Image by Karin Henseler 

In This Article

• The Denial of Death: How modern society struggles with mortality.
• Reincarnation Across Cultures: Beliefs from Buddhism, Hinduism, and Gnosticism.
• Near-Death Experiences (NDEs): What people report after crossing over.
• Soul Evolution & Karma: How past lives shape our spiritual growth.
• Different Paths After Death: Tunnel of light vs. other transitions.

Unraveling the Secrets of Life After Death

by Ann Merivale.

In his book The Antidote: A Bracing Detox for the Self-Help Junkie the journalist Oliver Burkeman comments that “it may be hard to swallow the idea that we should spend more time contemplating death, but there are some powerful and pragmatic arguments for doing so”. He quotes, among others, Ernest Becker, an American born in 1924, who died in 1974 from cancer of the colon, a year before the publication of his ‘magnum opus’, The Denial of Death.

As a very young man Becker came up against death firsthand while helping to liberate a Nazi concentration camp. This caused him to write about the human tendency to avoid facing up to the fatality of death and to overcome the haunting fear of it by denying its reality.

It’s partly the fear of death, now endemic in Western society that first gave me the idea of writing a book such as this in about 2015. Now that I am well into my eighties, I feel that we have little time left for dealing with such an important topic. And of course this focus was accentuated by Covid-19.

Buddhists, Hindus, indigenous people of, for instance, the Americas, and Western Gnostics have all for thousands of years taken for granted that every soul has countless lives on Earth. So for them losing one life, however ‘prematurely’, obviously makes the loss appear less tragic than most present-day Westerners believe it to be.

Christian teaching on the matter of reincarnation dates only from the Council of Constantinople in AD 553, at which, on account of the influence of Theodora (his by then late wife), the rather weak Emperor Justinian endeavoured to make a change. For she, not having liked the idea of returning to Earth as anything other than an empress, had been keen for the previously commonly held doctrine to be suppressed!

Yet the suppression of belief in reincarnation was never totally successful. Tere have always been movements of ‘Gnostics’, such as the Cathars, who retained this knowledge. (The Cathars’ beliefs were distorted and their barbarous and unjust persecution is one of the great shames of the Church.)

One Lifetime Is Not Enough

How could we possibly learn all that we want or need to in just a single lifetime? And how otherwise could it be fair that some are born with the proverbial silver spoon in their mouths while others incarnate into dire poverty? I am personally convinced that anyone who cares to research these spiritual matters seriously enough will easily find sufficient proof to convince them that they themselves had many previous lives.

Nowadays, the Churches have much less influence on the Western world than they did for about a couple of thousand years. The desire for ‘scientific proof’ of everything has caused atheism or agnosticism to become increasingly common and therefore many people no longer believe in either the immortality of the soul or any sort of afterlife.

In contrast, I myself was brought up strictly in the Catholic Church and it took me many years to ‘escape’ onto a path that, while retaining my admiration for Jesus, I see as more spiritual. Since its focus is supposed to be on ‘making it to Heaven’, it seems to me nonsensical that the Church teaches nothing at all about what happens when we die!

Wanting The Mysteries Explained

One of my big quibbles with all church funerals is the prayer “Grant him/her eternal rest”. (Can anyone seriously believe that someone such as Bruce Kent, the great activist for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), who was still campaigning a month before his death at the age of 92, would be content to be just lazing around? And anyway doesn’t the notion of resting for the whole of eternity sound intensely boring?)

Unlike other Catholics of my acquaintance who like the idea of ‘mystery’, I have always wanted to know what might happen when I died. I have fortunately, over the last 30 years or so, been able to make up for this lacuna in my religious education by a great deal of reading. This has been combined, too, with much experience of taking people who’ve come to me for Deep Memory Process, known as DMP (past-life regression therapy), through their deaths in previous lives and listening with interest to their stories. Following some brief shamanic training, I have also, over many years, sometimes used a drumming CD to communicate with the other side, but I have no way of vouching that what has come through to me is a hundred per cent genuine.

What Happens After Death?

Returning for a moment to the Catholic Church, one thing for which one can give it credit is its custom of praying for departed souls. Like the Buddhists, whose tradition is to pray for somebody daily for 49 days after death, most Christians appreciate that prayers sent from Earth can help souls on their way. This is needed particularly when the person concerned fails to realise that they have died — a thing that can occur easily, for instance, in the case of a sudden accident.

It’s sometimes said that generally, when people die, they find what they expected to find; for example, a Christian will meet Jesus, a Buddhist the Buddha, and so on. When it comes to atheists, however, they will usually find ‘nothing’ and it may take some time for them to be ‘woken up’ to the reality of life continuing on the other side. Fortunately they do all ‘wake up’ eventually, but prior knowledge can speed up the process, as can having people who care about them either praying for them while still on Earth or looking down and offering help from a higher level.

Young Soul, Old Soul?

One thing that I haven’t attempted to touch upon in this book is the different levels that exist on higher planes. These, it is commonly agreed, are seven in number and for those interested in the topic there are plenty of books available. Which level one goes to in between incarnations depends upon one’s level of development.

An important point to make at this juncture is that, although it is generally believed among those who have studied such matters that ‘God’, or whatever name one cares to give Him/ Her, decided at some point to split into countless numbers of different ‘souls’, these have not all had by any means the same number of lifetimes (either on Earth or elsewhere). Hence the terms ‘old soul’ and ‘young soul’ that are in common spiritual parlance. Since, however, we are all equal, the latter term is by no means derogatory. (As the renowned clairvoyant Edwin Courtenay commented to me many years ago: “We need the young souls around for their energy!”)

