Love is Stronger than Death

THE BODY OF HOPE IS UNIVERSAL. But what is not universal is our conscious connection to it. Something must be formed in us that is able to receive and give, draw life and share it, within the body of hope. This something does not come naturally to us, but it is both possible and fitting for a human being to attain it. Indeed, many schools of inner transformation claim that this is specifically the purpose for which human beings were placed on this planet, because by the very process through which we acquire second body we also participate in the great intercirculation of higher energies—faith, hope, and love—that sustains conscious life on earth. In one form or another this establishing of our permanent, conscious connection to the body of hope is the goal of all inner spiritual work. In the Christian tradition it is known variously as developing “second body,” “putting on the body of Christ,” or receiving one’s “wedding garment.”

When it comes to soulwork beyond the grave, second body is indispensable. For as we saw in the last chapter, the field of unity that holds together two souls separated by death is the body of hope. Only there can the two beloveds encounter each other afresh, not in memory or psychic residue, but in the living presence of anamnesis, which allows their mutual becoming in love to continue unfolding. The real interchanges between them—of conscious will, energy, and their common book of life—will take place within the body of hope, and to work together, the partners must deal in that dimension. Without such a connection, I believe, the usual scenario holds sway: that slowly widening drift between the worlds.

FORMING SECOND BODY

In general, second body is formed in a person by going against the grain of life. All spiritual traditions speak of this, although in widely varied terminology that is easily misconstrued as pointless asceticism or renunciation of the world. Jesus’ counsel that “whoever would save his life will lose it and whoever would lose it will save it” and the Desert Fathers’ constant urgings to “beware the peace which comes from the flesh” are rooted in a common principle, which in fact is not a moral principle at all but an energetic one. In veiled and paradoxical language, this teaching points us toward the key to acquiring second body—namely, learning how to draw energy not from our usual physical and psychological processes (the bios that Valentin Tomberg refers to), but directly from Zoe, the living water of Life itself.

In natural human life, we draw our energy mainly through the ego, although most of us are probably unaware of this. We head into life with our needs, expectations, and desires, based on our inner image of who we are. As these hopes and needs are fulfilled, we experience enlivenment, that sense of well-being that comes when our lives feel worthwhile. This is “the peace that comes from the flesh.” When our needs are frustrated, our expectations dashed or our passions triggered, our energy is squandered in emotional reactions. This happens to all of us. Sometimes it happens dozens of times a day.

The egoic process comes naturally to us, and it is in this sense that second body is formed in us by going against the grain of life. As long as we allow our energy to ebb and flow in us through the mechanical tide cycles of emotional reactivity, no deeper reservoir of spiritual attentiveness can begin to collect in us—the stuff out of which second body is made. The ruthless circularity of the egoic level seems designed to keep us squarely under the law of entropy, cruising along just beneath the critical velocity needed to leap into the next orbit (known in the Christian tradition as “faith”) where we are finally able to move beyond “the peace that comes from the flesh” and step out into the desert to receive our bread from heaven.

According to Orthodox tradition, the real problem with all these emotional reactions is that they “divide our heart in two.”1 The heart divided cannot rise to its real task. For the heart—and the heart alone—is capable of drawing energy directly from Zoe.

Hence, the core of all spiritual practice lies in teaching us not to identify with our psychological reactions to everything. Depending on the path—Buddhism, Vedanta, the Christian inner tradition, Sufism—the language for the practice will vary. The Sufis call it “dying before you die”—a phrase that obviously resonates deeply with Jesus’ own “whoever would lose his life will save it.” But whatever the language, the underlying principle is the same: if we can stop living exclusively according to our likes and dislikes, drawing and then squandering our energy through egoic reactions, then something finer will begin to gather in us that allows us even here and now to participate in the more subtle vibrations of divine life.

HOW RAFE DID IT

Since this may all sound rather abstract, perhaps the best thing is to ground it in Rafe’s own story.

