The Book of Immortality Read online

  The dispatches they passed on were, for the most part, nurturing messages of reassurance, along the lines of “your deceased sibling/spouse/parent/child/relative wants you to know they are doing just fine in the afterlife.” At other times, the speakers appeared to simply be tapping into random transmissions from their subconscious minds. “Ballerina shoes!” exclaimed one of them, pointing at a dimpled, middle-aged woman in a stiff dress with a high, black-and-gold collar. “You are going to be walking on tiptoes—remember: ballerina shoes.”

  While I didn’t believe that actual dead spirits were communicating through them, at no point did the actions of the psychics come across as staged or contrived. The tidings they brought were all too peculiar, too personal and exotic, like time-lapsed flowers blooming from their intuitive selves. The messages emanated with enough velocity and uniqueness to preclude memorization or conscious thought. When receiving, the diviners also spoke differently, their antennae tuned in to some murmuring frequency within—or perhaps without?

  “I see your face off your head,” exclaimed a female medium, addressing a bearded man in the first row. “Work on that.”

  “You won’t believe this, but I see a pink, fluffy slip in a hotel bed,” said the psychic next to her, shrugging her shoulders. “I see a roll of toilet paper with lips on it, unfurling into the distance. Just rolling away.”

  On it went, a ticker tape of pensées automatiques unraveling through the subterranean conference room. It called to mind André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto,4 with its emphasis on psychic automatism, on thoughts unfettered by the constraints of reason or rationality. In the same way that Surrealist writers transcribed nonsensical, dreamlike phrases that bubbled up from the depths, these clairvoyants sought to articulate them live. Whereas Breton advocated automatic writing, they were automatic speakers.

  While I didn’t perceive anything indicative of occult powers at work in the room, I did find the experience entertaining. At one point, fading the psychobabble out, I peered into the rug’s foliage design, trying to convince myself I could make out the image of a cyclops, a baby with an old face, and a bodiless cherub with wings. Perhaps our imaginations are made to run away with us. Seeking patterns where there may not be any, we love finding meaning in unrelated coincidence.

  The sensitives onstage made sure to single out everyone in the crowd at least once, whether sharing visions of the dead or of bathroom tissue. Toward the end of service, a giggling medium in tinted glasses singled me out. “I see books all around you,” he said, looking through me. “There is important information in these books. You will use this information to make a document of your own. That’s it.” He bowed and sat back down. I nodded, impressed.

  When the messages were done, the organizers passed around a basket for donations. At the end, they sprinkled their hands over the basket as though stirring energy into a receptacle. On the way out, I overheard the seer who’d pegged me as a writer telling a couple behind me that those seeking a more profound messaging experience could become members of the SSF and attend séances in the organization’s headquarters. Occasionally Marilyn Rossner herself guided the sessions.

  * * *

  There’s little outside indication that 1974 De Maisonneuve West is a school for mediums. Inside the graystone town house, I caught a glimpse of “the little one” striding purposefully down the hall, like the doyenne of a dollhouse. An attendant directed me toward the second floor. At the top of the peeling-paint stairwell, in an octagonal room with purple walls and gold moldings, I found a dozen people sitting there, meditating. It smelled of antique furniture, Oriental rugs, and dry tears. An exceptionally mellow, long-haired graybeard started the session by playing plaintive tugboat-foghorn drones on a trombone. The sounds abetted the conduits’ ability to enter a receptive state. Unfortunately, Rossner did not join us.

  “I see a vortex,” said one of the clairvoyants, her eyelids fluttering. “A vortex. At the center all is calm. You can let the whirlpool whirl you around, or sit observing. The choice is yours.” She brought her palms together, kissing her thumbs as her fingertips grazed a burgundy dye-job hairsprayed into place. The severe sideways parting of her hair glowed ghostly white, an arrow pointing to the recesses of her mind.

  “I see several people dancing in a rainbow,” announced another medium. Perhaps someone’s dead relatives? She described them vaguely and looked us over. No one in the circle recognized the deceased. She wasn’t discouraged. “They want us to know they are happily eating all sorts of meat pies and drinking pilsners in the afterlife.”

