Publisher Description

A modern exploration of what happens after death, uniting spirituality with philosophy, biology, neuroscience, and rich examples of afterlife experiences. What happens to us after we die? It remains perhaps the single most important question we can ask, one that still inspires thousands to turn to the Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead for hope and comfort. But we can no longer rely solely on ancient wisdom for truly useful answers about our own mortality. We must find explanations for the afterlife in the fruits of modern experience. Critically acclaimed author Ptolemy Tompkins grew up in a family where questions about the shape and fate of the human soul were discussed on a daily basis, but it was only after his father's passing that he began to consider death in a genuinely concrete way. In this boldly unconventional book--part memoir, part history of ideas, part road map to what might truly await us--Tompkins approaches the question of the afterlife with refreshing intimacy. Weaving together philosophy, science, stories of near-death experiences, and theology, he offers readers a new perspective on death and comes to an amazing and uplifting conclusion: that, somehow, human consciousness lives on.

Author Biography

Ptolemy Tompkins is a former editor at Guideposts Magazine and the author of seven books. His writing has been featured in Beliefnet, Harper's, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Best Spiritual Writing, and The Best American Spiritual Writing.

Review

"The Modern Book of the Dead is a treasure trove of insight into the Afterlife, and its consistency over millennia. Ptolemy Tompkins has delivered a remarkable synthesis of this crucially important reality that is fundamental to comprehending our existence."--Eben Alexander, MD, author of Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey through the Afterlife (2012)
"A fascinating, impassioned hybrid of memoir and divine supposition."
-- "Kirkus Reviews"

Review Quote

" The Modern Book of the Dead is a treasure trove of insight into the Afterlife, and its consistency over millennia. Ptolemy Tompkins has delivered a remarkable synthesis of this crucially important reality that is fundamental to comprehending our existence."

