As in Swedenborg’s account, and in the recent play Outward Bound, the deceased does not at first know that he is ‘dead’. Swedenborg, who also speaks of an intermediate state, says that, except for those immediately translated to Heaven or Hell, the first state of man after death is like his state in the world, so that he knows no other, believing that he is still in the world notwithstanding his death.[1]
Two illustrations may be given of the doctrine of the continuity and the similarity of experience before and immediately after death. In India, on the one hand, there are reports of hauntings by unhappy ghosts or Pretas, which hauntings are said to be allayed by the performance of the Preta Shrāddha rite at the sacred town of Gaya. On the other hand, I have heard of a case in England where it was alleged that a haunting ceased on the saying of a Requiem Mass. In this case, it was supposed that a Catholic soul in Purgatory felt in need of a rite which in its earth-life it had been taught to regard as bringing peace to the dead. The Hindu ghost craves for the Hindu rite which gives to it a new body in lieu of that destroyed on the funeral pyre. These souls do not (in an Indian view) cease to be Hindu or Catholic, or lose their respective beliefs because of their death. Nor (in this view) do those who have passed on necessarily and at once lose any habit, even though it be drinking and smoking. But in the after-death state the ‘whisky and cigars’ of which we have heard are not gross, material things. Just as a dream reproduces waking experiences, so in the after-death state a man who was wont to drink and smoke imagines that he still does so. We have here to deal with ‘dream-whisky’ and ‘dream-cigars’ which, though imaginary, are, for the dreamer, as real as the substances he drank and smoked in his waking state.[2]
- ↑ De Coelo, ed. 1868, 493–7.
- ↑ The editor has heard of a European planter who, having died in the jungles of the Malabar country of South-west India, was buried there by the people. Some years afterwards, a friend of the planter found the grave carefully fenced in and covered with empty whisky and beer bottles. At a loss to understand such an unusual sight, he asked for an explanation, and was told that the dead sahib’s ghost had caused much trouble and that no way had been
