Quest Magazine

By Edward Tick

Originally printed in the July - August 2005 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Tick, Edward. "Anne Frank and Uncle Willy." Quest  93.4 (JULY-AUGUST 2005):130-135

Last year my wife Kate and I traveled to the Netherlands with our children Gabriel and Sappho. We made this trip in honor of our son, who was graduating high school and leaving home for art school. Kate and I wanted to give Gabe a rite of passage by taking him to see Vermeer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and the worlds that had produced them.

We arrived in Amsterdam on the Friday evening following Easter. While taking a respite in a quiet canal-side cafe, we realized we were near Anne Frank's house. A short stroll brought us to 265 Princengraft, a building snuggled into a residential section of Amsterdam that overlooked a picturesque canal. Though it was the evening of the Jewish Sabbath, to our surprise the museum was open. We felt grateful to be able to honor the Sabbath and begin our tour of Amsterdam in this manner.

Men, women, and children of various ethnic backgrounds walked in a heavy, attentive, prayerful silence through stark rooms still darkened by blackout shades. This was the place where Anne, her parents Otto and Edith, her sister Margot, Fritz Pfeffer, and the Van Pels family—Hermann, Auguste, and their son Peter—hid together from the Nazis for more than two years. Large pictures from the 1940s show daily life in Amsterdam and then in contrast, the life in the concentration camps under the Nazis. Excerpts from Ann's diary are displayed on the walls: "One day this terrible war will be over. The time will come when we will be people again, and not just Jews."

Visitors are taken back in time when entering the kitchen and common room where they had "to whisper, tread lightly during the day, otherwise the people in the warehouse [below] might hear us." Coming to the front office that served as a bathing area on Saturday afternoons Anne wrote that she and her sister "scrub ourselves in the dark, while the one who isn't in the bath looks out the window through a chink in the curtains." Finally there is the bedroom where the movie magazine cutouts still hang that Anne used in a desperate attempt to bring some glitter to her shadowy, shut-in existence. Similarly, the board game Peter received for his birthday lies where he and Ann used to play.

A visit to these rooms brings the Holocaust of World War II and the present-day global warfare against civilians up-close and personal. These rooms stage the brute reality in which the Frank family lived and the moral tragedy humanity has inherited, a tragedy in which goodness and innocence struggle to survive ultimate evil. We are all familiar with Anne's famous words, "In spite of all that has happened, I still believe that people are basically good at heart," and we gain strength from this brave twelve year-old girl. But there are aspects of this tragedy that are not popularly known.

In these lonely rooms Anne and her companions learned about the gas chambers. She wrote, "The English radio says they're being gassed. I feel terribly upset." And at the end of the Annex tour, a video reports Anne's death due to typhus and deprivation in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945. The last witnesses to see her alive testify that her innocent, loving, and hopeful spirit had succumbed to a devouring hopeless despair. It is difficult to put that end together with Anne's inspiring writing.

Sadly, this story has become our common legacy. It symbolizes not only the 6 million Jews and 6 million non-Jews that the Nazis exterminated, but also the many millions of civilians who died or were murdered in purges, genocides, wars, and epidemics throughout the last century. It has happened all over: in Soviet Russia, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Bosnia, the Middle East, Africa, the World Trade Center—up through the present Iraqi war. The huge numbers of anonymous dead are impossible to imagine or personalize when we try to comprehend such massive slaughter. Anne Frank's diary gives us one story, which we relive vicariously when we read it or watch the play or movie versions. In this way, we practice our duty to "Never Forget," to partake in the ritual of remembrance for people who lost so much. Such remembrance is meant to serve the world as a sanctified safeguard against such slaughter happening again.

In the last room of the museum stands a pedestal. On the pedestal lies a book called L'Zachar, In Memoriam. Eight hundred fifty-eight pages long, with a hundred and thirty names on each page, it carries the names of the 103,000 Dutch Jews killed in the Holocaust. In Memoriam was published in The Hague in 1995. It stands open to page 208 where Anne's is only one in nine columns of the names of all the members of the Frank clan killed by the Nazis. The page is slightly smudged by the thousands of visitors who touched it like a holy relic at the end of their pilgrimage through her house. I saw the book, touched it, and ached over it. But Anne's hand was not the only one of the dead to rest upon my shoulder. This visit to Anne Frank's house brought an old family mystery to the surface, as well.

My paternal grandparents and most of their relatives migrated to America in the early 1900s. But I had one great-uncle who remained in Europe, fleeing to Denmark. He kept in contact with our American family until the Nazi takeover of Europe, and then was never heard from again. We have always feared we lost him and other blood relations in the camps. I thought my missing great-uncle was named Willy and that he was my grandmother Minnie Wasserman's brother. Willy had fled from Russia to Copenhagen around the time Minnie came to New York. Family rumors stated that he had relocated to Amsterdam. Laying before me was a list of Nazi victims; perhaps there was evidence in this book that would reveal the fate of my lost great-uncle.

With trembling fingers I leafed through the pages of In Memoriam. There, on page 799, was Willy Leopold Wasserman, who died at age 56 in Auschwitz. He was about the same age as my grandmother. I fell into a chair and wept in my wife's arms. When my heart quieted, I spoke with the museum staff about how to find out if Willy was indeed my uncle and, if so, how I could learn about his life and reconstruct this lost piece of family history.

The non-Jewish man staffing the information desk compassionately spoke of his visit to Hiroshima where he too cried to his depths. We affirmed together that the Anne Frank House, Hiroshima, and the atrocity site at My Lai, that I visit annually when I lead groups to Viet Nam, are among the great peace memorials of the world. He wished me "Shalom." A Jewish staffer— ironically, she was named Anne—told me how to research Dutch Jewish records. She informed me that discoveries like mine had occasionally happened to others. Then she left to photocopy the page with Uncle Willy's name for me. She returned a few minutes later with the memorial book, which she held out to me. She said the staff and director wanted me to have a copy of it. I was overwhelmed, befuddled, and humbled. Silently, we held hands.

