in the beginning to help them overcome their doubts.
Confused Awakening
“We are obliged to begin our work with them as we would begin with children, and not even in that way when they first come,” one spirit in the circle explained about so many of those making the transition. “They sink into a state that is hard to be described. They are not even ready to think. Brain and sense and heart and soul have so long been educated wrongly that silence and unconsciousness are the only remedies at first. Then there comes confused awakening, with their human habits of thought and all their evil selfishness predominant. What can be done, then, except to put strong forces in control, that they at least may be kept from harming others. You cannot conceive of this work, I am sure, but it is very real here.”
A spirit who had died 15 years earlier communicated: “I had not given a thought in earth life to what would be necessary in this. I did believe in a future life, and I was not long in a really unconscious state after arriving. But I was grievously disappointed at first that I did not find the beautiful heavenly life which I had been taught to expect.”
Another spirit from the circle communicated” “Many come so ignorant, and come into such a long sleep and unconscious period, which we are sure is unnecessary, for they have not believed the truth of actual spiritual development here. So they lose time, and lose the power at first of realizing the life and all it means.”
Dresser asked about a young man she had known very well years earlier, a man of high ideals who scoffed at the idea of communication with the spirit world and was skeptical as to whether there is an afterlife. She knew that he had died years earlier and asked if any in the circle could find him and determine how he is doing. Someone in the circle went searching for information on him and returned with a report that he still doesn’t believe in any of it. “Try to think of yourself in a dream, a long dream, and everything happening in ways that are strange, yet you do not wonder about it,” it was explained to Dresser. “Your dream accepts the thing as true. That is as near as I can describe the situation. When he first came, he was met by his father and sister, but they failed to reach his reasoning mind and he has wandered on in this condition through all these years.”
Still another spirit put it this way: “The ones who are longest retarded, and who come into spiritual joy with almost incredible slowness, are those who do not wish to change, who are wedded to their sins, and could not be happy with pure and noble spirits. For these – a lifetime – or even many lifetimes – may pass before their desires change from evil to good.”
Sorrowful Condition
One more in the circle explained that such souls are not necessarily evil in character.
“It is a sorrowful condition we behold on earth, and we wish to try to give a new thought that will turn the world to better things,” the spirit communicated. “It is not easy to say something really new; you have exhortations from the pulpits that should be sufficient. But they seem to have lost their effect. We know that materialism is leading many into habits of life and thought that will defer their awakening and advance here very seriously. This is not necessary for most of them, for they are not evil, and in many cases not especially selfish. But the strong thought they hold, that there is no future life, reacts upon them to such an extent that they fail to respond to the influences here after they arrive. We have no influence upon such people while they are on earth, of course. If we did, they would not be adopting these wrong beliefs.”
Another spirit described his initial awareness as “smothered consciousness,” as he was in and out of consciousness, experiencing a partial sense of freedom. “Through it all, unknown to me, loving guides were telegraphing to my consciousness the lessons which would lead me into the quiet and take away the antagonism.”
An old friend of Dresser’s named Willis Coleman communicated and said that he had not been on that side very long. “Not very long, they tell me. I was ill for a time and left the old earth in an unconscious state. It seemed to me that I was drifting, drifting slowly into the dark, but not a terrible dark; a time of rest in which I was content. Then into the darkness came a faint light, and light grew stronger and brighter, and through all my being there ran a thrill of life, life in abundance Then I awoke to a vision such as I had never dreamed. Beauty, love, all seemed blending in one beneficent power about me, and I felt enveloped and translated into a bliss I had never imagined. Such is heaven.”
I certainly don’t want to “rest in peace” when I depart this realm. I’ve had enough rest since retirement from the work force and the competitive distance-running sport a few decades ago. Some stimulating and vigorous activity, please!
Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I. and No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife. His latest book Consciousness Beyond Death: New and Old Light on Near-Death Experiences is published by White Crow books.
Next blog post: December 29
The ultimate comment on this may have been delivered by the post-mortem Msgr. Benson (quoted in Borgia’s “More Light” – 1954) who said…
“Eternal Rest–How thankful we all are here that this prayer is never answered.”
Amen.