As an example: Chapter 20 has contrasting stories of two women who got stuck for a while after their physical deaths in what is known in Tibetan as the Bardo (between islands),

Fiona is clearly an older soul than Beryl. Although she made mistakes in her lifetime (as we all do — otherwise we wouldn’t still need to be here), Fiona was, as a nurse by profession, well-educated and knowledgeable and consequently knew full well that she had died.

Beryl, on the other hand (appropriately nicknamed ‘Mrs Misery’), was probably a much younger soul and so, since she’d had very little education and since Earth’s etheric body looks exactly the same as the physical one, she was unable to appreciate the fact that she had left her own physical body.

Near-Death Experiences (NDE)

When one reads about near-death experiences (NDEs), the normal pattern appears to be that, upon leaving the body, the departing soul is whooshed through a tunnel towards the light, where he or she can meet the person (normally a spirit guide) who is best able to talk with him or her about what they’ve either learnt or should have learnt during the life that’s just ended. The usual pattern is then to discuss the available choices for what is to happen next.

Obviously, in the case of NDEs, the choice was made to return to Earth — otherwise the person concerned wouldn’t have been able to recount the experience — but my personal experience of regression to previous deaths (both my own and those of numerous clients) differs little from the stories that I’ve read about NDEs.

Soul Mate, Companion, or Karmic Relationship?

A particular question that has greatly interested me throughout my years of working as a therapist and counsellor is that of relationships. This is of course very often a thorny topic and for that very reason, solutions have to be found before we can clear all our karma and thus be able finally to return to the Source whence we originally came all those aeons ago.

‘Soul mate’ relationships come in here, as well as ‘thorny’ ones, and I have in all my writing adhered to the threefold definition given by Edgar Cayce (known as the ‘sleeping prophet’). These are firstly ‘twin souls’, who are literally two halves of the same being, since it’s thought that all souls divided into two right at the beginning and occasionally meet up again on Earth before becoming ready for the final reunion. (Such relationships can be either blissful or, again, ‘thorny’, depending upon the level of spiritual development.)

Secondly, ‘companion soul mates’ (often the most comfortable), that is, people who’ve been together many times in varying relationships — spouses or siblings, for instance — and consequently know one another well.

And thirdly, ‘karmic soul mates’, which involve people who come together in order to pay a debt. This could be something as drastic as one having previously killed the other, but even in such cases the partnership can be either contented or positively idyllic.

Tunnel of Light or Lake of Still Waters?

I’ll now conclude by mentioning that I have personally always been terrified by the notion of scary rides and consequently never liked the idea of being whooshed through a tunnel!

I was therefore delighted to hear from the distinguished shamanic practitioner Simon Buxton, in a workshop he led on the topic of ‘Death, Dying and the Beyond’, that one has a choice. He encouraged us to practise dying from time to time, saying that we could visualise how we would like to be transported to the other side.

My choice was of a boat coming over a tranquil lake to collect me (hopefully containing one or two people dear to me who have already passed on). Hence my choice of cover image, with the rising sun symbolising the new life that lies ahead.

Copyright ©2025. All Rights Reserved.
Adapted with permission of the publisher.

Article Source:

BOOK: DEATH: Friend or Enemy?

DEATH: Friend or Enemy?: Views from the Other Side
by Ann Merivale.

Death, as the saying goes, is the great leveller, and though many fear it, while others view it as a blessed release, its inescapability affects us all in some way. The author of this unusual book makes use both of her spiritual reading and of the knowledge she gained from 20-plus years' experience of taking her Deep Memory Process clients back to deaths in their previous lives, thus giving a broad spectrum of possible post-death scenarios. These she illustrates with a combination of famous and fictional characters, drawn both from accounts that came from the ‘other side' through her figurative pen and from factual research.

Part of the book's aim is to dispel all fears of death itself and to demonstrate that the notion of eternal damnation is mistaken. At the same time, it shows the reader that whether a lifetime lasts 10 years (as did Annie Darwin's) or 97 (like Bertrand Russell's), it has a clear purpose and value. The stories' precise truth is, however, immaterial, as you will find them enjoyable, educational, and reassuring.

Click here for more info and/or to order this paperback book. Also available as a Kindle edition.

About the Author

ANN MERIVALE started writing in 1993, after being told by the American clairvoyant Aron Abrahamsen (who had worked with the well-known prophet Edgar Cayce) that she had come “partly as a writer – to disseminate information on the spiritual life”. She became increasingly interested in healing and in 1998 obtained a Diploma from the London College of Past Life Regression Studies. This was followed in 2001 by a Diploma in Deep Memory Process therapy from the late Jungian psychotherapist, Dr. Roger Woolger. 

Her main therapy practice, at the Ripon Natural Health Centre, North Yorkshire, was suspended by COVID 19. Her first book, KARMIC RELEASE, was published in 2006, WOMAN THROUGH THE AGES (a sort of sequel to it) is her eighth and (nine being the divine number!) she feels happy to have completed her final book. Always a keen traveller, she used to finds that, whenever she felt an urge to visit a certain place, a reason for it invariably appears that was in some way connected to her writing.

Article Recap:

What happens after death? Reincarnation, soul evolution, and near-death experiences offer insight into what lies beyond. Spiritual traditions and past-life regression provide compelling evidence of multiple lifetimes. Understanding these concepts helps us embrace life’s greater purpose and the eternal journey of the soul.

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