Love is Stronger than Death

One of the coincidences that most impressed Rafe and me was the way our libraries dovetailed. From about 1971 on, completely independently of each other, we managed to find our way to most of the same watering holes, and these common reference points were a tremendous help in our work together. They were also the first places I turned to in my quest to discover a road map for the second leg of our journey.

Since the principles of soulwork beyond the grave come largely from the esoteric tradition, many of the names mentioned throughout this book will be unfamiliar to readers in the mainstream Christian tradition, and it seems, if nothing else, polite to offer a few words of formal introduction:

G. I. GURDJIEFF AND P. D. OUSPENSKY: George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, hailed by some as the greatest spiritual master of the twentieth century and dismissed by others as a charlatan, appeared in Russia on the eve of World War I offering a teaching he claimed to have gleaned in more than twenty years of searching (for the most part, in Central Asia) for living remnants of the ancient schools of spiritual wisdom he was convinced still guided the destiny of humankind. His teaching—generally referred to as the Fourth Way or “the Work”—is something of a Rorschach test: Sufis, Christians, and even Buddhists claim that its headwaters lie in their own traditions. A brilliant and convoluted mixture of ancient spiritual psychology, modern quasi-science, and mythical cosmology, it lays out a path toward conscious human evolution based on inner attention and the “harmonious development” of the three primary centers of human intelligence—intellectual, emotional, and moving.1 For an excellent overview of the Gurdjieff Work and its influence, see Jacob Needleman’s chapter, “G. I. Gurdjieff and His School,” in Modern Esoteric Spirituality.²

Peter Demian Ouspensky, a noted philosopher in his own right, was Gurdjieff’s most prominent disciple before their break in 1922, and his book, In Search of the Miraculous (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), is still the usual starting point for students of the Gurdjieff Work. When the Bolshevik Revolution forced the incipient Russian group into exile, Ouspensky eventually found his way to England while Gurdjieff settled in France; through these twin (but quite distinct) streams, the Work has continued to exert its subtle influence worldwide.

MAURICE NICOLL AND JOHN G. BENNETT: Nicoll and Bennett were students of Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, respectively, and among the most influential shapers of the second generation of the Gurdjieff Work. Nicoll’s The New Man and massive, five-volume Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky are deeply grounded in classic theology and contemporary psychology (he was also a student of Jung) and are the basic starting points for the journey into the Christian inner tradition. Rafe had a complete set of the Commentaries up at the cabin and read from them daily, along with his Bible; the two were his foundations for inner work.

Bennett, whose work is somewhat more individual and quirkier than Nicoll’s, was fascinated by Gurdjieff’s Near Eastern sources, and his Masters of Wisdom makes a powerful case for the Sufi influence in Gurdjieff’s thought. His book Sex, which despite its bodacious title is really a study of the transformation of sexual energy, was another mainstay of Rafe’s journey.

BORIS MOURAVIEFF: Mouravieff began as a loosely affiliated disciple of Gurdjieff’s (a fellow Russian refugee of the Bolshevik Revolution, he was first introduced to Gurdjieff in 1920 by P. D. Ouspensky), but soon branched out on his own, claiming that Gurdjieff’s teaching represented only a fragment of the original tradition and was hence inaccurate and often heretical. His three-volume Gnosis (first published in French in the early 1960s and republished in an English translation three decades later) purports to present the true version of the teachings, which he describes as “Esoteric Christianity,” handed down directly from the Orthodox tradition of Mount Athos. Somewhat paradoxically, given the fiercely celibate climate of Mount Athos, his work is also the most complete exposition of courtly love as a spiritual path, and the way of transformation through mystical union with one’s “polar being”—a path that he calls the “Fifth Way.”

Rafe never read Mouravieff. He flipped briefly through the first volume of the set and said, “Life is too short.”

JACOB BOEHME: Boehme was one of those who came to me. I had had a longtime hankering to dip into the works of this seventeenth-century German mystic and happened to mention it to Rafe, who brought me the monastery copy of Boehme’s The Way to Christ at the beginning of Holy Week, 1995. As I read, I had the experience of nearly everyone who feels deeply attracted to this teaching: Boehme becomes a living presence—a wise teacher and a friend, who himself guides the way through the dense jungle of his prose to the breathtaking clarity that undergirds it. He has been the single most important mainstay to me as I have tried to put together the building blocks for an understanding of soulwork beyond the grave. His The Forty Questions of the Soul and The Three Principles of the Divine Essence, more than any other sources, have helped me develop the principles of “the vow,” essence and majesty, and “putting on the body of Christ.”

