Despite at least two articles attempting to elucidate the human want for immortality, I have been again quizzed as to exactly what it is I think about “life after death.” If there were a simple answer, it would be I believe in eternal life because life is of itself everlasting. Is that a solecism, or is it a summons to confront the need to consider the breadth and depth of life? Lest one be confused as to the correct answer, it is the latter. To do that one needs to consider the interconnectivity of life, the nature of consciousness and the panoply of psychic powers upon which it rests, and the nature of time. These items have been addressed in The Question of Immortality and in My soul magnifies the Lord. There ought to be no need to revisit the points of consideration set out in those works. If one in interested in approaching with any degree of seriousness some insight into the idea of life everlasting, one cannot expect an answer in twenty-five words or less. Unfortunately, when people ask a profound question, they often want exactly that. We have been weaned to expect that the profundities of existence can and ought to be simply plopped down before us in crystalline clarity, or to have them delivered to us on a sugared spoon. Why then we have brains, minds, souls? Can we cease to be infantile in the approach to the deepest questions? Can we not realize life’s meaning and depths do not reveal themselves with the click of some remote control or the snap of a question? Life is not simple, and neither are its workings.
As noted in The Question of Immortality, life is something intricately interconnected. The members of each species are connected one to another, and each species is in turn interconnected to all others. The cosmos is a uni-verse, a singular, integrated co-operative of organisms. It is everlasting, that is, it exists without end from the beginning of time with time the orderly succession of events. Every event subsists within the everlasting. Thus everything, every act, subsists as part of the everlasting and enduring flow. Things and events do not vanish; they merge, flow, interweave into other events ever without end. This we instinctively grasp when we speak of the good, or of the ill we do by ignorance, folly, or intent as lasting evermore. Such acts do not vanish, they remain taints, tinctures, powers influencing all other acts. The power of every sin, every folly, every crime weaves its way into the life of the species, into the life of the cosmos. So too, every act of kindness, mercy, care emolliates the trials and travails of life, and redeems from the strain and stain added onto them by the callousness of moral vacuity and evil. The efforts of mind to find for that either a balancing equation or judicious encapsulation conjure for us the notions of heaven, hell, and some purgative in-between.
We, as a species, are not comforted with such cosmic sweep. We want to know simply that we will sleep forever, or forever be preserved—hopefully in some state of bliss for the good we have done. Let it be noted, few believe they merit damnation, and of them that do, most secretly hope against it or believe more firmly that death is annihilation. In brief, most want the wee “me,” that ego identity we design and fabricate for ourselves and the world to see, to last evermore, and to do so in a state of happiness. Here is the rub. “Me,” that ego identity ever fluid between the psychic forces of blind impulse and social expectation, that ever-adapting construct of a swirl of subpersonalities, is merely a transient item. I am not who I was at age ten. Who I am when writing is not who I am when playing, not who I am when praying, not who I am when talking to a stranger, not who I am when talking to one whom I deeply love. Yes, there is an underlying unity in the “I,” but each task above listed is done by “me”. That is more than a play at grammar. It is a reflection of the psychic dialogue that makes for our life in the world. That psychic dialogue takes place on a psychic platform, and that platform of being is called soul. There is no ego, no id, no super-ego, no anima, no animus, no persona, no personality without some root in soul. Soul is life. It is our life. All else is but fragment of its evolutionary process. That process is meant to reveal soul in its inner most potential, the power to integrate all facets of soul into a functioning and environmentally integrating whole. The purpose of all the aspects of life, of soul, is to reveal its core: spirit. Spirit, something nineteenth century philosophers dubbed the will-to-be or the will-to-power, makes the cosmos. In the magnetism of its abiogenic power it brings to light the mass of cosmos and gives it order, purpose, design, intent. The life that endures is that spirit. The life that is eternal and everlasting is that spirit—not this or that fleeting moment of “me” or “I.” It is egotistical to think the wee ego ought to endure forever when it can barely endure the solidity of an occasion or a day. “Me” and “I” are raiments of the body, and with the body they fade. That which remains is spirit. Thus Paul may write: “that which is planted is corruptible; that which is risen is spiritual.”