My three afterlife novels and the fourth soon to come are filled with activity. If anything, activity is much more intense than here in the physical. We feel and know and love and hate with a vividness and clarity that dwarfs what our dense brains can tolerate. I get the impression that the core experience for good souls in the early months following death is restfulness, self-examination, rehabilitation, and loving friendship. Then follows every kind of activity. Games like three dimensional soccer played with mind-controlled projectiles or music that not even a Schubert or Mahler could imagine are two examples. Counseling and teaching will occupy great numbers of us in the astral. Traveling and recreation, adventure and challenge, delight and hardship in ways beyond our imagination will be universal. My novels set in the afterworld are full of events and activities that almost certainly under-imagine rather than over-imagine what’s really there. The Contents page of my novel Guardians of the Afterworld suggests the scope and breadth of all this activity:
1. The Galaxy
2. The Afterworld
3. The Priest
4. Journey Over Earth
5. The Capitol
6. War
7. The Children’s Religion
8. A Little History
9. Dowry
10. Gaia
11. Depression
12. The Suicide Game
13. A Classroom Visit
14. Gender
15. Music
16. Shade
17. Jolene
18. Wild Animals
19. Spiritual Blue
20. Earth Addictions
21. Democracy
22. The Sun
23. The Shadowlands
24. Poverty
25. The Aliens
26. The Seven Vices
27. Sun and Moons
28. A Strange Coincidence
29. The Bulge
30. The Christmas Message
31. Expansion
I am totally with you on this question, Michael. Don’s quote from Msgr. Benson sums it up well.
Personally I use RIP as revel in Paradise ( be fully conscious and continue to exist.
“Revel in Paradise”, I like that.
— I shudder every time I see or hear someone wishing that a recently departed loved one or friend “Rest in Peace.” —
This puzzles me. Some people need a rest. It’s a genuine need. Some have less of it, some more, and some, like you, may not need rest at all. Each will get pretty much what is needed. And after all, what does time — such as time for rest — mean in relation to eternity remains to us a deep mystery. When we look at those who are (or just appear to be) more lost than ourselves, we would do well to recall the words ‘There but for the grace of God, go I’. It can be applied to our very selves at some other point of our cosmic-spiritual journey.
Pardon the slight exaggeration, Dorian JR. I agree that many, including myself, need a rest to some degree in the adaptation process. The “rest” I believe most people unthinkingly have in mind is the “sleep in the grave” until resurrection day. That’s how it comes across to me most of the time.
Dorian –
As you say, time is irrelevant to the deceased, so a person may have been unconscious for years of our time before regaining consciousness. I’ve collected death accounts relayed through the trance mediumship of Cora Richmond in the 19th century. In all cases, her communicators reported no loss of consciousness as they transitioned from this life to that. Each paragraph below is a separate account.
“I did not die; I did not lose consciousness; I did not sleep; I awoke…Nor was I aware of the cessation of thought for a single instant of time…I was aware of all that was around; of every object, every sensation, every word, every thought of those present.”
“The greatest surprise of all is that you feel the gliding away of human things without a pang, or regret, or grief, or pain—feel that pain itself is departed, and that a pure, ineffable flood is coming to you just across the harbors bow.”
“No moment of the expiring or receding ray of mortal existence was lost to my spiritual consciousness; at no interval of time did I feel that I was going to sleep, or that the power of my individual life was fading from me… I saw that the film fell from my eye as the bodily strength decreased, and I gradually became aware of spiritual existence and spirit scenes, as one standing in a mist among the mountains might suddenly, as the clouds would rise and disappear, become aware of the landscape around him.”
“Depressed from long illness, feeling the burden of years, I was caught up into sudden youth and sudden rapture of the full vigor of manhood. Without the loss of my intellectual power during the change called death, it was a transfusion of life and subtle element pouring through every avenue of my being, that restored memory, vitality, intellectual power, and all the powers of manhood.”
“I cannot declare to you in fitting language what it was, when in the midst of kind and ministering friends I became aware that the final change had really set in. It was an entire reversal of all human thought concerning death. Instead of being fettered, instead of the faculties being more and more benumbed and dimmed, there was a startling consciousness of a re-awakening.”
“I remember a sense of suffocation and I thought I called but for help; but the next thing I knew I was watching the thing lying there that looked precisely like myself, There it was, the exact personal image, only the eyes were closed, the lips were motionless, the face was colorless, the hands refused to move and the whole thing was as useless a lump of dust as you could imagine.”
