ack

Appendix A

What Was Baptism for the Dead?

Let the dead bury their own dead.

—Jesus Christ

As near as we can tell, the earliest form of Christian theology revolved around the idea of salvation of the dead. It was perhaps the major theme. We know that Jesus' post-death descent into the netherworld was thought to have somehow helped to achieve this result. We also know that a widely accepted branch of early Christianity practiced something called “baptism for the dead” (I Cor. 15:29). And while we no longer know what this “baptism for the dead” ritual was about, its a safe bet it was related to “salvation of the dead.”

We know from the Gnostic scriptures discovered in Egypt in the 1940s that some elements of that early Christian church taught its followers to “raise their own dead” by “looking within” and “knocking on themselves.” For example:

Then, if one has knowledge (gnosis], he receives what are his own and draws them to himself…consuming…death by life…. Raise up those who wish to rise, and awaken those who sleep.

—The Gospel of Truth 21:11-15; 25:15-19; 33:6-8

Light the light within you. Do not extinguish it. Raise your dead who have died, for they have lived and died for you. Give them life. They shall live again. Knock upon your-self as upon a door, and walk upon yourself as upon a straight road.

—The Teachings of Silvanius 107:14-33

The concepts in these passages, of “awakening one's own” and “consuming death by life” by “raising up those who sleep,” of “raising your own dead” by “lighting the light within you” and “knocking on yourself” suggest a close relationship to early Christian theology's focus on saving the dead. But these obscure passages, as well as the mysterious Biblical passage that labels the salvation of the dead with the intriguing phrase “baptism for the dead,” seem to assume that Jesus' efforts in the netherworld were not completely sufficient by themselves. Instead, they suggest that, in addition to Jesus' accomplishments, something more is also required by the living before the dead can truly be “saved.” The living must also successfully accomplish a task, and only then will the dead be completely “saved.”

What was this task? What was “baptism for the dead”? Conventional Christianity doesn't know.

As we've seen, there is a great deal about Jesus' model of life and death that Christianity doesn't comprehend. This doesn't prevent us from celebrating His teachings, but it may cause us to unwittingly prostitute them. Jesus' teachings are never celebrated more than they are at funerals, when all His comforting promises about salvation and eternal life are dusted off and run up the flagpole so everyone can salute them, hoping this will help them feel a little better about the death of their loved ones.

But Jesus' purpose was not to merely console us in the face of death, but to conquer death, and to help us do the same thing. The difference between what He thought He was teaching us and what the world decided He was teaching us is illustrated by something He said about life and death that will never be quoted at any funeral: “Let the dead bury their own dead.” This seemingly insensitive passage is a thorn in the sides of funeral directors, but our collective discomfort and reluctance to embrace this passage should not be taken as a sign to turn away from His words, but to consider them more closely.

Why would Jesus say this? It is as if He was suggesting that the living should not bury their dead, but this meaning has been overlooked for 2,000 years. The passage carries the unsettling implication that those who do bury their dead will then become dead by doing so, and by extension, it also suggests that either the living who do not bury their dead will not die, and/or that the living who exhume their dead will not die.

Which did He mean? Perhaps both, but in any case, I do not believe He was referring to the physical corpses of the dead, but to the dead themselves. As can be seen in the Gnostic passages quoted earlier, a living tradition and practice in early Christianity was based on this goal of exhuming the dead, raising their souls back to life! I am convinced that those Gnostic passages are directly related to His canonical comment about the dead burying their dead, and also to the mysterious practice of “baptism for the dead.”

Did Jesus teach (as the Gnostics maintained) that it is the duty and obligation of the living to exhume their own dead past-life selves, by looking within, by knocking on oneself and receiving what is one's own—just as the Gnostic scriptures demand, just as PLR pioneers are doing today?

Perhaps He did. Was this the ancient Christian practice called “baptism for the dead”? Perhaps it was. What do we know about that practice? Not much, but we can be sure what it wasn't. They might have tried to raise their past-life selves via some sort of PLR, and baptize them while those past-life selves were momentarily conscious again. However, such a practice would most assuredly not be “baptism for the dead,” but rather “baptism of the dead.” But that's just semantics.

At any rate, such a process would not work, because if the past-life self was allowed to rise up to full consciousness, again becoming the same person it had been in previous life, that reawakened self would be no more inclined to get baptized now than he had been when he was originally alive.

