To The Best Of Our Knowledge; The Afterlife

From PRI, Public Radio International, it's to the best of our knowledge, I'm Jim Fleming. Life's a bitch and then you die. It's a tired joke, but it captures our outrage, at the idea that someday we'll cease to exist. A more sophisticated response might be faith in scientific rationalism, or for that matter, religion. Every creed has its own dogma concerning the afterlife. But sometimes even revealed truth has to evolve to match the temper of the times. Just last year a story about the nature of eternity appeared in an obscure Italian journal. A few days later the Pope gave a speech and extinguished the flames of hell. Oh, said the church. Hell still exists, but it's a state of being, not a real place. Thomas Grume, a teacher and theologian at Boston College, spends his life making sense of matters like this. Talking with Steve Paulson, Grume pointed out that the new vision of hell doesn't change church doctrine. We start out with the conviction that God calls all humankind into a covenant, into a loving

relationship with God's self, and with each other. Now, at the same time God gives us free will, therefore we are capable of saying no to this invitation. And when people say no to it, then there's a certain logic in saying, well, God respects their choice. And so if somebody rejects this outreach by God into their lives, into a loving relationship, and lives their lives in isolation, or in bitterness, and hatred, and destruction, or whatever, then in a sense if they die in that state, it's not that God condemns them, but rather that they have chosen to reject God. So it's not that God condemns us, but a person in that state would have condemned themselves. Then you begin the question, well, what would that state look like after death? That's when the artist and so on take over. And I think the Pope in making that statement was trying to correct probably a certain undo imagination and exaggeration that Catholics theologians and preachers certainly have made over the years, very often terrifying

people of the specter of eternal damnation and this horrendous suffering. But weren't there certain virtues of terrifying people? Hell was a scary place. If you just go back to those images of Dante, and if you're just talking about being cut off from God, I mean if someone's an unrepentant sinner, then it would seem like there's not too much to worry about. Well, somebody said to me recently that the preachers preaching on the fiery brimstones of hell, we're almost analogous to contemporary horror movies. You know what I mean? The people get us got a certain charge out of them. They were almost entertaining like they scared people, they got people, they rush of adrenaline, the people can get it a horror movie. And yet they were reassured that, but you're on the right path so you're not going there. So there was a good deal of enjoyment almost at times. And the other hand, it also brought home to people this realization. And I would hope that a contemporary understanding would still retain the realization that indeed there are responsibilities that the human person is called, into profound social, personal, historical

responsibilities, and that there could be hell to pay for failing in these responsibilities. In other words, I don't want us to go to the other extreme of making a sound as if our lives are inconsequential, as if we can choose as we please, and have no consequence, that in a sense there are consequences, even eternal consequences, to making the wrong choices. Well, I'm still trying to wrap my mind around this concept of hell as being somehow separate from God. Can you be as concrete as you can to describe what that feeling, what that state of being would be? And the answer was an answer that most theologians hate to give, Steve, but we don't know. I mean, you begin to imagine, I have a friend who often says to me, I believe in hell, because I've been there. Now he has. He has suffered from drug addiction, from alcohol addiction, has bottomed out in his life, has found himself dreadfully alienated. At a certain point,

before he began his recovery, from his family, from his wife, his children, his parents, his brothers and sisters, indeed, from everybody and anybody, and he'd thrown himself into this dreadful isolation, that is as dour and as dour as one can imagine for the human heart. That's a dreadful state of suffering, now thank God, and by the grace of God, he turned his life around and has come back from that kind of isolation into community, into relationship, into right relationship, into loving relationship again. So maybe there in the life of any of our, in any of our lives of suffering and isolation and alienation, we have some inkling as to what hell, an eternity of that isolation and aloneness and self -absorption might be like. So you're really talking about loss of meaning and loss of love and being utterly alone forever. There's a great Chinese myth that describes the difference between heaven and hell, and this is as good a myth as any, because we are into symbol and myth when we start trying to image

it or describe it. But the Chinese tradition images it as this great huge monstrous banquet, where the very finest and best of food is on the table, and everybody sits around it, and the only difficulty is that the chopsticks are too long to feed oneself, that they're just so long that you can't possibly wheel them to put the food into one's own mouth, and the difference between heaven and hell is that the people in hell go on trying desperately to feed themselves and never can, because the chopsticks are too long, whereas heaven is where the people have figured out that each person is supposed to feed the person across from them. In other words, it's supposed to feed their neighbor, and the only difference between the two is that one goes on trying to be in isolation and the other is indeed eternal and loving relationship, and it's as good an image as we have. It's probably a richer image than the devils with tails and horns and hooves and trying to kick people back in when they jump out of the fire and so on. Well, I'm curious about the context of

