It's been a while since I saw fit to write about two books in the same post, but I find that the questions with which I am left after reading each of these overlap almost perfectly. In fact, they are really the same questions that led me to pick them up in the first place, and so I suppose I shall spoil my conclusions by saying up front that both books left me almost exactly where I started. I am faced with the same dilemmae over which I have been puzzling since long before picking them up:
1. Are those, including these authors, who claim to have touched the unseen in earnest, or are they playing with us for amusement or gain? As an extreme example of the former, one might look to Teresa of Avila. Whatever it is she saw and experienced, there can be little doubt that she was in earnest and thoroughly believed her own writings. In the former set, we might look to Joseph Smith or Uri Geller, manifest charlatans whose corrupting and greedy influence cannot be excused in this life, and in any other lives that may exist. The answer is therefore, "There are some of each."
2. For those that are in earnest (and let us assume for the sake of discourse that the authors in question are, though such is by no means certain), does what they experienced accurately relate to some external reality, or is it merely an internal construction? On this point, Darby and Joan make some effort and, in fact, seem to be asking themselves the same question throughout their experience. They go to great lengths to prove, to themselves at least, that there is no way that their supposed contact with the afterlife is the product of some internal delusion, or even of some such lesser phenomenon as telepathy or group consciousness. If we take them at their word, then they have indeed touched on and even proved the existence of other planes of existence.
3. Is what such earnest accounts reveal about the unseen accurate and reliable? Again, Darby and Joan take the role of skeptics, and introduce the idea of "coloring" to caution the reader about taking such phenomenal accounts literally. They assert that they did indeed touch the unseen, but that there is also the constant danger of the perceiver shaping and warping the experience so that it can be understood and fit in a certain framework. I take from this the caution that an overdeveloped ego, such as Godfre Ray King exhibits, could easily urn an authentic experience into a useless muddle. The best way to remove the ego is that taken by William James: to ignore individual accounts, and to bother only with the overlap of multiple accounts, thereby presumably isolating only that which is universal.
4. If there is an unseen out there, and humans have been able in some cases to perceive it, is it possible then for me to do the same? And it is on this point that I find myself frustrated. It is basically the same question I have been asking myself for decades. How do I go to the next level? This life bores and frustrates me. What else is there, and how do I learn more about it? The further I go along this path, the more I encounter those who say how easy it is, and how natural, and feel left out, blocked, and broken because I cannot perceive what earnest, sane, and perceptive people in books and in my personal acquaintance do. It is always there, tickling my temple, but ever with plenty of room for doubt and disbelief. Am I pursuing an end as dead as if it were a religion? Is this merely wishful thinking, cognitive dissonance, and self-delusion? Or worse yet, is it real and simply closed to me?
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