Excerpt from Book

1 A Long, Personal, but Necessary Introduction Explaining How I Came to Write This Book Few kids like going to bed. But when I was a kid, I really didn''t like it. That each day should have to come to an end with the closing of the door of my room and the (usually) all too long wait for unconsciousness to arrive seemed not only unfair; it seemed downright absurd. The darkness and separation that night brought with it filled me with a pure childish anxiety that I can still conjure up today. It was while lying in bed as a young child and waiting for sleep to come that I remember doing my earliest significant thinking about death. One night, at about age five, I awoke in a cold sweat from a dream in which the people I knew had appeared as one-dimensional paper cutouts. My father, my mother, my teachers--everyone was reduced, in the dream, to these simple paper shapes, each wearing a single, static expression, some smiling, some frowning, but all equally shallow, all equally empty of true human presence. In its simple, straightforward way, this dream summed up all the deepest anxieties I had about life as a kid. The notion that the human world was really just a surface event with nothing real beneath it, that the people I knew and the world I lived in had, in fact, no true or lasting substance... Wasn''t that what the concept of death--impossibly remote and hard to understand, yet at the same time hugely, intimately close and ever-present--really suggested? The more I thought about death as a kid, the more strange it seemed to me that most people in the world around me had so little to say about it--or at least, so little of any real usefulness. In 1970, when I was eight, my mother read E. B. White''s children''s book Charlotte''s Web aloud to me. At the end of the book, when Charlotte the spider died, I struggled to get my head around the idea that Wilbur the pig could have gotten any happiness or consolation from the fact that Charlotte had left a nest of baby spiders behind to keep him company. Babies or no babies, Charlotte was still gone. Wasn''t that what really counted? That same year, I began suffering a new series of nightmares turning around the theme of being kidnapped. In most of these scenarios, a group of malevolent but otherwise unidentifiable men crept up on me while I was sleeping, stuffed me into a sack, and dragged me away to a cabin in the middle of a dark forest. In an effort to find out what lay at the root of these fantasies, my father enlisted the help of a Scientologist friend of his named Rebecca. For several months in the spring of that year, I made regular visits to a small office in downtown Washington, DC, where Rebecca hooked me up to an E-meter--a lie-detector-like device that Scientologists use to measure electrical fluctuations at the surface of the skin. Over the course of half a dozen of these visits, Rebecca attempted, through a series of questions and a close study of the E-meter''s reactions to my answers, to lead me back to my previous lifetimes on earth. For, my father maintained, it was during one of those lifetimes that the event or events that were secretly causing my kidnapping anxieties had actually occurred. A writer who specialized in occult and esoteric subjects (1971''s Secrets of the Great Pyramid and 1973''s The Secret Life of Plants are, today, his chief enduring claims to fame), my father wasn''t a card-carrying Scientologist. But he was a great believer in the idea--common to Scientology, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and many of the other new or semi-new spiritual movements that seized so many people''s attention in the sixties and seventies--that the human soul preexisted the body, and will outlive it as well. My father revered the great early architects of new age thought. People like Helena Blavatsky (the controversial Russian mystic and founder of Theosophy), Rudolf Steiner (the Austrian philosopher and educator and founder of Anthroposophy), Edgar Cayce (the American clairvoyant famous for predictions he made while in a state of trance), and Scientology''s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, came up on a daily basis in our household. Different though the teachings of these thinkers were in certain of their specifics, my father believed that they had all made important contributions to a new way of looking at human beings and their place in the universe: a way that was, he felt, going to have a growing influence on the hopelessly confining antispiritual view of the world that more and more people in the West had been abiding by ever since the scientific revolution had occurred three hundred years earlier. Like many early enthusiasts of what was just then starting to be called new age thought, my father was strongly suspicious of conventional science, believing that most scientists spent most of their time covering up the real truth about the world rather than revealing it. He distrusted the proponents of traditional religious faith--most especially Christianity--even more, and never missed an opportunity to warn me against believing what the more conventional voices of wisdom in the world I lived in (teachers, school friends'' parents, people on TV) had to say about the way things really worked. To my father''s way of thinking, conventional science and conventional faith were both roadblocks to experiencing who and what each of us really is: a free spirit living in a cosmos that is not purely material, but material and spiritual: a cosmos that humankind was on the verge of seeing and experiencing in a new and infinitely larger way. At the center of this new picture of the universe was a vision of the human being as an essentially spiritual entity: a being that had taken on a physical body as part of a process of growth, or evolution, that had begun far in the past and would continue far into the future. That humans were more than their present physical bodies wasn''t simply interesting news to my father, it was revolutionary news. For when one took this view, human life was transformed in a moment from the painful, puzzling, and generally pointless exercise it so often seemed to be into a story that is going somewhere. When you held to the kind of worldview that my father and his new age friends did, at no single moment, no matter how futile and pointless life might seem, was it ever really so. Even on the bleakest days and in the lowest of circumstances, one need never feel totally lost or totally without hope. Instead, even at those points when life seemed to make least sense, one was simply like a football player so disoriented in the confusion of a scrimmage that he has momentarily lost sight of the end zone. "We''re not bodies," my father liked to say, summing up this entire new view of life and the human place within it: "we have bodies." My father (correctly, I would later discover) pointed out that the basic notion of reincarnation--that is, that we are souls, not bodies, and that as such we have each inhabited more than one of the latter over the course of time--had been the norm rather than the exception for most of human history. It was still an accepted reality for the cultures of the Far East, and even the more mystical elements of Judaism and Islam continued to make room for it as well. When you got down to it, it was really only Christianity--that most ideologically thorny of all the world religions--that had said a definite "no" to the possibility that we are born more than once upon the earth. And yet it was possible--indeed, said my father, even probable--that in their earliest days even Christians had embraced this doctrine as well. Jesus himself, said my father, knew that we move from body to body, taking birth time and again. But for various reasons, the early Church fathers had proclaimed the doctrine of rebirth a heresy, thus removing from Christianity one of the most genuinely useful tools to help us earthbound humans make sense of how and why we had ended up getting (momentarily) trapped in the web of material existence to begin with. Instead of spiritual evolution, instead of a cosmos where people dropped into and came out of earthly incarnation like a line of butterfly-stroking swimmers gracefully plunging into and surging out of the water as they moved down the length of an Olympic-size swimming pool, Christians believed that each of us had come to birth once and only once, created out of nothing at conception and consigned, after a single, short, and (usually) all too painful and confusing life, either to a choking, smoke-filled hell, or to an almost equally undesirable heaven full of clouds, halos, and not much else; a heaven where bad people weren''t allowed and where good people went for all eternity--to do what, exactly, it was hard to say. I had actually been named for one of those early, reincarnation-espousing Christians. Though people tend to assume that my namesake is the ancient Greco-Roman astronomer famous for proclaiming earth the center of the universe, my father always gave a mildly derisive laugh when people suggested this. In fact, I got my name from Ptolemy the Gnostic, an obscure metaphysical philosopher whom my father happened to have been lying in bed reading about when my mother went into labor next to him in early May 1962. "Here comes Ptolemy!" my father had said cheerfully and decisively, shutting the book and reaching for his car keys. Not that my father thought my mother was necessarily giving birth to that one and the same Ptolemy he was reading about in his book. But my father would have been the first to point out that she certainly might have been. For like many advocates of the theory of reincarnation, he believed that we choose our parents each time we l

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