Meditations on the Tarot: This book was published anonymously in the late 1960s and has put off many Christian readers, who assume by its title that it must be New Age. In fact, it is one of the most profound mystical apologies for Christianity ever written, its author stating baldly in one place, “The more one advances on the way of free research for [spiritual] truth, the more one approaches the Church. Sooner or later one inevitably experiences that spiritual reality corresponds—with an astonishing exactitude—to what the Church teaches.”³ It is by now no secret that the author is Valentin Tomberg, a Russian hermeticist, who at the end of his life experienced a profound conversion to Catholicism and wrote this book as his magnum opus shortly before his death. It represents an extraordinary synthesis of his lifelong experience and deep spiritual understanding.

LADISLAUS BOROS (1927-1981): The sole voice of traditional Catholicism represented in these pages, Boros belongs to the school of contemporary European mystical theologians following in the wake of Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner. His The Mystery of Death first appeared in German in 1962 as Mysterium Mortis: Der Mensch in der Letzten Entscheidung; it was translated into English and published by Herder and Herder in 1965. Later, while researching his biography for this book, I discovered that Boros, who had been a Jesuit priest, left the order in 1973, was laicized, and was married. It is as if the timeclock of that “total surrender that is love’s” was already ticking in him when he wrote The Mystery of Death, gathering his relatively brief life into an extraordinary richness of experience and insight.

VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV(1853-1900): Solovyov was one of the most brilliant philosophers of the nineteenth century, a close friend of Dostoyevsky’s, a Christian mystic, and the supreme metaphysican of erotic love.

In addition, Rafe and I were much sustained by literature, particularly the insights of the metaphysical poets. T. S. Eliot, John Donne, and Shakespeare were favorites—and also Helen Luke, psychologist, literary critic, and conscious woman, who died in 1995 at the age of ninety. Her exquisite little book Old Age framed Rafe’s understanding of growing into age and was always the clarion that called us beyond ourselves in our work together, when we had painted ourselves into a corner by old conditioning and outgrown road maps. Her loving and wise insistence that the way emerges not out of what is highest in us but what is wholest held our feet to the fire in the difficult work of inner integration—and became the cornerstone of my understanding of soulwork beyond death.

Rafe never read Rilke—except for one quote about “living the questions,” which he loved so much he copied it out by hand and put it between the pages of his Bible.⁴ But Rafe could have written Rilke. If you want to taste the essence of the world of ideas he was operating out of during those years I knew him, pull down from the bookshelf a copy of the Duino Elegies or Letters to a Young Poet. It is like continuing a living conversation.

Further Reflections on the Body of Christ

Rafe never said so—maybe because it was for me to find out myself—but I have come to wonder, are not the body of hope and the body of Christ somehow one and the same?

It is beyond the scope of this book to engage in an extended theological discussion of the mystical body of Christ. But perhaps a few brief elaborations are in order for those interested in pursuing the subject further.

First, with regard to the similarity between the body of hope and the body of Christ, let me begin by recalling the salient points in my description of the body of hope in chapter 10:

1. It is a living, palpable, and conscious energy that holds the visible and invisible worlds together and makes possible the most intimate communion between them.

2. It is not itself the individual resurrection body or essential core of a person, but it carries and sustains this core in its full individual particularity and enables it to grow.

3. It is universal, but our individual connection to it is made by crystallizing something within ourselves that can directly receive it—our “second body,” or “wedding garment.”

I would submit that any or all of these points could be applied interchangeably to a description of the mystical body of Christ, or “the cosmic Christ,” as it is often known nowadays. Functionally, what Rafe named for me as the body of hope dovetails precisely with the traditional theological categories of Christ as the mediator between heaven and earth… “in whom all things hold together.”

Boehme also depicts salvation as “putting on the body of Christ” in numerous references. Readers are referred in particular to the twenty-first question in The Forty Questions of the Soul.

But how—as Christian theology claims—can the body of a single human person be seen as uniquely the cosmic ground of all creation? For a deeper insight into this question I return to Ladislaus Boros and The Mystery of Death.

