Life After Death: The Burden of Proof [Paperback]

Starred Review. In India death is perceived very differently than in the West, "as a brief stopping point on an endless soul journey," says Chopra in this introduction to life beyond bodily existence. Chopra, a medical doctor and world leader in mind-body medicine as well as author of more than 45 books, now ventures to answer: what happens after we die? For Chopra, death deserves to be called miraculous, a "doorway to a far more important event—the beginning of the afterlife" and a mode of being that "can be as creative as living." Chopra effectively uses the classic Vedanta story of Savitri—a woman who comes home to find death, Lord Yama, waiting to take her husband, and who seeks the monk Ramana's advice to outwit death—to frame each chapter. Chopra grounds each topic in the long arc of this singular story, which is the perfect springboard for Chopra to introduce concepts such as Akasha (the highest stage a soul can attain) and Eternity within the Indian tradition (where we are beyond death, life, maleness, femaleness, and the experience of time). Chopra presents a fascinating account of life after death for Westerners that will certainly please his avid fans and draw in new readers as well. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

“A must read for everyone who will die.” —Candace B. Pert, Ph.D., author of Molecules of Emotion

“A penetrating and insightful investigation into the greatest mystery of existence. This is an important book because only by facing death will we come to a deeper realization of who we are.” —Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now

“If I had any doubts about the afterlife, I don’t have them anymore. Deepak Chopra has cast his inimitable light on the darkened corners of death. I think this is his greatest contribution yet.” —Marianne Williamson, author of The Gift of Change

“Deepak Chopra . . . takes us to the edge of our own deepest inner truth about life after death by sharing with us his vision and his wisdom, which, as always, is breathtaking, healing, and soul-opening.” —Neale Donald Walsch, author of Home with God: In a Life That Never Ends

“Deepak Chopra has written a masterpiece that is long overdue in our spiritual culture. Life After Death: The Burden of Proof is a bold and comforting guide into the afterlife.” —Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit and Sacred Contracts

“By marrying science and wisdom in Life After Death, Chopra builds his case for an afterlife in which our most essential self, the seer that observes our experiences in this temporary home that we call the self, uses the end of this lifetime to pass over into the next. This is an intellectual and spiritual tour de force.” —Professor Robert Thurman, Columbia University, author of Infinite Life and The Tibetan Book of the Dead


From the Hardcover edition.

What happens to the spirit after the body dies?

In Life After Death, Deepak Chopra draws on cutting-edge scientific discoveries and the great wisdom traditions to provide a map of the afterlife. He tells us there is abundant evidence that “the world beyond” is not separated from this world by an impassable wall; in fact, a single reality embraces all worlds, all times and places.

“A must-read for everyone who will die.”
—Candace B. Pert, Ph.D., author of Molecules of Emotion

“A penetrating and insightful investigation into the greatest mystery of existence. This is an important book because only by facing death will we come to a deeper realization of who we are.”
—Eckhart Tolle, author of A New Earth and The Power of Now

“If I had any doubts about the afterlife, I don’t have them anymore. Deepak Chopra has cast his inimitable light on the darkened corners of death. I think this is his greatest contribution yet.”
—Marianne Williamson, author of The Age of Miracles and The Gift of Change

DEEPAK CHOPRA is the author of more than fifty books translated into more than thirty-five languages—including numerous New York Times bestsellers in both the fiction and nonfiction categories. Dr. Chopra is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, adjunct professor at the Kellogg School of Management, and a senior scientist with the Gallup Organization. He is founder and president of the Alliance for a New Humanity. Time magazine heralds Deepak Chopra as one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century and credits him as “the poet–prophet of alternative medicine.”

Memoir: The Life Beyond

While writing this book on the afterlife, I kept being drawn back to stories that I'd heard in India as a child. Parables are a powerful way to teach children, and many of the ones told to me have lasted all my life. So I decided to weave the book around tales of the kind I heard at home, around the temples, and at school, hoping that the reader would be enticed by a world where heroes battle darkness in order to emerge into the light.

