Julia Assante - The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death

PRAISE FOR THE LAST FRONTIER

Julia Assantes The Last Frontier presents a brilliant combination of three categories of evidence for survival of consciousness after death the science, the history, and personal experience. Written from the unique perspective of an Ivy League scholar and a talented psychic, it is exceptionally well grounded and accessible. Assantes book offers an important contribution to our understanding of death, dying, and beyond.

Dean Radin, author of

The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds

In The Last Frontier, Julia Assante helps us approach death in ways that enlarge life, and to grow our ability to step between worlds and have timely and helpful contact with those who are living on the other side. Writing with passion and eloquence, deftly mixing the data of science and history with firsthand experience, she succeeds magnificently in a venture that is of urgent and essential relevance to all of us, because when we make death our ally, we find the courage and clarity to remake our lives and our world.

Robert Moss, author of

Dreamgates, The Dreamers Book of the Dead,

and Dreaming the Soul Back Home

Come along as Julia Assante guides you through a magnificent exploration of that uncharted, simply-out-of-this-world terrain we encounter when we die. With an eloquent balance of science and soul, she shows us that by beginning to grasp the miracle that is death we can transform guilt and grief as well as our relationships with loved ones on this side and the next, and in the process, create healing and peace in our troubled world. She unveils the afterlife as a realm of unlimited possibility, expanded awareness, and ineffable love.

Dianne Arcangel, author of Afterlife Encounters and coauthor

(with Raymond Moody) of Life After Loss

Copyright 2012 by Julia Assante, PhD

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Assante, Julia, date.

The last frontier : exploring the afterlife and transforming our fear of death / Julia Assante, PhD ; foreword by Larry Dossey, MD.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60868-160-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Future life. 2. Near-death experiences. 3. Spiritualism. I. Title.

BF1311.F8A87 2012

129dc23

2012026240

First printing, November 2012

ISBN 978-1-60868-160-0

Printed in the USA on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

New World Library is proud to be a Gold Certified Environmentally Responsible Publisher. Publisher certification awarded by Green Press Initiative. www.greenpressinitiative.org

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my husband, Walter

Contents

T oward the end of a life spent trying to see truly, novelist Arthur Koestler said, [We are] Peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity. But at least we can try to take the stuffing out of the keyhole, which blocks even our limited view. In The Last Frontier, Dr. Julia Assante not only removes the stuffing from the keyhole but demolishes the keyhole altogether, along with the door containing it. Assante leaves us standing blissfully awestruck, face-to-face with unsuspected splendor.

If The Last Frontier does not take your breath away, it should, for it upends nearly all the assumptions in life that we unconsciously accept as hard facts. Assante shows that the two major signposts we erect in life birth at one end, death at the other are not absolute, onetime events but transitions in states of being. The in-between duration spanning the crib and the crematorium is not the one-way, flowing time we take it to be but a nondurational expression of eternity. Assante reveals the futility of striving for immortality; she shows that we are already immortal, even if we are too blinkered to notice. Immortality is our birthright, she says. It comes factory installed, part of our original equipment. We do not need to acquire or develop it. We dont live into eternity; we re up to our neck in it now.

The natural result of this realization is the diminution or eradication of the fear of death, which throughout human history has caused more suffering than all the physical diseases combined. That is why this book is an exercise in fearolysis the dissolution or lysis of the death fear, that dark dread and weariness that are part of the human condition.

Many wisdom traditions have recognized the comic relief that can result when a death-haunted human suddenly realizes that the finality of death has been misconstrued all along the Zen adept who erupts into laughter at the moment of enlightenment. The realization that the infinitude of life does not need to be developed, but has only to be realized, has burst upon the poets and mystics of all eras. Thus Emily Dickinsons exultation: So instead of getting to Heaven, at last / Im going, all along.

For those who believe we are blighted from birth with original sin, this is radical stuff. Assante confronts this dismal view firmly. She is uniquely qualified to do so, from her academic background as a scholar in ancient Near East cultures and beliefs. Her work points to intrinsic worthiness, not inherent sinfulness, as a hallmark of humanity. She would agree with Henry David Thoreau, an American original, when, on his deathbed in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1862, his aunt Louisa wondered aloud whether he had made his peace with God. Thoreau replied, I did not know we had ever quarreled.

Those individuals who have learned to sneer at medium and psychic should realize that Assante, who is both, has science on her side. The Last Frontier, in essence, is an exploration of the nonlocal manifestations of consciousness, for which there is overwhelming evidence. Assante is at home with nonlocality, and the seamlessly interconnected whole called the cosmos is the canvas on which she paints.

For nonphysicists, nonlocal can be generally equated with infinite. If something is nonlocal or infinite in space, it is omnipresent. If something is nonlocal or infinite in time, it is eternal or immortal. Nonlocal mind, therefore, is infinite, eternal, and one one, because there can be no separation between minds that have no boundaries in space and time. This astonishing realization has been embraced by some of the greatest physicists, including Nobelist Erwin Schrdinger, who proclaimed, The overall number of minds is just one. In truth there is only one mind, With immortality and oneness in place, Assantes treatise begins to seem not radical but conservative.