Quest Magazine

From Death to Rebirth: Teachings of the Finnish Sage Pekka Ervast

Jouni Marjanen, Antti Savinainen, and Jouku Sorvali, eds. Foreword by Richard  Smoley
Literary Society of the Finnish Rosy Cross, 2017; 123 pp., PDF. Available for download at http://www.teosofia.net/e-kirjat/From_Death_to_Rebirth_Pekka_Ervast.pdf

Speculation about what happens to us after we die has been a staple of philosophy, religion, and poetry for millennia. But especially over the last fifty years, the literature on this subject has exploded into a cottage industry of first-hand accounts about life on the other side. This has been due largely to advances in medical technology, which have enabled us to revive individuals from illnesses or accidents that would have killed them a hundred years ago, but who now return to life with their eyewitness accounts in hand. The upshot has been a profusion of works about NDEs (or near-death experiences), as reflected in popular books by Eben Alexander, Betty Eadie, Natalie Sudman, and Dannion Brinkley, among others.

But this renaissance of interest in the afterlife has also triggered a closer look backward at accounts of such experiences that were written prior to the advent of modern medicine. In part, the intent has been to compare what those earlier figures described with what contemporary experiencers have related about their own otherworldly journeys. This has meant revisiting the insights of writers like Emanuel Swedenborg, spiritist Allan Kardec, clairvoyant Andrew Jackson Davis, Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner, and Theosophist C.W. Leadbeater, to name a few.

Among the lesser-known figures to have resurfaced recently is the Finnish writer and teacher Pekka Ervast (1875–1934). A pioneer of the Finnish Theosophical movement, he lectured and wrote extensively on a multitude of Theosophical topics for almost forty years, and in various talks and writings discussed life after death from multiple points of view, apparently derived by psychic and intuitive means. Some of the most important of these have been brought together into this volume. The result is a fascinating collection of commentaries on the stages of consciousness beyond physical death, as well as their spiritual and psychological implications. It’s possible some of his terms will initially seem a bit quaint to some readers—Hades, purgatory, heaven, hell—but soon it becomes apparent that these are simply convenient labels for identifying various aspects and stages of the afterlife journey, rather than just vestiges of an earlier worldview.

Some of those descriptions correspond closely with what many modern near-death experiencers have related, such as encounters with deceased loved ones on the other side, or the panoramic life review, in which individuals see various episodes of their lives replayed back. Ervast writes: “[The individual] does not live in his reminiscences as he did while being physically alive. He just watches the great play and judges it objectively, calling each thing—depending on its own quality—as good or bad, crime or merit, and so on. He remains in a great light, so to speak . . . In fact, the viewer is the personalized higher self. In death the solemn experience of memories is not due to the ordinary physical personality; instead, it is due to the higher self, the ‘I,’ which is behind the physical personality. He is in the light of the higher self and watches the past life.” It is worth noting that Ervast published his first book on death and the afterlife as early as in 1904, whereas the first book about NDEs was published in 1975 (Raymond Moody’s Life after Life).

But some elements in Ervast’s teachings are less commonly found in the NDE literature, if at all—such as his claim that the deceased not only reviews experiences of the just-lived incarnation but also those of the prebirth state, as well as the individual’s collected dream states throughout life. Also, while some writers over the years have suggested that life in the afterworld is essentially similar to life in bodily form, Ervast’s view is different. In one difficult but intriguing passage, he describes how death brings about a division between the “lower” and “higher” selves—that is, between our mortal personality and the more spiritual component of our nature—and he goes on to address some of the surprising consequences this division holds for our survival in the afterlife.

The book includes a number of interesting tidbits for those interested in afterlife studies, such as speculations about a historical phenomenon that’s been long discussed in the paranormal literature: reports by soldiers during wartime of phantom presences or “angels” seen either over or on battlefields (as during the famed Battle of Mons in World War I). Ervast writes: “Some [of the deceased] are still eager to fight, and they continue fighting in the invisible world that is near the physical world, that is, in the etheric world. That is why another group is often seen fighting in the air above the physical troops. They are shadows, filled with vigor, attacking each other.”

That description struck a particular chord with me in light of something I once heard from a man who described a similar wartime experience. A battlefield medic while young, he remarked how he watched as a fellow soldier leapt up from the trenches and marched towards enemy lines, only to be fatally shot seconds later. But although the poor fellow’s body collapsed to the ground, my friend described psychically seeing his astral body continue marching into battle, seemingly oblivious to the fact he had just died!