Here we need to consider not heaven and hell, but that by which they are within us confronted: prayer. Despite the distinct types of prayer one might wish to set out, there are fundamentally two: the prayer that glorifies the holy (heaven), and the prayer that seeks to escape from hell, from the clutch of evil in this world. We pray to express our thankfulness, to express devotion to and adherence to the highest powers and ideals. We pray to de delivered from ills of body, mind, soul, estate, from ills that befall ourselves, our loved ones, the world. Prayer sets us before the reality of good and evil. It is not about God. It is about our humanity. It is not a devise to move God, but to incite the trace, the grace, the print of God, the spirit of the all-wholly within. “I set before you good and evil: choose.” Because all life is interconnected, there is a positive psychic value to every prayer, to every act toward self-understanding, care, creativity, love. Yet the heart of every prayer must be devotion. Such devotion is neither about the want, the hope, the desire of the moment, nor is it about a blind resignation to fate. It is the placing of self in the light of the spirit that resides at the core of the soul, and there in humbleness rehearsing the desires and needs of self and world. It is, in religious terms, about kneeling before God with the all of self that one might better understand and with-stand the all of self. No, it is not egocentric. It is about the revelation of self, of soul, of spirit dwelling within and revealing also the Self, the Soul, the Spirit in whom, with whom and through whom all that is, is. Prayer is about offering oneself before God to behold the truth of self and world. The power that emerges from that is a mystery, a soulfulness, a psychic propitiation unconfined by the physics of cause and effect. Both saints and scientists have played with words to explain that power, but like any art or artistry deciphered or described, such efforts are inept to capture the vitality excited within both soul and world. Wishful thinking does not make the world, but neither does the unexamined life, the unopened heart. Prayer is examination of soul, the confession of the soul, the analysis of the soul. The clarity, the light, the power released from its exercise is world-efficacious because it is self-constitutive, soul-releasing, spirit-giving. Ego cannot stand before God. Neither can the id nor the super-ego. God is spirit and to place oneself before God, before the light of God, is to open oneself to illumination, to allow oneself to become the medium of that illumination in act, in word, in deed, in living-in-the-world for-the-world, that interconnected cosmic flow of life everlastingly seeking its integration, its wholeness, its Holy. Prayer is not so much a dialogue with God as before God. It is not so much about the world-to-come as the confronting of this—my–world, and the insight, and the strength to be in this world for this world.
That insight and strength, that moment of spirit-in-the-world is never without nuance, and thus, never without the need for discernment. Spiritual vision wants always for clarity. The Seen One is the Risen One but never without some need for reflection. Is He a gardener, a ghost, a stranger on the road? Even when he is seen in the brilliance of God it needs be asked: “Who, Lord, are you?” Thus, Paul spent no small time after his great vision to understand who he needed to become, what he needed to do. The apostles in Jerusalem as well required time, and reflection, and challenges to come to grips with the span of the commission they had been given to “go to all the world.” Jesus himself, always one with his Father, was wont to retreat to the silence of night and solitude to pray that “Thy will be done.” If our Lord and master himself, if his most intimate disciples bowed to the spirit’s call to reflect, discern, learn, and be existentially enveloped in order to transmit the heart and mind of Creativity, no one ought to think to be seized by the spirit or by the Spirit, and suddenly be imbued with the perfection of clarity regarding being and mission. In this world we all and ever see “as if in a mirror dimly.” To know the spirit within the soul must listen and learn—in both solitude and experience in the world. There are no simple answers in life. Life in this world and life in the spirit are complexities reflecting in time the pleroma of the Holy. And beyond any practical psychology of action, despite all worldly experience, logic, and insight, there is still the want of faith and hope in the unstoppable power of the Creative. Only therein does spirit find the Spirit, only therein does Spirit become the Christ, the incarnate of the divine for us here and now, and for our salvation evermore.