Rafe was on the trail of second body from early on, although he didn’t know it at first. Even before he entered the monastery, while he was still absorbing the first shock waves of a profound religious conversion at his brother’s farm in Mississippi, he had come upon a quote in a newspaper: “Happy the man who realizes that his happiness does not rely on anything outside himself.” From the start that quote galvanized Rafe. He sensed in it a kind of inner independence that haunted him—and also left him a bit restless in the highly regimented structure of conventional monasticism. He hung in for eighteen years as a Trappist lay brother, but it bothered him more and more that the lifestyle seemed to allow people to slip by, simply going through the motions. “They spend all their time going up and down the steps,” he complained of his fellow monks, who seemed to see no more to the process of spiritual transformation than simply putting in their hours tramping up and down the staircase to the daily round of prayer services in the old pine-board chapel. Finally he won permission to join an experimental Trappist community in North Carolina, where he bumped into a copy of P. D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous and could at last begin to put a name to that elusive quality he had been seeking for so long. Later, after he arrived in Colorado, someone gave him the five-volume set of Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, which he read from every day, along with his Bible; these became the twin cornerstones of his spiritual work.

By the time I met him, some twenty years later, he had developed a largely self-taught Fourth Way practice that he called “shifting gears smoothly”—a way of making a smooth connection between the deep stillness of contemplative prayer and the manual work by which he earned his keep. A lot of people who saw Rafe’s collection of old snowmobiles and constantly broken-down junk assumed he was either eccentric or cheap. In fact, he deliberately used the work with machines—a craft he admittedly hated and had no natural aptitude for—as a tool for seeing and working on himself, observing his emotional reactions and moving beyond them. Even in the midst of trying conditions and his ongoing struggle with an explosive temper, there was a person there who was constantly watching, measuring, and exploring. Pinned up on the wall of the shop was a quote from Nicoll that pretty much summed up his practice:

Faith is a continual inner effort, a continual altering of the mind, of the habitual ways of thought, of the habitual ways of taking everything, of habitual reactions...2

When I came into Rafe’s life, much of our work together was simply a matter of my joining him in his practice. It meant a lot of hours spent tinkering with snowmobiles or down in the pump house at the Stanley place as I worked along with him and learned an attitude about work and a way of working on oneself. People sometimes ask me what our spiritual practice was; it was basically that. In the friction of the work itself—and often in the friction of each other—we had to step back, get a second wind, and reorient ourselves around the higher purposes we both claimed we were striving toward. I had worked in Fourth Way groups before I met Rafe, but never have I worked with anyone, either before or since, who could apply the Work principles with such consistency and ferocity of purpose.³

I remember vividly an episode less than two weeks before his death. The driveshaft had dropped out of the Scout. It turned out, once we’d gotten it up on blocks in the monastery garage, that the frame had been bent in that nightmare ride down the hill when Rafe had passed out at the wheel and wound up sideways in a ditch.

Anyone else would have given up on the old Scout, but not Rafe. Clambering underneath with hammer, crowbar, and arc welder—mostly lying on his back in a pool of water as the frozen mud on the undercarriage gradually thawed out—he patched the frame, then slowly started to reassemble the driveshaft from the pile of worn and greasy parts at his side. At one point toward the end of the ordeal, when a particularly stubborn gasket refused to yield to either friendly persuasion or brute force, hammer and screwdriver came flying out from beneath the Scout, followed by an impressively unmonastic string of profanity. I started to rescue the hammer, but as I grabbed for it, out from underneath the Scout wriggled two muddy boots. With icy dignity Rafe walked over, picked up the hammer, and stood there holding it, shaking with exhaustion and rage, eyes tight shut. Slowly the shaking subsided. When his eyes opened again, they shone with that fierce, faraway blue that seemed to emanate from a point far beyond life.

“Rafe, I don’t know why you don’t quit,” I said.