In this case the hero is a woman, Savitri, and the enemy she must defeat is Yama, the lord of death. Yama shows up in her front yard one day, waiting to take away her husband the moment he returns from his work as a woodcutter. Savitri is terrified. What strategy could possibly turn Death away from his inexorable mission?

I had no trouble imagining these characters. I was frightened for Savitri and anxious to find out how her battle of wits with Death turned out. Their world flowed easily into my own, because the India of my childhood was not that far removed from ancient India. I want to take a moment to convey what death and the world beyond meant back then. It may seem like a very esoteric place. If so, you can come back to it after reading the main body of the book. However mysterious and exotic, here is where I began.

What was most magical in my childhood was transformation. Death itself was seen as a brief stopping point on an endless soul journey that could turn a peasant into a king and vice versa. With the possibility of infinite lifetimes extending forward and backward, a soul could experience hundreds of heavens and hells. Death ended nothing; it opened up limitless adventures. But at a deeper level, it's typically Indian not to crave permanence. A drop of water becomes vapor, which is invisible, yet vapor materializes into billowing clouds, and from clouds rain falls back to earth, forming river torrents and eventually merging into the sea. Has the drop of water died along the way? No, it undergoes a new expression at each stage. Likewise, the idea that I have a fixed body locked in space and time is a mirage. Any drop of water inside my body could have been ocean, cloud, river, or spring the day before. I remind myself of this fact when the bonds of daily life squeeze too tight.

In the West the hereafter has been viewed as a place akin to the material world. Heaven, hell, and purgatory lie in some distant region beyond the sky or under the earth. In the India of my childhood the hereafter wasn't a place at all, but a state of awareness.

The cosmos that you and I are experiencing right now, with trees, plants, people, houses, cars, stars, and galaxies, is just consciousness expressing itself at one particular frequency. Elsewhere in spacetime, different planes exist simultaneously. If I had asked my grandmother where heaven was, she would have pointed to the house we lived in, not only because it was full of love, but because it made sense to her that many worlds could comfortably inhabit the same place. By analogy, if you are listening to a concert orchestra, there are a hundred instruments playing, each occupying the same place in space and time. You can listen to the symphony as a whole or, if you wish, put your attention on a specific instrument. You can even separate out the individual notes played by that instrument. The presence of one frequency does not displace any of the others.

I didn't know it as a child, but when I walked around the crowded Delhi market where more humanity was packed into one bazaar than was possible to imagine, the world I couldn't see was even more crowded. The air that I breathed contained voices, car noises, bird songs, radio waves, X-rays, cosmic rays, and an almost infinite array of subatomic particles. Endless realities lay all around me.

Every frequency in nature exists simultaneously, and yet we experience only what we see. It's natural to fear what we can't see, and since death snatches a person out of sight, we react to it with fear. I certainly wasn't immune to this. The death of a pet made me anxious and sad; the death of my grandfather, which happened suddenly in the middle of the night, was devastating. My younger brother kept running around the house crying, "Where is he? Where is he?" It would be years before I realized that the correct answer was "Here and everywhere."

Different planes of existence represent different frequencies of consciousness. The world of physical matter is just one expression of a particular frequency. (Decades later, I was fascinated to read that according to physicists, there is a background hum to the universe that is so specific as to sound like the note B-flat, although it vibrates millions of times lower than human hearing.) In India a child would never hear such a complicated quasi-scientific idea, but we did hear about the five elements, or Mahabhutas: earth, water, fire, air, and space. These elements combined to form everything in existence, which sounds crude to someone versed in Western science, but it contained a valuable truth: All transformations come down to a few simple elements.

In the twentieth century Western science came to understand that all solid objects are actually made of invisible vibrations. In my childhood, solid things were seen to have a large portion of the earth element. To put it another way, solid things had dense vibrations, or vibrations on a lower plane. Vaporous things had a fine vibration, on a higher plane.

