The Unanswered Question challenges the premise that conditions in the Afterlife reported by near-death experiencers accurately portray what we actually experience after physical death.

Anything we might experience in the Afterlife will exist outside of space and time as we understand them. This essentially nonphysical reality will therefore be organized in ways that our usual waking consciousness or rational mind may have trouble understanding. To make sense of it, near-death and out-of-body experiencers must represent this reality in quasi-physical terms. Translation of their nonphysical perceptions into physical images will necessarily—and often unconsciously—distort the information they bring back about the Afterlife.

Citing accounts from The Egyptian Book of the Dead, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Gnostic, Christian, and other ancient wisdom traditions—as well as the writings of the seventeenth-century Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, contemporary near-death experiences, and his own out-of-body experiences—Leland outlines what we might expect to encounter during our passage from the physical reality in which our lives unfold to the nonphysical reality of the Afterlife.

By triangulating between images of the Afterlife gleaned from near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, and the ancient wisdom traditions, we may be able to prepare ourselves for what we’ll encounter after death—when it’s finally time for us to answer that great Unanswered Question for ourselves.

Kurt Leland has written on astral projection, near-death experiences, and the transcendent possibilities of composing, performing, and listening to music. In 2007, What Is Enlightenment? magazine numbered him among “the world’s foremost OBE [out-of-body experience] experts.” In 2017, his book Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan was a finalist for the Benjamin Franklin Award from the Independent Book Publishers Association in the Body, Mind & Spirit category. As well as being a National Lecturer for the Theosophical Society in America, he is a Boston-based classical musician and award-winning composer and maintains a consulting and teaching practice called Spiritual Orienteering. He may be reached at www.kurtleland.com