After-death experience

Platonius, do you not recognise me?

 

Have you forgotten the Portico of Pythagoras? 

 

The Ancient Platonius recounts his thoughts and feelings while passing through death – 

 

It was a cold starlit night when I passed from earth. The fields were covered with a pure mantle of virgin snow. The frost, driven by the northern blast, glistened fantastically in the starlight. There was a beauty in the scenery which, to one fain to tarry longer on earth, would have rendered it hard to close the eyes and say, I have viewed these beauties for the last, last time; I am no more of earth. I could not force back the clouds of mantling night as they rolled over my intellect. Slowly, gradually, I sank down, down into a great black gulf of oblivion. Down, down I sank, beyond all human thought or conception, seemingly millions of millions of miles, with the gloom growing thicker, denser and more stifling. It was an awful sensation to be suspended over that black abyss by a single thread and, as life ebbed away, to feel oneself going down, down into its unfathomable depths. 

 

The last words I heard as I sank down were the lamentations of my family and friends and their sobs and cries as they said I was gone. Yes, gone! gone from earth, its pleasures and its pains. Their sighs seemed my death-knell to oblivion. Down, down I sank for hours after they said He is gone, when suddenly a flood of light burst on my astonished vision as a gleam of lightning and on its wings my soul sped upwards – up, up, up, in that golden light, to earth again. I was conscious and, looking about me, saw my body on the couch. I was a short distance off but still myself. A slight cord of ethereal matter connected me with my form. It was soon broken and I was free. There stood my friends weeping over my inanimate body, inconsolable for my loss. I strove to convince them that I still lived but could not; for I found that my body, though real to me and perfectly organised, was far too ethereal to affect physical atoms. My acquaintances, while on earth, who had gone before me, now welcomed me, at the same time giving me a beautiful mantle. They then conducted me to my new home with the angels. 

 

Ah, how can I express the overflowing rapture which thrilled my whole being, when the sublime reality of immortal life came rushing over my soul, like a gleam of lightning! Words are but faint indicators of the emotions I experienced or the ineffable joy which filled my being. 

 

Centuries have passed away since that time but its scenes still cling tenaciously to memory's abode. I have passed those centuries in traveling from world to world – in traveling the ether ocean that fills up the intricacies between the suns and planets. Let me speak without egotism. When I look back on bygone ages, I feel as if standing on the summit of some lofty pinnacle and looking down on my path until it seems lost in mists and I can clearly see now from what a small beginning I had started.