7

THE INVISIBLE THREAD

TO TELL THE truth, the things that Ramana had told Savitri didn’t come as a total surprise. She had been raised to believe in the soul. She had heard about how the higher self, the “inward dweller” as Lord Krishna called it, was immortal. But these lessons had seemed remote.

“How do I know I have a soul?” she asked.

“You cannot know by seeing it or touching it,” Ramana said. “Your soul might whisper to you, but even then you could just be hearing echoes of your own voice.”

“So the soul may be a fiction?” Savitri asked, with a sinking feeling.

“The soul isn’t a fiction just because it’s invisible,” Ramana said. “Look.”

Suspended in a shaft of light was the outline of an intricate spiderweb anchored between two bushes. It gleamed and rippled with the slightest breeze.

“A spider made this web,” said Ramana. “You see his work but you don’t see the spider. He holds a tiny thread that tells him when anything lands in the web. Where has the soul gone? It doesn’t matter as long as the connection exists.”

Savitri couldn’t help being stubborn. “I still may be imagining I have a soul.”

“Ah, but that’s the wonder.”

Ramana’s face was suddenly aglow with inspiration. “Nature imagines spiders. Big ones were imagined and small ones, smooth ones and hairy ones, those that live in the air, water, and earth, those colored white and black and every shade in between. Think of baby spiders that fly on gossamer threads in the spring while giant water spiders dive to the bottom of a pond and catch fish. We are foolish to think the spider is a thing. It is a shifting whirl of qualities, ever changing and fascinating. The soul is like that, too. However you imagine it, it will take on that quality and still have infinite potential left over. When you ask, ‘Where is my soul?’ the answer isn’t a place but a potential. The soul is wherever it is, has been, and will be.”

Ramana’s eyes remained fixed on the web rippling in the sunlight, and through his fascination Savitri began to be fascinated, too. She couldn’t know for certain if the spider that made this web was white, yellow, or red, big or small, male or female, yet that didn’t stop her from knowing that it was real. She had no idea of what her soul looked like, either, or what lay across the boundary of death. All she had was an invisible thread. Would it be enough?

“Yes,” Ramana said. “You have listened well today. You are learning.”

Savitri smiled a bit doubtfully. Suddenly she was quite tired. She sank down on a billowy bank of moss and closed her eyes. Her mind slowed down, bit by bit, until she forgot where she was or the dangers she faced. It was enough just to sleep.

A WEB OF WORLDS

The Akashic field has been interpreted by every culture to make it meaningful to that culture. In and of itself, the field is pure potential. But the great spiritual guides of the past wanted to reassure their followers that space wasn’t the same as a void. We know this because our own inner silence isn’t a void. It doesn’t take dying to go beyond thoughts and images. When someone meditates deeply enough, thoughts disappear and leave only the experience of silence. One could say that this silence is nothing, emptiness, but the Vedic sages tell us that it’s a very rich silence indeed.

We’ve been following the soul’s journey into the highest stage it can attain, which is the Akasha itself, the source of creativity. Different spiritual traditions envision this end point in different ways. Here are seven versions that continue to shape how people experience their spiritual journey:

Paradise

The Godhead

The Spirit World

Transcendence

Transmigration

Awakening

Dissolution

These are seven settings for the soul, and each possibility is self-created. A dream begun on earth continues until it reaches its conclusion. Its ingredients are taken from the mind’s invisible structure, then combined in such a way that makes sense of the Akashic field.

SEVEN DESTINATIONS FOR THE SOUL

1. Paradise: Your soul finds itself in a perfect world created by God. You go to paradise as a reward and never leave. (If you are bad, you go to Satan’s home and never leave it.)

2. The Godhead: Your soul returns to God, but not to any particular place. You discover the location of God as a timeless state infused with His presence.

3. The Spirit World: Your soul rests in a realm of departed spirits. It rejoins your ancestors and those who passed on before you, who are gathered with the great Spirit.