No, it would seem that the Biblical phrase points in the right direction. The current incarnation, the self alive today, would have to also be conscious, standing in as a substitute or representative for the dead person so he could use his own will to speak for, and make choices for, that past-life self. In order to baptize a past-life self, today's present self would have to commune together with that past-life self, the two joining consciously together in the same mind enough to communicate and interact with one another, thus allowing the baptism of the present self, the choices of the present lifetime, to flow directly into the past-life self.

Thus, it seems that the Gnostic Christians believed that if the living had received baptism, they could transfer it to all their other past-life selves as well, saving their whole beings from one end of history to the other:

The dead shall arise!…The thought of those who are saved shall not perish…. Does not that which is yours exist with you? Yet while you ate in this world, what is it that you lack? This is what you have been making every effort to learn…. Nothing saves us from this world. But the all which we are—we are saved. We have received salvation from end to end. Let us think in this way! Let us comprehend in this way!

—The Treatise on the Resurrection 46:7-47:31

Those early Christians felt that the salvation they received from Christ was like yeast: if it was successfully inserted into their being at any point, during any of their incarnations, it would eventually spread throughout their being, saving all their past-life souls:

He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.”

—Matthew 13:33

Appendix B

Integrity and the Nondual

Integrating the conscious and the unconscious means far more than merely dredging a certain amount of backlogged unconscious messages up to our conscious awareness. That would just be the first step, clearing away the logjam of unprocessed material in the unconscious. The full goal would seem to be much more ambitious—to create a perfectly integrated and unified psyche in which unlimited interaction continuously occurs between the conscious and unconscious.

In all us less-than-enlightened folks, this does not happen. Instead, the two halves of the psyche take turns at the helm: during the day, the conscious mind is in charge, and then at night the unconscious takes over. But in the highly integrated psyches of humanity's spiritual¹ success stories, this familiar rhythm seems to be changed. “Holy Men” of today and yesterday tell us the same thing—they require less sleep. Why? Perhaps because they are simultaneously operating both sides of the psyche more of the time, and so have less need for the compensation of sleep. All natural systems, such as the mind, tend towards a state of balance. When one side goes to an extreme, the other side responds with a compensating movement in the opposite direction. Perhaps the only reason we sleep and dream at night is because the unconscious is not allowed to adequately function while we are awake, and so the system compensates by giving the unconscious equal time at night. But if the wall were down, allowing the two halves of the mind to always function in tandem, so that neither was operating at the expense of the other, then this compensation would no longer be required, and the person would find he or she needed less sleep. Just as the “spiritually accomplished” have been reporting for millennia.

With the wall down, future messages from the unconscious soul would be far less likely to be rejected or denied or refused, no matter how challenging they might be to our conscious egos. With such an efficiently functioning system, messages from the unconscious soul would no longer get automatically rejected, and so, future backlogs or logjams would be less likely to build up. We would not be divided any more; our inner beings would be whole and unfractured and uncompromised; in short, we would have structural integrity. Because of this, it seems, we would be far more inclined to behave with moral integrity.

Moral integrity or structural integrity? Why does language use this same word to point to these two apparently different meanings? The word “integrity,” of course, is related to words such as integer, integral, and integrated, all of which point to a similar underlying concept—the idea of a pure undivided unity. When we speak of a piece of wood, or a piece of iron, the word “integrity” brings to mind a solid wholeness with no defects, splits, holes, or weaknesses. But when one speaks of the integrity of a person, why then do we think immediately of the perfection of moral qualities, and not of constitutional unity as we do with physical materials? Obviously, this is because we had forgotten about the binary quality of the human soul (even though language itself had not).

Our sense of morality rests in the unconscious. When we do something that deep down inside we feel was wrong, the unconscious always tries to tell us this (as in the universal cliché “I just knew in my heart that it was the right [or wrong] thing to do”). But in all us less-than-enlightened folks, the moral sense shares its home with all the repressed material we also force down into the unconscious over the course of our many lives, and this material, once there, functions automatically, compelling us to do various things largely without being aware of it, or at least without being aware of why we are doing it. So long as the contents of the unconscious remain unknown and hidden, the moral sense that resides there must compete with these automatic behavior patterns, and often fails.

