In what follows, there is a brief account of the work of Frederic Myers, a Cambridge classicist, who, towards the beginning of the last century, arranged with a group of academics that after he had died, he would come back through mediums and tell them what life was like after death. They had already been studying what mediums had reported on the subject, but their reports were of doubtful accuracy. Myers, they knew, would be reliable. He would let them know that it was he who was transmitting, by giving them a password which was a quotation from an obscure Latin poet.

Before getting on to Myers, it is worth noting that some of what he reported had been observed by other people in former centuries. Thus bodies of flame which we acquire in one of the stages, had been observed by St Vincent de Paul [1589-1660] at the death bed of St Jane de Chantal. He saw her spirit in the form of a flame rise from her body, and when it did so, it was met by another body of flame which St Vincent recognised as St Francis de Sales, and the two joined together.

There is someone else who witnessed one of Myers stages of the next life, and that was St Simeon the New Theologian, one of the most important saints in the Orthodox Church. He assigned a central place to the vision of the Divine Light in his teaching. Here it is: ‘he [ie himself] was wholly in the presence of the immaterial light and seemed to himself to have turned into light. His mind then ascended and beheld yet another light, which was clearer than that which was close at hand. In a wonderful manner there appeared to him, standing close to that light, the saint of whom we have spoken.’  [Simeon The New Theologian. The Discourses. Classics of Western Spirituality. SPCK. London.1980.p.246]

We return to Frederic Myers. His colleagues waited twenty years, and the password came through. Immediately after death, reported Myers, we are usually met by friends, work mates and relatives who died before. The normal transition is a peaceful going into a pleasant, sometimes blissful sleep. However, if we die in a disturbed state, as in suicide, it may take time to orient ourselves. We have bodies which are like earthly bodies, though they lack the mechanical properties of mass and weight, like an image in a mirror. Communication is by direct image telepathy, hence there are no language barriers.

That stage is unstable and brief and gives way to a later stage which is more stable and seems to be rather like life on earth. Very large numbers of souls, reported Myers, remain comfortably in this stage for long periods, even centuries, without making any effort to move on.

The next stage, Myers called ‘the plane of eidos’, [Gk: form] since it features sounds and colours outside the range of our earthly experience, some of great beauty. In this stage, sleep is no longer necessary. There may be experiences of profound despair and inconceivable bliss, which burn away the pettiness and animosities of Earth, and free us from their dominion.

Myers was on the plane of eidos when he delivered his descriptions of the next life. What he knew of later stages he learned from others. On the next stage, he was informed, we acquire a body of flame which enables us to tour the stellar universe without being harmed by its temperatures and turbulence.

There is a further stage, about which Myers knew little, but which he called ‘The Plane Of White Light’.  We have already visited this in St Simeon`s account.

The material on Myers comes from Arthur Ford. The Life Beyond Death. Abacus.1974