Extracts from my forthcoming novel

“Atulyaratna the Indonesian Youngman had held the audience in London spellbound with his story of the extraordinary change that came over the old man in Surabaya.  The old man that was earlier mentally retarded dull and ordinary with a pronounced stammer had miraculously become extremely coherent lucid and authoritative. He showed an awful command over the spoken language. When people questioned him about this miraculous change he was reluctant to provide an answer except to say that he was now a different person even though the body may have remained the same. It was ultimately the local priest that intervened and sought an explanation from the old man threatening to excommunicate and bar him from staying in the village if he did not explain. The old man insisted that he was willing to reveal the truth to only one person of his choice that lived in the village who could do whatever he wanted with it. The village council then decided to accept the condition. The council asked the old man to make his choice. The choice fell on Atulyaratna’s father. The old man related his tale to him. The father in turn revealed it to the priest and the priest immediately put a stop to any further revelation saying that it is the devil’s word and he wanted no one else to hear it. The excitement died down after that and the old man continued to be respected for his knowledge and the discrimination he showed in not revealing his secret to all and sundry. Atulyaratna however was able to get the old man’s story from his father strictly on condition that he would not reveal it to others. Atulyaratna had kept his word while he was in Indonesia but he was under great strain keeping such a bizarre story a secret. His father had recently passed away and had left him in a dilemma. Being In London far from home Atulyaratna decided to finally share the secret story with a select group of young persons. That was how Sandra and I heard it that fateful day.

Atulyaratna said that the old man’s assertions were fantastic and unbelievable and negated most religious beliefs held as gospel truths by the faithful. 

“What were the assertions?” many that were present there had asked.

“For a start, according to the old man there are powerful centers on Earth that control all living beings. All humans at the time of death lose their bodily identity as well as the attributes of name and form to pass through  a series of stops to ultimately become tiny dots of transparent light capable of only one yearning that of receiving a pulse of energy from the control center that determines rebirth. The combined thought and memory bank passes on to the center that attracts it and stays there till it is either destroyed or given to a fresh body-mind depending on the center. In the physical world unknown to us there actually are more dimensions that may be called the fourth, fifth and the sixth dimensions, unseen and unknowable by living humans apart from the three that we know namely length, breadth and height pervading all space. The old man did not count time as a dimension. These other dimensions are entered into immediately after death. Passage into the fourth dimension will result in an inconceivable boost in size while entry into the fifth will result in size change from the hugest to the tiniest speck. Entry into the sixth would result in a transformation into just a ray of light. Entry into these dimensions apparently is controlled by the centers.

 The old man said he had lost all sense of his physical body but was conscious of utter peace and was not aware that he was dead. He was conscious firstly of a colossal hugeness and later of the smallness of the smallest spec inside an enormous envelope of space. After that a glow came over his consciousness and he could experience a sense of traveling at unimaginable speed first to one center and then to the other while his sense of peace stayed undisturbed all along. Although he was not aware of his body, he could at all times experience this journey that seemed instantaneous. He had no feeling of time in that state of absolute peace where the blissfulness that was being felt did not diminish. However he had seen or more accurately felt a glow of light and a thought occurred that he did not belong to the center. He did not react and continued in his state of bliss until he was violently shaken and awoke to find that his mental ability high, making the knowledge of things and ideas sit lightly on his mind. He also had a clear video like image of all that happened from his death till rebirth. He said that he had a visual image of a place where extremely huge sized beings were moving around who barred him from entering a particular place that he was not aware of and the next thing he visualized was that he was in the light glow as a tiny spec when there was a sound that told him ‘Go back to a body waiting for you’. The old man said that it felt as though he was made into nothing at the time he was barred entry and that the spec that he was aware of was a different consciousness and the body he entered was not known to him earlier.

The old man was pointedly asked by Atulya’s father “Do you know or remember who you were when you died?” for which the old man had replied that he could access many philosophical insights from memory but was not aware per se of the body he was previously in or the body he was living in at the moment. The old man said that the body aspect seemed unimportant and that the only important factor was his memory bank and the ease with which he could access it. When asked about how or what made him feel the process of travel without a body, the old man was non- plussed for a moment but collected his wits and replied “Physical movement which is a part of travel as understood by men and women with bodies is different from the awareness of travel that happened to me in my ‘after-death’ stage. I just knew,” he said without defining what he meant by the word ‘I’. While he could not define the person or thing that the word ‘I’ represented he seemed pretty sure of the experience of feeling.”