4
ESCAPING THE NOOSE
FROM THE MOMENT she ran away from home, Savitri had been counting the minutes until Satyavan would return from his woodcutting. But now her mind grew quieter. This wasn’t just the influence of Ramana’s wisdom or the silence of the woods. Fate had a scheme in mind for Savitri. Fate was leading her in circles until it was satisfied that she could face Yama on her own.
Before, all she could see in her mind’s eye was her beloved husband coming home to his doom, but now she saw nothing. Perhaps this was a good sign, because Ramana began to speak.
“I’m not promising you that we can save Satyavan, but others have escaped death.”
Savitri’s heart rose. “Tell me.”
“I remember a boy who was born under a terrible curse. His father was a great rishi, the most revered sage for many miles. This rishi had longed for a son, yet his wife was barren. Finally the rishi decided that he would demand a son from God. Only the wisest know the secret that God was created to do our bidding, not we to do His.
“The rishi called upon God, but at first He refused to appear. The rishi had great patience, however, and he kept telling God to grant him a son, year after year. Finally God appeared to him and said, ‘I will give you offspring, but you must choose. Do you want a hundred sons who will live long but be fools, or do you want one son who will be intelligent but die young?’
“The rishi didn’t hesitate to choose the intelligent son, who God decreed would die on his sixteenth birthday. To the boundless joy of the rishi and his wife, she became pregnant and gave birth to a boy. He grew up to be extremely intelligent, and his parents cherished him all the more knowing the curse he was born under. They intended to tell the boy his fate in time. Somehow the years passed, and they kept putting it off.
“Finally the boy’s sixteenth birthday arrived, and still he knew nothing. When he knelt before his father to get his blessing, the rishi said, ‘I want you to stay beside me and not leave the house today.’ His son was puzzled, especially when he saw the tears in his father’s eyes. Obediently he stayed beside him the whole day, but the rishi was called away for a moment, and his son seized the opportunity to run out the back door. He owed an offering to God on his birthday, which a father cannot forbid.
“When the boy got to the temple he stood in front of the altar, not noticing that Yama had followed him there, carrying the noose that he uses to snare his victims. He threw it over the boy’s head to drag him away.
“But at that very moment the boy bowed before the altar in gratitude for the gift of life. Yama’s noose missed and caught the sacred images on the altar instead, which crashed to the floor. When they broke, God leaped up, enraged at this insult. He kicked Yama out of the temple and granted the boy a reprieve from death. Some say that he kicked Yama so hard that he killed him, but then God gave him life again when he realized that people were so used to dying that they couldn’t do without it.”
Savitri listened to this tale intently. Her intuition told her that the boy was none other than Ramana, but she decided to keep that to herself. “What did the boy learn from this?” she asked instead.
Ramana replied, “He learned that when Death comes to grab you, let him grab God instead. If God is in you, Yama’s noose will always miss. That is the secret for escaping his clutches.”
As it happened, they were passing a meadow that gleamed with flowers in a clearing. Savitri said, “Let’s lie down here for a while. I’ve been so anxious that I forgot to be grateful that I am alive.”
“A good idea, Savitri.”
They sat down in the afternoon light that turned every flower into radiant gold, and Savitri meditated on her soul.
A RISHI’S HEAVEN
The notion of heaven keeps things human, and that’s one reason it has survived so long. The image of returning home after we die, resting from our labors, and receiving our just reward offers powerful reassurance. (It’s difficult not to come to tears listening to the old gospel hymn with its gentle, rocking refrain: “Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, Come home … Come home.”) In an age of doubt, however, the shakiest assumptions about heaven are the two it can’t do without:
When we talked about the transition stage known as “crossing over,” we saw that step-by-step the dying person comes to terms with losing a physical body and the many attachments of a personality. But this is just the first stage of what transpires. A destination lies ahead, which for most religious people implies a real place, not simply a state of mind.
Of all possible destinations, heaven is the easiest. It offers reassurance that we will remain physically the same, with our personality intact. (People get even more specific. I was talking with a breast cancer patient who had undergone a radical mastectomy. We both knew there was a chance she might not survive, but being a devout Christian she was easy about going to heaven. “What do you expect to see when you get there?” I asked. “My boobs,” she shot back immediately.)
Heaven flies in the face of Vedanta, which holds that our destination is a meeting with the unknown. After the familiar images of “crossing over” disappear, the unexpected unfolds. Consciousness can take a creative leap. The conventional heaven we were all told about as children was just such a creative leap that has become a cliché. We can remain in its well-worn groove, but in a culture of doubt, I don’t think this is fixed. Doubt has the advantage of opening new possibilities.
