TWELVE

BEING TOWARD DEATH

Martin Heidegger argued that man—or rather Dasein, the human being in the human condition—is a being toward death.¹ By this Heidegger appears to mean that not only death, but the awareness of death, is the central fact of human life. He writes:

The fact that even everyday Da-sein is always already toward its end, that is, constantly coming to grips with its own death, even though “fleetingly,” shows that this end, which concludes and defines beingwhole, is not something which Da-sein ultimately arrives at only in its demise. In Da-sein, existing toward its death, its most extreme not-yet which everything else precedes is always already included.²

Death, the grotesque familiar portrayed in the old danse macabre, is always with us, and all our actions are in reference to it. But usually we avoid this fact, for example by deferring the question. “One says that death certainly comes, but not right away. With this ‘but . . . [sic] the they denies that death is certain.”³ The they, Das man, the background of conventional thought and opinion against which we live, defers and denies death. It is common to give even the terminally ill the dishonest reassurance that “you’ll be better soon.” But the only way to live authentically is to face your own death, and to face it for yourself and only for yourself. “Death does not just ‘belong’ in an undifferentiated way to one’s own Da-sein, but it lays claim on it as something individual.”⁴

Death means one thing and one thing only: the death of the body. In this form it is undeniable and inevitable. Even if physical immortality were possible, it would be monstrous, as we see from the ancient myth of the Sibyl at Cumae. Apollo granted her immortality, but she failed to ask him for eternal youth, so she lived an endless life of progressive decay, dwindling down to the size and shape of a cicada. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels makes the same point in describing the struldbrugs of Luggnagg, beings who possess immortality without youth: “They were the most mortifying sight I ever beheld; and the women more horrible than the men. Besides the usual deformities in extreme old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness, in proportion to their number of years, which is not to be described.”⁵ Even if gerontology makes good on its boasts of soon being able to reverse the aging process, no doubt the kind of youth that it would bestow would be as hideous as that of a Sibyl or a struldbrug.

The body is death; not now, perhaps, not today, or tomorrow, but inevitably. One could dispute the advantages of being struck down suddenly and cruelly, in the fullness of one’s powers, versus those of a lingering experience of being, to use Yeats’s phrase, “fastened to a dying animal,”⁶ but they come to the same thing. So when Heidegger speaks of Dasein as a being toward death, it is the death of the body he means. To the extent that you identify with the body, this is terrifying: it is inexpressibly bleak if you believe that you are the body and nothing else. Today’s astonishing rates of mental illness and depression may be connected with the obstinate insistence by contemporary thought that human consciousness is merely a side-effect of the body’s physical functioning and nothing more. This belief could also explain the long-scale trend toward the sanitization and denial of death: it is unpleasant to think of in its own right; it is unendurable if you believe there is nothing else.

The usual retort is that “human kind cannot bear very much reality.”⁷ The deep-rooted aversion to this idea—that the death of the body is the death of the self—is usually explained as a refusal to face a hard truth: that the physical body is all we are. But what if it is the other way around? What if we so stubbornly refuse to accept it, not because it is a truth, but because it is a lie?

I strongly suspect—I am firmly convinced—that it is a lie. The very question implies that it is a lie. Because if the human being were simply equivalent to the functioning physical body, no one would ever have thought otherwise. Plotinus would not have been ashamed of being in his body, because the alternative would never have occurred to him.⁸ Then there is the evidence of those who have had near-death experiences. Often they see their bodies as alien and repellent. A construction worker from Georgia reported, “I recognized me lying there . . . [it was] like looking at a dead worm or something. I didn’t have any desire to go back to it.”⁹

The pseudoscientific insistence that the human being is the body casts light on certain cultural conflicts. In the United States the intelligentsia, who worship scientific thought, are baffled by the belligerent resistance of many religious believers to ideas such as evolution and the big bang. We even see full-size replicas of Noah’s Ark and theme parks devoted to the claim that the dinosaurs were contemporaries of Lamech and Methuselah.

