Peter Costello
Journey’s End: The Truth about Life after Death by Colm Keane (Capel Island Press (€14.99 / £12.99)
In classical times some Greek philosophers likened the soul to a butterfly erupting from the very different chrysalis. The implication was that the “next life” of the human soul is likewise so different that it cannot be imagined by a living human being.
This has never prevented, however, human beings from earliest times onward speculating about the nature of a future existence. Others have felt that it was better to accept the mystery for what it is, live the present existence as best they can do. This course is what the Gospels tell us to do. We know not the day or the hour, so we should live for others as best we can.
Variety
Over the course of his life as a writer the late Colm Keane explored this topic in different ways through a variety of books that gained a very wide readership. This is his last book, which was conceived, written and achieved while he himself was mortally ill.
Based on some thirteen years of research, the ideas explored in these pages are not his ideas, but as he says, those of mystics, scholars and scientists. Now, across a wide area of opinion, not all readers will feel able to follow or accept all that he says.
Artic landscape
The cover of the book suggests a bleak arctic landscape which is not actually conveyed in the chapters of the book itself.
Those who have followed Colm Keane through eight No. 1 Bestsellers, and a total of 19 “Top Six” bestsellers over some 30 books – some of which were entertainments – will certainly want to read this book, the final outcome of those years of wide ranging and humane research.
He believed that our consciousness, our personality, survives and lives on in a hereafter of our own making, where “we will meet again deceased relatives and beloved pets”. Colm Keane read widely, but his ideas wherever they led were always based in a sense of love and kindness, on giving of one’s best to others.
He dismisses all those notions of eternal punishments that trouble so many people. But when we observe the course of the world around us this is what we would all like to believe; but the evil of human actions, as in the present war, leave us dismayed and uncertain about how true justice is served in the universe. Yet he is basically right: it is better for us and for the community that we embrace at least some of what his assembled sages have suggested and taught.
I suspect that Colm Keane is an author many will miss; but he has at least left his admirers a legacy of writing which his publisher will continue to keep in print.