One of these is the possibility that death can be as creative as living. A painter knows that he’s using the raw material of pigment, but the vast majority of people do not realize that they are using the raw material of consciousness. If they think about consciousness at all, what comes to mind are its contents. Like a room full of furniture, your consciousness is filled with thoughts and memories, wishes and fears, desires and dreams. Some of this content gets changed, but some of it is permanent—the fixed furniture of the mind. It isn’t creative to keep using those same contents over and over, yet that’s essentially what heaven amounts to: reused furniture.
Take a piece of paper and mark one column “heaven” and one column “hell.” As quickly as you can, list the words and images that come to mind for each word. Most people, whether they consider themselves believers or skeptics, come up with a list along the following lines:
HEAVEN
harps
fluffy white clouds
angels
home of God
everlasting peace
bliss eternal
the soul’s true home
Paradise—lost and then regained
reward for the righteous
great white father on his throne
nice but boring
one big family again
opiate of the masses
I want to go there
HELL
devil, pitchfork, sulfur
torments of the damned
fire
Dante’s Inferno—circle after circle
unending pain
scary beyond belief
cloven hooves
fear keeps people in line
glamour of evil
Satan the ultimate rock star, seductive bad boy
I don’t want to go there
These were the entries I came up with, writing as fast as I could. I immediately notice two things: my images are entirely secondhand, inherited from the culture I live in. There is no ambiguity. Heaven is one thing, hell is the opposite. Without room for ambiguity, the afterlife can’t be creative. But our minds prefer things to be clear-cut. Every fairy tale opposes absolute good with absolute evil. We don’t tell our children that after Cinderella came home from the ball she was so happy to see her stepsisters there that they became better friends. Or that once the glass slipper fit her foot she decided to go on a trial date with the prince. Despite centuries of theology about Satan and his relationship to God, our minds simplify their roles into villain and hero.
According to Catholic belief we see God imperfectly while we are alive here on earth. His reflection is cast in a mirror like our own face and body (Saint Paul’s “seeing in a glass darkly”). We imagine that he is human. But on arriving in heaven we will see God directly as he is. And that, according to the Church, raises a contradiction, because we will see both the “obscure and vague” image we had in mind and the real God “after the manner of His own Being.” In other words, he will be real and unreal at the same time. This contradiction can’t be settled; it’s a mystery. On this Vedanta would agree. How, then, can we find mystery in Heaven?
The War in Heaven
The popular British writer H. G. Wells wrote, “This doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven … is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought.” What made heaven so revolutionary was a shift from this world to the next for which Jesus is almost single-handedly responsible. In fact, heaven is one of his most unique contributions.
In the Old Testament God promises the prophets and patriarchs a kingdom in the literal sense: They will rule the earth in His name. Thus God makes a covenant, a binding legal contract, with David that He will “never lack a man to sit upon His throne, forever.” Since David was already a king, this promise was taken to mean that David’s throne in Jerusalem would be God’s for all eternity. Jesus himself seems to second this notion when he promises that the Kingdom of God is at hand, yet his teaching extends much further.
In Christ’s conception heaven is present: It’s an inward experience that can be felt by the righteous. Heaven is also future: It’s returning home to be with God that the righteous await on Judgment Day. Heaven is personal: It is to be found “within you.” At the same time, heaven is universal: It is an eternal abode beyond birth and death, a place outside Creation.
This teaching was revolutionary because Jesus built a bridge to the soul, exhorting every person to find his (or her) way across. Before, being righteous in the eyes of Jehovah was a matter of ritual, obeying the priests, and not breaking divine commandments. Whether the Old Testament even holds out any afterlife is a matter of debate. (Needless to say, Jews do not consider the New Testament an advance over the Old. As Judaism has evolved it came to include its own elaborate metaphysics. But for millions of Reform Jews, there is no afterlife. This puts pressure on every believer to live the most moral and righteous life possible here and now.)
After Jesus, people could go on a spiritual journey, and the urgency of the journey was something quite new. Heaven was a prize one had to win through one’s own efforts. The urgency to win heaven has fueled Christianity to this day, and the most fervent believers declare that it must never be forgotten. But do they remember that the entire process happens inside?