As a fully human person, Boros argues, Christ would have followed the same journey to death as all human beings follow: a gradual narrowing of all of his human and outer energies in a convergence upon that moment of complete “ontological exposure” that is death, when the soul is cut loose from the entire physical and psychological matrix that has carried it to this point. This moment is also a moment of total presence: to the whole of oneself—“everything we have guessed at, sensed, and loved”1; the deepest reality of one’s own heart—and also to the whole of the universe. The soul becomes in that moment “pancosmic,” Boros argues:² it does not withdraw from the material world, but “thanks to the process of death the soul is given access to a more really essential proximity to matter.”³ He elaborates:

This earthly, empirical world of ours is nothing more than a corner of that essential cosmos from which the force for existence flows into our world just like so many individual drops present each but for a moment of time....Seen in this way death appears as a descent into the centre of our mother earth, to the root unity of the world—there where all the connexions end in one knot, where all spatio-temporal things join together, burgeoning on one root—down to the furthest and deepest of all that is visible. Perhaps one might express this reality with the single word “heart.” In the metaphysical process of death the soul reaches “the heart of the universe,” the “heart of the earth.”⁴

There—and this is the core of Boros’s hypothesis—“the soul takes hold of itself through the pancosmos”⁵; and in that place of utter and complete presence gives its final yes or no to God.

What then happened in the moment of Jesus’ death? The very same thing. He became present to his own deepest self and present to the cosmos at its deepest “root unity.” And when God fully human met God fully God and gave his resounding yes, it is as if a fissure that had run through the world since the first moment of creation—perhaps the fissure of createdness itself—was finally healed. Boros waxes lyrical on this point:

At the moment of Christ’s death the veil of the temple was rent in two from top to bottom, the veil, that is, that hung before the Holy of Holies. For Jewish mysticism and subsequently in the Christian interpretation of this mysterious happening, the veil of the temple represented the whole universe as it stands between God and man. This veil was torn in two at Christ’s death to show us that, at the moment when Christ’s act of redemption is consummated, the whole cosmos opens itself to the Godhead, bursts open for God like a flowerbud. In his triumphant descent into the innermost fastnesses of the world the Son of God tore open the whole world and made it transparent to God’s light; nay, he made it a vehicle of sanctification.⁶

Meanwhile, when by the passage through his own human death Christ became pancosmic—totally present at the “root unity of the world”—the reality of the mystical body of Christ as the ground of all existence may be said to have begun.

“Perhaps this might help us to explain better,” Boros concludes, “why our world is so deeply and mysteriously filled with the reality of Christ.”⁷

Building on this foundation, it is but a short further stretch to see “the cosmos in its totality”⁸ as the resurrection body of Christ, and our own salvation as a “growing together with the risen body of Christ”:

Free of all the “fleshly” constraints of time and place, Christ is able to reach the men of all times and places and make them members of his transfigured body—enable them to participate in his “pneumatic” [spirit-filled] corporeity. …The glorification realized in the resurrection, i.e., Christ’s entry into the unimpeded, open clarity of being, is, therefore, an event in the scheme of salvation. It procures the condition for the possibility of our salvation because it enables us to grow together with the risen body of Christ, and this growing together with Christ is precisely what salvation is.⁹

Boros’s profound insights coincide with my own most intimate experience of Rafe and myself being held together in the body of Christ—from its tightest focal point in the Eucharistic bread and wine to the widest pancosmic view of the whole universe as the living body of the one life of Christ. Bede Griffiths’s final words, “Receive the growing Christ,” are a profound expression of that mystical seeing: that nothing can ever fall out of Christ, and that in passing from one’s own “fleshly constraints” into the “unimpeded, open clarity of being,” it is the mystical body itself that grows larger and more vibrant.

But Rafe—or Bede—never “disappears” into Christ, any more than Jesus “disappears” into Christ. Each one remains a living cell, with its own unique and irreplaceable particularity. The Mystery of Christ is that it “holds all things together,” not that it folds them all into one.

A Note on Reincarnation

In view of the admitted complexity of the abler-soul hypothesis, many readers will undoubtedly wonder why I do not handle the issue of continued growth beyond this physical body through the much simpler mechanism of reincarnation. If Rafe’s growth is not completed in this life, could he not simply take another body and come back in another life?