The conscious mind is dominant, and the stronger of the two, and can repress the messages from the unconscious (except for a little bit that always manages to leak through), and often does. The more the voice of the unconscious is repressed in order to avoid its moral judgments, the more a person also finds that he or she becomes cut off from his own feelings and emotions. This is why it is a classic cultural image that the most evil people in the world seem to feel no emotions, for in the process of turning off the voice of their own morality, they had to block the voice of the entire unconscious, and so became cut off from their own feelings as well.

However, once the constitutional integrity of the psyche is restored, once all the repressed material in the unconscious is cleared away, we would be less inclined to ignore the voice of our unconscious soul. Not only would we be less willing to push its messages away, we would actually be inclined to actively seek out those messages and listen to them more closely. Now, while those messages would often be moral in nature, it would not necessarily be our conscious intent to be moral per se, so much as it would be our intent simply to honor and appreciate and integrate the messages of the soul into our conscious awareness, whatever those messages happened to be. Basically, we would be less willing to lie to ourselves about how we felt and about what we felt was right and what we felt was wrong. And from that would come moral behavior. This process might not transform us immediately into moral people, but it would make us less inclined to lie to ourselves, and from that, in time, would come moral behavior.

Integrity is “integral” to spirituality itself. A person who does not possess the first could only pretend (or deceive himself) that he had the second. Radio's “Dr. Laura” is one voice speaking this message, insisting that true spirituality requires the most perfect and unflinching self-honesty, responsibility, and integrity. The concept that these two things, spirituality and integrity, are related—no, not merely related, but that they totally depend on one another—often seems to be utterly lacking from today's new age thought. The ancient binary soul doctrine, however, explains why integrity has always been traditionally taught to be a prerequisite for spirituality, why, in fact, pure integrity actually constitutes spirituality.

In Search of…the Nondual

Perhaps nonduality is the answer; after all, teacher after teacher seems to have pointed in that same direction. But if so, then what precisely is the question? What is the problem that must be overcome? Wouldn't it be duality—experiencing reality, life, and even oneself as dual, as divided, as two divided and alienated parts instead of one perfectly united and integrated whole?

Paradoxically, the very same Eastern philosophies that hold nonduality up as the ultimate goal tend to dismiss the entire right-brain unconscious human soul, with all of its subjective feelings, moral attitudes, and personal memories, as completely irrelevant. In fact, to attain the ultimate goal, many Eastern philosophies maintain that one's subjective half needs to be entirely discarded, blaming it for preventing us from experiencing nonduality in the first place. Of course, many others take the exact opposite approach, insisting that we can simply say, “It is right because it feels right,” and ignore, deny, and reject the intellectual half of one's being, even when the objective self is saying, “No, it is wrong. It doesn't make sense.”

But if we can only honor our feelings by rejecting the voice of the intellect, or if we can only honor our objective intellectual selves by rejecting our subjective feeling selves, isn't this, either way, still only honoring half of our Maker and half of ourselves? When we are not acting from our full selves, but only from selected bits and pieces, then we are not being fully who we are, and so will inevitably fail to reach our highest potential and greatest good.

Still, most people seem to assume that it's easier to reject one side in favor of the other. For example, men have historically favored allowing the objective conscious mind fuller expression, while relegating the expression of the subjective unconscious to a back burner, while women did the exact opposite. Isn't this the opposite of nondualism? How can we hope to achieve nonduality if we are splitting ourselves apart to do it? How can we know ourselves if we are rejecting half of ourselves? Aren't we acting rather like the split-brain patient who had one hand trying to button up his shirt while the other hand was trying to unbutton it? Division is the problem, not the solution.

To reject the soul, the BSD suggests, is the original problem. The unconscious soul is subjective, feminine, emotional, intuitive, artistic, caring, nurturing, loving. And these are precisely the qualities that humanity has repressed, to its own detriment, for thousands of years. To say that the rejection of the soul is necessary for salvation is to authorize and encourage the continued rejection and repression and denial of all the values the soul provides. To approve the rejection of the feminine soul is to give unwitting approval to the continued repression of women by men, to approve the domination of the strong over the weak in all avenues of society and civilization. It is to reject art in favor of science, to reject faith in favor of reason. The unconscious soul is where our feelings reside, where they come from. Our feelings are what make us human, what allow us to care and feel for each other. No salvation that leaves this out is worthy of the name.