In today’s culture Christianity has become stuck in literal images—such as heaven that is literally a place. There’s no hint of an inward journey and no room for creative exploration of the soul. People wind up arguing fiercely over an imaginary landscape far removed from Jesus’ actual teaching. The ramifications of this war reach everywhere. In 2005 a forty-one-year-old brain-dead woman in Florida named Terri Schiavo became the focus for a war between faith and science. The heartache of Ms. Schiavo’s condition, known as a persistent vegetative state (PVS), is that the brain-dead person may have brief periods of what looks like intermittent wakefulness as facial expressions change, the eyes blink, and the head possibly moves. These are all unconscious reflexes. If viewed through desperate eyes, slim signs of wakefulness can seem like “minimal consciousness,” a medical term that implies a faint degree of hope. Terri Schiavo’s parents had seen her eyes move after she emerged from her original coma, and this they interpreted as a sign of recognition from someone they loved. (Right-wing politicians blew these faint signs of awareness out of all proportion, claiming that Ms. Schiavo laughed and cried, knew her surroundings, and recognized her family.)
The idea that Schiavo was no longer alive—and hadn’t been for fifteen years, ever since the day in 1990 when she collapsed from heart failure—was attacked vehemently by the religious right. President Bush flew overnight from his Texas ranch to Washington, D.C., so that an emergency bill in Congress could “save” the life of one endangered person, a move that was denounced in some circles as a cynical political stunt. Accusations of hypocrisy flew freely. Isn’t the religious right also an eager supporter of capital punishment, a form of death that has taken scores of innocent lives? In the end, Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube was removed by court order, despite the emergency congressional bill. She died two weeks later, in March 2005. The right to end the life of the brain-dead has been well established all the way up to the Supreme Court, and it was upheld again in this case.
In this story religion traps the mind in a welter of firmly held contradictory positions. Those people who so vociferously believe in heaven, weren’t they also denying Terri Schiavo her chance to go there by trying to keep her alive? If heaven is the supreme reward, is euthanasia a crime or a gift? Medical science doesn’t care when the soul enters the body or when it leaves. If a woman in PVS can’t see, feel, or think, then taking her off life support isn’t much of a change. She will go from dead to dead, experiencing merely a more complete definition of what “dead” means. Finally, there is a peculiarly Christian dilemma here: Was Terri Schiavo going to heaven now or on Judgment Day, in which case how much can it matter if she is allowed to die sooner or later? According to fundamentalists, her body will still have to wait until the End Time to rise from the grave and meet God face to face.
The schism between science and religion is more than faith versus materialism. Science absents itself from metaphysical questions, but most people assume that science disproves metaphysics, indeed, disproves all invisible things associated with God, the soul, heaven, hell, and so on. This assumption is skepticism, not science. Science in the age of quantum physics does not deny the existence of invisible worlds. Quite the contrary. And we can’t claim that Jesus is only about metaphysics—he gives plenty of advice about living in this world. Which brings us to a puzzle. When Jesus tells his disciples that they should be in the world but not of it, his teaching seems unlivable. If I’m eating breakfast, how can I do that without being of the world? My physical body anchors me here every moment. But the soul manages to be in this world while remaining firmly outside time and space. Jesus is giving us a clue about the kingdom of heaven within.
Where the Rishis Go
Many times Jesus sounds like a rishi in the tradition of Vedanta. Certainly that’s true about being in the world but not of it. In simple terms, he is telling his closest followers to stop thinking of themselves as physical creatures. Jesus becomes more explicit if we look outside the four Gospels to the fragmentary Gospel of Thomas, which was written very early, perhaps within a century after the Crucifixion, but was later excluded from the official canon.
Jesus said: “If those who lead you say to you: See, the kingdom is in heaven, then the birds of the sky will go before you; if they say to you: It is in the sea, then the fish will go before you. But the kingdom is within you, and it is outside of you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will know that you are the sons of the living Father.” This passage shows how profound the roots of religion are, and how compatible the great traditions of wisdom would be if dogma didn’t stand in the way. What Jesus says here supports the view that heaven is everywhere, but it goes further by saying that heaven is an inward experience—an experience in consciousness. Jesus sees the soul everywhere and thus he can see that the essence of people lies outside time and space. Like the rishis, Jesus was comfortable living with eternity. Why, then, aren’t we?
Eternity can’t be grasped by the mind in our ordinary waking state. Our waking state is dominated by time while eternity is not. There must be a link. Vedanta says that there is a continuum, in fact. Every quality in yourself is actually a soul quality. Think about the following sequence of words:
Contented
Happy
Thrilled
Overjoyed
Ecstatic
Blissful
This is the kind of continuum the rishis had in mind. A person can feel contented without knowing that there is any connection to the soul. When contentment intensifies, one is aware of being happy, and if happiness is intense enough, it feels thrilling. At rare moments we can rise to a higher level and say that we are overjoyed, or ecstatic. We are moving along a continuum, which may be invisible but is just as real as tasting increasingly sweet desserts.