“Neither do I.”

By the end of the day the old Scout was back on the road. It would carry him up and down the hill for one more trip before death relieved them both of their struggle.

That was the flavor of Rafe’s own work. There was nothing mystical or elegant about it. It was brutal, step-by-step trying in every moment to stay awake, to move beyond the habitual, to see. There in the mud and grease of ordinary life Rafe carved his path to liberation. As Jacob Boehme said of his own struggle into spiritual emergence: “But what I am, that all men are who wrestle in Jesus Christ our King for the crown of eternal joy, and live in the hope of perfection.”⁴

SELF-CONFIGURATION

The purpose of such spiritual work is not penance or martyrdom. What begins to gather in a person—by conscious seeing—is a certain inner independence from the external conditions of one’s life. Maurice Nicoll says simply and directly, “The man who has reached a stage in which he has something independent of failure and success, cold or heat, comfort or discomfort, starvation or plenty, such a man has Second Body.”5 And Valentin Tomberg defines this second body as “an etheric body independent of the life forces that can draw its energy directly from the Spiritual life world.”⁶

In both these definitions, I see the same touchstone: independence. This second body is independent of the chain reactivity that characterizes life at the psychological level. A man or woman who has acquired second body has indeed come to “realize that happiness does not depend on anything outside.” Discovering and uniting with something deeper within that endures beneath the psychological storms, such a person begins to acquire a freedom that some writers call “permanent individuality.” Even on a freezing, muddy garage floor with a job somewhere between impossible and hopeless, one can still find that invincible inner point.

Ladislaus Boros describes the process of forming second body as well as I have seen it described anywhere in esoteric literature—emphasizing also that it is “the supremely individual creation of a man.” In a significant passage in The Mystery of Death he writes:

From the facts of experience and the surrounding world an inner sphere of being a human being is built up. This inner man is brought about by a never-ending application on the treadmill of duties, annoyances, joys and difficulties. From these insignificant actions freely performed, the great decisive freedom is built up—freedom from oneself, freedom to view one’s own existence from the outside.⁷

Please note an important nuance in what Boros is saying here: these actions must be “freely performed”—i.e., with an attention that is not totally bound up and caught in the activities themselves. It is not merely a matter of putting in one’s hours on the daily treadmill of duties that brings about this inner self, but rather, developing a conscious relationship to the material of one’s life. As Rafe knew full well, there was nothing intrinsically holy about a lifetime spent mending broken snowmobiles—nor, for that matter, a lifetime spent in the mechanical repetition of prayers and daily office. What matters above all is that conscious relationship—that capacity for seeing and reflecting and standing slightly apart from one’s existence. It is the material of daily life, passed through the mirror of reflective consciousness, that begins to create second body—or “being,” as Boros calls it. He continues:

The external freedom of action diminishes as time passes, as the vital forces slowly but inexorably fail. At last man appears in the fullness of his days and works, and in the inestimable possession of a definitively achieved deliverance. From the crowded days and years of joy and sorrow something has crystallized out, the rudimentary forms of which were already present in all his experiences, his struggles, his creative work, his patience and love—namely, the inner self, the supremely individual creation of a man. He has given his own shape to the determinisms of life by a daily conquest of them; he has become the master of the multiple relations that go to make him up by accepting them as the raw material of his self. Now he begins to “be.”⁸

Quite strikingly—considering that this is a Roman Catholic theologian speaking—Boros further notes that one of the attributes of the inner man fully realized is that he configure himself—“he can call into existence out of the bases of his own being a body (no less) and a relationship with his surroundings and his neighbors.”⁹ For such a man, death is not an end, but an extension of this tendency already visibly under way in life. It is the state in which “he can produce a corporeity of his own and so be free—self-posited, right down to the most hidden fibres of his reality.”¹⁰

This insight is both brilliant and astonishing. The starting point is in the psychological realm; the end point is in the physical. What begins as a psychological self-configuration—an interior capacity to reflect and “recompose” oneself as Rafe did that day at the garage—gradually emerges into an actual physical capacity to “produce a corporeity of one’s own”—to move and act from beyond life itself, in the body of hope.