4. Transcendence: Your soul performs a vanishing act in which this expression person dissolves, either quickly or gradually. The pure soul rejoins the sea of consciousness from which it was born.

5. Transmigration: Your soul is caught in the cycle of rebirth. Depending on your karma, your soul moves from lower to higher life-forms—and even may be reborn in objects. The cycle continues eternally until your soul escapes through higher realization.

6. Awakening: Your soul arrives in the light. It sees with complete clarity for the first time, realizing the truth of existence that was masked by being in a physical body.

7. Dissolution: Eternity is nothingness. As the chemical components of your body return to basic atoms and molecules, the consciousness created by the brain disappears completely. You are no more.

There is a good deal of cultural overlap here as one tradition feeds into another. The Muslim vision of eternity as a paradise garden, complete with the sexual attractions of houris and exotic fruits, owes its existence in part to the Garden of Eden. Spirit worlds are common all over the globe. The ancient Greeks expected to meet the shades of the departed across the River Styx in Hades, but filtered through time and Christianity, Hades became a punishing hell presided over by Satan while the Greek place of blessed spirits, the Elysian Fields, became heaven.

There are invisible spirit worlds found in the ancestor worship of Japan and China. In a prehistoric age aboriginal peoples drifted from South Asia to Australia and the islands of the South Pacific, bringing their spirit worlds with them. With them also came a kind of “dream time” that infused ordinary time, in which material events could be seen as depending upon spiritual events. But spirit worlds didn’t hold in India, where the dominant belief gathered around three other afterlives: transcendence (rejoining the sea of consciousness), awakening (discovering that one’s true nature is Atman or the soul), and transmigration (the eternal cycle of rebirth).

Being born in a certain culture, however, doesn’t always determine where your soul finds itself after “crossing over.” Eternal life, it turns out, is also very personal.

Expanded Awareness

The standard assumption is that no one really knows what happens after we die. But the rishis asked the question, Why don’t we expect to know? Instead of being unknowable, perhaps the afterlife is something we haven’t looked at hard enough. And if so, why not?

For one thing, the mind is addicted to repetition. We pursue the same desires today that we had yesterday. Even our thoughts today are generally about 90% the same as the thoughts we had yesterday, according to some studies. Habit rules our actions; a fixed roster of likes and dislikes governs our taste. If you are afraid of being poor today, it’s likely that you’ve had that same fear since childhood. If you think about losing five pounds, it’s likely that this reflects a bodily obsession that goes back years. On the positive side psychologists point out that the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain motivate us every day, and generally to good effect. We’re reassured by what we know. In fact, the Vedic rishis declare that habit is what makes a person feel real. (In the business world, when someone suddenly loses his job, the loss can be psychologically devastating—not to mention that a sudden layoff greatly increases a person’s risk for heart attack, cancer, and stroke.)

At the same time that it reassures us, repetition has a deadening effect. By keeping out what’s new, it forces reality into the straitjacket of the old. Each of us lives behind a wall, beyond which lies the infinite potential of the unknown. Only the smallest gates are built into the wall, and we stand guard at these, allowing one experience to enter but excluding another, calling this experience good and that one evil. As long as we keep on taking in reality so selectively, freedom is a remote possibility.

In this regard death is a great gift, because it throws open all the doors and windows. Dying forces us outside the wall. Instead of seeing the familiar things we’ve assiduously collected and labeled as reality, we must start over. However, the rishis assert that we don’t enter the Akashic field empty-handed. Whatever our dream is right now, that dream continues. Consciousness is tied by thousands of threads to old memories, habits, preferences, and relationships.

Whenever someone really presses the issue of what happens after we die, my response comes in the form of a question: “Who are you?” You have to know where you are right now, in order to know where you will be tomorrow, and the afterlife is just a special kind of tomorrow.