I carried the book against my heart as we walked back to our hotel. I called my father immediately and asked him to begin researching from his end. I set the book on a chair, as an altar next to my bed, and opened it to Uncle Willy's name. As I awaited my father's answers, I prayed that Willy Leopold Wasserman was my lost uncle—giving me a bloodline that stretched into the gas chambers—and I prayed that he was not.

Over the next two days my father and I exchanged a flurry of phone calls and e-mails that zipped between Amsterdam and Florida as we struggled to discern whether Willy was our lost relative, the lost piece of our family history. Was the blood of my family spilled in the camps? Had my uncle's spirit cried out to me to fight against the evil that causes these losses?

I've always felt keenly that when any person is attacked for his or her membership in another race or religion, then the same thing can happen to me, that evil is can strike any of us indiscriminately, arbitrarily, with utmost cruelty and meaninglessness. Regardless of Anne Frank's beautiful and innocent vision, evil exists in this world we share. The famous psychoanalyst Bruno Bettlehiem, himself a survivor of Dachau and Buchenwald, responded to Anne Frank's sweet vision with, "If all men are good, there never was an Auschwitz."

It is common for members of groups that have experienced oppression or extermination to feel survivor's guilt. Even when we are historically or geographically removed from the direct experience, we identify, suffer, idealize, and search for ways to carry the legacy. Dr. Stephanie Mines, another Jewish psychotherapist specializing in treating severe trauma, said, "I grew up with Anne Frank in my heart. She is my model, my heroine, and my inspiration. For years I thought I might be her reincarnation." Willy being a blood relation would justify my collective survivor's guilt, granting me direct permission to feel as I do—that I am a survivor of war, trauma, and Holocaust.

As much as I wanted Willy to be my uncle, I wanted him not to be my uncle. As a Jew, I contemplate my relatives and their communities who were victims of the Holocaust and Russian pogroms. My family has survived such tragedies and more. Those are enough. The legacy of annihilation is replete with both profound suffering and with ambivalence. We all wish to escape, to cling to what Michael Ortiz Hill calls "the fetish or certainty . . . that my life and my death are possessions of mine." Nobody wants their line to stretch into the furnaces of hell, for nothing else so completely destroys this belief.

But what about those whose names and stories we do not know? Anne Frank's legacy makes the Holocaust personal by allowing us to intimately share the lives of a handful of victims, but how do the others impact us? What is their legacy? What are our spiritual, religious, and cultural relationships and responsibilities to all the anonymous dead? Ethnic groups that inherit holocaust and genocide sometimes think that the quest to annihilate their race or religion was aimed personally and especially at them. But history since World War II makes it apparent that genocidal slaughter is a world problem that concerns every national, ethnic, racial, and religious group on this planet. Terrorism has put the final exclamation point on the lesson that humanity has received since the beginning of the practice of mass impersonal death. Impersonal vulnerability is everyone's modern-world legacy.

We know we live in an era of holocaust and genocide but are barely capable of remaining sensitive and responsive before so many anonymous deaths. We shake our heads, look the other way, our faces sadden, our hearts constrict when we hear large statistics of mass deaths. Soon we go numb, as we do from watching too much war coverage on TV. For this reason, a visit to Anne's house is most relevant for our times. It shows us how the human spirit responds to or is broken by terror, whether that terror is generated by attacks from outside or propaganda and dictatorial control from within one's own government.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Anne Frank, her family, and all the other Jews under Nazi occupation were subjected to a new and terrible form of terror. Other forms of terror came, not much later, to Russia, Japan, African nations, the Balkans. On a September morning in 2001, three thousand of the people who went to work in the World Trade Center never again emerged, and we Americans became terrified as never before. We, too, experienced helpless shock and the unremitting fear that meaningless, unexpected, and anonymous suffering and annihilation might happen to us or our loved ones at any time.

The flurry of e-mails with pointed questions demonstrated that Willy Wasserman was not my blood uncle. My lost uncle came from my grandfather's, not my grandmother's line. He was from my mother's branch, not my father's. And his last name was Waldman, not Wasserman. In the end it didn't matter. I experienced the discovery—and the loss—of Willy Wasserman as if he were my uncle. I was touched by one of the anonymous dead and he is anonymous no more. Willy Leopold Wasserman was born on November 8, 1888. He was from Bautzen. He married Alice Berta Rosentiel, who was 11 months older and from Luxemburg. They arrived in Auschwitz together. Both in their mid-50s, they must have failed the selection and been put to death on the day they got off the cattle cars. They both died in Auschwitz on October 19, 1944.

The story of Uncle Willy teaches me about our relationship with other anonymous victims of modern wars. From World War II and the Holocaust up through this most recent war against Iraq, we have created untold numbers of unknown dead. Though their names and histories may not be known, the world and our individual souls are weighed down with their suffering and pain. We become culturally, psychologically, and spiritually more unhealthy to the degree that we deny their memories. Whether it is personal or historical, we all have a significant relationship with and responsibility to these lost souls. We must find ways to honor them, give their sacrifice meaning, and end the worldwide slaughter without adding to it, whenever and wherever it occurs.

For our own sakes and for the souls of the dead, our challenge is a form of the spiritual movement that in Hebrew is called Teshuvah, which means Return. The concept of Return is the essential impulse behind spiritual healing. It is the governing principle of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. We must return these millions and millions of soul-numbing statistical deaths back to individual and personal status—give them their with names, faces, and stories—as In Memoriam begins to do for Dutch Jews. These anonymous dead must become real people again.