On its own terms, this resistance to knowledge is incomprehensible. It is less so in view of what I have just said. Fundamentalists’ reaction to current scientific theories is, I believe, less about the theories themselves than about the assertion—not scientific but made in the name of science—that material reality is all the reality there is. In this, apologists for science have overstepped their mark. This claim has not been proved, and, we could even argue, has been disproved. Until the misguided friends of science admit this mistake, cultural clashes will only grow more vehement. Still more unfortunately, present-day theology and philosophy live in such terror of appearing unscientific that they are unable to stand up to the materialists.

We have already seen how A Course in Miracles responds to the problem of physical death. If the body is ultimately unreal, its demise is of little importance. Christianity over the centuries has repeatedly insisted upon the body’s transiency. That, indeed, was the point of the themes of the memento mori, the danse macabre, and other such motifs. I was most struck by it when visiting Bristol Cathedral in England. There were the usual sepulchers of bishops and noblemen, topped by carved effigies of their bodies in their regalia. But there was one unlike all the others. It was of Paul Bush, the first bishop of Bristol in the sixteenth century, and it showed him as a half-rotted corpse.

These thoughts can easily arouse a hatred of the body, which in turn can generate self-mortification and masochism of the most grotesque sort. Catholic art since the Counter-Reformation, with its crucifixes dripping with blood and hearts of Jesus girded with crowns of thorns, provides the grimmest examples.

The Course will have no truck with such imagery. “The grimness of the symbol [of death] is enough to show it cannot exist with God. It holds an image of the Son of God in which he is ‘laid to rest’ in devastation’s arms where worms wait to greet him and to last a little while by his destruction” (M, 66). Furthermore, “the curious belief that there is part of dying things that may go on apart from what will die, does not proclaim a loving God nor re-establish any grounds for trust. Death denies life. But if there is reality in life, death is denied. No compromise in this is possible” (M, 66).

As for the body, the central and often sole concern in life, the Course advocates neither an obsessive preoccupation with it nor a cruel abuse of it:

The body is in need of no defense. This cannot be too often emphasized. It will be strong and healthy if the mind does not abuse it by assigning it to roles it cannot fill, to purposes beyond its scope, and to exalted aims which it cannot accomplish. Such attempts, ridiculous yet deeply cherished, are the sources for the many mad attacks you make upon it. For it seems to fail your hopes, your needs, your values, and your dreams.

The “self ” that needs protection is not real. The body, valueless and hardly worth the least defense, need merely be perceived as quite apart from you, and it becomes a healthy, serviceable instrument through which the mind can operate until its usefulness is over. Who would want to keep it when its usefulness is done?

Defend the body and you have attacked the mind. For you have seen in it the faults, the weaknesses, the limits and the lacks from which you think the body must be saved. You will not see the mind as separate from bodily conditions. And you will impose upon the body all the pain that comes from the conception of the mind as limited and fragile, and apart from other minds and separate from its Source. (W, 253)

We can see why the Course does not really speak of an afterlife. It teaches that the Son is immortal, so there is no death. As for heaven, “Heaven is here. There is nowhere else. Heaven is now. There is no other time” (M, 61). As for hell, “The belief in hell is inescapable to those who identify with the ego. . . . The ego teaches that hell is in the future, for this is what all its teaching is directed to” (T, 301). But “the Holy Spirit teaches thus: There is no hell. Hell is only what the ego has made of the present” (T, 302). Therefore “Atonement might be equated with total escape from the past and total lack of interest in the future” (M, 61).

Strangely in light of these ideas, the Course speaks of reincarnation ambiguously. “In the ultimate sense, reincarnation is impossible. There is no past or future, and the idea of birth into a body has no meaning either once or many times” (M, 61). Nevertheless, the Course stops short of dismissing the concept entirely. “For our purposes, it would not be helpful to take any definite stand on reincarnation. A teacher of God should be as helpful to those who believe in it as to those who do not” (M, 60). It goes on to ask, “Does this mean that the teacher of God should not believe in reincarnation himself, or discuss it with those who do? The answer is, certainly not! If he does believe in reincarnation, it would be a mistake for him to renounce the belief unless his internal Teacher so advised. And this is most unlikely” (M, 61). Robert Perry is probably right in explaining: “How can we actually enter into a succession of bodies over time when bodies and time do not really exist? This does not mean that reincarnation cannot happen within the dream. It just means that if reincarnation does happen within the dream, then like the rest of the dream, it is not real.”¹⁰

The Course seems to be saying this: If the body is a learning device and the lesson of the Atonement is not learned in one lifetime, another body may be taken on. When the lesson is learned completely, the body is set aside. This is more comforting than the conventional Christian doctrine of the afterlife, “and if it heartens [individuals], then its value is self-evident. It is certain, however, that the way to salvation can be found by those who believe in reincarnation and those who do not” (M, 60).

