THE END OF THE TUNNEL

I was standing in Grand Central Station. Near me was a group of angry people hitting each other with sticks. A voice inside me told me this was the regular world with its troubles and strife. Then I noticed two large arched entranceways in one of the station walls. Both of them led to a very dark passageway of some kind. In one of the entrances an angel-like form was standing, beckoning for me to come.

I went in and the next moment I felt like I'd left everything that was familiar behind me. I was entering a psychological place I'd never experienced. But it was also strangely familiar, like I'd been there before. There was a different time and rhythm here. There wasn't the usual rigid separation between past and present.

I found myself walking in a tunnel. A number of other people joined me, and a tour guide started leading us through a series of rooms. We stopped in one room that had a lot of crosses on the wall and other mystical symbols. The guide identified this room as 'texture and color.' In another room he said, 'size, shape, and form.' In another he said 'time an space.' Each room, I suppose you'd say, represented some property of the physical world.

At this point I started studying the people next to me. Right away a chill passed over me. They all had a dull, zombielike look to them, as if they were hypnotized or in a daze. I understood it all in a flash. These people were dead. They were souls of the dead. But they didn't know they were dead. They didn't know they were in the hereafter yet. I wondered, What was I doing here? Had I also died? I didn't think so.

Next I was standing at the foot of a long bridge. On either side of the bridge everything was dark, but the darkness was lit by thousands and thousands of tiny lights. I could hear a pleasant murmur all around me. It was like the sound of people eating and talking in a restaurant. There was a refreshing coolness in the air. Something in me knew that each of these lights was a human soul. Then I looked up. At the end of the bridge I saw a gigantic wooden door. It was closed and bolted with a big iron bolt. I knew instinctively that God was on the other side waiting to judge me. I started to walk toward the door, but something gently pushed me back. A voice told me that it was not time yet. I had to get back to the world and carry a message. Two messages, actually. The first was that when you die, if you haven't developed your spiritual side you won't know that you're dead. That's not good. You'll be like the people in the tunnel. It's bad not to know you're dead. The voice didn't tell me why. Second, I was supposed to explain to people that the afterlife is a real place, and that we all go there. It's no fooling around. It's real. Don't doubt it."