The Little Book of Life After Death. - book reviews

Journal of Parapsychology, The, March, 1994 by Karlis Osis

The 1992 annual issue of the Journal of Pastoral Counseling contains Gustav Fechner's little-known publication The Little Book of Life After Death along with an introduction by William James. The issue also contains commentaries on the book by David Bakan; Eugene Taylor; W. G. Bringmann, M. W. Bringmann, and W. D. G. Balance; and Stanley Krippner. The Little Book is just 25 pages, whereas the commentaries, including the introduction by James, fill another 53 pages.

The Little Book of Life After Death was first published in German in 1837 under the pseudonym "Dr. Mises." It was republished, using Fechner's name, in 1882. The first American edition with the introduction by William James appeared in 1905. The impetus for republication today came from David Bakan's invited address at the American Psychological Association Convention in 1989.

Who was Gustav Fechner? William James says in the introduction: "Fechner's name lives in physics as that of one of the earliest and best determiners of electrical constants, also as that of the best systematic defender of the atomic theory. In psychology it is a commonplace to glorify him as the first user of experimental methods, and the first aimer at exactitude in facts". James also refers to Fechner's contributions to philosophy and aesthetics. "His mind," writes James, "was one of those multitudinously organized cross-roads of truth, which are occupied only at rare intervals by children of men, and from which nothing is either too far or too near to be seen in due perspective. Patient observation and daring imagination dwelt hand in hand in Fechner".

I was fascinated by Fechner's grand and original vision of human personality and stimulated by leading scholars' commentaries on that vision. Each of them has his own agenda highly relevant to parapsychology and frontier areas of psychology.

As one reads this little book, one must keep in mind that Fechner wrote 160 years ago, when parapsychology and thanatology were not yet born, and even psychology was but a fledgling in its nest. The Little Book provides us with a peek at life after death as seen through the eyes of a genius unencumbered by what we know or presume to know today.

Surprisingly, Fechner, one of the fathers of empirical psychology, takes empirical observations that suggest life after death very lightly. Only an occasional sentence or footnote refers to near-death experiences at drowning (NDEs), or to out-of-body experiences (OBEs), ecstatic experiences, or insights of geniuses. There are no detailed cases, no numerical assessment--nothing that is a precursor to the hard empirical work of the last hundred years.

One wonders why he ignored the empirical aspects of the survival question. His approach is clearly different from the methodologically obsessed one we find today. It appears to be a forerunner of systems theory, but one of enormous scope; it attempts to trace self-validating laws that have inner consistency and conformity with the insights of those geniuses of mankind who had spiritual eyes with which to see. But it is also an original, cast within the cultural advances in the first third of 19th-century Europe.

Mind and matter, the spiritual and the earthly, are inseparably intertwined in Fechner's system, which has something akin to a Swedenborgian vision of God, yet seems to bypass the Christian notions of Savior or Redeemer. Our fate after death, according to Fechner, follows benign cosmic laws that allow for great spiritual advancement: "Whatever one has contributed during this life [in the way] of creation, formation, or preservation to the sum of human idealism is his immortal part which will continue to operate even if the body . . . were long destroyed". This advancement takes place in a process of communion with similar souls. Those whose consciousness in this life is invested in things that they cannot "take with them," and is immersed in destructive attitudes, wake up empty-handed and in the awful company of similar individual spirits. But, in Fechner's benign cosmic system, these same spirits can also finally gain access to the harmonious community of souls. Fechner wrote The Little Book at a time when the spirituality of India was discovered by European scholars and influenced Western thinkers like Schopenhauer and Goethe. The notion of the law of karma seems to have had some influence on Fechner's system.

In Fechner's system, the heroes of culture have important roles in the afterlife, shaping communities of souls and contributing to the progress of the lives of human beings in this world.

Has any evidence of the intense psychic traffic below the levels of conscious awareness suggested by Fechner emerged in the 150 years since he wrote the The Little Book? I know scientific methods of research have verified nothing that would support pyschic interactions at the level of intensity indicated by Fechner. Does this mean that the insights of Fechner's genius were simply wrong? I thought so until I realized that our research methods simply do not adequately reach the deep stratum that Fechner, Myers, Jung, and Heywood discuss. We have only tidbits of information, crude pointers toward the potential transpersonal highways. Tart's proposal of state-specific sciences was aimed at something like a "video camera" placed on a highway of our inner regions, but today it is still a dream.