this reinterpretation, especially as the Pope has laid it out, because, of course, the Catholic Church has had a lot of competition lately from, well, New Age religions, among other things, and if you start reading some of these New Age books, you hear about light and angels and bliss, and it seems pretty nice compared to what the Church had long talked about, the torment and suffering for all eternity. And I'm wondering if this is a way for the Catholic Church to improve its image, to kind of soften our notion of hell. Yes, and I think your question is a very reasonable one, but I would like to think that it is not. Catholicism has never had a tradition of literal interpretation of Scripture. I mean, the core of Revelation, Christian Revelation, is the universality of God's love. Now, that's what we should be preaching, but isn't there a basic paradox, because the concept of hell, even in this more metaphorical kind of way that you're describing, still

talks about condemning people for eternity in some way. And I guess the question is, why would a loving just God do that, even to the most horrible people? Yes, and then I go back to my opening statement that it wouldn't be a just and loving God who condemns anybody, but somebody could. This is the great mystery of human freedom. This is the extraordinary phenomenon of our own historical agency that we are actually capable of standing before God and saying no. And even saying an irrevocable, permanent, unwithdrawable no to God, that in this great final moment of ours we can make a fundamental option away from God. I think if you say that we cannot, then in a sense you've denied human free will. Now, however, having said that we are capable of doing that, I would certainly be of the opinion, although it's only a personal opinion, that why would any human being ever, in fact, irrevocably choose that? You have to grant the possibility of it just to

be logical and consistent to the principle of human free will, and that God never interferes with our free will, that God doesn't violate our choosing, but rather respects our choosing. Well, I'm still curious about why this change of thinking is happening now. Now, you say that maybe some people have gone overboard with the imagery of the flames leaping up in hell, but why at the new millennium is this old notion of hell kind of falling by the wayside? I think, and you see now, I wouldn't let it fall by the wayside too much. The old imaging of it falls by the wayside, but the Pope and his statement, very, very clear, that it's while it may not be a place of physical sulfuric corporeal suffering, that it is a state, it's a state of rejection from God, an alienation from God, and in that sense, then you begin to try to describe what is it like, is it painful? Well, within human analogy, that's about the only thing we, way we can talk about it, is to talk about it as painful. In other words, I don't think the church intends to fall too far away from the

notion that we are held responsible for how we live. If the church updates hell is heaven next, are we going to throw out those visions of cherubs and frothy clouds and heartbeats? Again, a great question, Steve. I mean, is heaven really a bunch of cherubs chirping and singing Alleluia and playing on harps? I hope not. I don't know, it sounds pretty good to me. I think we get terribly boring after a while. How long can you sing Alleluia without getting bored to death? You know what I mean? And these little cherubi angels flitten about the place, they don't seem very interesting characters either. I want my old friends there, you know? Old sinners like myself that finally made it home. We're always, as the good book says, I'll just a little less than the angels, and yet like the beasts that perish. And we live in this limit situation between being tremendously human and being tremendously divine, an ultimate and transcendent. And we live these lives with a givenness and a thrownness to them. And yet we have

this extraordinary potential of divinity, of becoming likened to our God, of course, the opening story from the book of Genesis. Chapter 1 says that God made us in God's own image and likeness, and sends us forth from God's presence to live our lives in covenant and right relationship with God and with each other to be drawn home to God's presence again. What is that like, Steve? I make a living trying to explain these things, and I have to say I really don't know. It's Thomas Groom, who teaches theology and education at Boston College. His latest book is called Educating for Life, a spiritual vision for every teacher and parent. Steve Paulson spoke with him. Forget

updating the imagery. In 1917, the Bolsheviks simply abolished heaven and hell. For the next 70 years, the people of the Soviet Union found what satisfaction they could in the dreary reality of the workers' paradise. Today, their economy is in shambles, and the environment's a catastrophe, but at least they have hell and heaven. They can think as they please. For some of them, especially the ethnic Russians, that means a return to the Orthodox Christian church. Even in Siberia, writer Colin Thubrin found that the old traditions offer believers something communism never could. There's a feeling, I think, among the Orthodox, that even to enter the church service, the Eucharist, is in some sense to be in the Antirum to heaven. It's felt as being a sort of fortest of heaven, hence the immense richness of the Fistli Vagalia, the great globular crowns, the banked iconostasis, you know, the screen that separates the

