The Dead Saints Chronicles: A Zen Journey Through the Christian Afterlife

by David Solomon

  3Jonathan Cott 1987. The Search for Omm Sety. Parktown, South Africa: Studio 33 Books, Random House Group, Ltd., UK, p. 167.

  4Mark NDE, #1859, 02.22.09, NDERF.org

  5Jo B NDE, #3706, 01.21.14, NDERF.org

  6Anna A NDE, #3784, 10.27.14, NDERF.org

  7R.O. Faulkner 1985. The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, (revised ed. C. A. R. Andrews). London: The British Museum Press. Compare the ancient Papyrus from the Book of Dead of Ani, Thebes, Egypt, 19th dynasty, 1275 BC, with a vignette from the Book of the Dead of Hunefer, also in the British Museum.

  8David O’s NDE, #73, 10.17.01, NDERF.org

  9Roger C’s NDE, #253, 04.02.03, NDERF.org

  10Peter N NDE, #3253, 02.14.13, NDERF.org

  11Carmen D NDE, #1902, 05.11.09, NDERF.org

  12Steve B’s NDE, #441, 07.24.04, NDERF.org

  — 11 —

  We Die in Character

  ~When it comes time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death. So when their time comes, they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death Song. And die like a hero going home. ~Chief Aupumut, Mohican Leader

  Among practicing Christians and metaphysical students alike, there is a common belief we become different people after we cross over to the other side. Based on the voluminous evidence brought back by the Dead Saints, the state of our consciousness and the personality we presently identify with is what we bring with us into the Afterlife. How we live our lives on Earth, will be how we enter the next world. The old cliché tells us we “can’t take it with us.” However, this applies only to the material world. We do in fact, take all of our loves and attributes, both positive and negative, with us. (See chapter 17, Heaven—The Kingdom of Light.)

  Ecclesiastes 11:3 likens us to a fallen tree when we die:

  Through all the aeons of eternity. If clouds are full of water, they pour rain on the Earth. Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where it falls, there it will lie.

  According to an English proverb written in 1678, we see the same sentiment:

  As a tree falls, so shall it lie

  As a man lives, so shall he die

  As a man dies, so shall he be

  Described in previous chapters, is the concept of the garden we have all created in our hearts and minds since Creation began. Our gardens grow and ideally become more beautiful each time we return to Earth University to learn one or more of the 12 pillars or lessons (each with their many electives) laid down by the Creator.

  In this chapter, I use the fallen Bonsai as metaphor. Unlike the wild tree in the forest, the Bonsai is a product of human actions and human decisions. Thus, if your fallen Bonsai is a product of anger, hate, self-centeredness, obsessions, psychological attachments, aberrations and deformities your heavenly destination will be affected. Even after a successful Life Review and Judgment, Steve witnesses other souls who struggle with actions and negative habits. These became “chains” and prevented them from moving forward:

  They, like myself had departed from our physical world for the other side. But, because of their ignorance in refusing to forfeit their negative emotional and physical energies and attachments to the world they were not permitted to continue beyond this point… ‘In other words, by use of their own free will they refused to break the chains that bound them to this world. And consequently due to that they had to remain in this place that some refer to as ‘Hell’ until they came to terms with whatever it was that was holding them back, and then agreed to let go of it.1

  Even attachments to our physical bodies can affect our Bonsai character. How do we think we will respond when we die and find ourselves wandering in the Afterlife? Will we be so attached to our physical bodies that upon losing them, we will become enraged…as one Dead Saint found himself?

  I tried again and again attempting to use any part of my body, but I seemed to no longer have a body. I became enraged and soon afterward I could see other beings in my same state and they were angry too. I could feel them searching for a place to go, and that they were envious of anyone with a body. I thought to myself, this is Hell, and I said to whoever it was that was watching me that I didn’t want to be like that, and suddenly I could feel I was curled up in a fetal position and I could see a tunnel with a Light at the end.2

  I have noticed this “fallen Bonsai” state in dozens of blogs on GBM brain cancer boards. Good and bad tendencies are amplified during a terminal illness. Unkind, selfish people become more selfish, while normally positive people stay positive. Your Bonsai’s shape and personality doesn’t change because it fell and died.

  Amy’s NDE completely illustrates this retention of personality after death. Since she was 17, she had been having trouble with chronic pain brought on by fibromyalgia. It had become a tortured existence-sound sleep was next to impossible to achieve. Often she was able to sleep only in 15-minute increments. She was constantly tired. Her doctor prescribed a medication with terrible side effects. Even in the tiniest amount, her nose would swell and her breathing became too shallow. It was scary and uncomfortable, but it gave her relief from pain. She informed her doctor she believed she was having an allergic reaction to the medication. He chuckled and told her that her body simply needed to “get used to the meds.” The small dosage is so low it couldn’t possibly do anything.’

