Block of text on life between lives

[Here’s a self-portrait drawn by my 6-year-old nephew.]

To Whom It May Concern:

The differences (or lack thereof) between what we call memory and imagination have always enchanted me. I once read a book that was dedicated to compiling the accounts of people under hypnosis who relayed their experiences beyond the boundary of their current life: these were people from all different backgrounds and religions; and, in addition to remembering their past lives, they all claimed to have inhabited a certain domain between existences – an intermediate realm that they occupied during the interval comprising post-death and pre-birth, spanning from the closing of one life to the opening of the next. The people tended to speak of this in-between world as a place for their spirit to get cleansed and to heal from its wounds. (I wrote “spirit” but I might have said “soul” or “spark,” or whatever one wants to call the part of a person that somehow maintains an identity while being transferred from body to body, and which also can apparently subsist without a body.) Although I don’t put my full trust in any of these kinds of accounts, I still find the subject alluring, even comforting; for, as Blake says, “Every thing possible to be believed is an image of truth”; and it’s nice to think that there might be a place where one can rest and recover from the stress after being alive. One of my favorite aspects of the schemata that emerged from all this somnambulism (by the way, isn’t it funny that these hypnotized folk were able to remember sundry details of life beyond life, and yet I myself cannot even remember the title of their book!) is that one could spend as much time as one desired basking in the sector of nonexistence before deciding to undergo a new birth: some required myriads of millennia to pass, before feeling ready to endure another existence. I like that idea. I think I’d break the record for hanging fire: I’d hug that non-zone and remain unborn indefinitely. For they say that all your best friends are with you there.