congregation from the holy place, banked with these glittering icons. It all is meant to be some sort of idea of what the future world is going to be like. I suppose, though, it must be very appealing. The richness of it, the magic of it, the difference from day to day life must lend it a greater sense of reality, if you will, then it might have in a place where outside life was less drab. I think you're right. I mean, it's a sort of a leaf from the hard sort of materialism of outside life, the aesthetic drabness, and the sheer stress on the material. There is a fascinating story that you write about that seems to me to have nothing of anything to do with the Orthodox Church. In the tiny village of Potolov, you visited, you came across a part of the cemetery that showed a vision of the afterlife that I'd never heard of before. There were broken reindeer skulls and curious things hanging. Can you tell us about that?

Yes, well, this was a village. It surprised me to. It was a village, half Russian, but the other half were Ense, who are a Turkic people, part of the old, shamanistic, animistic peoples of North Siberia. I was in this very remote village, and I went across to the cemetery the last day I was there, which was on the other side of the hill from the village. First I saw the rather depressing communist graves, you see, which has simply got a red star stamped on them. And the communist funeral services tend to be, they can't fall back on anything they couldn't in the past, really fall back on anything except invocations to patriotism and that somebody's led a good life and so on. Although they were gilded around, if you like, with some sense of ceremony and something grander, but the substance of them could only be atheist. In those, of course, no afterlife at all was promised. No afterlife at all, but they of course wanted somehow the trappings of something grander than simply a body slipping back into the earth. But then I came to an area of

the graveyard, which was quite big, and on all the graves were heaped reindeer skulls and antlers, and reindeer skulls were hanging in the trees. And on every grave was an enamel pot or kettle, which had been turned upside down and ritually gouged, ritually destroyed. I remember, too, on a child's grave was a doll, which had been very carefully dismembered and laid back on the grave, and all the sledges which had carried the dead there had been broken. It's kind of a horrifying picture that you've drawn. It must have been frightening. It was odd. It was just sort of amusing, although I could dismember having read something about such a thing from years before. And when I, before I left the village, I asked an old herdsman about this, who seemed to be somebody who did dimly remember the traditions. And he said, well, you see, in our ancient beliefs, the future world, the world

after death is the opposite of this one. Things upside down here are the right way up over there. Things the right way up over here are upside down over there. Everything is the opposite, so that the dead will find it. You spent some time among the Yakut in eastern Siberia, and I gather they have a rather complex idea about the soul. Can you tell us about that? Yes, a little. It's an idea that's evolved rather artificially from a multitude of cults which are half forgotten. And it's been synthesized, not by shamans of whom there seemed to be none, and not by peasants out in the countryside, but by intellectuals in universities. I met a girl there who said, oh, you know, she was all despised all these. She said she had never known that people had so many gods as being produced by these university professors. And there was, at the summer solstice, a great festival among the Yakut people in which

everybody would pour out into the streets of the capital, and you would have a good time. And she said there was a shaman who led this festival, a white shaman, and I said, gosh, you know, where did they find a shaman? And she said, oh, he's not a real shaman, he's an actor. And I'm afraid this was the sort of state they had come down to. I think one of the, sorry, I think one of the troubles was that when the shamans were virtually eliminated by Stalin, that it was like taking away the people's memory, the memory of the spirits, the memory of the ancestors, because only the shamans knew it. You did meet one shaman, though, who at least finally revealed to you some of his shamanism. Who was he? He was an old man down in Tuva, which is traditionally a great place for shamans there, even at the beginning of the Stalin era, there were 700 shamans, many of them women. So Tuva was sort of famous for shamanism, and I went there in the hope of

finding somebody. They had reinstituted, since the freedom that has come with the demise of communism, they had instituted a college or an association of shamans, as they called it. When I went in here, I found that the shamans were suspiciously young, and they seemed simpler to be giving people short sales and getting money for it. And I sought in vain for anybody there that I felt a sort of instinctive confidence in. But luckily, I had been given a letter with some money for a shaman who was said to be a true one, the money was for the sale of a yak. And somebody had begged me to find this sale of shaman, who was described as the one sort of surviving shaman, and deliver the money to him. I duly tracked him down in a little hut. And the Soviet propaganda is so harsh on the shamans, you know, they always staged them as sort of black magicians of great teller and corruption. And the door was opened by this little sweet, very still man who I should meet in. And he was making