  A squinting, myopic South Asian man in a lumpy suit pointed at me. “Can I come to you?”

  I nodded.

  Concentrating hard, his scrunching face swallowed his eyes. It seemed as though he were peering so far into his own infolded head he could see into another continuum. A communiqué came through. “I see a young man carrying a beam of light,” he declared, tugging on his jagged-geometric tie. “Spirit says you can share this radiance with many people. You can touch them. You are voyaging to sacred destinations, recording your impressions in a notebook. Spirit wants you to know you can do whatever you want the way you want.”

  Afterward, I spent a moment in the building’s lobby perusing announcements for upcoming events. The walls, painted in primary colors, were plastered with prohibitive signs. DO NOT EVER TURN THIS OFF. NEVER PUT ANYTHING IN THIS FURNACE. NO RECORDINGS OF ANY KIND! I figured that documenting the events in a notebook wouldn’t count as a recording, seeing as Spirit had green-lighted my quest. On a door adjacent to the exit, a thumbtacked piece of paper said SILENCE PLEASE, HEALING IN PROGRESS. I loitered in front of it for a moment, hoping to overhear a snippet from the beyond. But then the blue door opened, and Marilyn Rossner herself stared out at me. “Well, are you joining us? We’re about to begin.”

  * * *

  The room’s large, brown table had a dozen or so disciples sitting around it. The boardroom feel was offset by trippy artwork and the sounds of interstellar pan flutes playing some sort of outer-space Chinese ragas.

  I grabbed the one available chair, two seats away from Marilyn. A couple of twentysomethings paused to look me over inquiringly. As they started talking again, it became clear that they were studying mediumship. A suburban couple, both of whom wore mournful countenances, sat across from me. They were discussing how the term bless you derives from the ancient belief that when you sneeze, your soul can escape your bodily form. A pregnant woman sitting beside them joined in, saying that she’d heard that gravestones began as a way of keeping spirits in the ground.

  The white-haired woman at my left spoke with Marilyn about the caregiving trip to Africa they’d just been on. It took a moment for me to realize the woman was a nun. Ending the chatter, Marilyn adjusted her sunglasses and began by explaining how the antimalarials she’d been taking were making her feel out of sorts. Any discomfort paled, she said, in comparison with the rewards her team had felt ministering to impoverished, abandoned, and infirm children in Soweto. She said she’d go around the table, counterclockwise, and tell each of us what the heavenworld had in store for us on that day.

  She commenced with the nun next to me. Full of tenderness and gratitude, Marilyn spoke of the special rewards for people as devoted to the spirits as the nun, of how she would be having the most incredible visions on the insides of her eyelids.

  My turn came next. Marilyn started off innocuously enough, talking about how I’d gone through a great trauma. “You will soon be relieved as you will receive a great blessing,” she said, starting to cough and shiver. She wrapped herself up in a blanket, looked up at the ceiling, and grew perturbed. “You are in great danger, do you realize that? Drugs! You must not take any drugs if they are offered to you!” Her breaths sounded strained, as though blocked by gravel.

  “Your mind is sensitive, do you understand?” she shouted at me, someone else speaking through her. Before I could react, she leapt from her chair and cast off her blanket, y
elling about blood, hearts, and “that which isn’t which is.” Startled, I wanted to calm her down, to reassure her that I wouldn’t shoot up or pop pills or whatever it was she was seeing. Raving, she stood up and frantically pawed the countertop at the rear of the room. She found the sink and turned on the faucet. I watched, aghast, as she started throwing tap water at me.

  Was she baptizing me? “We are in the kingdom,” she growled. She rushed over to a nearby watercooler, filled her palms, and hurled their contents at my head. The people around the table were all staring at me, mouths gaping, as I tried to not look too mortified. She kept coughing painfully and prophesying my violent death.

