Rosalind A. McKnight Soul Journeys (Charlottsville, VA : Hampton Roads Publishing, 2005, 250pp.) This is a book concerning the soul and the spiritual development of the person written as if the author and a spirit guide “the Radiant Lady” were travelling through a dimension of the afterlife. She meets friends, former co-workers and a few spirits who were never persons — angels — “ Angels were created by God to be our messengers and protectors. Angels will appear on Earth to accomplish this service, but they never incarnate on Earth. They live exclusively in the higher dimensions…Angels are collective energies of Light.” The tradition of writing lessons for life as though it were a journey of the afterlife is very old. The Bardo-Thodol (The Tibetan Book of the Dead) is a well-known example. It is written as though it describes the period between incarnations; in fact, it deals with the empty space between thoughts, the space between breaths, the silence where one sees things as they are. Likewise in the Upanisads , teachings about the nature of the person are presented as an afterlife journey going to the moon where the soul becomes food to the gods and is thus united with the gods as a consequence of its good deeds. When the efficacy of the good deeds is exhausted, it passes from the gods to the ether, from ether to air, from air to rain, rain to earth when the cycle begins again. There is no reason to believe that this tradition is reporting from the “other side”. Rosalind McKnight’s “other side” is very much like the one she has always known. As she writes, the book is “written to dispel the fear of death which many, many people have. “ One Way of overcoming this fear is by saying that after death, we find ourselves in a world we can understand, with friends and relatives we have known but without the toil associated with having a body one must care for or emotions one cannot control. “We are a spirit with a soul that is currently having a human experience.” Our purpose for being on earth is to learn, to grow and to love through real energy and not to be attached to and controlled by the physical. Yet life is never simple; it is complex, filled with nuances The book combines a review of past experiences in the life of the author which indicate broader laws of nature such as karma, reconciliation, the need for forgiveness, conversations attributed to the Radiant Lady and ideas resulting from her explorations of the “other side”. It is a personal book, not very deep, but some readers will enjoy the personal style, a friend recalling dreams over a cup of coffee. Rene Wadlow