herbal medicines in his room, which he shared their different properties with me about what they could do. And I began to feel that he was just a medicine man. I thought, you know, he's not really a shaman. And I edged towards asking him about things. And he was reluctant to talk about that spirit journey, which the shamans were said to make into the underworld. But he knew what I was after, and he disappeared behind a little curtain clodding off the other part of his room. And beyond it, I heard this suddenly, this tremendous boom of a drum. And when I looked in, he was dressed in his shamanic regalia, which were these tremendous raven feathers, springing out of a bank of silver discs around his forehead. And this long black robe with a lab that tassels on it. And this flail with which he was flailing away the spirits. He said, I beat them, I beat them until they flee away. And above all the drum, which was always the great instrument for the shaman, this mesmerizing sound of sort of thudding hoofbeats or mist. And he realized that this is what I had been

wanting to see all the time. He was reluctant to talk about literally spirit journeys. But he was a practicing shaman who had a little shrine of his own secretly up in the hills. And he said that they were almost all gone now, the shamans. There was one old lady, he said, of almost 90, who he thought was still alive. But otherwise, he said they have disappeared, and people, he said, have so much need of us. Colin Thugren writes about the shaman and many other fascinating and forgotten Russians in his book In Siberia. It chronicles his odyssey by plain, train, automobile, and on foot across the vast spaces of the old Soviet Union. Later on, novelist Ambi Frute takes on

the skeptics. Just because something can't be touched or measured does not mean that it's not equally plausible. I'm Jim Fleming, it's to the best of our knowledge from PRI Public Radio International. Mary Allen never gave a thought to the afterlife, until the day she got home and found police cars outside. Her boyfriend, the young, intelligent, funny, alcoholic, and drug addicted, Jim Beeman, had committed suicide. Allen told Steve Paulson she was desperate to talk to

Jim one last time. She sensed he still existed, he was somewhere, she must be able to communicate with him. And so, being a skilled graduate student at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she started researching the afterlife. There were all these accounts of people being in contact with the spirits of dead people through various methods. So then I thought, oh, that's what I want, I want to be able to talk to him. In some way, I want to be able to just get one little tiny message from him. Because it's such a shock when somebody leaves the world, especially when they leave it so suddenly. First they're there and then they're not there, and you'll do anything to get one little tiny bit of them back. Are you a religious person? No, I'm not. I was raised a congregationalist. But even when I was a kid, I wasn't especially religious. And this quest that I went on to find out something about the afterlife and where Jim went, had nothing to do with religion. I mean, I sort of felt like I had to reinvent the world and reinvent the spiritual wheel sort of. And I

wanted to do it myself to open the Bible and read the Bible wouldn't have helped me because I wanted to figure it out. For myself. And it's not as if I'm not a skeptic either. I think I'm pretty open -minded, but I'm not somebody who just takes things for granted or just believes what people tell me. So you were sort of wavering between whether you should believe in these far -out things, the spiritual world, like as you could say, or whether you should be a materialist, that things end when the body ends. Yeah, exactly. And if I wasn't going to be a materialist, I wanted to have some sense of what makes it possible for there to be an afterlife. You know, I really thought very deeply about that question for a long time and read a lot of books about it. And sort of came to something myself. What did you come to? Well, that's a good question. The hard question. I think I'm the only author who's ever had to describe the afterlife in an interview. I do believe in an afterlife very much. And I think for

us to be able to understand that there is an afterlife, we have to change our understanding of this life. As long as we think of this world as all hard and fast material things, and it's impossible to think that when a body is dead, there can be a person who's left, but physics tells us that actually this world is made of energy. It is not all as hard and fast as we think it is. And my idea is that actually the afterlife maybe isn't that different from this life, but that's because this life is not quite what we think it is if that doesn't seem too odd. No. And these were your personal conclusions after you're reading about this. Yes. And I actually have many conclusions. Let's get back to how you responded in a very personal way to this. You did some things that I think most people would consider pretty weird. Yeah. You got out the Ouija board. Well, that's right. I like to blame this on my friend who came from California.