  Moving away from the cooler, she fell back into her chair, shuddering. Her head was twitching. She’s possessed, I told myself. This is about her, not you. It’s the antimalarials, some semipsychotic side effects. Bolting upright, she looked at me and began speaking in a hoarse voice: “The time has come for you to do the work you were put on this earth to do. In the beginning was the word and the word was God, and you too shall come to understand the meaning of your name: Ah-dahm.”

  How does she know my name? I wondered, as she collapsed forward onto the table.

  * * *

  I never went back to the SSF.

  After the class, a young medium-in-training followed me to an Italian restaurant around the corner. I hadn’t invited him to join me but he did anyway. Over a plate of supplì al telefono, he suggested I return to investigate the energy that had “mounted” Rossner. I politely declined. It wasn’t always this apocalyptic, he insisted. Indeed, following our baptismal pas de deux, Marilyn Rossner had regained her composure and showered everyone else in the room with positive, easygoing messages of light. The young man said he hoped to see me there again. I remarked that some chemistries are better left unexplored. Before leaving, he informed me that I would come to love sunrises more than sunsets.

  * * *

  1. In a past life, he also served as a priest in ancient Egypt. In this life, he died doing yoga on August 27, 2012.

  2. Marilyn called her husband Dad.

  3. Subsequently rebranded as Hotel Espresso.

  4. Breton acknowledged the movement’s indebtedness to Frederic Myers, of Britain’s Society for Psychical Research.

  3

  The Valley of Astonishment

  There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which, without art, we can’t receive. . . . This essence reveals, and then conceals itself. When it goes away, it leaves us again in doubt. But we never seem to lose our connection with the depths from which these glimpses come.

  —Saul Bellow, Nobel Lecture, 1976

  Fishes, asking what water was, went to a wise fish. He said that it was all around them, yet they still thought that they were thirsty.

  —Azīz-i Nasafī, The Most Sublime Goal

  CAN I help you?” an elderly Middle Eastern man in a taqiyah asked.

  I explained that I’d come for the open house, that I was hoping to speak with someone about immortality in Islam.

  The newspaper that morning carried a notice that the Muslim Council of Montreal had organized an awareness program called “Montreal Open Door Mosques.” Thinking about it, it dawned on me that Islamic spiritual leaders would likely be able to shed light on the watery shadow world of immortality. I decided to visit the temple around the corner from my studio, the Al Sunnah Al Nabawiah Mosque.1 When I showed up, on a Saturday afternoon, the building was nearly deserted. A few men were milling around in a room near the entrance, and I joined them in what turned out to be the mosque’s library.

  “No one is here to help you right now,” the man said, sternly, responding to my query about the idea of immortality in Islam. “I am only the librarian. But perhaps I can get you something which will answer your questions.” He turned to the stacks of books and pulled down two volumes.

  The first one offered a general outline of Islamic principles: devotion to Allah; praying five times a day; the commitment to make the hajj to Mecca, if possible, during one’s lifetime; fasting during Ramadan. It spoke of the importance of Jesus to Muslims, the major prophet antedating Muhammad. The religion emphasizes peace and mercy; any act of terrorism, the book clarified repeatedly, is a sin.

  The second book, a beige hardcover, offered a detailed exploration of Muslim immortality beliefs. Following death, souls end up either in the paradisiacal gardens of heaven or in the reeking abysses of al-Nar, where sinners have their bowels dissolved by boiling, festering water while wearing garments of flame and eating meals of fire through burnt-off lips. For dessert, the damned are fed torment-intensifying Zaqqum fruit, covered in thorns and shaped like devil’s heads. As they’re digested, they release innard-scalding oils.

  While I read, the librarian came over to ask whether I was planning on speaking to any other Islamic experts.

  “I’m not sure, perhaps some Sufis?” I answered.

  The librarian shook his head and frowned. “Sufism is not Islam,” he explained, in weary tones. “Us Sunnis speak about what is True. All that is True is in the Qur’an and the words of the prophet. Everything else is human, confused. The Sufis are like other religions. A blend of beliefs. In Islam, you need proof. And it’s all provable. You are seeking the Truth and the Truth has to be provable.”

