In the afterlife, Merlin Zauber discovers that while his mind is sharp and clear, and his sense of who he is remains as strong as ever, he no longer has any senses, with the exception of vision. He gradually becomes aware that mind, soul, and spirit are one and the same and manifested in the aura, or energy body that surrounds the physical body of an incarnated being.
The Greek view from the time of Plato is that "the mind is separable from the body and eternal." Anyone who has ever had an out-of-body experience (OBE), will find that concept easy to grasp.
I have repeatedly experienced OBEs myself, and I have watched other people undergo an OBE. The first was my mother, when I was four years old. I describe this in Chapter 13: "Wizard Merlin," in The Passing of Merlin Zauber. Why I can tell when this happens to others is that I can see the aura, which is what slips off the body during an OBE.
I began to understand this phenomenon better when at the age of eleven or so I was following by best friend, Christopher, through his living room when we passed his schizophrenic father, who was sitting on the couch staring at the wall. Christopher said, "Look at this!" Then he frantically waved his hands back and forth in front of his father, who seemed not to notice.
I remember taking a close look, and noticing that his father had no aura. Christopher's father had, it was said, "regressed into himself," but even at that young age I realized that the father's aura had slipped off the body and gotten lost somewhere. Reflecting on this years later, I realized that the expression "to lose one's mind" is an accurate description of what truly occurs, and this was precisely what had happened to Christoper's father. Shortly after that, men in white coats came in an ambulance and took Christopher's father from the house and drove him away. I heard later that he was taken to the Menninger Clinic in Kansas for electroshock treatment.
When I was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I once observed an "almost OBE." That happened when I was walking about twenty feet behind a young man ahead of me on the sidewalk in town about a block from the UNC campus. That person was striding along with great determination, yet I could see that his energy body had slightly pulled loose from his physical body and was flapping along behind him like a balloon in the wind. Here, it seemed that the person's mind was trying heroically to hang on, but having a hard time doing so.
On several occasions I have encountered other people who did not have an aura. Try as hard as I could to see it, I failed to detect the usual light around the body. With people like this, the first clue is that I get no telepathic input from that person. From this, I have come to realize that when telepathy is popularly described as "mind reading," that is exactly correct. I realized that a telepath is sensitive to the mind, but not the brain.
So for me, and for Merlin Zauber in The Passing of Merlin Zauber, Plato's concept that the mind is separable from the body is self-evidently true. In addition, my experience with past-life recall, indicates that Plato was also correct when he declared the mind, as opposed to the temporary body, is also eternal.
© Copyright 2005 by Robert J. R. Rockwood. All rights reserved.