When she came to visit, she said, let's do the Ouija board and try to get a message. And so we did. And she... You did. What do you mean you did? Well, we did do the Ouija board together a bunch of times. And we didn't really get much of anything on the Ouija board. She thought that she got a message from her mother, but I don't know. I wasn't quite sure about that. She still thinks she did, so she'd be mad after you heard me say that. But after she left, I felt bad because I didn't have this vehicle anymore. I didn't have a friend to do that with anymore. Because even if nothing came through, it was still... This gave me this little hope, you know, that I might get some word from Jim. So, you know, I was reading all these books and trying all these goofy things. Then one day I was sitting around my house by myself and it came to me to try to do the Ouija board by myself somehow. I had been reading in all these books about this practice called Automatic Writing, where you hold a pen loosely in your hand and it picks up energy and it writes out messages. And the messages, supposedly, are from the dead. And, you know, there's a big history of that. William Butler Yates is wife, did it. And he wrote a book about it. And so, anyway, I

wanted to do Automatic Writing, you know, where you hold a pen in your hand and it writes, but it would never work for me. So, I tried the Ouija board by myself and I tried it a couple of times in a row. And the last time it actually started to move very, very slowly and it spelled out a word that I was very shocked and surprised by. That seemed to come from Jim. What was the word? It was wasted. And then I said, what do you mean, wasted and it spelled out my life very slowly. And I was so shocked by that. I don't know why I should have been because, you know, it does make sense if you were around somewhere, he might feel that way, but I had been reading all those books about near death experiences and I thought the afterlife was this wonderful place where everybody was so happy. And anyway, it was just this amazingly surprising experience for me when it did that. And then after that, I tried doing Automatic Writing again, you know, where you hold the pen over the paper and it seemed like it worked. And then I spent about a month and a half talking to my dead

boyfriend. You were writing messages back and forth. Yeah, I was writing them. And it was such a strange experience. What kinds of things did you or he say? Well, in the beginning, it was actually pretty good. And he said some things that were pretty interesting and surprising to me. A lot of it was just sort of talking, you know, yak and about things. But I tried to get him to describe what death was like. And he said, death is like hypnosis, only you can't stop. I had hypnotized him once. And tried to get him to come up with a word for dead because he didn't seem dead the way we think of it. And so he said, how about undressed as in the soul steps out of the body like a set of clothes, which I had read? And he said, thoughts are really important in the afterlife. And I said, you mean it's like they're real and he said, no, they are real. So there was actually a fair number of kind of interesting things like that. And some of them were funny too. What kinds of

things were funny? Well, probably the funniest thing is one night I was sitting in my bedroom writing these messages. And I looked up my window and I saw this light and I said, oh no, UFOs. That's where I draw the line. And the writing said, it's just a police car on Iowa Avenue. And then I figured out that, in fact, that was what it was. But I had not realized until then that I could actually see Iowa Avenue out my back window. So... Did you really think that you were talking to Jim? I did. I mean, I didn't think I was talking to Jim because it wasn't the same as the real live Jim. But I at least had hope that I was talking to some part of him. I thought I was getting the best I could do, you know, under the circumstances. The real Jim wasn't there, so this was the best replacement around. I was willing to settle for whatever I could get. There's something kind of comical about this, but

it wasn't very comical for you. You ended up in a mental hospital in a psych ward. Right, exactly. The ultimate final outcome. Actually, what happened was, so I was sitting there doing that writing in one day, I picked up the pen and there was something different on the other end. And it felt like someone different and I said, who is this? And it spelled out just a message who wants to talk to a woman who talks to spirits like equals or something like that. I think that was the beginning of the descent into the psych ward for me, because at that point, I started talking to other people besides Jim, other spirits. And I think it was sort of like the boundaries between reality and whatever started breaking down for me. You know, when you sit in a room alone talking to an invisible dead guy all day long, it becomes really easy to start interpreting your own thoughts as reality. And, you know, it was sort of just this gradual thing where I just kind of got farther and farther out into outer space with it. And I think I really was

pretty crazy because I told my neighbor what I was thinking and doing and my neighbor had me committed to the psych ward. What happened when you got there? How did they diagnose you? Well, I had a doctor diagnosed me as a bipolar having manic depression. And I took a lithium. I was there for 11 days. And while I was there, I picked up a pen and I tried to do automatic writing. And I'm not kidding, it said no writing. And I've never been able to do a sentence. But anyway, that was I abruptly returned to ordinary reality while I was in the psych ward. Your book is called The Rooms of Heaven. And I have to ask you, do you take the concept of heaven seriously? Oh, yes, I definitely do. Or at least the afterlife. I'm still really fascinated by the notion of the afterlife and what is it and where is it and is it possible? And why is it possible? What have you come up with in some of those questions? Well,

