Poet Lionel SCHERER performs in “SOLO SLAM” La Caserne Ephémère – ARTFACTORIES, Pontoise-France, may 2002. (1) Credit: Regis Amice
Lionel Scherer contacted me recently and sent along a zip file containing a French translation of New Maps of Heaven!
Wow, what a treat and what a surprise it was!
Following that, he did the same with the English translation. I’m thrilled!
I’d like to see his work receive widespread dissemination and so he’s agreed to allow me to release the entire contents here, free of charge. The files are actually quite small and should be capable of being located to most computers.
It’d be fine for anyone to create a site with this material: Get the word out, in this case, that there is no such thing as death. We live forever. Perhaps let us know what imaginative, creative use you’ve made of it!
NOUVELLES CARTES DU CIEL (.doc & .pdf)
https://mega.nz/folder/hi9VFQ7Q#uOQ7_lXFfrQyoMxcIDf1LA
NEW MAPS OF HEAVEN (.doc)
https://mega.nz/folder/V6EkAKIb#VCl0KYNZxlUfSPywAHiBRw
Lionel furnishes us with this biographical note:
Lionel SCHERER is a French poet, author, songwriter, singer, actor, performer, sound & music producer, journalist, literary columnist, copywriter, wordsmith.
He is involved in writing, music production, sound design, publishing, television, radio, advertising, the web, press, performance, theater and live shows.
He currently lives and works in Southeast Asia.
He tells us how this project came about:
I don’t know how I came across the Golden Gaia databases and New Maps of Heaven one day.
It took me a little while to understand what I had in front of me and how it was structured.
But the general subject excited me to the highest degree. And as I started reading, this resonated within me, as if I instinctively already knew all this. It was not unknown to me (I must mention here that at the age of 17, during a car accident of which I was the driver, I was the victim of a head trauma with initial loss of consciousness which lasted 5 hours) and what was flashing before my eyes took me from surprise to revelation, to confirmation, to acceptance, in light of the richness of the content [of New Maps of Heaven], the raw sincerity of the testimonies and the surge of hope, joyful, positive, loving, universal, underlying this spiritual “bazaar.”
Wow! A slap ! Not frontal, but powerful, long, insidious, unstoppable. Never read anything like this, on a frankly daunting subject.
This turned me around. A gigantic, sharp, detailed, lively (!) work, illuminating without being dazzling.
My dear mother, as she grew older, began to talk more and more often about death or to evoke it, in a rather simplistic, clichéd and caricatured way, which seemed so far removed from what I had perceived and learned in New Maps of Heaven that I almost felt sorry for her, for her naivety and her ignorance of what had just been revealed to me.
On the occasion of her birthday, I decided to translate some texts from NMH into French and offer them to her, in the hope that she would be interested in the subject and the book and perhaps come to change her perception and her approach to the act of dying and of death in general. May she envision that “the day of her death could be the happiest day of her life.” (1)
After these first quick translations, passionate about the subject, I got involved and translated your entire book.
Knowing that the translations were imperfect, from December 2023 to the end of January 2024, I took the time to reread everything and refine them.
Thank you so much, Lionel, for all your hard work to spread the word! Death in our world is our birthday in the next.
Footnotes
(1) “For me, one of the happiest moments of my earth-life was the moment of death. Of course it was much longer than a moment, but the wonderful freedom from pain, the feeling of peace and security when I saw my loved dead alive, smiling, waiting for me, drive away loneliness, fear, and, for a while, all the grief of separation from my two boys.
“Other people may die differently – I don’t know. I can only tell you that the word ‘death,’ judging from my experience, should have its definition altered in the dictionary to ‘the first human experience of a peace that passes understanding.'” (Hilda to Geraldine Cummins, They Survive. Evidence of Life Beyond the Grave from Scripts of Geraldine Cummins. Comp. E.B. Gibbes. London, etc.: Ride and Co., n.d., 139.)
“They do not suffer, these people, in their passing. I think sometimes their friends suffer more, when they see the body writhing in apparent agony, while in reality the spirit is already tasting the first freedom from pain, or lies in a blessed insensibility.” (John Scott in Paul Beard, Living On. How Consciousness Continues and Evolves After Death. New York: Continuum, 1981, 56.)
Footnotes
(1) A SLAM is an act in which poets perform original work, without music. It combines poetry, theater & performance.