Rebirth and the Western Buddhist - Khamkoo

62 Rebirth and the Western Buddhist
beings in the intermediate state, and even hell-beings.
"Ghosts" may not be present living persons at all; according
to Joan Grant, 35 a ghost is a split-off fragment of a
personality, with a limited energy which eventually runs
down.
The recollections of hells I have found reported are
limited to the far memory experts. Elisabeth Haich 42 describes
unforgettably how she broke the ancient Egyptian
equivalent of a Tantric root vow and fell into a special
kind of hell state, bound immovably to her mummified
body for 3000 years, during which there was nothing by
which to judge the passage of time, so it seemed infinite:
The feeling of horror and fear refuses to leave
me for a single moment. ... I cannot look in any
direction for help for my tortured soul .... The
tortures and sufferings know no end ... no
end ... no end .... 110
She then lived many lives as a woman before at last, in
her present life, she regained the realisations she had lost.
In Buddhist terminology this would be a pratyeka-naraka,
an individual hell.
Joan Grant 111 has described a "visit" to the Caverns of
the Underworld, which was part of her initiation in pt
Dynasty Egypt. There, "people expiate those crimes
which are too manifold to be freed on Earth." A former
Peruvian priest who had slain thousands in human sacrifice
feels his heart being torn out again and again, his
torturer being but a vision of himself. A woman "whose
presence in a house had always disturbed the quiet of
them who shared it with her, until it was as though their
rest was tormented with stinging insects," is beset by
hornets. People who had maltreated animals are now
themselves in tortured animal bodies, such as a monkey
with its paws cut off.