In this spirit of making the losses personal, in May 2003 thousands of Austrian schoolchildren researched and documented the lives of individual Jews, gypsies, or disabled persons exterminated in Austria during the Holocaust and wrote letters to them. In a public ceremony in Vienna on the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp, many of these letters were tied to balloons and released. This gesture helped rescue the anonymous dead. It also helped contemporary Austrians deal with a painful part of their own history which they were forced to confront, when the world criticized their election of a former Nazi operative to lead their country.

In this same spirit, one moving gesture of the recent anti-war movement occurred when protestors carried on placards and buttons the names of individual Iraqi women and children endangered by our bombing. Again anonymous and distant victims became real people. War became personal, not just through our personal losses, but also through the deaths we've caused. Such personalization is a form of spiritual action. It humanizes what would otherwise be unknown corpses. It fulfills Ezekiel's vision of preaching to the dry bones until they fill with breath again.

I cannot believe that my experience with Willy Wasserman was just coincidence. Some spiritual traditions teach that souls are alive after death, that when people die violently their souls wander restlessly until they are given rituals or remembrance. If souls are alive it may be possible for any one of the millions of anonymous dead to choose and call out to any one of us, demanding an encounter that changes our lives. Anne Frank, of course, is not anonymous. The publication of her diary by her father, the family's lone survivor, guaranteed that we would know her. We respond to Anne's memory precisely because she has become an individual we can see, picture, imagine in her daily particulars, and therefore know in a personal way. But what about all the others?

In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus poured fresh blood for the shades in Hades to drink so they could instruct him. In an ancient custom of several traditions, survivors made animal sacrifices to the spirits of the dead so they'd come back to life and speak with the living. Who are the living sacrifices that enable the dead to speak today? Willy Leopold Wasserman emerged from the shadowy past and touched me in Anne Frank's home. He stepped out of the anonymous ranks of 103,000 murdered Dutch Jews and made my visit personal. My family's pilgrimage brought him the flesh and "blood" he needed in order to speak.

We the living, who carry the memories of the dead and make meaning of their sacrifices, are their lifeblood. By seeking, feeling, hearing their spirits, we allow them to speak to us, touch us, and teach us. Through a name, a place, a date, a wife's name, the anonymous dead become personal and individual once again. They come back to life within us and we become their living relatives. Thus Willy Leopold Wasserman has become my uncle. I light memorial candles in his name. Thus he lives again in us all. Together, we can give meaning to Willy Wasserman's life and the lives of each one of those listed In Memoriam.

Edward Tick has had a private practice in psychotherapy since 1975. His practice includes extensive and innovative work with survivors of severe trauma, especially war, sexual and substance abuse, severe mental and emotional disorders. men's issues, and psychosiritual healing. This is his first contribution to Quest magazine.

By Franz Hartmann

Originally printed in the JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2006 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Hartmann, Franz. "The Dangers of Occultism." Quest  94.1 (JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2006):7-10.

An excellent article about "True and False Yoga," written by Marie Russak in the Adyar Bulletin of August 1908, has again forcibly called my attention to the disastrous results arising from meddling with occult practices without understanding their real nature. I have before my eyes a long list of friends and personal acquaintances, who within the last few years have become victims of their "psychic researches," for which they were not yet ripe and in which they persisted in spite of all warnings. Some of them became insane, some incurably diseased, others obsessed and morally depraved, and not a few of them ended by suicide. They were not unintelligent or uneducated people; on the contrary, one of them was a great and well known scientist and inventor, noble minded and generous; several were writers or poets of some distinction and a few even public lecturers on Theosophical subjects and on Spiritualism—things, however, of which they had very little personal experience and of which they knew only from reading.

H. P. Blavatsky has repeatedly said that for the purpose of obtaining occult knowledge one has first to become a "Theosophist." This is not to be understood as if a person could not attain occult knowledge without having first his name inscribed as a member of the Theosophical Society, or as if by doing so he would become immediately ripe for receiving magical powers; but it means what the great Shankaracharya teaches in his Tattwa Bodha, namely, that the first requisite for obtaining real knowledge is the discernment between the "lasting and not lasting,"—between the high and the low, the real and unreal, the true and the false—to distinguish between one's own permanent Self and the evanescent personality to which that higher Self is bound during its terrestrial and astral life.

In other words, we must realize that which is spiritual and divine within ourselves and in every other thing, before the portals of profound occult knowledge can be opened for us and we become initiated into the divine mysteries of nature. We must be able to raise our consciousness to a higher plane, before we can be able to perceive and actually know that which belongs to that plane and to avoid the snares and pitfalls which await those who walk with closed eyes in the dangerous precincts of the astral plane.

But with the advent of the Theosophical Society and the revival of the Theosophical movement a certain amount of promulgation of occult teachings was unavoidably connected. The spiritualistic movement had already paved the way; its phenomena had brought consternation among the learned and attracted the ignorant crowd. It became necessary to divulge some of the occult secrets which had been hidden for ages, and to explain some of the mysterious laws of nature, for the purpose of destroying certain misconceptions which had been caused by the establishment of a communication between mortals and what were supposed to be the immortal spirits of the departed. It was necessary to explain the nature of some of these astral entities, and thus to stem the tide of a wave of superstition which seemed to invade the world while the wave of materialism was receding and clericalism losing its hold.