In the final analysis, any approach to solving humanity's problems, whether individual or collective, must come from and satisfy both the head and the heart, both our male and our female, both our right and left brains. Sooner or later, ail attempted solutions that don't satisfy both halves of the equation will be abandoned as ineffective and unworkable. This is a lesson that our religious leaders, as well as our politicians, should have figured out a long time ago. Humanity has tried for millennia to place male above female, science above faith, logic above feeling, Republicans over Democrats, law and order above right and wrong, justice over love, and it never works.' Having tried this partisan, divisive, fractured approach for millennia, we as a species should be about ready by now to admit that it just doesn't work. Society as a whole, as well as its individuals, have all just been stunted and crippled by this naive approach.

The simple truth is, human beings are not more right-brain than left-brain, not more head than heart, not more intellect than emotion, and not vice-versa. Whenever we find ourselves in a dilemma and willfully choose to honor one side by rejecting, denying, and ignoring the needs of the other side, we betray half of ourselves, dividing both our selves and our world in two. The only successful solution would seem to be to integrate them together, balancing them as Taoism teaches, “making the two one” as early Christian doctrine taught, achieving true “nonduality.”

Appendix C

How Can Belief Save Anything?

Christianity does something virtually no other religion ever did, making one's salvation dependent on belief rather than on hard-won accomplishments, on faith instead of works. Jesus promised “He who believes in me will live, even though he dies,” and since then, all other religions have been doubtfully wondering how mere belief is supposed to change anything.

I addressed this question in part in The Division of Consciousness, but like so much else, there seems to be two distinct elements to the answer. That earlier book only explored one of them: how trust in Jesus Christ might save one from the worst moment of the Judgment Day scenario—the Baptism by Fire—when all the repressed soul-pain accumulated down through history is finally shotgunned into humanity's conscious minds.¹ But I didn't examine how belief might also be able to save one prior to that event, how it could prevent one's soul from suffering alone in hellish dreams during the period after death but before Judgment Day.

The answer, again, would seem to revolve around Jesus' great accomplishment, melding His soul to our own. Via such a connection, we would no longer be cut off from other people after death, for Jesus' soul, and through Him, all others' as well, would then exist inside our own. Following our after-death soul-division, the experience of our unconscious souls would still revolve exclusively around their own inner contents. However, Jesus' accomplishment changed those contents.

The scriptures suggest that this inner connection to Jesus is conditional; we must activate it before the connection will be functional. How to do this, those texts declare, could not be more simple; we simply need to seek Him: “All who call on the name of the Lord will be saved.” However, in the mentally crippled afterlife of the separated soul, such an act would be more challenging than it sounds, as we would be unable to rationally figure out that this is the correct response to the situation. Our faith would have to be so ingrained in us that this sort of response was already part of our automatic habitual behavior. Whatever we do by habit during life, our unconscious souls will continue to automatically do after they have separated from their conscious spirits. Thus, the teachings of the Church, which put all its hopes in peoples' faith in Jesus, would not be mistaken at all, but dead-on accurate. Conditioning the populace to have such faith in Jesus that individuals pray earnestly to Him in response to all life's challenges would be exactly their ticket to escaping the isolation and insanity of the soul's divided afterlife. Even though one's soul would still be separated from one's own spirit, it would still be connected to Jesus' soul, and through Him, immeasurably more. Thus, the picture of the faithful soul's divided afterlife changes from an intellectually crippled mind churning alone through its incriminating memories, dreams, and hallucinations (hell), to a mind that, while still functionally limited, now finds itself enveloped within a loving community of others happily dreaming in unison (heaven).

And so now, finally, at the very end of the book, we find what the NDE community has been looking for since the very first pages. The binary soul doctrine has now perfectly reproduced the heaven and hell of NDEs.² While chapter 3 did examine numerous parallels between NDEs and the BSD, one crucial detail was left unaddressed until now. While many of the denizens of hell, according to NDE reports, indeed do seem to be caught up in a private one-person nightmare just as the BSD predicted, the occupants of heaven seem to consistently enjoy the community of others. They do not dream alone.³ And without considering Jesus' contribution to the situation, such community was inconsistent with the experience predicted by the BSD. But once Jesus' accomplishment is factored into the equation, the reports coming from the NDE community make sense down to the last detail.

What does this mean? If NDE-ers' reports of community in heaven are to be believed, then the BSD can only be true if Jesus’ accomplishment is as well.