A Peek into One of White Crow’s Many Books

The Final Choice: Death or Transcendence?  by Michael Grosso, White Crow Books, UK,  2017, 226 pages

This book examines humanity’s attitude toward death – from embracing it, as some mystics have done, to escaping from it, as is so common among the masses today. “Beneath the ceaseless changes of history, death remains a changeless fact of life,” author Michael Grosso, Ph.D., states in the introduction. “The fact is constant; the meaning varies from culture to culture and from age to age.  We are at present living through a twilight of worldviews, and nobody quite has the answers, in spite of science to the perennial questions and great mysteries of life and death.”

He adds that book is born of the discontent with the materialism of the ruling classes in many places, a discontent that ends “with the core image of nothingness waiting to swallow us up in the last act.”
Grosso has taught humanities and philosophy at Marymount Manhattan College, City University of New York, and New Jersey City University and is affiliated with the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia. He has authored five other books. The one is a revision of his 1985 book and includes many updates, including much discussion of the near-death experience (NDE) along with recognition of the increasing risks of mass destruction.

There is, Grosso observes, an ever increasing abundance of research, coming to us from mediumship, near-death experiences, reincarnation studies, and deathbed phenomena, suggestive of postmortem survival, belief in an afterlife seems to be at an all-time low.  This, he sees, as being the result, in great part, of practical materialism in everyday life leaving little space to encounter the transcendent.  In earlier societies, before all the technological advances we have witnessed in recent decades, consciousness was much more permeable to alternate realities.

“Brainwashed by mainstream scientistic materialism, we feel constrained by their ideas of what is possible,” Grosso explains. “Tied to constricted worldviews, we submit to the status quo, however soul-deadening.  Faced with more idealistic possibilities, we respond with passive skepticism.” Materialism, he goes on, neglects the unseen dimension and serves to keep us distracted and unaware of the Transcendent.

Leo Tolstoy’s classic story of Ivan Ilych is cited as perhaps a typical ending for many non-believers.  A judge by profession, Ilych looked to pleasure, status and power as his gods, until his world began to crumble as he approached death and what he saw as an abyss of nothingness.
     
The NDE, Grosso opines, is a “metaphysical paradigm-buster,” a phenomenon that points increasingly toward undermining the mechanistic universe subscribed to by mainstream science.  In Chapter Five, he summarizes a number of NDEs, pointing out how the standard debunking theory of oxygen deprivation does not explain them. “Consciousness delocalized suggests the possibility of a prolonged or even permanent out-of-body experience – also known as the afterlife,” Grosso offers, also telling of two of his own out-of-body experiences in which he found himself light, mobile, electric, and ecstatic, at the same time feeling angst over his concern about getting lost in mental space.

Grosso quotes from a paper written by a student in one of his classes, after he had introduced the class to types of evidence for an afterlife. “The greatest problem that death presents, in my opinion, is its finality,” Mary, the student, wrote.  “When I began this course I had feelings of anger, desperation, fear and confusion.  My daughter, age six, is dying of leukemia.  Her fears were hard enough to deal with, but compounded by my own fears the task was next to impossible….[but] now I feel that when the end comes, I will still feel pain but I also feel that my child may go on to another dimension.”  Mary goes on to say that she has conveyed some of the evidence to her daughter and that her daughter now seems more relaxed and her anxiety diminished.

If nothing else, the evidential stories gave the mother and daughter hope that death was not the end. If only our world leaders could understand what Grosso so astutely explains.  – MET