Here are the things necessary to knowing “Who am I?”:

1. What is your story? Your story is more than just a list of the events in your life. It’s about your self-image, how you see yourself, what shaped your mind, which memories imprinted themselves on you. Taken altogether, your story tells you where you are in the cycle of life.

2. What are your expectations? Expectations are seeds. Once planted, they manifest into those things we gain from life, or lose. When you become aware of your own expectations, you discover the unspoken limits you have set on yourself. There is a huge difference between those who expect great things and those who don’t.

3. What is your purpose? This is the meaning you are trying to find. Purpose runs deeper than the superficial things we hope to get, which mostly center on money, possessions, status, and comfort. If you know your purpose, you know the deeper project to which your life is dedicated.

4. What is your destination? This is about fulfillment. Human goals are endless; they unfold, not like a road that has an end but like a river that flows to join the sea, merging with ever larger possibilities. If you know your destination, you can envision your highest fulfillment.

5. What is your path? Having identified your purpose and your destination, there must be a way to get there. “Path” has been adopted as a spiritual term, but in fact everyone, spiritual or not, follows certain ways to get where they want to go.

6. Who are your adversaries? Forward motion is never without obstacles. On your path you will find yourself blocked. At times the adversary is external, but if you examine yourself deeply, you will find it is always internal as well.

7. Who are your allies? We all bring others with us on our journey. Just as your adversaries did, you may identify these allies as external, but they only reflect your own inner strength, just as an opponent reflects your inner vulnerability.

None of these questions asks anything about the afterlife. They don’t touch on your beliefs about heaven and hell or about your soul. That’s because what we know right now is immediate and personal: how we feel, what we want, whom we love. And that’s enough. The decisions we make determine how life proceeds. We don’t go through life simply making good choices and bad ones. We go through life making who we are. Choice is the hand that shapes the raw clay of a person.

With a little thought each of us can answer questions about who we are and our purpose in life. All we need to do if we wish to choose what happens in Akasha is to extend the same questions over the threshold of physical death.

What do you want your story to be after you die?

What do you expect will happen next?

What does the afterlife mean to you personally?

Where will your last breath take you?

How will you get there?

Who will block your way?

Who will help you along?

Notice how strange these questions would sound if you hadn’t first encountered them in the context of every day. We are caught between two levels of existence. Let me give an example:

Recently I met Lydia, an older woman who has been devoted to a Zen roshi, or master, for over thirty years. This particular roshi was Italian rather than Japanese and a woman. Lydia mentioned these unusual facts without explaining how she happened to choose her teacher. “We were always very close. It’s not something one can intellectualize about. It has to come from in here.” Lydia touched her heart lightly.

“I spent time with my teacher in Rome, and over the years my practice became central to my life. Every winter I go to Rome to stay with her, and I practice Zen with the small group she’s gathered there.”

“You’ve found your path,” I remarked.

She looked doubtful. “Have I? The last time I was packing to go, part of me kept wondering, Why am I doing this? What’s the point? My doubts seemed ridiculous at first, but then I began to wake up at night in a panic, my mind racing.”

I asked her what the panicky thoughts were about.

“Always the same thing. I imagine I will be lost over there, lonely and with no real confidence in what I’m doing. But I know everything is going to turn out all right once I get with my Zen group, so I go back to sleep.”

After decades of meditation and other spiritual practices, Lydia knew herself well, but these panic attacks had recently grown worse. She asked me what I thought they were about.

“A lot of things are possible,” I said. “Maybe you’re just going back and forth to Rome out of habit, and your real commitment has come to an end. Maybe you haven’t gotten what you expected from Zen Buddhism. Maybe you’ve reached a stubborn level of resistance that refuses to let you move on.”

Lydia nodded eagerly. “All of that. I sometimes get so disgusted with myself and all my stubborn habits and judgments that I think I haven’t gotten anywhere. Is that possible?”

