Customer Reviews

Experiencing the Next World Now

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Dr. Michael Grosso's "Experiencing the Next World Now" contains a wealth of material which, when taken together, suggests that the conscious minds of sentient beings may survive the death of their physical bodies. Its eleven chapters cover such topics as ghosts and spirits, mediums, evolution, mental bridges to the next world and techniques for preparing one to experience in this life what the next world may hold in store for us. It discusses in detail the difficult problems of authenticity when considering evidence which may be suddenly thrust upon an unsuspecting observer. It also presents objections to the survival hypothesis as might be raised by an informed yet sincere skeptic. I found the book to be both readable and thought provoking and believe that Dr. Grosso has fully achieved his stated objective of offering the reader a glimpse of an enlarged philosophy of human faculity or potential. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in seeing what could be waiting for us on the other side of the veil.

Imagine The Other Side of Death's Door
Will we survive? Will global warming wipe us out? Will the U.S. government go bankrupt? Will New Orleans recover? Will an asteroid, a volcano, an earthquake or Tsunami destroy life as we know it? How much life support can we offer to a person in a vegetative state? Is there life after death? Tremulous times we live it, for sure, and in so many ways to we face the question of survival. No wonder we seek comfort in miraculous reports of transformative miraculous near-death experiences and heart warming stories of mediums reconciling the bereaved with the spirits of their relations recently passed over. We need to believe that life goes on. Wouldn't it be even better to know, from our own experience, that life continues beyond the death of the body?
It is such a quest that drove Michael Grosso, Ph.D., to explore how such experientially based knowledge might be obtained. In his book Experiencing the Next World Now (Paraview Pocket Books), he shares with us his discoveries, and they are worth examining. It would seem that we do have the ability to experience the after-life now, even though it may require faith in one's intuitive abilities to trust the validity of the experience.
Grosso's exploration of the possibility of survival begins by reviewing the various human experiences that are suggestive of life after death: out of body experiences, ghosts, deathbed visions, mediumship, spirit photography, and memories of past lives, to name a few. Although, as he judiciously points out, these experiences fall short, to a logical mind, of actual proof of an existence after death, we should not underestimate their value in exciting our imagination and enhancing our intuitive sense of an afterlife.
He concludes, along with Edgar Cayce, the Tibetans, mystics and poets, among others, that it is our creative consciousness, our imagination, that survives the death of the body. To quote the mystic artist-poet William Blake, "This world of Imagination is the world of Eternity, it is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetative body." In other words, death is a change in consciousness.
Equipped with this understanding, Grosso then examines the various techniques, practices and rituals developed over time to alter consciousness so that the subliminal consciousness ordinarily hidden behind the veil becomes clearer in awareness. After examining shamanic ecstasy, lucid dreaming, and yogic practices, His explorations finally focus on cultivating the imagination to discover the inner experience of light. He concludes that becoming aware of the afterlife domain is ultimately a function of attention. Where attention points, there lies our experience. And where attention points, he notes, in agreement with Edgar Cayce and William James, is a function of our will.
Grosso's final chapter is not devoted to what you might expect. His focus on the use of the will takes him into the territory of daily life. Are we so much "in this world," he asks, that we have become too much "of this world"? He argues persuasively that our contemporary excesses of overeating and overwork block out the space needed to allow our subliminal imagination to bubble up with messages from that other world. He describes the experiences of those who practice fasting, of those who spend time alone, in silence, doing nothing, showing that glimpse beyond the veil are easy to come by to those whose brains are not overstimulated by TV, consumption, work, and socializing. What drives these earthbound behaviors? How can these compulsions be arrested, tamed, or redirected? He doesn't say, but I found an important clue in an earlier portion of his book, having to do with the impact of our judgments.
The spiritual traditions that advocate preparing oneself to become a conscious spirit that can migrate seamlessly into the afterlife emphasize the development of the imagination. The practices involve not simply learning to experience oneself more as an immaterial than a material being. They also require working to get beyond judgments, to reconcile opposites, to get beyond the sense of separation that judgment creates and that is supported by the materialistically bound physical senses. These judgments drive our eating and working beyond necessity. "Love and light," terms that sometimes seem clichéd in the New Age communities, eventually come to be experienced as the ultimate reality. Grosso quotes Al-Ghazzali the Sufi philosopher, "I owed my deliverance not to concatenations of proofs and arguments, but to the Light that God caused to penetrate my heart." So it would seem that the easiest bridge to the other side is to make time in our day, in our attention, in our awareness, not to the life outside us, but to that within. [...]