Boros equates this transition point with the moment of death, but from my work with Rafe I suspect that the transition begins far earlier and more gradually for dedicated spiritual practitioners. By the time I met him, Rafe was already fairly adept at “producing a corporeity for himself” beyond the physical body—that’s what the “everything that can be had in a hug is already here” lesson was all about—and in the last weeks of his life, this aspect of his relationship with himself became strikingly pronounced. Overall, his physical vitality was clearly waning. But at times he seemed to draw surges of life out of nowhere, and the whole shape of his body would change almost before my eyes. I am not talking about an old man trying to act young or being momentarily swept up in my own vitality, but something much more deliberate and conscious. During our last conversation, I had the distinct impression that he had taken himself back to a man in his late forties, my age, and was holding himself there by sheer force of will, as if he wanted me to meet that person in physical life, remember him as that person when death separated our physical bodies. Months later, when an old photograph happened to come my way of Rafe, age forty-eight, standing outside his little cabin at Waunita Hot Springs, Colorado, I nearly fell over in disbelief. I was staring once again at the very face I had last looked upon in physical life.

This ability to physically configure oneself by conscious will is by no means a psychic phenomenon, but rather, I believe, a normal inner progression as one approaches spiritual eldership, a sign that the process of acquiring second body is well advanced. It speaks of a growing detachment of the tincture, or quality of one’s aliveness, from its basis in the physical body. In ordinary life, the two are virtually inseparable; in fact, according to some hermetic schools, it is the specific function of the “vital body” to keep the quality of our aliveness inextricably pasted to our physical body until the moment of death. But as second body begins to grow in us, it more and more carries the tincture, and since it draws its sustenance directly from Zoe, the eternal life energy, there is an increasing independence from the physical life energies themselves. Far from being dependent on the physical body, the liberated tincture can express itself directly without a body, or even, on occasion, reconfigure the body to suit its purpose. For a person well along on this path, as Rafe was, it can be understood how death will pose relatively little disruption to one’s sense of identity or ability to act. It is merely doing for keeps what one has already been practicing.

I am convinced that a person who reaches the hour of death with no developed second body—no conscious relationship and shape to the material of his life—does, indeed, “rest” in the classic sense of Christian teaching. I am unwilling, by my own Christian roots, to take the view that Gurdjieff took by assuming such a soul is annihilated. But I believe that for the vast majority of souls the Church’s explanation of rest is in fact true, until the final day of judgment, whatever one construes this to be. Boehme avers that most souls enter heaven “hanging as by a thread”¹¹—“and these souls must wait till the last day for their bodies; they remain in their bodies in the still rest, till the last day, without feeling any pain but in another principle.” Only those who through dedicated spiritual work in this life have crystallized second body within them will have the means in the kingdom beyond death to act—to participate as conscious servants in the unfolding of divine love, both in this world and in the world beyond. From the standpoint of life beyond the grave, second body confers the all-important capacity of mobility.

The Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan expressed this same point in a picturesque way: “Those who are given liberty by Him to act freely are nailed on the earth, and those who are free to act as they choose on the earth will be nailed in the heavens.”¹² There is a trade-off required—not bargaining, exactly, but a wager one must stake one’s life on. Acquiring second body is no fun and requires hard and dedicated work—in Rafe’s words, “It’s a struggle all the way.” Far easier to coast along on the enchantments and diversions of life, the ready-made explanations of who one is and what one’s life means. It may also mean sacrificing a lot of potential growth at the horizontal level, like a plant that must be pruned in order to bear fruit. This is what is meant by being “nailed on the earth.” If one does not believe in the fruit, then the pruning will always seem like a folly.