Thus, what I may call a new era of occultism and psychism was inaugurated as a side issue of the Theosophical movement; occult phenomena, whether spurious or genuine, alike attracted the general attention of the public. The occult teachings, calculated at first only for such as were supposed to make proper use of them, soon became public property and were extensively misunderstood. Curiosity, the great motor power of the human mind and the first guide on the road to knowledge, was aroused. Many were those who by means of having their attention called to the higher truths of religion, were induced to lead a higher life, owing to the Theosophical teachings which they received; but there were and still are also many desirous of coming into possession of celestial powers, only for the purpose of applying them for the gratification of their passions or selfish desires; because, as the proverb says: "Extremes touch each other, and there is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous".

Every great movement, when it becomes popular, oversteps its boundaries and devastation begins. The tree of occultism, overflowing with life, produced many excrescences; hypnotism and mental suggestion appeared upon the scene and their miracles worked both ways; for, the best kind of medicine for effecting a cure may, if misapplied, also become a poison that kills, and the two, great enemies of mankind, stupidity and selfishness, are always ready to misapply the gifts which they receive. There are not a few who are willing to pledge their souls to the demons of hell, if they thereby could come into possession of infernal powers. If magic were to become the property of popular science, no man, woman or child would be sure of his life or safe against obsession; for, as the fanatical vivisectionist would not hesitate to destroy the whole of our animal creation for the purpose of giving support to some of his scientific theories, so the scientist of the future, without moral support, if endowed with occult powers, would not hesitate to experiment with the souls of human beings for the purpose of gratifying his curiosity and ambition for making discoveries. The ignorance and scepticism of the majority of the learned is at present the best protection against such evils for the majority of mankind.

But we will not enter at this moment into a discussion of the history of psychological crime or its prospect in the future, but merely turn our attention to the consequences of human folly and misunderstood truth.

If you remove a part of an anthill, its inhabitants become greatly disturbed. The sunlight, suddenly shining into its subterranean passages, which heretofore rested in darkness, seems to create a great deal of confusion, and you see the ants hurriedly running to and fro in all directions without any apparent object. Thus the light of the Theosophical teachings, made popular by the advent of the Theosophical movement, caused a great stir among those who had thus far rested in the blissful sleep of agnosticism or were enjoying the happy dreams of theological superstitions. The teachings given out by H. P. Blavatsky and her followers made a great impression upon the public mind. Soon new movements were originated by persons who appropriated to themselves this or that portion of those teachings, which they only half understood. Thus the existence of the Theosophical Society gave occasion to the formation of different other societies and sects, which partly, though in a deformed shape, taught the same truths as the former, although they repudiated the original fountain from which their wisdom was drawn; for it is and ever will be a fact in nature that fanatical sectarianism is intimately bound up with fanatical intolerance; acting upon the maxim: "Dare not to touch any other food but that which comes out of my kitchen, even if the other is of the same meat and has been cooked in the same style."

Some of these societies, being based upon a financial scheme for making money, pretending to be able to employ divine powers in their service and to have the will of God at their command for the purpose of procuring for their adherents physical health and worldly benefits, met with great success; for the multitudes will always rush to that camp, where they think that a mine of gold has been discovered and where they are expecting a share; and the holding out promises of making salvation easy has always been the fundamental power of every clerical institution. However, we will not quarrel with these sects; however mistaken their theories and however deplorable the entire want of intelligence among some of their leaders, they too were the outgrowth of our times, the products of the law of necessity, and they had to fill a certain place in the progress of human evolution, and to certain of their guides the testimony may be given, that in spite of their ignorance and self conceit, they after all believed themselves in what they taught, and that they consequently "meant well."

And now came a glorious harvest time for divers, chevaliers d'industrie, adventurers, conscious frauds and humbugs speculating on the contents of the pockets of gullible people by pretending to be able to teach persons, at so many dollars a head, how to put themselves in possession of supernatural powers. "Occult Societies" were formed with the evident object of desecrating that which is holy and making the high subservient to the low. They met the financial success which usually awaits those who know how to use the ignorance and greed of others to their own advantage; but how many of their deluded followers became victims of black magic will never be known. These victims were not all uncultured persons; there were some of them known to me as men of superior intellect, who seriously believed themselves to be earnest seekers for truth and tried all sorts of yoga practices for the purpose of "seeing what would come of it." What came was insanity, prostration of the nervous system, loss of vitality and death. I have given the description of one such case in the Occult Review, March 1906. No end of tales, some of them amusing and ridiculous, others tragical, might be told about the experiences of people seeking to obtain occult or magical powers who fell into the hands of cranks or charlatans. It is quite surprising to see how many otherwise intelligent people are ready to pledge implicit obedience to orders supposed to come from some unknown superiors, even if these orders are purely nonsensical. The game of "Unknown Superiors" was already in the seventeenth century successfully played among the order of the "Illuminates" whose system was based upon mutual espionage and secret supervision; it was organized after the pattern of the Jesuitical orders and existed until it become a real danger to the State. Some years ago the sending out of spurious Mahatma letters was quite the fashion in certain places, and all sorts of lies were employed to make the seekers for wisdom believe in their genuineness. When I was in Hamburg a lady came to me with what she claimed to be a letter from a Mahatma. She said she had been sent by some members of the society to which she belonged, to show me that letter and ask my opinion about it. It was an anonymous letter, containing some common pious phrases and demanding implicit obedience to all orders issuing from the writer—especially such orders as requested the payment of money. I answered that I should consider a person very foolish if he were to act blindly upon orders contained in an anonymous letter. The lady retired, but instead of reporting my answer she, as I afterwards found out, said that as soon as I looked at that letter I immediately recognized it as coming from a Mahatma; that my eyes were filled with tears of emotion (!) and that I recommended the strictest obedience. The fact was that the writer of the letter was that lady's husband, and that he wanted to obtain my endorsement to strengthen the faith of his gullible followers.