While reading this book, I was reminded of a fascinating Brazilian film I happened to see recently, Astral City, based on the teachings of the South American medium Francisco Cândido Xavier (also known as Chico Xavier). Like Ervast’s writings, such accounts can only be taken as interesting speculation, of course, since they can’t be confirmed one way or another until we pass through that mysterious doorway ourselves. But until that day comes—hopefully later rather than sooner!—we have intriguing works like these to pique our curiosity, and maybe even to provide us with a kind of roadmap to help prepare us for what lies ahead.

Ray Grasse

The reviewer worked on the editorial staffs of Quest Books and Quest magazine for ten years, and is author of several books, including The Waking Dream and Under a Sacred Sky. Excerpts from his latest book, An Infinity of Gods, appeared in the fall 2017 issue of Quest. He is a practicing astrologer, and his website is www.raygrasse.com.

Annie Besant (1847–1933): Struggles and Quest

Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière
Translated by the author, with Keara Engelhard
London: Theosophical Publishing House, 2017. xii + 325 pp., paper, £10.

Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière’s book, the product of “five years of research and reflection,” is an impressive and detailed biography of one of the modern era’s most fascinating and influential women. Theosophists are familiar with the role that Annie Besant played in the Theosophical Society, but they may not be aware of her struggle for women’s rights, her battle against social inequalities, or her fight for Indian independence from British rule. This new biography, translated from the French, describes her struggles and battles in such a way as to leave no doubt that Besant was one remarkable and courageous woman.

The story of how this book came to be written is worth noting. Dr. Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière is a senior lecturer in Victorian studies at the Sorbonne, and her research on Victorian women introduced her to Besant, a prominent figure of that era. The impetus to write a new biography came about when the author realized the two main Besant biographies, by Arthur Nethercot and Anne Taylor, had serious deficiencies. Neither author, she says, was able to perceive the continuity between the dramatic but seemingly disparate phases of Besant’s life; instead they saw only a fragmented and fractured life that (to them) bordered on incoherence. Both books also suffered from gender-based biases as well as prejudices regarding Theosophy. In writing this new biography, Dr. Pécastaing-Boissière explains, “I hoped to demonstrate the underlying continuities in her long life of struggles.” This reviewer believes the author has accomplished that objective in a convincing and admirable fashion.

Today the word Victorian has a largely pejorative connotation, primarily because of the repressed sexual attitudes of the day. It is an unfortunate stereotype, because the Victorian Age produced men and women of great stature and character: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Florence Nightingale, John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Alexander Graham Bell, and—Annie Besant. As author Joseph Epstein states in Essays in Biography, “The cavalcade of Victorian genius is greater than that of any other period in any other nation in the history of the world.” While perhaps not a genius, Annie Besant was clearly a woman of indomitable courage and great stature. She certainly can stand shoulder to shoulder with the luminaries mentioned above.

Sometimes it seems difficult to relate to such towering figures, but Pécastaing-Boissière does a marvelous job of introducing us to facets of Besant’s life that we may not have known about: that as a young woman, she could play all the Beethoven sonatas and Bach fugues on the piano; that despite her strong intellect she was self-taught, because of the lack of educational opportunities for women in her day; that when traveling as a lecturer for the TS, she used her spare time to study Sanskrit and the sacred Hindu texts. Other facts: Her first tour in 1875, for Britain’s National Secular Society, had her doing twelve lectures per week in places where “she regularly encountered hostile crowds” and “barely escaped a lynching in Hoyland, Yorkshire.” In 1911 she was invited to lecture at the Sorbonne on the martyr Giordano Bruno to an audience of 4000, while angry Catholic students protested loudly on the streets outside. She learned to drive a car at the age of sixty-two, and in 1927, at nearly eighty years of age, she traveled Europe, giving fifty-six lectures in three weeks. Before reading this book, I thought I knew a lot about Annie Besant, but I have to admit that I didn’t know any of this.

If you are a feminist and want to be inspired, you need to read this book; if the lives of great social reformers motivate you, you should read this book; and if you think, as I did, that you already know everything about Annie Besant, buy this book, and your admiration and respect for this great Theosophist will grow by leaps and bounds.

David Bruce

David Bruce is national secretary of the Theosophical Society in America.

Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics, Volume 1: The Physical World

Edited by Thupten Jinpa
Somerville, Mass.: Wisdom, 2017. 530 pp., hardcover; $29.95

Monks and scholars, just as you test gold

By burning, cutting, and polishing it
So too well examine my speech.
Do not accept it merely out of respect.
—The Buddha

The Buddha said to accept the validity of what he taught only after direct experience; the mere testimony of scriptures is not sufficient. The examination of the nature of reality is only real when it is accompanied by direct perception. Scientists take a similar approach, with experimentation and mathematical logic as pillars of inquiry. Buddhism and science thus share this mode of critical inquiry, which draws its conclusions from evidence and reasoning. In Buddhism, however, empirical observation has a wider scope than the range of the five senses and includes experiences arising from meditation practice.

This, the first of a four-volume series, presents classic Buddhist scientific and philosophical explorations of the nature of reality for the contemporary reader. This series was conceived by the Dalai Lama and compiled under his supervision. The ancient Buddhist treatises identify three domains: the scientific, the philosophical, and the religious. The first two volumes in this series cover the scientific domain, with volume 1 presenting the physical world and volume 2 presenting the mind sciences.

Buddhism has two things that have great potential to serve everyone, regardless of their faith, as the Dalai Lama explains in his introduction. One is the presentation of the nature of reality (or science), and the second is the methods for training the mind to alleviate suffering and discover inner peace. Four principles of reason characterize the Buddhist outlook on the world: the principle of nature (that is, the way it is); the principle of dependence (cause and effect); the principle of function (those we perform and those we support); and the principle of evidence (drawing inferences: if such is the current state, such will be the future state). Contemporary science gives us the Big Bang theory for the emergence of the universe, but the Buddhist sources answer further questions, such as “what is the relationship between the natural world and the sentient beings that came to evolve with it?” The presentation of the nature of reality in Buddhism is fourfold: (1) the nature of the objective world; (2) the presentation of the mind, the subject; (3) how the mind engages its object; and (4) the means (the science of logical reasoning) by which the mind engages its object. This framework has been adopted for volume 1.

The depth with which volume 1 is presented is astonishing. The exploration is divided into six parts: “Overview and Methodology,” “Knowable Objects,” “Subtle Particles,” “Time,” “The Cosmos and Its Inhabitants,” and “Fetal Development.” Each part is introduced by Thupten Jinpa (the editor of this volume and the Dalai Lama’s principal translator) and provides a list of further readings in English. It is almost impossible to describe what each part entails in a short space. I was especially interested in causality and time.

The impulse to avoid pain is our nature, and being conditioned beings brings forth suffering (the First Noble Truth). Suffering necessarily has a cause (the Second Noble Truth). The ultimate cause of suffering is ignorance, but ignorance can be resolved (the Third Noble Truth). The cessation also has a cause (the Fourth Noble Truth).

The section on cause and effect in this volume is enlightening. Dharmakirti’s treatise The Exposition of Valid Cognition states:

Where it exists that arises

And when it changes that changes as well

This is referred to as the cause.

The section on time says that it is posited on the basis of “three states of conditioned things”: (1) that which is not yet risen; (2) that which has arisen but has not yet ceased; and (3) that which has arisen and ceased. This in turn relates to “entities of cause and effect that have already come, are coming, and will come into being.” In Buddhist thought, the shortest unit of time can be thought of as a moment. The Buddhist texts describe two types of moments: (1) the shortest moment of time; and (2) the moment required to complete an action. Vasubandhu posits that the “shortest moment” is 1/65 of the time it takes a strong man to snap his fingers. One hundred and twenty of these short moments are one second.

Major sources in this work have come from Tibetan translations of original Sanskrit works, which are mostly lost. Two canonical collections are used: “The precious collection of Kangyur contains translations of Buddha’s words embodied in the three baskets (Tripitaka), and the precious collection of the Tengyur contains treatises of great Nalanda masters such as Nagarjuna and Asanga.” (Nalanda University in India was the great center of Buddhist learning until it was sacked by the Muslims around AD 1200.) Works of the Buddhist sages Vasubandhu, Dignaga, and Dharmakirti are also quoted throughout volume 1. This is an astounding effort and a rich treasure, with the Dalai Lama’s vision shining through.

Dhananjay Joshi

The reviewer, a professor of statistics, has studied Hindu, Zen, and vipassana meditation for the past forty-five years. He is a regular reviewer for Quest and volunteers in the archives department of the TSA.

Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump

Gary Lachman
New York: TarcherPerigree, 2018. xxii + 234 pp., paper, $17.