obviously it's not anything geographical or anything like that. How can I explain it? The reason I call the book The Rooms of Heaven is because I believe that the afterlife or heaven or whatever it is is very nearby. Maybe one way to think of it as maybe the universe is like one big huge radio band. And we're tuned into one radio station in this world. But the other, you know, there are other worlds that are tuned into different radio stations. And, you know, when you think about it when you're lying on your bed at night sleeping and dreaming your body is there in the bed, but your thoughts and your being in whatever is not there in your bedroom on your bed, but somewhere else. And the way that I've read about the afterlife, it's very much like that. Except that your body is now cremated or you're not even connected to your body anymore. But there are many different worlds. And I don't, you know, I don't think that heaven, in the religious sense, it's not a saccharine, you know, a sweet place where angels are sitting on clouds,

playing harps or anything like that. I mean, most of what we think about and read about heaven is very cliched. And I wanted, that didn't interest me at all. I wanted to know, you know, really, is there an afterlife in what makes it possible? And I actually think that contemporary physics is onto a whole lot of things that would tell us there probably could be an afterlife if only they weren't so mechanistic in their approach. Do you still feel the presence of your, your dead boyfriend, Jim? Yup. Yes, I do, actually. It's amazing. It's just something that I've kind of incorporated into my life. And it's very subtle. You know, many people who have loved someone who has died will say the same thing or maybe they won't admit it to, you know, to someone who they're not sure will know what they're talking about. But it's very common for people who have been close to someone who is dead to feel their presence in this sort of mysterious, but very unmistakable way. Mary

Allen tells the story of her quest for the afterlife in her book The Rooms of Heaven. Steve Paulson talked with her. In the movie The Sixth Sense, young Haley Joel Osman's character has no trouble making contact with the deceased. I want to tell you my secret now. I see dead people. Now, if only that little boy could escape from the sixth sense and find his way into Abbey Frug's new novel, Polly's Ghost. The book is narrated by Polly, who had died in childbirth nine years earlier. Since then, she's been trying to get the hang of this ghost thing. Hoping to set the sun, she never got a chance to mother onto the right path in life. She's having the worst time making herself understood

how Abbey Frug could understand a ghost dilemma intrigued you to stress her. Frug says, it's really not that hard, after all. Whenever a writer sits down to write, you're inventing a voice out of nothing anyway. You know, you're not starting with a corporeal being. You're not starting with a flesh and blood person. You're creating a voice out of nothing. So maybe the leap that I had to make in order to create a ghost was not as big as it might seem. Maybe not in order to create a ghost, but on the other hand, you have a whole sense of the afterlife. Polly is dancing with the night night as always capitalized. Maybe you should say what the afterlife that you ended up constructing is. Yeah, well, Polly ends up traveling through numerous stories and through the lives of numerous characters in order to achieve a measure of peace and really return to a proper death, which would be a kind of sleep, a kind of peacefulness, a kind of rest. This book represents what I would envision as this interim period for her when she

must cross over from having died into being finally at peace. The night was really a way of making concrete rather than abstract the fact that she feels whisked around. She feels quite novice as a ghost. As she says several times in the book's ghosts don't know how to be ghosts right away. We have to make our own methods. And this night, this figure of the night who picks her up and washes her around is really a way of just sort of visualizing her mad dance through a chaotic, what's the word? A mad dance through all of the stories and lives that she must cross through in order to attempt to influence her son. So the notion is that a person dies, doesn't know how to become a ghost, has to learn how to become a ghost, which was something that

just charmed me the idea that you have to learn how to become a ghost. And yet each ghost is different. And then ultimately once you come, once the ghost resolves whatever it is that has them coming back to earth and haunting people, if that can be resolved in the ghosts sort of. That's the way I understand it in terms of this book. And what I think the character in the book, who most dramatizes that is another ghost, the one who's named Edie or Eddie, who has a very brief sort of cameo appearance in the book. And she says quite openly that ghosts come back only when they need to solve the problem that they had in life, only when they were lacking something in life and missing something and deprived of something that they loved or needed. They come back in order to reclaim that thing that they lost. How does she go about learning to become a ghost? In her case, it seems to be a matter of trial

