/lit/ - Literature

Reposting this passage from Filoramo's History of Gnosticism

>What happens to the person in a coma? Is it possible to photograph (or, in more fortunate cases, to interview those who have experienced) the moments before the great irretrievable step and to understand the state of mind and the thoughts that accompany them? Reduced to arid scientific curiousity, or worse, to the publicity hype of a new 'bestseller', it may appear simply as a further act of cruelty to an invalid who has become a guinea pig. But in terms of religious history it takes on a more human light and a different cultural dimension. It is the theme of the Zwischenzustand, the twilight zone, those eternal moments, the fine bridge between time and its cessation, an area explored and wonderfully described by so many religious spirits. It is enough to glance through that extraordinary volume, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, to detect some surprising aspects, of relevance to the contemporary situation. The central theme is that of the bard: a minute, lucid, almost obsessive, analysis of the representative states violating inexorably and mercilessly the aseptic moment of transition. Buddhist meditation has rigorously analysed them and ordered them hierarchically in a sort of spiral; and it is necessary to ascend this spiral, with all its menace, in order to reach the desired goal: the final abandonment of those illusions (however vivid and resistant) against which humans are called to fight and the resulting dissolution of those representations (menacing, but captivating) that, in the Renaissance Books of the Dead, are translated into endless struggles between devils and angels on the bed of the dying and the lost and the helpless.

>Even our Gnostics recognized this singular challenge. Their ascents of the soul, the celestial journeys awaiting the souls immediately after death, are the most illuminating example of how they experienced the intermediate stage.