  He reached into a drawer of his desk and pulled out a thin booklet called A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam. “It’s a good book because it gives you proofs,” he explained, handing it to me for perusal.

  The booklet was definitely proof-oriented. The first chapter outlined the ways Muhammad’s explanations of natural phenomena have been substantiated by science. For example, the Qur’anic description of mountains having deep “roots” is a concept now confirmed by modern geologists. Additionally, according to the booklet, modern meteorologists explain cloud formation the same way the Qur’an did. And the Islamic contention that the universe at one point consisted solely of smoke has also apparently been validated by astrophysics, with contemporary observational cosmologists characterizing the cosmos’s beginnings as an opaque, dense, and hot gaseous composition.

  One of the most unusual chapters of the book focused on child growth in utero. The Qur’an posits a period of fetal development called the mudghah (or “chewed substance”) stage. X-rays prove that human embryos do in fact resemble a chewed substance, a claim the booklet substantiates by printing an image of a used piece of Bubblicious chewing gum next to an image of a twenty-eight-day-old embryo.

  “Take the book, it contains further proofs,” the librarian concluded. “Just don’t speak to Sufis. They’ll mix you up. They’re not the Truth.”

  * * *

  Soon after my trip to the mosque, I bumped into a couple of Sufis in long robes coming out of the alley behind my apartment. One of them—red bearded, pale skinned, wearing a kufi—I recognized as Husseyn, the owner of a nearby restaurant called Rumi.

  We spoke for a few minutes, as neighbors do. I mentioned that I’d started researching immortality. Husseyn’s friend, also in a kufi, recounted a story about a friend of theirs whose cat had died that week. “The thing about immortality is that most people are completely detached from the reality of dying and decrepitude,” he added.

  “Yes, and that’s what’s so interesting about belief,” I answered. “It helps people contend with that reality.”

  “We can believe what we want,” said the friend, firmly. “Then there’s tasting.”

  I’d read enough to know he was referring to a famous Sufi dictum: “He who tastes, knows.” Tasting what? The truth.

  Historically, Sufism emerged synchronously with Islam in the seventh century CE. The sect is considered to be Islam’s mystical kernel, its inner reality. Sufism is Islam, insiders say, and it is not Islam. Adherents believe that all religions share an essence, that a single, underlying truth resides within everything we consider spiritual. This makes them open to ot
her denominations, dubious toward the exclusivism of institutional paths, and prone to esoteric utterances. “Sufism is the milk,” they say, “and religion is the butter, after it has been churned.”

  Sufi teachings form an energizing chain of transmission they call the Sufic stream. They describe it as a yeast that leavens one’s inner bread, permitting spiritual potentials to rise. Sufi means “clothed in wool,” symbolizing the renunciation of material concerns. The aim of the Sufi is to realize and participate in one’s own divine nature.

  Sufism’s take on immortality is not written down in books because it cannot be. Attempts at articulating it have never succeeded because, in their words, “those who know do not need it; those who do not know cannot gain it without a bridge.”

  A teacher is a bridge, but one does not simply select a Sufi guide; nor can one even be found; a true master chooses to adopt the disciple. Poetry is also considered a bridge; poets have been the Sufi path’s primary disseminators since its inception. And while poems convey tenets of their faith, the canonical versifiers always insisted that what they were really getting at is beyond language. Their couplets are a bridge to a bridge, a fuel that lights the torch carried into the darkened silence of the real journey.

  In Sufism, the Barzakh is a threshold zone between life and death where souls end up after leaving the body. The Barzakh is both a barrier and a bridge, a liminal midway point that we cannot attain until we die—unless we let go of our conscious mind and tap into it through a mystical experience. Beyond that paradoxical barrier-bridge lies an even greater ultimate reality that cannot be described. In the words of Nobel-winning British author Doris Lessing, a prominent Sufi, “all our associations with the word mysticism are wrong or limited.” As her teacher Idries Shah noted, Sufism’s mechanisms take over at the point where words leave off. According to the sufi Al-Ghazali, there’s a limit to how much one can communicate about mystic truth: “The rest can not be learnt by study or by speech.”