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Michael
Grosso is a teacher, author, and painter,
whose interests span psychical research,
metaphysical art, the parapsychology of
religion, and, primarily, philosophy.
He received his Ph.D. in philosophy, and
studied classical Greek, at Columbia University,
and has taught at City University of New
York, Marymount Manhattan College, and
City University of New Jersey. He has
published books on topics ranging from
life after death to the mythologies of
endtime.
He presently lives in
Charlottesville, Virginia, where he is
affiliated with the Division of Personality
Studies of UVA. On the Board of Directors
of the American Philosophical Practitioner's
Association and reviews editor of its
Journal, Michael conducts Wisdom Seminars,
discussion groups that apply philosophy
to problems of everyday life.
Experiencing
the Next World Now?
By Michael
Grosso
How did a philosopher
trained in an age of science and reason become
an aficionado of spirits, a hunter of marvels
and miracles? It’s a question I often
ask myself. I guess it boils down to personal
experience. When I was a boy my mother told
me strange stories-to take one example-about
her sitting by an open window in a sweltering
apartment on the lower East Side in New York.
Suddenly a cold breeze from nowhere went through
her, and she sensed her father’s spirit.
Later she learned that at that moment her
father had died. And my mother regularly regaled
us with stories of Padre Pio’s miracles.
When I was a teenager my brother told me how
one day he found himself looking down on his
body from the ceiling. He was so struck by
the experience that he thought of writing
a letter to a place I had never heard of-the
American Society of Psychical Research. Even
I remember as a boy once praying to theVirgin
Mary to stop a killer toothache that hit me
out of the blue and the pain vanishing after
three Hail Marys. On the other hand, as far
as my belief-system went, by the time I finished
high school I was already a born-again pagan.
When I finally got to graduate school at Columbia
University I discovered how preconceptions
can close people’s minds. For my fellow
philosophy students it was heretical to take
the idea of spirits seriously and they spoke
enthusiastically about exorcising the “ghost”
in the machine. The idea was that we are essentially
meat machines, nothing more. They took righteous
pleasure striving to deflate all our higher
spiritual pretensions. The official party
line was that we are just accidental tourists
in a universe devoid of purpose.
But was this image of “man the machine”
true? It was fashionable but was it the whole
story? Not according to my experience. If
my professors (and fellow students) were right,
my mother’s ghost was a sham, my brother’s
out-of-body flight an illusion, and the answer
to my prayer a delusion. (The truth is, I
continued to have paranormal experiences,
see my book Soulmaking [1997].) But if these
experiences had any truth in them, the prevailing
materialism had to be false.
Of course I couldn’t rely solely on
my own experience, so I set out to research
the mystery of consciousness by combing the
historical records and talking with other
people about their unusual experiences. And
I studied what serious, open-minded, and critical
investigators discovered from their researches.
So, is there another world? For one thing,
I learned that my family and I were typical;
reports of anomalous spookiness are fairly
commonplace. My experience has been that almost
anybody you talk to either has had some unusual
experience or knows somebody who has. All
together-in light of my own experience and
the careful systematic research of others-I
found stubborn patterns of evidence pointing
to something postmortem. Increasingly it came
to look as if our mental life can transcend
its neural substrate.
Of course, it’s easy to be hypnotized
into believing in the mechanistic worldview.
The amazing success of modern technology has
helped to seduce us. Modern life in many ways
is the embodiment of antispiritual worldview.
I realized that for me I had to keep putting
matters to a personal test. I recalled the
teaching of Socrates who paradoxically said
that to philosophize was to practice death
and dying. What he meant by this was that
we have to free ourselves from all the mental
and emotional clutter that distracts our consciousness
and prevents us from seeing, sensing, and
feeling the larger reality about which we’re
normally clueless. In short, the challenge
was to experience the “next” world
now myself.
The latter
part of my book Experiencing the Next World
Now (2004) attempts to describe how that is
possible. The most important point was that
by means of spiritual exercise and simple
changes in lifestyle such as diet and work
habits one could make oneself more transparent
to intimations of immortality. These practices
and lifestyle changes are based on the perennial
experiments of the shamans, mystics and mediums
of all ages and cultures. Glimpses of a greater
reality are possible for us all. It is possible
to adapt old practices to our busy lifestyles
and slowly re-orient consciousness toward
the transcendent pole of our being. Everything
depends on our intentions and expectations.
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