It is always a pleasure to read a new book by Gary Lachman, as there are few writers in the field of esoteric and occult studies who write as clearly and engagingly while also maintaining a mind-boggling level of output. Like his mentor and literary hero Colin Wilson, Lachman (a longtime Quest contributor) has the gift of digesting an array of ideas, theories, historical details, and mostly obscure thinkers, and rendering up highly readable books that avoid both scholarly nitpicking and pop sensationalism.

Dark Star Rising is no exception and, for bonus points, it may be Lachman’s most timely book, given its relevance to the Age of Trump, which continues to unfold on a daily basis.

To briefly summarize, Lachman starts out pondering the possible causes behind Donald Trump’s unexpected and, for millions, perplexing election victory. Rather than focusing on theories about Russian meddling, Lachman notes several factors that may have eluded most people’s attention.

One is Trump’s decades of practicing Norman Vincent Peale’s power of positive thinking (most famously described in his best-selling book of that title). Trump’s father introduced his son to Peale’s perspective in the 1950s and initiated his lifelong attendance at Peale’s Manhattan church. Lachman explores the history of New Thought, the hugely influential spiritual movement that blossomed in the late nineteenth century and counted Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science and Ernest Holmes’s Science of Mind among its propagators. Peale was perhaps the most famous of its exponents.

In a nutshell, New Thought teaches that we create our own reality through the thoughts we cultivate; that our individual minds are a manifestation of the universal mind or intelligence; and that if we wish to be healthy, wealthy, and wise, we can attract those states through prayer, creative visualization, a positive attitude, and maintaining a faith that the bounty of life can be ours.

Lachman suggests that Trump’s insistence on his own positively defined reality, which strikes so many as delusional or sociopathic, is rather an ingrained case of positive thinking, which for the most part has served him well throughout his life (taking him to the White House, for example).

Lachman also notes the pervasive influence of postmodernist theories that have saturated academia and oozed into Western culture at large. Rejecting the grand narratives of historical and cultural explanation that have characterized modernity, postmodernism has championed the rise of a subjective fracturing of the notion of truth. This feeds into the present space, where consensus reality has broken down. Accusations of “fake news” arise from both left and right, exacerbating the sense that everything is just a matter of interpretation. “You create your own reality,” indeed.

 Lachman also examines the Internet-based phenomenon of meme propagation, which amounts to the rapid spread in social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and 4Chan) of catchphrases, images, and clusters of ideas that have widespread social influence. According to Lachman, these resemble the practices of Chaos Magick and the sigil-based magick of Austin Osman Spare. (This spelling of magick originated with occultist Aleister Crowley, who used it to distinguish occult magic from the sleight-of-hand variety. Chaos Magick uses unorthodox, often ad hoc, ritual forms and stresses the subjective nature of belief.) In other words, the “anything goes” meme propagators of the alt-right, who spread the cartoon image of Pepe the Frog in mockery of progressives, may have been unknowingly (or not) using an esoteric practice that harnesses the power of intention, will, and mental energy to produce real-world results. As unlikely as this may seem, Lachman makes a plausible case for it.

 The most extended section of Dark Star Rising ponders the influence of Traditionalism on current political trends. This includes both the Traditionalism of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon on the one hand and the more politicized version of Julius Evola on the other. Most curious among the defenders of Tradition in this sense is Alexander Dugin, a Russian intellectual who has bounced between supporting National Bolshevism, a Russian “red-brown” mixture of Stalinism and fascism, and Eurasianism, a geopolitical strategy that tries to cast Russia and its surrounding countries as an allied bloc. Given that Dugin identifies with the Traditionalist philosophy of Evola and savors the “positive” aspects of Stalinism and Nazism (whatever those may be), he is a controversial figure, to say the least. Lachman sees Dugin’s Eurasianism as a significant influence on Vladimir Putin’s attempts to restore Russia as a geopolitical force.

 But here too postmodernism may have the last laugh. If truth is up for grabs, and powerful rulers see fit to create their own realities, we may need to harness our own mental capacities and visualize a future that trumps those of both Putin and Trump.

In any event, Dark Star Rising is a stimulating read, and a provocative meditation on the hidden forces at work in our present juncture. Its timeliness, which is its greatest strength, may prove its greatest weakness a few years down the line. But for the time being, it serves as one of the most acute studies of the present moment.

 Jay Kinney

Jay Kinney was founder and publisher of Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions and is a frequent contributor to Quest.