Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

“This is perhaps the most important book Hampton Roads will ever publish,” I said.

Strong words. I’m still not sure they weren’t true.

Clearly, it wasn’t the most profitable book, or the most successful. Yet our publishing The Division of Consciousness encouraged Peter Novak to write two more books, The Lost Secret of Death, and Original Christianity. For that alone it would have been worthwhile to publish it. But as I say, I’m still not sure that it wouldn’t be true to say that The Division of Consciousness may not be the most important book Hampton Roads will ever publish.

That requires some explanation, given that the author remains little known, and that among our other titles are Neale Walsch’s worldwide best-selling Conversations with God books. But I’m not talking, here, about immediate impact. I’m talking about the inherent value of the thought enclosed in covers. Many people will find their lives changed by this book, many of them second-hand, without ever reading it, as its content percolates through the culture.

It started with what seemed like a simple question: What happens to us when we die? Do we go on to heaven or hell, following judgment? Do we reincarnate? Or do we merely cease to exist? The first conclusion is (for example) Christianity’s; the second, Hinduism’s, and the third, materialism’s.

That materialism has concluded that there is no afterlife is only to be expected. Materialism can’t see past its nose, and refuses to see inconvenient testimony, dismissing it as “anecdotal” as though that meant anything. But it is curious, when you come to think about it, that the world’s spiritual traditions are not in consensus on the subject. You would think that after so many thousands of years, religions would have come to the same conclusion.

And even today’s materialistic science, that has usurped or been conceded so much authority to define what is real, is finding itself faced with testimony about near-death experiences and past-life recall, the one implying judgment, the other implying reincarnation.

But they can’t both be true!

Can they?

Well, yes, maybe they can. The idea came to him in a flash. “I consumed everything that seemed even remotely relevant. One week found me more or less simultaneously reviewing Jungian psychology, Swedenborgian theology, both the Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead, a collection of Hindu Upanishads, a handful of previously unknown Christian Gospels unearthed in Egypt in 1945, and the Biblical prophecies of a Universal Resurrection and Judgment Day. Slowly, in the course of that week, in the chaos of all this, the question which unlocks the entire mystery took form in my mind: How might such a Universal Resurrection transpire if reincarnation indeed is a fact?

“With the simple asking of that question, something profound changed. A door opened; a new perspective dawned; an alternate possibility presented itself.”

It did indeed. And as he drew out the implications of his thought, cautiously, doubting (as one would) that something so important could have been undiscovered so long, he delved deeper. We published The Division of Consciousness in 1997, and he kept delving-and discovered that indeed something so important had been discovered long ago. It formed, in fact, the basis of ancient religions, as he demonstrated (to my mind, convincingly) in The Lost Secret of Death, which we published in 2003. And then, examining Gnostic scriptures, he became convinced that this is the point of view from which they too were written. Hence, Original Christianity (2005).

An amazing body of work. I say it again, perhaps the most important work Hampton Roads will ever publish.