It is reasonable to ask about the nature of embodiment in what the Course calls “the real world.” The Course does speak cryptically of “the Great Rays.” A prayer toward the end of the Workbook reads in part: “Father, it is Your peace that I would give, receiving it of You. I am your Son, forever just as you created me, for the Great Rays remain forever still and undisturbed within me” (W, 484). It seems to be suggesting that the Great Rays are as we were created by God, but there is no description of them. Conceivably they resemble a vision Helen Schucman had before beginning to write the Course, when she was riding on a dirty, crowded New York subway with her husband. Helen’s friend Robert Skutch describes it:

A blinding light seemed to blaze up behind her eyes and fill her mind completely. Without opening her eyes, she seemed to see a figure, which she knew to be herself, walking directly into the light. The figure seemed to know exactly what she was doing; she paused and knelt down, touching the ground with her elbows, wrists and forehead in what looked like an Eastern expression of deep reverence. Then the figure got up, walked to the side and knelt again, this time resting her head as if leaning against a giant knee. The outline of a huge arm seemed to reach around her, and then she disappeared. The light grew even brighter, and Helen felt an indescribably intense love streaming from it. It was so powerful a feeling that she literally gasped and opened her eyes.

She saw the light just an instant longer, during which she loved everyone on the train with that same incredible intensity. Then the light faded and the old reality of dirt and ugliness returned to her.

Shaken, she described her experience to her husband, who said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s a common mystical experience. Don’t give it another thought,” and went back to reading his paper.¹¹

One glimpses similar things in Christianity. The transfiguration described in the synoptic Gospels, in which Jesus’s “raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow” (Mark 9:3), may have been a vision of this kind. The sayings of the ancient desert fathers include this anecdote: “Then came to the abbot Joseph the abbot Lot and said to him, ‘Father, according to my strength I keep a modest rule of prayer and fasting and meditation and quiet, and according to my strength I purge my imagination: what more must I do?’ The old man, rising, held his hands up against the sky, and his fingers became like ten torches of fire, and he said, ‘If thou wilt, thou shalt be made wholly a flame.’”¹²

I have seen people this way a few times myself. They looked like great, intensely bright ovals of light. The physical form did not vanish entirely, but looked like a two-dimensional shadow in front of this light.

Such is the Course’s teaching about what Christian theology calls the particular judgment—the fate of the individual soul after death. But there is also the general judgment: the reckoning of all souls at the end of time.

The existence of both general and particular judgments in Christian eschatology is difficult to explain logically (why judge somebody twice for the same lifetime?) but reasonably clear historically. The Hebrews of biblical times had only a vague concept of the afterlife: “The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence” (Psalm 115:17). The Hebrew Sheol, less richly imagined than the Greek Hades, was equally dismal. In New Testament times, the Sadducees, “which say that there is no resurrection” (Matthew 22:23), did so not out of innovation but out of conservatism. Even today many educated and devout Jews insist that Judaism has no teaching about life after death.

Apocalyptic eschatology grew up in the last centuries before Christ, notably in Daniel, which posits a general resurrection, for Israel at least (Daniel 12:1–2). At the time of Christ, the Jews had no clear consensus about what happened to the soul between death and the resurrection. The older view was that they slept “in the dust” (Daniel 12:2), but there was an increasingly popular view, imported from Greek mystery religion, that the soul went into an intermediate state of heaven or hell before then. It was held by the Essenes, according to Josephus.¹³ This eschatology is reflected in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31), which, if it authentically goes back to Jesus, would suggest that he believed in this doctrine too (although the Course would deny this). But the Gospels also presuppose a final resurrection, as we see in Martha’s statement about Lazarus: “I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day” (John 11:24).