“Of course you’ve gotten somewhere,” I assured her. (In fact, Lydia had a strong presence that made itself felt the moment she entered the room.) “But the things we’ve accomplished spiritually get put on the shelf, and the things we still have to work on loom large, like spots on a tablecloth that attract attention even when the rest of the tablecloth is clean.”

Lydia liked the analogy, but she remained doubtful. “Maybe something inside me wants to be judgmental and depressed, or whatever negative thing it is I can’t move past. If so, then what?”

I offered several ways to look at it. They apply generally to existential doldrums.

“You are a deeply spiritual person, and that means you’re allowing your deepest issues to come up to the surface instead of hiding them.

“Being spiritual isn’t about being comfortable all the time.

“You may be in transition, anxiously awaiting a new phase in your journey.”

“I didn’t realize I had that many choices. I thought I was just …” Lydia’s voice trailed off.

“Failing?” I said. “Not at all. Most people spend huge amounts of time and effort on one thing: avoiding the painful truth about themselves. You’re doing exactly the opposite.”

She felt better, and she had something to think about. Many people resist a commitment to being spiritual once they discover that it brings a state of ferment. Everything serious and difficult gets postponed, often to their dying day. But the rishis taught that self-exploration is the most important thing one can do to prepare for the afterlife. All the tactics we use to avoid ourselves must be dissolved. Which puts someone like Lydia in an unusual position. In effect she is experiencing the Akashic field as her own inner silence. Buddhism sometimes describes its practices as conscious dying. One dies to old memories, conditioning, habits, and self-denial, all the things that the mind uses not to see itself.

To experience the Akashic field requires an expanded state of awareness. Contracted awareness keeps us anchored in daily affairs. I told Lydia that her mood swings and lack of decisiveness were symptoms of swinging back and forth between expanded and contracted awareness. When her mind wasn’t in the Akashic domain, she was centered in her ego personality. Everyday desires and impulses took control. But at other times her mind would slip outside its boundaries. Seeing herself with expanded awareness, she’d drop her ego—as much as anyone can.

“It’s the price you pay,” I said. “Everyone feels wobbly who walks the path with your kind of dedication.”

Lydia was lucky, in that she was used to the swings between contracted and expanded awareness. Many people find negative words for expansion. They say “I’m just spacey,” “I’ve lost my bearings,” “I hardly know who I am.” Sometimes those labels may apply, but moments of transcendence are being overlooked. By the end of our conversation, Lydia affirmed what she had learned from long years of practice: The dramas we live out take unexpected turns, and as we make new choices, the life of the soul takes shape. The critical thing is to have a life of the soul, and that comes about only through expansion.

A Variety of Choices

Akasha is the home of the soul and therefore cannot be limited in any way. The mystery, strangely enough, is how we manage to restrict the unbounded potential of our own minds. But we do. The choices we make build invisible barriers that only we can take down. There are constant forks in the road that shape the invisible structure of the mind depending on the road we choose. The key words for such choices are

EXPANSION	CONTRACTION
Expression	Repression
Self-knowledge	Denial
Comfortable with uncertainty	Crave security
Personal insight	Received opinion
Spiritually oriented	Materialistic
Self-accepting	Guilty, self-denying
Individualism	Conformity
Altruistic, selfless	Ego-driven

These qualities don’t describe types of people but qualities of your own mind, which expands and contracts depending on many factors. The mind isn’t a single thing moving in one direction. We may share a tendency to be more expressive when young, more repressed in old age, but we may also have gained personal insight to replace the received opinions that give young people a sense of belonging. From day to day the mind fluctuates, even when we feel we are committed to a single path. It’s natural for life to be open-ended, and so it will continue in the afterlife. In the Akashic field we will meet both sides of ourselves, the individual who wants to be free and the conformist who wants to be secure. The Akashic field is nothing more than our own potential. Will this idea take root?