My immediate response is that reincarnation is not a doctrine that Rafe himself believed in or processed his life in terms of. His understanding of the hereafter was shaped entirely within the parameters of traditional Christian teaching, and at one point he told me flat out that once his body had been cast away, he hoped never to take it up again. “It’s already a hindrance to consciousness,” he said. My preference, apart from compelling reasons to the contrary, is to remain within the basic frame of reference we both used in our human work together.

Within the greater Christian tradition itself, opinions diverge as to the compatibility of reincarnation with the traditional body of doctrine. Some say reincarnation was in fact once part of the teaching of the early Church and was later suppressed; others say it is antithetical to the Church’s core understanding of resurrection. Within the inner tradition the split continues as well. Ouspensky, Nicoll, Mouravieff, and Tomberg all assume some form of reincarnation (or “recurrence,” as Ouspensky calls it); Gurdjieff, Boehme, and Boros argue against it. The great traditionalist René Guénon (whose name has not previously appeared in these pages, but who has been in the backdrop of many of these discussions through his influence on Tomberg) was adamantly opposed to the doctrine of reincarnation and did his best to demolish it on metaphysical grounds.

My own conclusion is that reincarnation does not intrinsically belong to the Christian color palette, particularly in the line of inner development I have been following. Boehme was the deciding opinion for me. Here is why:

First, the soul does not come down and “take” a body, if the argument I have been developing throughout this book is correct. Essence is a unique and irreplaceable contribution of the body itself. Aspects such as one’s sex, ancestral heritage, and physical type are not the “clothing” one wears in this life, but the matrix of essence and a nonnegotiable part of one’s unique selfhood. What is commonly called “soul” arises out of the interaction between essence and Spirit—or between what I earlier referred to as the “sensible” and “intelligible” aspects of reality, form and particularity meeting pure divine idea. Soul is the unique and authentic outcome of this interaction. The metaphor of the candle and flame is again useful: the candle (essence), ignited (Spirit) and sustained by the invisible air (again Spirit), yields flame (soul), the goal toward which both are bent. But the tincture of the flame—its unique quality of aliveness, color, fragrance—derives from the candle. The tincture of the soul—the unique quality of its aliveness, burning in the timeless dimension of eternity—is what I believe Gurdjieff means by “Real I.”1

Second, reincarnation fixes the “I” at the wrong level. The very notion of “my” continuance betrays a level of self-identity that arises from the ego, the self-reflexive consciousness that compulsively looks back on itself and views itself from the outside. Even in life we can go far beyond this superficial selfhood of the ego, realizing that our deepest “I am” is a mystery that can never be grasped by the self-reflexive mind, but only coincided with in the heart. The entire point of meditation is to take us beyond our mechanical identification with the egoic self and enable us to rest quietly in the presence of who we truly are.

Joscelyn Godwin, commenting on Guénon’s teaching on this point in a recent article in Gnosis magazine, writes: “He knew that we all live most of our lives in the transitory and illusory realm of the ego. But this is no reason for the bad metaphysics of mistaking our temporary human personality for our true being, and the worse one of projecting that personality into the past and future as an ‘I’ that is reborn in other bodies.”²

Third, reincarnation places undue importance on human life as the summum bonum of all existence and hence implicitly limits that divine thrust toward more subtle forms of manifestation, and the possibility of infinite dimensions of existence. Like the citizens in Edwin Abbott’s imaginary Flatland, who can grasp only a two-dimensional reality, we are terrified at the vastness of divine creativity and cling to our static notion of recurrence in time rather than yielding to the possibility of dimensions of reality far beyond our ken. Guénon is entirely unsympathetic: “As soon as we die, we leave the human species behind forever, and if we do not like the idea, that is our problem.”³

My difficulty with the doctrine of reincarnation, at least as it is usually presented in Western tradition, is that it is too static. It disregards that thrust into a different dimension that seems to be at the heart of divine creativity. Even in the image of the candle and flame, we see this thrust. It is what Boehme calls a counterstroke (Gegenwurf): the same thing in a different, more subtle dimension. The flame is the counterstroke of the candle. Real I is a counterstroke of essence. The Duino Elegies are a counterstroke of Rilke’s brooding, yearning, unconsummatable life. Once this principle is grasped, that each level provides the raw materials for a transformation to the next level of subtlety,⁴ and that divine creativity dances through this whole process and is this whole process, then the Christian concept of “the arrow of time” is seen in its mystical component, and the doctrine of reincarnation shows itself to belong intrinsically to a different paradigm—the nondualistic unity of the East.