Is there some truth to this idea of the Last Judgment? It might be best to approach the subject through reference to another tradition. Mahayana Buddhism speaks of the eventual “enlightenment of all sentient beings.” Aspirants are told to desire this goal rather than the more selfish aim of mere personal enlightenment. The thirteenth-century Tibetan sage Longchenpa even says that those who wish to help all other beings achieve enlightenment before themselves will, paradoxically, reach enlightenment first.¹⁴

This seems peculiar. Why desire the enlightenment of all sentient beings before your own? Why not choose enlightenment for yourself? (After all, until you are enlightened, you have no assurance of doing more good than harm.) The most likely explanation is that because all beings are linked, indeed all beings are one, your own enlightenment will be incomplete until all are enlightened. To understand this fact itself brings you that much closer to enlightenment.

The Course presents a similar train of thought. In its terms, the Atonement is a universal process: it is not complete until it is complete universally. This process is not going to happen overnight: “Just as the separation occurred over millions of years, the Last Judgment will extend over a similarly long period, and perhaps an even longer one” (T, 34). Here we are far from biblical apocalyptic, with its claims that the end of time is imminent—marked by Antiochus Epiphanes’s setting up “the abomination that maketh desolate” in the Temple (Daniel 11:31; 12:11), or by a Roman invasion of Judea, as hinted in the apocalyptic discourse in the synchronic Gospels (Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21). We are also far from modern updates, with elaborate calculations of the date of Christ’s return (usually six months from now) and raptures causing car crashes. The separation was a cosmic event, taking place over an immense time scale, and so is the Atonement.

The eschatology of the Course is nuanced but clear: The Second Coming “is the time in which all minds are given to the hands of Christ. . . . Every one who ever came to die, or yet will come or is present now, is equally released from what he made. In this equality is Christ restored as one Identity, in which the Sons of God acknowledge that they are all one” (W, 449). To return to my metaphor, it is the moment when the man steps out of the box of mirrors.

In other words, the Second Coming refers, not to a physical descent of Jesus from the skies, but the complete acceptance of the Atonement by all minds. It is “the willingness to let forgiveness rest upon all things without exception and without reserve. . . . The Second Coming ends the lessons that the Holy Spirit teaches, making way for the Last Judgment, in which learning ends in one last summary that will extend beyond itself, and reaches up to God” (W, 449).

Once the unified Sonship accepts the Holy Spirit’s message—forgiveness for “all things without exception and without reserve”—the way is cleared for the Son to reach up to God. And God takes the final step: the Last Judgment. “The final judgment on the world contains no condemnation. For it sees the world as totally forgiven, without sin and wholly purposeless. . . . You who believed that God’s Last Judgment would condemn the world to hell along with you, accept this holy truth: . . . To fear God’s saving grace is but to fear complete release from suffering, return to peace, security and happiness, and union with your own Identity” (W, 255).

At this point the world vanishes. It has served its purpose, or, rather, it has been discovered to be purposeless, and the Son, which is all of us, is reunited with the Father.

Of all the eschatologies I have ever encountered in all the religions in the world, none compares with this one in sublimity and beauty, and this fact, I believe, is evidence in its favor. Some may dismiss it as wishful thinking. But are we wishing for it because it is the truth?

I once interviewed Hameed Ali, a teacher of a spiritual system called the Diamond Approach, who writes under the name A. H. Almaas. He said, “The heart really loves to know the truth. Everybody knows that. Even if you just investigate and find out something for yourself, there is a joy, a satisfaction. The heart really likes it! That is inherent in us, in human beings.”¹⁵

I agree. Admittedly you can arouse a synthetic joy in yourself through self-delusion, but it is the direct opposite of the joy that comes from learning the truth.

This hope is far from the typical Christian apocalyptic, with its vials of wrath, bleeding moons, and beasts slithering out of the abyss. As the Course says, “The world will end in joy, because it is a place of sorrow. . . . It will end in laughter, because it is a place of tears” (M, 37).