Ptolemy Tompkins (born 1962) is an American writer specializing in books describing the role of the spiritual in ordinary life. His best-known work, "Proof of Angels" (Howard Books, 2014), co-authored with Utah police officer Tyler Beddoes, focuses on the death of Jennifer Lynn Groesbeck, whose car veered into the Spanish Fork River just outside the town of Spanish Fork, and the mysterious voice which Beddoes, along with three other responding officers, heard inside the car as they struggled to right it. Tompkins also collaborated with Eben Alexander on his mega-selling "Proof of Heaven" (Simon & Schuster, 2012) and its follow-up, "The Map of Heaven" (Simon & Schuster, 2014).
Biography
Tompkins was born in
Washington, D.C., educated at
Sarah Lawrence College
Sarah Lawrence College is a Private university, private liberal arts college in Yonkers, New York. The college models its approach to education after the Supervision system, Oxford/Cambridge system of one-on-one student-faculty tutorials. Sara ...
, and currently lives off the coast of Maine. He is the son of best-selling author
Peter Tompkins (A Spy in Rome, Secrets of the Great Pyramid,
The Secret Life of Plants
''The Secret Life of Plants'' (1973) is a book by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. The book documents controversial experiments that claim to reveal unusual phenomena regarding plants such as plant sentience, discovered through experimenta ...
, and others), and for nine years was an in-house editor at Guideposts Magazine. ''Paradise Fever'' (
Avon Books, ), his 1997 memoir, chronicles his childhood in the early seventies, focusing on the time his father spent searching for
Atlantis in the waters off of the island of
Bimini in the
Bahamas. His ''
The Divine Life of Animals
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in ...
'' (Crown, 2010), argues for the validity of the idea that animals possess souls, while ''The Modern Book of the Dead'' (Atria, 2012) sketches a contemporary map of the
afterlife
The afterlife (also referred to as life after death) is a purported existence in which the essential part of an individual's identity or their stream of consciousness continues to live after the death of their physical body. The surviving ess ...
focusing on the work of mid-twentieth-century afterlife investigators Robert Crookall and Jane Sherwood. Other books include ''The Beaten Path: Field Notes on Getting Wise in a Wisdom-Crazy World'' (William Morrow, 2000,), which focuses on Tompkins' step-brother, the Buddhist Abbot Nicholas Vreeland. His first book, ''This Tree Grows Out of Hell'', first published in 1990 but re-released in revised form by Sterling Books in 2010 (Sterling, ), is a spiritual history of
Mesoamerica heavily influenced by the thinking of
Ken Wilber and
Owen Barfield. "Proof of God" (Howard Books, 2017), written with astrophysicist Bernard Haisch, explores Haisch's work on the Zero Point Field and Haisch's contention that the physical world is analogous to a computer simulation, the ultimate programmer of which is God. Tompkins also appears in "Monk with a Camera," a 2014 documentary about his step-brother Nicholas Vreeland.
Tompkins' mother is Jerree Talbot Smith. He has two siblings, Timothy Christopher Tompkins (deceased), and Robin Ray of Hobe Sound, Florida.
References
External links
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http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,356133,00.html
1962 births
Living people
American male writers
Writers from Washington, D.C.
Sarah Lawrence College alumni
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