The history of human stupidity is without end; inexhaustible is the army of the credulous, willing to commit all sorts of folly, if they are made to believe that thereby they may obtain superiority over the rest of mankind. They are ready to sacrifice everything except the egotism resulting from the delusion of self.

But we will now direct our attention to another class of "occult schools," which are more dangerous, as their guides are invisible and belong to the inhabitants of the astral plane. One such case has been graphically described by C. W. Leadbeater in an article entitled "A Vision and the Facts behind it," contained in the Theosophist of April, 1909.

Here I might give account, from my own experience, of a number of cases where well intentioned and intelligent people met financial and physical ruin by placing implicit confidence in the teachings and directions of invisible "spiritual" guides. I will select only the following two.

Some of our readers will perhaps remember that a few years ago a dozen students of Theosophy, being dissatisfied with the slow progress which they were making in becoming spiritual, formed an "inner circle" at Budapest in which they soon become witnesses of the most surprising phenomena. They had materializations and the ghosts represented themselves to be the twelve apostles, and each " apostle" accepted one of these students as his disciples. All that had heretofore been taught by H. P. Blavatsky and the Indian Sages was now by these apostles declared to be nonsense, self sacrifice and asceticism made ridiculous, and contrary directions, enjoining strict secrecy, were given. Finally "Jesus Christ" himself appeared in person; they were ordered to go to Madagascar and, being partly obsessed by these spooks, they actually went there, expecting "further orders." There they lived for a while in the swamps, contrary to all the laws of hygiene, but soon one after another they fell victims to the climate. Out of the twelve seven died and the rest returned, perhaps wiser, but surely poorer men.

Another case is the following, and I regret to have to leave out names on account of personal considerations. In Hamburg I was introduced into a society of "occultists," counting among its visitors persons of some distinction. They had their "Masters," which they held in great veneration, and these "Masters" produced their phenomena and gave their communications through the wife of the husband who owned the house where the circle met. This lady seemed to be in a state of chronic obsession, often lying for weeks in a state of semi-trance, during which she declared that her own spirit was absent and that the "Masters" had taken possession of her. The most remarkable phenomena took place at that house; noises, as if cannon balls were being rolled over the wooden floor, were heard, and made the walls shake; lights appeared at night so strong as to make the neighbors believe that the house was on fire; handfuls of sand were thrown in the faces of visitors, photographs of scenery of living and dead persons, elementals and monsters were taken on plates without the use of a camera; but the most astonishing phenomenon was the almost instantaneous traveling of living people to long distances and through walls and closed windows, such as I have described in my article on "Magical Metathesis" in the Occult Review, July 1906.

What surprised me still more, was the fact that these spirits seemed to be well acquainted with the contents of Madame Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine and other books on Theosophy, which those people had never read, while on the other hand the communications received, which were held very secret and sacred, being shown to only the very select, contained the greatest vagaries, descriptions of the "realm of Pluto," the infernal regions within the interior of the earth, and the like. These "Masters" not only directed the "spiritual progress" of their disciples, but also their external affairs, and the disciples always acted according to the orders received. The end was that the husband of that lady first entirely neglected and finally gave up his business, and afterwards—also "by order of the Masters" —sold his house at a great sacrifice. The family were reduced to poverty and having become destitute they finally abandoned their "occult research".

All such failures go to show that there is a desire for progress and spiritual evolution within the human heart, and that everybody consciously or unconsciously strives to attain it, however erroneous may be the ways and means which are taken for that purpose. The unguided aspirant for occult knowledge resembles a fly that falls into a basin of water and tries to save itself by swimming now in this and then in that direction, often changing its course even when nearing the shore and finally getting drowned.

But where is that guidance to be found? There are innumerable "seekers for truth" and "students of Theosophy" wishing for guides and continually clamoring for "more instructions," without ever thinking of following those instructions which they have already received. They are at all times looking at external things in the hope of finding that which can be found only internally; regardless of the often repeated saying: "Within yourselves deliverance must be found".

The first step on the way to Initiation is purification of the heart and mind, because the light of Divine Wisdom cannot manifest itself in a place clouded with impure thoughts and filled with selfish desires. No one has ever made the second step without making the first one, and all efforts to drag the high into the service of the low lead only to degradation, misfortune and evil. Therefore the real practice of occultism consists in the control of one's lower thoughts and emotions, which can be done only by the aid of one's own higher nature; because only the higher has power over the lower; "self" cannot overcome "itself," and for this purpose it is necessary to acquire that discernment between the eternal and true, and that which is temporal and illusive, of which we spoke in the beginning of this article.

Thus it appears that instead of running after bogus "Masters" and pseudo adepts and being led by the nose by humbugs and frauds of this or the astral plane, it would be better to cultivate high thoughts and elevating selfless aspirations, from which good actions are the natural outcome. If his consciousness is thus firmly established on a higher plane, the student of Theosophy will be ready to receive further light; and the Great Souls who are watching over the progress of humanity will not fail to come to the aid of those who keep the divine ideal before their eyes and seek to realize it within their hearts.

Quest is a magazine of philosophy, religion, science, and the arts, established in 1988, which has replaced The American Theosophist, established in 1913 under the title The Messenger. Our philosophical perspective is that of the Ageless Wisdom (Perennial Philosophy), and we are more interested in religious and mystical thought and experience than in the history of religious institutions and doctrine. The unifying theme is the concept of wholeness; we hold the view that there is but One Life, and all of life is interrelated.