I am a skeptic when it comes to anything having to do with the paranormal. I have read several books on the subject but Experiencing The Next World Now is the first one that has made me pause and reconsider my opinions. Michael Grosso has done a masterful job of analyzing and describing several paranormal incidents in which his conclusion that some sort of energy or life force from an unseen dimension was experienced in this one, by extremely credible witnesses, is plausible. I highly recommend this book to anyone curious about the paranormal; even hardcore skeptics like me.

Great eclectic mix of ghost tales, mediums, mystics, very very old seance stuff, religious anecdotes of the ecstacy and saints and all sorts of metaphysical oddities. Nice look at religious beliefs across the world, and great stories of kids remembering past lives and all sorts of deja vu.

Advice in the back about meditation and fasting to get one closer to the portals of the afterlife just in case we get to sneak a peek through the keyholes.

But how can you write a book about experiencing the next world now, and not even mention the life between lives studies of Michael Newton and Brian Weiss? They're much more up to date with the soul state than pages and pages of nineteenth century trance mediums, poltergeists and ghosts.

Forgive me for being critical. The tapestry of metaphysical anecdotes was a pleasure to read, I just don't think it was evidence enough to support the title without more relevant twenty first century input.

Michael Grosso is to my mind, an American Colin Wilson. A polymath when it comes to the exploration of the esoteric byways of human psychology. In reading this work one immediate thing was apparent, he reviews some of the strongest cases for survival from the archives of psychical research/parapsychology. Yet I felt still unconvinced by the data he presents. It neither moved me toward nor away from the question of survival after death. His emphasis on the need for celebrating living itself each day to the fullest, while at the same time "keeping our death before us" as practiced by Tibetan Lamas and other contemplatives is the message of most guides for the living regarding the afterlife. Grosso's analogy of Bucke's "cosmic consciousness" and Maslow's "peak experiences" as a foretaste of things to come leaves me unsatisfied on some level as well. The inevitability of death seems to me to be a message from nature that in the final analysis it does not matter. A life well lived should be open to all possibilities, be it the dualism of Christianity (which I doubt), reincarnation, oblivion or nirvana. As Alexander Pope wrote, "whatever is, is right." All speculative works on the afterlife seem to be an attempt to convey the experience of color to a person blind from birth. I am not convinced that death and what lay after (if anything) is communicable to the living. But this is a vailant attempt in that endeavor.

Dr. Michael Grosso uses anecdotal evidence that contends there are paths to the afterlife available for those willing to take a peak or more. He uses some examples gathered under professional observation and others that are more hearsay and not under a controlled environment to provide specific peepholes that a person can look through or for the more daring take a deeper dive into the afterlife pool. The roadmaps Dr. Grosso says exists consist of a wide variety of otherworldly phenomena such as ghosts, reincarnation and past life experiences, seeing the Light, out-of-body events, UFOs, and mystical experiences, etc.

This is a fun book that especially true believers will enjoy for the "true life" tales (some more famous than others) as well as the guide to experience the next world. Besides my read, I asked my husband (a skeptical statistical trend analysis expert) how statistically based is the evidence. He said: that Dr. Grosso uses too few examples (sample of the population not considered) in too many subcategories to draw any generalization/conclusions and that each anecdotal is accepted as truth regardless of the source adding doubt of reliability of the data to the already questionable validity of each subcategory. Still these are interesting stories that readers will enjoy, but for those who want to take that one giant step there is no simple instruction except austere practices that are way outside the norm. EXPERIENCING THE NEXT WORLD NOW is for those who appreciate "true" tales of those experiencing otherworldly events.

Harriet Klausner