This is true even for Rafe and me. While we may still be growing together, the place where this growth takes place is in the abler soul, which is already a counterstroke of our human lives—the next dimension of subtlety, made possible by our willingness to sacrifice our individual selves as raw material for the holocaust of becoming. In one sentence that is the gist of my whole argument.

All the religious traditions seem to allow for the possibility of one of their “enlightened beings” taking up a body again having once left it. But this is always under special circumstances for reasons of cosmic servanthood, not to continue developing its soul.

A Note on Sexuality

Erotic energy is also, obviously, sexual energy. And as J. G. Bennett and so many others have observed, sexual energy is the most potent energy of creativity and transformation available to human beings, and its very nature is to interchange modes of expression, sometimes like quicksilver. “In one creative thought a thousand nights of love come to life again and fill it with majesty and exaltation,” says Rilke. “And those who come together in the nights and are entwined in rocking delight perform a solemn task and gather sweetness, depth, and strength for the song of some future poet.”1

But the instructions for use of this volatile, powerful, all-embracing energy on the path of spiritual transformation are contradictory and incomplete. Schools exist which say that only through strict celibacy, strict conservation of the seed, can sexuality be put in the service of inner transformation. Opposite and equal schools say that the experience of sexual union forms an essence connection between the man and woman and is a prelude, if not in fact the sacrament, of union with God. These two opposite schools converge closely in Fifth Way teaching. Some, such as Mouravieff, insist that the path requires celibacy; others, such as Charles Upton, see sexual expression as part of the turf.²

Given the incomplete and contradictory state of the teachings available to us, it does not seem possible or even desirable to lay down ironclad rules. The parameters need to be worked out by each couple in terms of the givens of their own situation and their own highest striving. But as one moves toward this individual discernment, considerable guidance is available from within the path itself.

The Fifth Way path, remember, is one of complete self-giving, of radical self-abandonment in love. Love calls forth the reality of the beloved, and the act of loving calls forth one’s own deepest reality, so that what emerges is a new creation in love, the fusion of hearts and wills in that one abler soul which is our true self and our imperishable destiny. The total outpouring of all that one is for the beloved—and not so much the beloved alone, but for the building up of that abler soul—is the Highest Good on this path, the yardstick by which the particular exigencies of each situation may be measured.

Sexual expression, if chosen, must be clarified. Its counterpro-ductivity from the point of view of spiritual work is the tendency to trap the couple in the coarser instinctual energies, themselves impersonal and having a life of their own. “Lovers—were not the other present, always spoiling the view!—draw near to it [the Mystery] and wonder,” says Rilke in his Duino Elegies. “…But no one gets beyond the other, and so the world returns once more.” Sexual passion does, indeed, tend to “make the world return once more”—to keep us enchanted and hence firmly under the sway of mortal and transitory life. The only practical way to higher ground—to a clarified sexuality—is through a jointly embraced celibacy, at least for a time.

Celibacy, because it represents a redirection of tremendous transformative energies, already puts one in touch with higher and finer spiritual capabilities. It was through his experiments in this area, I believe, that Rafe learned how to extend and direct his heart at will within the body of hope. And since this is clearly the nature of the communion beyond the grave, it seems sensible to at least start to get the hang of it here.

But celibacy must be purified of avarice and self-protectiveness: that part which would hold itself back from complete self-giving in order to protect its own spiritual self-interests. In point of fact, that was the “narrow spot” Rafe and I always found the most challenging to negotiate: how to embrace a celibacy that was not at the same time a withholding of self, a flight into holiness; but was a complete and shared realization of “everything that could be had in a hug.”

But it does exist. There is a celibacy that is a complete outpouring of sexual passion at a level so high and intense that every fiber of one’s being is flooded with beatitude.

And there is also a sexuality that, clarified of its craving and attachment, is truly Eucharistic—“This is my body, given for you”—a drawing near to the other with all that one has and is; in conscious love; to give the innermost gift of oneself in the most intimate foretaste of divine union that can be known in human flesh.

Both exist. Either can be attained—or both can be attained—with pain, confusion, false starts, forgiveness, and grace—by partners who know that the only absolute law on this path is the law of absolute self-giving.