  He asked her to take three whole pills. She took a quarter of one to try it out. One night, after a week of brutal pain and no deep sleep, she considered the doctor’s prescription of three whole pills and decided to take them all and trust him. She went to bed after taking all three, and within minutes felt herself begin to go numb. Her nasal passages swelled up and soon she could not breathe at all. She struggled to get air in, but could not. She felt encased in her body as if mummified. Unable to call out for help, it only took a few minutes before the struggle was over. She felt a strong vacuum-like suction coming from the top of her head, followed by an absolute sense of relief. She realized there was no longer a need to breathe and lost the feeling of her own physical body.

  The next thing she knew she was traveling along with other souls through a tunnel very quickly. It’s a long story, but it is a compelling account of the tenacity of our earthly personalities post-death:

  The next thing I remember is moving through some kind of a portal along with many others. It felt like I was in some kind of a waiting room situation. With the many others coming through, I was curious, and began to watch them move in. I watched a group of about three teenage boys come through who had an energy and way about them I felt as abrasive. As I was

  looking at them, it came to me they had died in a car accident where they had all been drunk.

  A lot of others came through. I didn’t feel the people were either good or bad. It just felt like a room of normal people, unique to themselves. This room or area did not feel very bright to me, and despite the fact I was receiving somehow, information that these people were dead, I hadn’t fully accepted that, because everything felt so real and natural. So alive. Nothing felt shocking or strange. I was very curious about what it was all about.

  A young woman told me how she had regretted not ‘hanging in there.’ How it ‘would have been better to stay’ and work out her issues and continue learning. But she also told me to, ‘Tell them how free I feel now.’

  …I remember we had congregated into a bigger and brighter room or area where there were many others present. Everyone was so busy talking and getting to know each other. It felt similar to a scene in a high school cafeteria. People even seemed to want to quickly find others they related to or felt at ease with, and there were even little groups that began to form.

  At a certain interval, I noticed a man move into the room. He looked at me and I realized he was a kind of teacher or guide for this group. I knew he had died in a truck
accident. He had been a truck driver by profession. He was a Latino man. He told me he was not a perfect man, but he had mastered humility. I could feel this when I was with him.

  He explained, he had come to help teach the importance of humility to this group of people, because they had been in some ways self-absorbed in their lives, to the degree where this had blocked their own vision and progression. They hadn’t been able to learn vital lessons and had aborted their own lives, unwittingly for all I knew. He seemed to be telling me in one way or another, these people had committed suicide—but without using that exact terminology.

  This made me wonder, as I hadn’t noticed anyone in the room who had hung themselves, intentionally overdosed on drugs, shot themselves, or things like that. I was a bit confused by how the term, ‘suicide’ could come to me with these people. I came to understand that the casual disregard for life, or flagrant and selfish risks one might take, whether involved in drug use, drunk driving, or any kind of action that could essentially lead to one’s own demise is what is considered, in a way, like suicide, at least where I was. When a human takes their own life in desperation, due to emotional or mental imbalances, physical agony, or depression so severe, I understood that as being similar to when a very old person gets so tired of hanging on, that they will themselves to go, simply stop eating and breathing, etc. This is not punished, so to speak, on the Other Side. It is different. It is just the human, willing themselves out of this life cycle. I never witnessed punishment or condemnation.

  The teacher continued to offer more information. He explained how in aborting their own lives, these people would have a rest period, but that learning what they needed to learn would be needed and the process would not be easy. I came to understand as much as they were taught and infused with good and helpful information there, and even if they agreed wholeheartedly with what they needed to learn, that learning without a body is like learning to get over an addiction to drugs with no opportunity to do the drugs! Or like learning to love one’s own enemy without having enemies to deal with. He explained how he needed to teach this group of people how vital it is to get beyond themselves—how to lose their obsession or fixation with themselves—how they will be stagnant in all progress if they cannot unchain themselves from their own ankles.

  He shook his head, smiling slightly, and implied there was still very little he could help them with, without their bodies. His service was to help instill more of a passion for what he had to teach, strong enough that it would leave a seed of Light that might stay with them through their sojourn. I don’t know if he taught by talking or just being there as an example. I never experienced him teaching the way we might imagine it done here. I know that just by being in his presence helped me to connect with what he was, though.

  When this particular teacher was transmitting information to me, I felt a jolt of sudden anxiety with my next wondering.

  I queried, ‘Who are these people?’

  He came in more clearly, stating telepathically, ‘They are deceased. They have died.’

  I remember demanding point blank, technically speaking, ‘If these people are dead, what am I?!’

  I don’t know why it took me so long to grasp this fact. (But then again, time wasn’t as it is here, so I am not sure it was “long”.) He explained gently, ‘You are in-between. You are as if in a coma. There will still be life in you. You are not the same.’

  With that, I started upward. I wanted out of there, then. As I moved toward the corner of the room to leave, at least a couple of the teenage boys suddenly lunged at me with an energy like, ‘She’s alive. Touch her!’ They were reaching toward me and trying to pull me back toward them. It seemed almost as if they were desiring sexual contact or energy. This of course had me all the more determined, I was leaving.