Quest is published by the Theosophical Society in America, the American section of a worldwide organization promoting the comparative study of religion, philosophy, the arts, and science. We seek to explore the common ground between philosophies and religions, between East and West, between science and religion. While we are interested in exploring esoteric themes, articles themselves are accessible, not esoteric. Readers have told us we are "scholarly but not pedantic" and "a good balance of the philosophical and the practical."

Quest is published quarterly. The following subscription options are available for Quest (all costs are in U.S. dollars):

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Quest is a quarterly magazine of philosophy, religion, science, the arts, and the Wisdom Tradition. It is available both to general subscribers and to all members of the Theosophical Society. Our philosophical perspective is that of the Ageless Wisdom or Perennial Philosophy, and we are interested in the connections between cultures and in mystical thought and experience. We explore the common ground between East and West, the ancients and the moderns, science and religion.

Although we are interested in exploring esoteric themes, articles should be accessible. We’re looking for material that is scholarly but not pedantic and provides a good balance of the philosophical and the practical. We also publish book reviews, ranging between 300 and 1000 words in length. Strong preference for reviews is given to books published within the year prior to submission. We do not publish poetry or fiction.

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By Joann S. Bakula

Originally printed in the Fall 2009 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Bakula, Joann S. "How Death Changes Life." Quest  97. 4 (Fall 2009): 142-147.

Near-death experiences (NDEs) have fascinated people around the globe ever since the first popular book on the subject, Raymond Moody's Life after Life, became a best-seller in 1975. If such experiences awaken a person to another dimension of consciousness, reading accounts of these experiences may be able to touch and awaken the same layer of consciousness in us all.

Betty Bland, president of the Theosophical Society in America, had an NDE in 1968 and has described it, along with some of its aftereffects, in many talks and writings (e.g. Bland, 1—3). She went into the hospital for a simple surgical procedure, but a physician"s error put her in a situation where, as she describes it, "I endured several days of hanging on the edge of death. Certainly psychic sensitivity was greatly heightened at this time, and I was able to slip in and out of physical consciousness at will. I preferred staying in the astral realms, but could be called back whenever necessary."

One night Bland was transported to what she calls the "Council of Light." As she describes it, "there were no specific forms as such, but different foci within the Light. They were great beings, but received me as if they were my brothers and sisters, partners in the life process."

With the help of the council, Bland went through a nonlinear life review in a "series of thematic holographic bubbles...from obscure reaches of time," including "relationships with individuals and qualities of being or capacities developed." She perceived "threads to past and future," where "successes were viewed as completions and shortcomings were relegated to future lives." Learning that "life is a classroom," she was left with an intense quest for new ideas and understanding and with the knowledge that one could not know from external appearances what particular tasks you had taken on in your life. Deep within ourselves is the nexus or "flower of being," that "exalted aspect of ourselves that is part of the universal All [and] is accessible to each one of us."

Bland was surprised to learn from the council that "as far from perfect as I was . . . I had accomplished all that was necessary for this life." Given the choice between returning to the earth plane and moving on, she says, "I reluctantly but determinedly set my direction toward the earth plane," even though the council warned her, "It will not be as easy as you have had it up to this point."

Depth of understanding, extended perception, compassion, love, insight resulting from an unique review of her own life and life itself, living for others, knowledge of purpose, and the ability to use the experience in living skills are all there in Betty Bland"s life and words and even in her presence. This is the most noticeably profound, life-transforming, and long-lasting aftereffect of the NDE. As she describes it, "reality gains a new dimension."

Many similar statements may be found in the famous NDE experience of the psychiatrist C. G. Jung, recounted in his autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Jung's NDE had elements similar to Bland"s, affecting his sense of temporal location and resulting in multidimensional perception: "I had the feeling that I was an historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. My life seemed to be snipped out of a long chain of events" (Jung, 291). "Although my belief in the world returned to me," he added, "I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it." He described the other state as "a non-temporal state in which present, past, and future are one." Everything that had happened "in time had been brought together. . . . Nothing was disturbed . . . .nothing could be measured by temporal concepts. . . . One is interwoven into an indescribable whole and yet observes it with complete objectivity" (Jung, 295-96).

Researchers Kenneth Ring and Raymond Moody have categorized NDEs in terms of their depth. The basic than atomimetic narrative in Moody"s first book, Life after Life, includes fifteen core elements, compacted by Ring into five stages: peace and well-being; out-of-body sensation; going through a dark tunnel; seeing the light; and entering the light. The deeper, fuller NDEs go on longer, and the experiencer enters further and deeper into the light, revealing details of perception, memory, purpose, and meaning not found in accounts of the other four-fifths of Ring's sample (Moody, Life after Life, 80). Two new elements associated with deeper, fuller NDEs were "the vision of Knowledge" and "cities of Light" (Moody, Reflections, 9, 15). Betty Bland entered deeper into the light and had a fuller realization, as did Carl Jung. "When we come to examine the core of full NDEs we find an absolute and undeniable spiritual radiance," Ring writes. "It"s as if the core of the NDE becomes their core. The NDE is, then, not merely an experience that becomes a cherished memory" that changes one"s life. "It is one"s life. And it becomes the source of one"s true being in the world" (Ring, Heading toward Omega, 50).

H. P. Blavatsky distinguishes two kinds of memory, the ordinary one and the "soul"s memory," which is a record of every thought, word, and deed in the life. She writes that "not the most trifling action of our lives can disappear from the soul"s memory, because it is . . . an ever present reality on the plane which lies outside our conceptions of space and time" (Blavatsky, 66). A direct experience has a quality and significance that beliefs simply do not contain, and this puts all NDEs in a special category, even if researchers with materialistic beliefs deny the significance of the data.