“But when suddenly that shock came which cut off as in a single instant, with a blade of lightning, my physical form, my spiritual and mental being was not even for one moment lost, not for one instant was there cessation of consciousness in the brain, not for one instant was there any lack of throbbing, pulsing life.”
Michael,
Mediums often get accused of disturbing the rest of the dead. In the book The Awakening letters by Cynthia Sandys (dictated by automatic writing) Cynthia gets told of the “don’t knows” as a group of people who arrive in to spirit but are difficult to convince that they have died = don’t know that they died.
The person passes from this world and “dead” relatives approach but it is up to their mind to either accept them or reject them. The arrival team is usually a hand picked two person team which would have the strongest connection.
The debate with mediums is “Who do expect to meet you when you transition?” Are they going to be your family or friends from your spirit associations? My answer is family as I can meet the friends later.
RIP can also mean Responding to Interested People. Which people do you expect to greet you on arrival into the after Life is one of my questions?
I would ask the people in the audience Why did you think of them? (the term is Top of Mind in marketing = the brands you have placed at the top when buying).
I usually was told that they were loved and stood out.
I am not sure if the loved ones at the top of mind are always the meet and greet team but from a small subset I have found that is standard operating procedure.
Thanks,
Bruce
Bruce, my most veridical sitting with a medium is told in chapter one of my book, “No One Really Dies.” It took place at the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain in London in 1999. I assumed that if anyone attempted to contact me it would be a deceased brother or recently deceased friend. However, it turned out to be a former co-worker whom I did not know outside of work. We often shared coffee breaks together, but I did not know him outside of work, i.e., he was not a close personal friend. He had died some 20 years earlier. He was so remote from my mind that I did not immediately know who was communicating. I put all the pieces together while on the underground train back to my hotel.
Michael,
It is funny when we get trained as mediums we get told if they are standing on LHS mothers side and RHS fathers side. (I never used this as I received names). The friends contacting from the past are always hard to identify as they are unexpected. (We were told friends stand in the middle).
The sitter is expecting their aunt or someone closer and when you give them a past friend, the sitter then thinks. “Well this medium is not that good giving me an old friend.” The sitter then asks for a better spirit and when the medium say No one is stepping forward it is considered a fail.
I am reading the transcriptions of Carl Wickland (the author of Thirty Years Amoung the Dead) other book “The Gateway of Understanding” published in 1934 and on page 75
“Of the thousands of spirits we have contacted in our many years of research, not one has seen God. Spirit, like intelligence, is invisible. All advanced spirits describe an all-pervading Power expressed through lofty, inspiring ideals and indescribable harmonies permeating all things. Such harmonies or spirit vibrations are not discernible to blind, religious devotees who have not added understanding to their faith.”
The friend who contacted you might be looking for some understanding from you to advance (one of the techniques used by spirits).
Sitters think that it is a one way street of information from the spirit to the sitter but often the spirit is looking for someone who “had it together” and might help them advance. I would probably ask for guidance from you and Jon for myself.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce, thanks for the additional comments. I’ve related my George story mentioned in the last comment to many friends and the first thing they ask is how George just happened to be around me at the time. Why somebody I haven’t seen in 20 years and who was not a close friend? I suspect George was an advanced spirit at the time, as he was a very caring individual when I knew. always listening to the concerns of others and trying to help them. However, the bottom line, as I always say, is that so much of it is simply beyond human comprehension and not to be explained by relating it to earthly relationships.
Michael,
I came across this recently and thought that it might fit the puzzle.
“The principles that regulate spiritual inter-communion and intercourse
are just as exact, and indeed are verily like the laws governing all vortical
movements. They are as precise and all-inclusive as the principles of geometry. As a matter of fact, there is a sort of geometry of the mind that
regulates our spiritual conduct. We are our own severe judges and there is
scarcely any need for divine wrath. Were I to violate a single one of these
moral rules I should straightway find myself to be my own accuser. I could give particular examples of this but I think you will understand. It is the law, and it is fashioned upon the principle of the old proverb which declares a guilty conscience to be its own accuser.”
This spirit was trying to explain the differences between incarnate and discarnate thinking.
Thanks
Bruce