and error. I mean, one of the very first things she does in the book is to make a pilot fall out of this guy in his airplane and die, and that's not what she intended at all. And I also think that her ghosthood is influenced by her passion and her sensuality. You also have a sense of what people who are alive, how they perceive or don't perceive ghosts. I mean, some people, it seems to me when they sense the ghosts presence, any ghosts presence, they suppress a sneeze. Yes, they sneeze. Or the people who are directly touched, although they don't know they're being touched, by poly, suppress a sneeze. And the characters in the book who are for one reason or another being influenced by Tom, who is the pilot who fell out of the sky and who is in the lake, feel a kind of irrepressible urge to approach the lake and they also feel a ringing in their ears. There's some people like Paulie's husband, Jack, who don't ever sense at all the presence of ghosts. I mean, you have Jack say nothing was left of her except her

bones in a moldering dress beneath a chunk of polished granite. And I'm wondering whether you're suggesting that with regard to the afterlife, people see or feel what they allow themselves to see or feel. I think that to Jack, the prospect of imagining that Paulie still existed as a ghost was too sad for him to imagine, because if he thought that she still existed as a ghost, then he would feel his separateness from her, his inability to reach her and touch her and be touched by her. I myself don't have a position on the afterlife. I don't know if there is one. I would never presume to say that there was or wasn't. There is in the context of this book, I wouldn't say that people end up going where they think they're going to go or if there's a heaven they'll end up there. I think that Western society has a notion of this very distinct division between life and death, this notion of being there, everything being empirical, everything being measurable and

touchable, and the fact that things that can't be measured and touched are there for unreal and that they don't exist. That's I think a fairly Western perspective, and I prefer to think that there's more mystery in the world. Abbey Frucht is the author of several novels, including Life Before Death and Paulie's Ghost, Judith Strasser spoke with her. Coming up, little kids who mean it when they say you're not my real mother. I'm

Jim Fleming, it's to the best of our knowledge from PRI Public Radio International. Tom Schroeder's credentials as a hard sell are impeccable. He edits the Sunday style section of the Washington Post and has been an award -winning journalist writer and editor for over 20 years. So he's going to take some heat for old souls, the scientific evidence for past lives. It's the book he wrote about Dr. Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist who has spent almost 40 years researching cases of apparent reincarnation in children.

Schroeder is a skeptic in good standing, but after what he's seen and heard. All over the world there were very small children who often as soon as they could speak began to talk about what sounded like previous lines. Well, let's take one of the stories. Is there one that you found particularly convincing? We met a young woman, a 25 -year -old woman, who Stevenson had first interviewed when she was five. Her name was Suzanne. She lived in Southern Beirut. From the time she could talk really, she was very expressively and emotionally talked about having another family. And she named her, quote, parents. She named her seven brothers in order of age. She talked about her children. She talked about her husband most. You know, with great passion, she really insisted that

she wanted to see these people. And this all developed over the time between, you know, two and a half and three and a half. And she said the town that she lived in. She even gave a phone number, which the family tried and it was not a working number. Eventually, though, they knew somebody who knew somebody who lived in the town that this little girl was talking about. And indeed, there was a family with seven brothers of that name and a sister who had died in Richmond after heart surgery. And children by the name she gave and a husband by the name she gave. And this family was curious. They were an upper -class family, very westernized, not inclined to believe in reincarnation. But they were certainly curious that this little girl was saying that she was their dead mother in the case of the daughters who came to visit her. So I just, I want to interrupt for just a moment. There's no question that these families knew each other. They were not in the same town. They didn't have any previous contact. Right. And of course, that is one of the key subjects

of investigation. Is there any possible contact between the two families? And this was a particularly clean case in that they were of completely different social classes. They lived in different towns. Everybody who was interviewed quite clearly said that there was no connection between these families. One of the reasons I found this case particularly compelling was that the family of the dead woman was very unhappy that these claims had come to light. It was very embarrassing to them. But the family into which the woman was presumably reborn was comfortable with the notion of reincarnation? Well, they were a member of the Drew's religion. And one of the things that the Drew's believe is that people are reincarnated many times. They thought it was curious. They were concerned for the little girl because she really exhibited a lot of emotional pain around the subject of missing