Over the years, several of my students at Florida International University and Southern Oregon University have reported their NDEs, along with the profound aftereffects of those experiences. Self-development, knowledge, and aversion to judgmentalism and negative emotional states are some of the most common changes reported. The following three accounts are as accurate as words and notes can provide, although the identities, and in one case the details, have been changed to preserve anonymity.

Vital Engagement

Even NDEs with elements appearing to be negative can have positive effects in the life afterwards. One of my Florida International University students, of Cuban Catholic background, whom I"ll call Rosa, reported an authentic NDE during a death studies class. Her experience followed a brain aneurysm and left her very puzzled about part of it. She described the customary tunnel and the painless voyage to a blissful realm where "light more brilliant than the sun" seemed to be caressing her. "It was loving, approving, safe." She said to herself, "Now you"ve done it—you"re dead!" A soundless voice answered her, "You are not dead. You must go back." A review took place in the presence of this being, whom she identified as God. As she left this state she was surprisingly told to "become more selfish."

After Rosa returned to consciousness, she had a difficult time assimilating the information and following the advice. Would God tell her to be more selfish? Like most people raised in the Christian religion, she had always associated God"s way with being less selfish and less self-centered and with leading a life of service to others. What she heard while near death caused her to doubt her understanding of her faith.

Nevertheless, Rosa felt certain that this presence was God; she had no doubt of this. The experience was profound; she told her parents and husband that she had changed and would continue to change, and that there was no death, although they dismissed her experience as part of the trauma. But how could she follow the advice? It caused considerable conflict to her in the months that followed. As an aftereffect, she reported definite changes in her personality, resulting in a less passive and more vital engagement in life. She had become more assertive and self-confident, more aware of male dominance of women, and more concerned about using her full potential. She was less likely to be complacent and took the initiative more often. She had developed a need to learn, understand, and develop. She realized that she had to "love myself before I could love others without judgment." Something of the nonjudgmental and unconditional love of the presence she had felt began to fill her, changing her life.

Kenneth Ring has grouped aftereffects of NDEs into four categories: (1) change in attitude toward life; (2) sense of personal renewal; (3) personality changes; (4) changes in attitude toward others (Ring, Life at Death, 139). Rosa reported positive changes in all of these areas. After the initial period of doubt, confusion about conflicting values, and cognitive dissonance, Rosa felt that the NDE significantly changed her personality, causing her to become a much stronger person, more caring both for herself and for others, as well as more self-confident and self-directed. She had a new sense of the importance of life and the opportunity it presented. This is confirmed by the fact that she was pursuing her undergraduate degree as an older woman, wife, and mother. Moreover, when she related her experience to others, she was careful not to challenge their beliefs while remaining certain of the meaning of her experience.

As Betty Bland wrote, the aftereffect is related "to growing into [one"s] full potential," to actualizing that potential, and to increasing a sense of purpose. This affirms what The Secret Doctrine describes as the "obligatory pilgrimage" of the divine spark through a process of development or unfoldment of individuality, "first by natural impulse, and then by self-induced and self-devised efforts," both consciously, and, it appears, unconsciously in a brush with death. Bland writes, "Those who have experienced the near death state...have embarked on their pilgrimage with a new sense of purpose and zeal" (Bland, 2).

Near Death by Misadventure

A male student in one of my death studies classes at Southern Oregon University reported an NDE of some years earlier, following a night of drunkenness, debauchery, and wild driving that culminated in hitting a tree head-on at high speed. The young man, whom I"ll call Stuart, was found with his leg wrapped around his neck and with a ruptured kidney and spleen, and he woke up in the hospital in traction. The injuries were multiple and severe, taking him over two years to recover. As is typical of victims of severe accidents, he had a swift life review, which he described as like "a fast shuffle of cards, a card bridge." He had a sense that in the NDE he had returned to the state where he belonged. I asked him whether he would call it returning to home. He replied, "No, it was more an experience of belonging."

Stuart came back with a different attitude toward life. He had an expanded sense of where he had come from, where he was now, and an awareness of a deeper layer of conscious being. At the same time his life direction had recovered as well. He had returned to the university to earn his undergraduate degree and had specific goals for his future career as well as positive changes in lifestyle. The major negative aftereffect could be that since that time he was "stuck on a feeling of ascension" and had become obsessed with bungee jumping!

The assurance that belongingness does not primarily come from the outside or social realm, but from the inside and is subjective, gave Stuart a new sense of identity and self-assurance that enabled him to change the direction of his life. Jung also mentioned belongingness in his NDE account: "I was about to enter an illuminated room and would meet there all those people to whom I belong in reality. There I would at last understand—this too was a certainty—what historical nexus I or my life fitted into. I would know what had been before me, why I had come into being, and where my life was flowing" (Jung, 291).

Thanks to the NDE, Stuart had a deeper knowledge and life experience than most people, and he knew it. Education became more important to him, as it did to Rosa. With their direct experience of deeper knowledge they felt a sense of inner authority that drew them to higher education. Leadership qualities and a deeper sense of seriousness about knowledge itself remained with them. There are accounts throughout the literature of knowledge becoming available during the NDE, with accounts of "libraries" and "institutions of higher learning." One said, "This is a place where the place is knowledge" (Moody, Reflections, 13-14).

Calming Emotions

An older woman from California discussed the NDE experience of her second husband, a retired businessman, following a heart attack. The man had been devoted to his family and to the family corporation of which he was an officer, and had been heartbroken by conflict with his son, the only male heir. The son had driven him out of the business, displaying blatant disrespect for and considerable aversion toward him. After a decade or so of excruciating emotional pain from this loss, the man reciprocated. Love between them died; hate grew. Then he had a coronary. Recalling the NDE afterward caused him extreme fright, his wife reported.