Ecstasy represents the limit of happiness that can be felt personally, and even here the Latin root of the word “ecstasy” means “to stand outside.” In common usage people will say, “I was so happy it felt unreal, like it was happening to someone else,” or “I loved her so much it was like an out-of-body experience.” In Vedanta there is one final step on the continuum: bliss. In Sanskrit the word is ananda. Bliss is a quality of the soul. From the perspective of everyday life, it cannot be imagined. The mind is as baffled by infinite happiness as the tongue would be if it tasted something sweeter than sweet.
Even though it is inside everyone, heaven isn’t reached in a single leap of faith. As with bliss, there is a continuum with every quality of the soul. We all know this instinctively. Take kindness. The urge to perform a small act of kindness, such as giving spare change to a homeless person on the street, is expandable to giving welfare to the needy. Kindness crosses over into a religious act when faith-based groups engage in AIDS relief work in Africa. We see the essence of this impulse in Buddha, the Compassionate One, whose very nature is kindness.
We need this reminder that our best qualities can reach universality. Christianity may claim that Jesus was unique, as Buddhism claims that Gautama was unique, yet the continuum says otherwise. The following qualities become more intense as we get closer to the soul:
Compassion
Strength
Truth
Bliss
Beauty
Love
Wisdom
Power
Every act of kindness adds another brushstroke to the picture; every insight draws you nearer to your essence. You and I differ from each other in a thousand ways, depending on how we relate to our souls. On a given day I may be struck by a beautiful sunset, a loving smile from a child, a sudden truth about who I am. You may be struck by how much the poor deserve compassion, how wise a poem by Keats is, how beautiful it is to give of yourself. What keeps life fascinating is the constant creativity of the soul. After all is said and done, I believe in heaven, and when I die I expect to be there, not in a celestial garden but in a space described by T. S. Eliot’s famous lines:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Truth, wisdom, beauty, and all the other qualities of the soul don’t need physical settings. Pure love exists even in the absence of a person to love. Spiritual truth needs no crusade to follow. The soul in its full intensity takes center stage after we die but is foreshadowed long before.
“I’ve never married, and I’ve never been a mother, because I’m a man,” a middle-aged writer told me once. He had been a spiritual seeker for a long time. “For some years I lived in an ashram in western Massachusetts where the orientation was Hindu and a lot was said about the Divine Mother. I’m not Christian enough to be attracted to the Virgin Mary. I guess you’d say I was always more male oriented. But I realize that the feminine is important.
“I have women friends who have joined Goddess groups. They perform rituals and dance under the full moon. I followed a more conventional path, basically meditating hours a day. No dancing, no singing, not even any prayers. I did this for five years. Then one day something very strange occurred.
“I was sitting in meditation when a gentle feeling came over me. It began as warmth in my heart, then it took on an emotional tone. Tenderness, sweetness, love. I sat there enjoying this when the intensity increased. I seemed to melt away. Within ten seconds I became pure. Nothing but love. I was the Divine Mother.
“How can I tell you what that’s like? Imagine that you’re watching a great movie actress. She embraces and kisses her children, and for a moment you forget that you’re sitting in the dark watching the play of light on a screen. You are her. That’s what this felt like, only a thousand times more intense. I was nothing but the Mother.”
At unexpected moments we go beyond our usual place on the spiritual continuum. We don’t feel mere affection, infatuation, romantic love, or deep devotion. We become absorbed into universal love itself. This man told me that he now looks at women very differently. “They exist as ordinary people but at the same time a totally impersonal force—the Mother—shines through them. I can be honking at a woman driver to move faster through a light, but if she turns her face toward me, I see it. It is doing everything, and when I realize that, honking my horn seems absurd. Can you honk your horn at God?”
In physical form there’s only so much purity we can absorb, but sometimes that threshold is transcended. I’m thinking of Saint Teresa of Ávila, the sixteenth-century Spanish saint who experienced divine love as a golden arrow being pushed through her heart by an angel. Teresa described this as excruciatingly painful and blissful at the same time (hence her status as the patron saint of sufferers).
This brings us back to the paradox of heaven, that God is visible and invisible at the same time. So is the soul. We encounter it visibly through events that inspire us to feel love, truth, and beauty. The vessel that contains them—a loving spouse, a beautiful painting, a wise saying—will fade and disappear. But its essence remains, and it is this essence that allows us to look forward to feeling more love tomorrow. This is the path to heaven.
For someone who has died, the path is complete. Then what? Having arrived in the soul’s domain, does experience stop? In physical terms, yes. The objects of love are gone. Only essence is real now. But as we will see, activity hasn’t come to an end—far from it. The soul finds itself much freer to choose “on the other side,” and the possibilities—so the rishis declare—are more interesting than ever.