Just as there are different planes of material things, there are also different spiritual planes, a shocking notion to the pious Catholic brothers, mostly Irish, who were my teachers at school. To them the only spirit was the Holy Ghost that lived in heaven. We children were politic enough not to disagree, yet in our cosmos it only made sense that if the Earth was a dense spiritual world, there must be higher spiritual planes, known to us as Lokas, which in Western mystical circles became known as "astral planes." There are an almost infinite number of astral planes, divided into a higher and lower astral world, and even the lowest ones vibrate at a higher frequency than the material world.

Long ago the West gave up trying to hear the music of the spheres, but in India it is believed that a person with finely tuned consciousness can go inward and actually hear the vibration of various higher planes. In the astral plane you can see your own body, for instance, yet it might change in age from moment to moment.

In the lower astral planes we find clairvoyance, telepathy, and other refinements of the five senses, as well as ghosts, disembodied souls, and spirits that for one reason or another are "stuck." As a child I was certain that when a cat or dog paused to assess the air, it saw something I couldn't. So it came as no surprise to later read, in various texts both Eastern and Western, that lower astral planes sometimes sensed by humans in higher states of awareness are often sensed by animals. Nor was I surprised to meet a psychiatry resident who told me that if the hospital room was dimly lit enough, he could see--on the very edge of visibility--when the soul left a dying person. Every Indian child devours comic books about the exploits of various heroes who fought their battles in faraway Lokas. Slipping in and out of material existence was our version of traveling to outer space. Our comic book heroes would come across thought forms and thought clouds, astral bodies traveling during sleep, astral colors and auras. All these are vibrations in the lower astral plane.

In the Indian tradition every physical body is assigned an accompanying astral body. Your astral body is a complete mirror of your physical body; it has a heart, liver, arms, legs, a face, etc., but since it operates at a higher frequency, most people are unaware of it. During life, the physical body provides a garment for the soul; it gives it the appearance of being localized in the material world. In death, as the physical body begins to disintegrate, the departing soul enters an astral plane that corresponds to its existence on the material plane, the frequency that corresponds most closely to its former life.

The general notion that you go where you belong rested easily in my mind back then. I imagined dogs going to dog heaven, and people who loved dogs joining them. I imagined bad people no longer hurting anyone except themselves because they were isolated in a kind of karmic jail. This was consoling, an assurance that the good people who loved me but were now gone lived in a place of goodness. But my view had limitations. I was never sure whether my wise grandfather met his wise grandfather in the hereafter, who showed him how to proceed, or if that job was carried out by angels, or enlightened spirits. Much later when I began to research karma I found that after we die, we remain self-motivated. A soul moves according to its desire from one astral plane to another, projecting as in a dream whatever sights and people, guides and astral entities it needs for its own advancement.

All these planes ultimately were imagined by Spirit, just as it imagined the material world. The Indian word for Spirit was Brahman, which is Everything, the one consciousness that fills every plane of existence. But Indians are relaxed about terminology, as befits a very old culture. We said God. Rama. Shiva. Maheshwara. The important thing wasn't the name but the concept of a single consciousness that creates everything and continues to do so in infinite dimensions at infinite speed. On the astral planes Spirit continues to play roles. There, one can actually see images of gods and goddesses, angels and demons. These are ultimately illusions, however, for each astral plane provides the experience of Spirit. Here, on our plane, we experience Spirit as matter, solidity. On the astral planes we experience subtle beings and the landscapes they inhabit--what we might call dreams.

The cosmos is nonlocal, that is, it can't be mapped as a location. After dea...

India's rich history of parables about the afterlife is the basis for this poetic audio on how life flows from one reality or type of awareness to the next. Fortified by his grasp of science as much as his spirituality, Chopra sounds eloquent as he explains these subtle ideas in a musical stream of rich and flowing sentences. Big ideas and unforgettable imagery from a variety of realms cut across the limits of traditional religious thought and are made more powerful by Chopra's deeply satisfying voice--a voice that still bubbles with the surprise of a young artist's discovery. His bottom line: The afterlife is less a reward or punishment than a continuation of the beliefs, expectations, and quality of awareness we adopt during our lifetimes. T.W. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.