In the months after the NDE, his attitude underwent a noticeable change. He no longer expressed anger or acute distress when talking about his son. He no longer spoke with pain of his broken relationship, nor did he seek to understand how it happened or recount his painful tale. He no longer sat in judgment, even though he apparently had every reason to do so, as the other members of the family corporation had the same feelings toward his son. The man"s emotions were calmed, his aversion was gone, his hurt was soothed, he stopped obsessing.

The past was not altered, nor was the grief ignored; rather his acceptance of the injustice was now objective rather than emotional, with equanimity and the assurance that justice would somehow work out in the larger scheme of things. According to his wife, he recognized that his inflamed negative emotion—which he didn"t like to see at first—was hate, and this was the only thing he was responsible for, not his son"s behavior. His attitude was transformed after the NDE by seeing how detrimental dying with negative thoughts and feelings in his heart could be. In the end, he saw that we are responsible for what we do, what we think, and what we feel, but we are not responsible for what others do to us in thought, word, or deed. This brings to mind what the humanistic psychologist Victor Frankl said: "It"s not so much what we expect from life, but what life expects from us."

One of the greatest obstacles in overcoming hate is the inability or unwillingness to call it what it is. Hate hides under many guises: injustice, racial prejudice, wrongdoing, the desire to punish someone for deep or superficial wrongs, sibling rivalry, and competition. It becomes an habitual cognitive behavioral pattern from which projections onto others are constructed. Hate is an energy easily infecting individuals through social networks; hate hides in history. The Tibetan Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche (134) calls this the "afflicted consciousness, or –klesha mind," which is the instigator of mistaken thoughts, conceptions and disturbing emotions." The well-known Tibetan Buddhist author Sogyal Rinpoche writes: "If our death was peaceful, that peaceful state of mind is repeated; if it was tormented, however, that torment is repeated, too" (290). He puts great emphasis on the right to a peaceful death, away from the torments of an intensive care unit with tubes, IVs, and resuscitators (as well as agitated relatives). "Peaceful death is really an essential human right, more essential perhaps than the right to vote or the right to justice; it is a right on which . . . a great deal depends for the well-being and spiritual future of the dying person" (186). Because the experiences after death are mind-created, with all of the delusions, misconceptions, and false identifications to which we have become habituated, serenity and acceptance at the moment of death become very important. Eventually, of course, the quality of the whole life takes precedence over the moment of death, but in the immediate aftermath the circumstances of death do matter.

One aftereffect of the California businessman"s NDE was a dramatic change in attitude, which became nonjudgmental and was accompanied by an equally dramatic reduction in strong negative emotions. He no longer sought to judge and punish, hate or blame, despite good reason. He realized his responsibility for his own thoughts and feelings, and how they could injure him. It is as if he had experienced something of Betty Bland"s "totally noncondemnatory" Council of Light and knew that he too must adopt this attitude of nonjudgmental acceptance. In terms of Ring"s "Behavior Rating Inventory" for NDEs (Ring, Omega, 281), the man"s "tendency to accept others as they are" had definitely increased.

In this case, however, the most significant aftereffect was a calming of emotions and decrease in negative emotional states. Having had similar effects, Jung wrote:

The objectivity which I experienced...signifies detachment from evaluations and from what we call emotional ties. In general, emotional ties are very important to human beings. But they still contain projections, and it is essential to withdraw these projections in order to attain to oneself and to objectivity. Emotional relationships are relationships of desire, tainted by coercion and constraint; something is expected from the person, and that makes him and ourselves unfree. Objective cognition lies hidden behind the attraction of the emotional relationship; it seems to be the central secret. Only through objective cognition is the real coniunctio possible (296-97).

As we have seen even in this short review, the insights of an NDE can result in changes far beyond attitude or emotions; they can change the direction of a person"s life and work. Betty Bland, whose NDE ended with the word "others," emerged to become president of the Theosophical Society in America. Having had direct and profound experience of one of the most important unexplained physiological processes of nature, death, and transpersonal union, she eventually came to lead an organization dedicated to brotherhood and to investigating unexplained natural laws. Similarly, Jung wrote, "The insight I had had, or the vision of the end of all things, gave me the courage to undertake new formulations" (Jung, 297). His three-volume series on the transpersonal process of union, or coniunctio, in psychology and alchemy was part of the "new formulations" resulting from his NDE.

Not only do NDEs eliminate the fear of dying, they also reduce the fear of living. Those who have undergone NDEs tend to have an adjusted sense of values, stemming from a sense of synthesis that undergirds their judgment and decisionmaking. They are more fully alive and present; at the same time they have a longer view of consciousness through time. They act as guides to the true principles upon which the whole cycle of life is based, from individuation to the Omega Point of enlightenment and perfection, resulting in the cessation of the cycle of lives on the wheel of samsara.

References

Bland, Betty. "The Near Death Experience: A Theosophical Perspective." The Messenger, March 1996, 1—3.
Blavatsky, H. P. "Memory in the Dying." The Nature of Memory. Adyar, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 1980. 
Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. Mind beyond Death. Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion, 2006.
Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Vintage, 1963.
Moody, Raymond. Life after Life. New York: Bantam, 1975.
———. Reflections on Life after Life. New York: Bantam, 1977.
Ring, Kenneth. Life at Death: A Scientific Investigation of the Near-Death Experience. New York: Quill, 1982.
———. Heading toward Omega. New York: Morrow, 1984.
Sogyal Rinpoche. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992.

Joann S. Bakula, Ph.D., is a transpersonal integral psychologist and lecturer. She is review editor of the Esoteric Quarterly and the author of Esoteric Psychology: A Model for the Development of Human Consciousnessas well as of many articles on myth, the bardos, higher states, and applying ancient wisdom to planetary living.