  So I now believe some of the deceased, if not all, still have many earthly or worldly desires. That they go out and arrive, the same human natured beings they were in life. Looking back at that part of my experience, I was astounded by how earthly people can be on the Other Side. One might expect upon entering through death’s door, there would be sudden enlightenment—that maybe everyone would realize absolute goodness and choose Light and a fresh start, possibly becoming more angelic and purified, but in that place, everyone came in exactly as they’d been before.3

  The Swedish philosopher and scientist Emanuel Swedenborg claimed to be able to visit the Afterlife at will. From his Afterlife journeys, he discovered:

  A person’s strongest love is revealed at death. The love for wisdom and service; or the love of money, evil and corruption. Everyone has a considerable number of loves, but they all go back to their strongest love which a person makes one with —or taken all together —comprise it.4

  During several of Swedenborg’s after-death communications, he would witness people dying and watch their soul journeys in the Afterlife. He stated immediately following death, there is a period of self-discovery where they have “the same face, speech, and spirit and consequently, they have much the same moral and civic life” when they cross over, but eventually (for some, immediately) the social masks worn by people on Earth dissolve away and the true self is revealed. All fear, anger, sadness, and negative emotions vanish.5

  According to the Dead Saints, the Heaven or Hell we create within us and around us, regardless of religious belief (or unbelief), our personality, our Bonsai character, is taken with us into the Afterlife. The loneliness or remorse we create in our minds and hearts is brought with us. Whether born-again Christian, devout practitioner of another faith, atheist or agnostic, it doesn’t matter. Our psychological state of mind and heart, not our religion (or lack of it), determines our Afterlife experience. The anger or love in our hearts, the forgiveness or lack thereof we feel, set the stage for the Realms of Heaven (or darkness) we will inescapably experience.

  The good news is, if you are reading this, you are not dead yet.

  Your Bonsai tree can be pruned and trained in a more becoming direction before it falls. You can become more Christ-like. I experienced a beautiful garden illustration of this concept in a dream I had on October 18, 2015. In the center of my living room, there was a beautiful 12x8 foot desert sand garden bordered on all sides by a shin-high Japanese/Chinese carved, wooden fence and capped with wooden three-inch balls at the corners. On one end of the desert garden, a windswept black pine Bonsai about 18 inches long, flowed partially over the 8-inch-high sand dunes with sharp windswept edges, which were sculpted to look exactly like the Arabian desert. I marveled how it could have been miniaturized to look so picture perfect, as if God sculpted it, not man. It was the most peaceful Bonsai garden I had ever seen. ~Chronicle 858

  The windswept Bonsai tree and the peaceful desert represented me, but the only one who can carve a perfect, peaceful desert is God. The dream became for me a Zen lesson about dying in character peacefully and, no matter what, no matter how we die, we are loved.

  —

  Endnotes

  1Steve B’s NDE, #441, 07.24.04, NDERF.org

  2David A probable NDE, #1411, 12.17.07, NDERF.org

  3Amy C NDE, #2386, 10.09.10, NDERF.org

  4Emanuel Swedenborg 2012. Heaven & Hell, Swedenborg Foundation Press, USA, p. 493.

  5Ibid. p. 493.

  Part II

  Afterlife Bonsai

  My stepfather Ray visited me in a vivid dream at 3:00 am, the day after he died. Knowing his time was near, I’d been praying that while alive, he would help me put together his Memorial Service. In the dream, a bright Light illuminated the background behind Ray’s face. He was absolutely beaming and appeared thirty years younger. He had this message for me to deliver at his Memorial Service.

  ‘We need to love one another more.’

  — 12 —

  Is our Mission Finished?

  ~Delynn talked in her sleep again saying, “ooooh, it’s your time!!! Wow!!!
I asked her while she was sleep talking, “Whose time?” She said, “Your time.” ~Chronicle 428

  Kiros.

  Momento Mori.

  The Greek and Latin words for our appointed time to die.

  Are we resigned to this Mohammedan fate? —to die at a particular moment, on a particular day?1 The Bible tells us in Psalm 139:16 “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” So apparently God knows exactly when, where, and how we will die. Does this mean our fate is sealed? Does this mean we have absolutely no control over when we will die? I wondered.

  Near-death experiences are classic examples, where we witness a soul’s opportunity when they must make a decision to stay in Heaven, or return back to their body here on Earth. Obviously, we only hear the thousands of stories where the Dead Saints decide to return! In nearly every case, those who have had near-death experience are told “It is not your time,” and then, they are sent back or sometimes forcibly thrown back into their body.

  Recently, my father’s longtime friend Dick who died of a heart attack came to my father in a vivid dream a few weeks after he died. In the dream, my father asked Dick why he passed over and Dick replied, “Well, I guess it was my time.” A strange thing to hear if it was not true. This then, becomes the eternal question. What determines if it is our time to die?

  A Dead Saint describes a very interesting situation where Earl is told he must go back, but wonders why his friend Robert has to stay in Heaven:

  Earl, it’s not your time. You have to go back. You have to endure. You must continue with your life.

  Disappointed, Earl asked, ‘Why do I have to continue on? You didn’t.’

  ‘You still have work to do. I squandered much of my time,’ Robert said. ‘You still have work to finish. You have to keep on.’