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. Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...

, educated at

Sarah Lawrence College Sarah Lawrence College (SLC) is a Private university, private liberal arts college in Yonkers, New York, United States. Founded as a Women's colleges in the United States, women's college in 1926, Sarah Lawrence College has been coeducational ...

, and currently lives off the coast of Maine. He is the son of best-selling author

Peter Tompkins Peter Tompkins (April 19, 1919 – January 23, 2007) was an American journalist, World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS) spy in Rome, and best-selling author. Biography Tompkins was born in Athens, Georgia, and later travelled to Rome, ...

(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, which documents controversial experiments that claim to reveal unusual phenomena associated with plants, such as plant sentience and the ability of plants ...

, and others), and for nine years was an in-house editor at Guideposts Magazine. ''Paradise Fever'' (

Avon Books Avon Publications is a leading publisher of romance fiction. At Avon's initial stages, it was an American paperback book and comic book publisher. The shift in content occurred in the early 1970s with multiple Avon romance titles reaching and ma ...

, ), his 1997 memoir, chronicles his childhood in the early seventies, focusing on the time his father spent searching for

Atlantis Atlantis () is a fictional island mentioned in Plato's works '' Timaeus'' and ''Critias'' as part of an allegory on the hubris of nations. In the story, Atlantis is described as a naval empire that ruled all Western parts of the known world ...

in the waters off of the island of

Bimini Bimini is the westernmost district of the Bahamas and comprises a chain of islands located about due east of Miami. Bimini is the closest point in the Bahamas to the mainland United States and approximately west-northwest of Nassau. The popula ...

in the

Bahamas The Bahamas, officially the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, is an archipelagic and island country within the Lucayan Archipelago of the Atlantic Ocean. It contains 97 per cent of the archipelago's land area and 88 per cent of its population. ...

. His '' The Divine Life of Animals'' (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 or life after death is a purported existence in which the essential part of an individual's Stream of consciousness (psychology), stream of consciousness or Personal identity, identity continues to exist after the death of their ...

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 Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area that begins in the southern part of North America and extends to the Pacific coast of Central America, thus comprising the lands of central and southern Mexico, all of Belize, Guatemala, El S ...

heavily influenced by the thinking of

Ken Wilber Kenneth Earl Wilber II (born January 31, 1949) is an American theorist and writer on transpersonal psychology and his own integral theory, a four-quadrant grid which purports to encompass all human knowledge and experience. Starting publishing ...

and

Owen Barfield Arthur Owen Barfield (9 November 1898 – 14 December 1997) was an English philosopher, author, poet, critic, and member of the Inklings. Life Barfield was born in London, to Elizabeth (née Shoults; 1860–1940) and Arthur Edward Barfield (186 ...

. "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

* * https://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 {{US-editor-stub