Breath After Death

 

Breath After Death in Kauai

 

Writing a novel is an incredible journey in consciousness. It’s time spent with focused attention on a set of themes and ideas, which for me meant stepping out of the box.

I decided to write Breath After Death when I became bored with metaphysical stories that pulled up painfully short from attempting to explain things. For example, I saw a movie where some people were blown up in a terrorist suicide bombing. When they woke up in a new world, they groaned about being dead and gone.

Yeah, they groaned about being dead and gone.

Well, hello? If you can think new thoughts, you aren’t dead. You may have moved from one dimension to another, but in the big picture you’re still alive and groaning. But the movie dumbed it all down, and while these dead people did all sorts of action-adventure antics in their new world, they still thought of themselves as dead. And the peculiar part of it was that they were afraid of being killed again, which makes no sense considering that they were already groaning about having been killed once.

Not once did they question their new environment. They didn’t ask for a map or a guidebook. They didn’t wonder about who was in charge or if there was any orientation available. They simply assumed that they were dead. End of story, except that they weren’t dead.

I have never understood the widespread indifference so many people have to cosmic mysteries like why we’re here on this planet or what happens after we “die.”

By contrast I watch nature shows where they describe incredible and incredibly expensive research projects, such as tagging and monitoring wild animals or migrating sea life. Yet outside of a few voices, science seems disinterested in studying near-death experiences, despite millions of accounts where people report perceiving that their consciousness traveled outside of their bodies and they saw lots of unearthly stuff.

While I always liked Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I was always disappointed that movies like that do not dare to explore the meaning of the paranormal events that occurred. Close Encounters spent most of its time on the question of the Richard Dreyfuss character’s sanity. Everyone thought he was bats. I’ve never seen a movie where the UFOs land and we get to explore “then what? How does this mass landing of extraterrestrials change things?”

Same with most ghost stories. We spend the time trying to figure out if ghosts are real. All the drama of these shows is based on a few readings from some high-tech surveillance equipment. Sensitive microphones capture breathy sounds that people interpret as words from the dead (I usually never hear what they heard.) We don’t come from the viewpoint of “if ghosts are real, then what? How does that change things?”

So I wrote Breath After Death much more as a then-what story. As Benjamin Fields encounters woo-woo experiences, we explore what it might mean.

As I was saying, writing a novel is an incredible journey in consciousness. The writing process is heavily laced with asking “then what?” Much of what ended up happening in the novel came to me as if out of nowhere. I would be writing along asking then what and some dialogue or a plot twist would present itself. “Psst! Josh, go down this path.”

Writing a novel is a serious investment of time and energy. It often takes years to complete, especially if you also have to earn a living doing other things. For me and Breath After Death, that meant thousands of hours daydreaming about such cosmic wonders as near-death experiences, reincarnation, afterlife or spirit communication, Christ, and spiritualizing sexuality.

I have not personally had a profound mystical, out-of body, near-death, or paranormal experience of my own. I have been going on the research and writings and shared experiences of those who have. They were deeply touched by these events. So all the woo-woo that happens in my novel did, in fact, happen to others. I would worry about basing a novel on total fantasy, yet in the end decided to apply then-what. If some phenomenon were real, then what? I don’t need for it to be proven real to ask.

Society as a whole still views death as final. Science seems reluctant to tackle the question. But I created Breath After Death because people I’ve met who have had near-death experiences insist that there is no end.

I invite you to download Breath After Death. (<– click the link!) It’s free. If you have a small fraction of the joy reading it as I had writing it, I think you’ll be pleased.

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