her family. They were happy when she made contact with these people and it seemed to help her out a little bit. Although even at 25, when we met her, we discovered something the family had known, which was she was continuing to call the husband of the dead woman quite frequently. And she had never married. And there was something very sad about her. And I still think she felt somewhat dislocated. And I'm curious about Suzanne and whether she is typical. You said that at the age of 25, she is still suggesting anyway that her life is still driven by this former life. She is on the extreme end of the spectrum. There's a spectrum of what happens to these kids as they grow up, which is one of the interesting things since Stevenson has been doing this for 40 years. She's been able to follow some of these subjects into adulthood. And especially in cases where a contact has been made with the family of the presumed previous personality as Stevenson calls it. And a relationship

isn't developed. The emotions tend to remain fairly strongly. Suzanne herself said, when we asked her about this, said that the visual images had really faded. But that the emotional memory was very strong with her. In cases where there is no contact between the family of the remembered person and the kid very often around the age of seven or eight or so, they stop spontaneously making these statements. And by the time they're in their 20s, they won't even remember having made them very often. And their family will remember that making the statement. But they won't have any memory of themselves. That's the other end of the spectrum. Well, tell me another story. A different one maybe. There was a boy who insisted on wearing cowboy boots from a young age and always talked about my farm. He insisted from the time he could talk that he had a farm. He always talked about his farm and he talked about the specifics of it that he had

cows, that he took crops to market in a truck, that he had a black truck, that his mother had seven children, that he remembers her standing before the fire pregnant, that kind of thing. And he would be telling this to the mother who's a very sort of secular humanist typical contemporary American. And then one day the daycare provider said, well, when did you move off the farm? And then they realized that he'd been telling it to her as well. And they traded notes and he'd been telling them exactly the same story. And what developed was they moved into one of those areas, those new suburbs that are built right in old farm fields. And they were trying to find a shortcut to the grocery store so they went off the main road down a side road. And the kid who was then maybe three and a half started getting tremendously excited and saying, my farm, my farm, it's right near here. And she's saying, well, I think we told you that your preschool was around here somewhere that you were going to go to. He says,

no, it's around here. And you know, so they were trying to talk them down. He says, no, it's just, it's, it's keep going. And he talked about the white farmhouse that he lived in and they turned a corner and there's a white farmhouse. And they said, well, but you always said there were sheds by the farm. He said, there are keep going, keep going and they turn around another corner and there are some sheds. How does Dr. Stevenson approach these things? These are, these are interesting stories. I don't know whether they prove anything or not. Does he? Well, that's, you know, that's exactly the problem that he's facing is that they're very interesting stories. People say, well, they're anecdotal. Well, what do you do with something like this? You know, what makes sense to me is that many of these present items of knowledge that the child was said to have had that there's no apparent way he could have known them normally. And that's really what Stevenson focuses on. For instance, in Suzanne's case, was there something she remembered that she could not have known?

Well, one thing that that was confirmed by both her family in my presence and by this family that didn't want anything to do with this case that was very compelling was when this, when the family of the dead woman learned of this, they came to visit Suzanne. When Suzanne was then maybe four years old, and they said that the, one of the first things Suzanne said to them, the, the daughters of this dead woman was, did your uncles give you the jewelry as I asked them to? And they said that only the family had known that on her deathbed before the surgery that she wouldn't survive, this woman had asked her brothers who were present to please distribute her jewelry among her daughters who were not present. And so that was one thing that they said. The other thing was that the number that the little girl had given them as her, quote, phone number, they had written it down. Then when they met this family, they had showed them the number and it was exactly the number except the last two digits were transposed. So

each case has, you know, each of the most compelling cases has maybe, you know, 20, 30 items of that nature. Well, what about you then? You went into this as a journalist, an objective reporter. Do you still feel that way? You know, what my feeling is, these cases are interesting. There's no easy explanation for this. They're fascinating. You know, and on one extreme end, they could provide evidence that there's a whole level of reality that we know nothing about. I think they are worth people going and looking at closely. But what's frustrating is people's tendency to say, well, that's absurd. I'm not going to, you know, it's not worth your time. It's just false. It's just wrong. And that seems like a dogmatic position rather than a scientific one to me. Tom Schroeder is an editor of the Washington Post and the author of Old Souls, The

Scientific Evidence for Past Lives. It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Jim Fleming. To buy this program on cassette, just call the radio store at 1 -800 -747 -7444. Ask for the afterlife. Program number 416 -A. To the best of our knowledge is produced by Mary Lou Finnegan, Debbie Builder, Veronica Rickert, and Anne Strange Champs with Engineering Help from Marv None. Our executive producer is Steve Paulson.