For centuries Eastern beliefs have had little effect on the West, despite some evidence that the Old Testament, for example, considered reincarnation possible. The Gnostics, a sect of early Christianity, espoused reincarnation before they were wiped out as heretics. Jesus seems to refer to it once. The followers of John the Baptist believed that he was either the Messiah or the return of the prophet Elijah, called Elias in the New Testament. This was important because of the belief that Elias would “first come” before the Messiah. When Christ’s disciples questioned him about this, he replied, “‘Elias must truly first come and restore all things. But I say unto you, That Elias has come already, but they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they liked’ … then the disciples understood that He spake unto them of John the Baptist” (Matthew 17:9–13). However, in Catholic theology reincarnation was condemned as a heresy by A.D. 553. This disparity with Jesus’ comment has given rise to dark muttering that all references to reincarnation have been systematically removed from the Bible. True or not, the East was resisted.

Once the Vedic scriptures began to be translated at the turn of the nineteenth century, their ideas began to crop up in strange places. The Atman, for example, became the immensely popular Oversoul that Ralph Waldo Emerson spread throughout New England before the Civil War. Drawing from Indian ideas, Emerson’s circle began to redefine inherited Puritan beliefs, discarding sin, damnation, and the absolute boundary between life and death that can only be crossed through faith in Christ. This launched the Transcendental movement.

Now we face a polyglot blend of East-West beliefs. The New Age movement is an outgrowth of many traditions, but the main one is Theosophy, a spiritualist movement that began with séances in Victorian parlors but was deeply transformed by Hinduism. (Mahatma Gandhi, in fact, first became acquainted with the Vedic scriptures through English translations produced by the Theosophical Society in India.) It was primarily through the spiritualism of the late nineteenth century that reincarnation began to be embraced by popular culture.

By contrast, some versions of the afterlife have no wish to overlap with any other. When Mel Gibson was being interviewed about his controversial movie, The Passion of the Christ, with its emphasis on ultra-violence and its almost total neglect of Christian love, he freely admitted his belief in an exclusive heaven. Gibson was being interviewed by the Herald Sun newspaper in Australia when he was asked if Protestants are denied eternal salvation. “There is no salvation for those outside the Church,” Gibson replied, referring to the Catholic Church. “Put it this way. My wife is a saint. She’s a much better person than I am. Honestly. She’s, like, Episcopalian, Church of England. She prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus, she believes in that stuff. And it’s just not fair if she doesn’t make it, she’s better than I am. But that is a pronouncement from the chair. I go with it.”

Fundamentalism is often criticized for its inflexible and literalist interpretations of Scripture. The great advantage of believing in this kind of exclusivity, as millions of devout Christians, Muslims, and Jews do, is its unalloyed simplicity. Dying is as cut-and-dried as winning a football game—or losing it, in the case of hell—and just as irrevocable. Good and bad deeds are added up with a specific weight assigned to each one. A petty theft or adultery can be offset by penance of equal value, while some sins, such as murder, cancel all good deeds and buy a ticket directly to eternal damnation.

In traditional Hinduism, however, the arithmetic of good and bad deeds is infinitely flexible. For every act that earns bad karma, sending the soul downward in its next rebirth, there is a chance to balance the scale through good karma. Reincarnation also allows a soul to experience one heaven or hell after another without limit until Moksha, or liberation, is achieved. Moksha ends the entire cycle of heaven and hell forever, at which time the soul returns to its original state as pure consciousness, a drop of bliss in the ocean of bliss. Here, the quarrels of religion end. Like all earthly attachments, they fall away.

According to Vedanta, eternity isn’t a smorgasbord. If “God is one” as so many faiths declare, there must be a deeper layer to the Akashic field where disagreements and multiple choices end. Consciousness is consciousness no matter who is interpreting it. Akasha exists beyond choice, beyond mind. This state of unity attracts the dying person toward it. Through the magnetism of the soul, one is drawn to the next stage of a personal dream that is universal at the source.