Love is Stronger than Death

IF THERE IS A SECRET to love’s transforming power, surely it must lie in its uncanny ability to call forth who we truly are. “Love always seeks the ultimately real,” says Bruteau; it has an infallible knack for pushing through dim outer shells and inner dark places and bringing the essence of who we are into the light. Love always brings about an increase in being, and it does so by giving us the courage and power to live out who we truly are. This is the simple and completely straightforward meaning of that fundamental esoteric doctrine: love actualizes essence.

With this reference point in mind, I want to pick up again where I left off in chapter 12, with Ladislaus Boros’s scenario of what takes place in the moment of death, and my own earlier comments on that scenario. The moment of death, according to Boros, plunges the soul into “total ontological exposure,” which is also, paradoxically, its first moment of complete, unanimous coherence. For the first time the whole picture is opened, ordered around its core principle, and held fully present to itself. The pretenses, the parts tied to the false self and the outer energies, disappear with the outer energies themselves. The parts that belong authentically to oneself but have not been fully actualized and integrated in life simply remain dark, like the full of the moon faintly present behind the sliver. And in this timeless instant, backlit against the light of divine love, the soul’s true stature is revealed in two dimensions: mobility and majesty.

These two coordinates, mobility and majesty, are the indispensable starting points for approaching soulwork beyond the grave, for together they plot the graph of the soul’s destiny. If you think of mobility as the vertical axis and majesty as the horizontal, you have a concrete way to pinpoint the position of the soul in its moment of death, and also to gauge the size of the essence territory it has been able to enclose during its earthly journey.

Mobility is the power of movement within the Kingdom of Heaven—“the liberty to act freely,” as Hazrat Inayat Khan described it; it is the opposite of the rest generally attributed to the soul after death. In the classic spiritual traditions of the West, mobility is created by dying to self.

The other coordinate is majesty. The term comes from Boehme, and as we saw earlier, majesty is created through “the wonders thou hast wrought and found out here.” Rather than dying to self, majesty is created by awakening to self, “playing out the hand dealt by essence.” It is brought about by engaging life fully with all one’s skill and courage in order to draw forth the great secrets of God hidden in the potentiality of one’s human form—like a Michelangelo teasing the Pietà from the bloc résistant.

In terms of Boehme’s earlier metaphor of the soul at the instant of its death glowing like a piece of iron, mobility would be the intensity of the incandescence—the brilliance with which the light of Christ presses through it. But majesty would be the beauty of the artifice: Is this piece of iron an intricately wrought grille, or simply an unarticulated lump? Majesty has to do with the power of actualization: the conscious shaping of the vessel that bears the light of Christ.

Dying to self...awakening to self: the two paths exist in creative tension within us. If mobility is won through the intensity of spiritual striving, majesty has more to do with the bringing forth of what is hidden within us and the integration of competing elements within us. It involves the yielding and giving aspects of our journey, whereas the former involves the pushing and driving. Between these contrary tensions—and in fact because of them—we make our way along, like a sailboat poised between the force of the wind on its sails and the tug of the water against its keel. The knack of finding one’s innate sense of balance here is what I believe Helen Luke is referring to in her observation about wholeness emerging out of the acceptance of the conflict between the contrary strivings within us.

One fact that contemporary psychology has made eminently clear to us is that wholeness can come about only if we embrace the whole of ourselves—not only what is highest in us, but the shadow as well. For majesty to grow in us, all must come to the light, both the dark parts of oneself that need healing and the light parts that need birthing; and only the whole ball of wax, integrated and accepted, becomes “the wonders thou hast wrought and found out here.” This is because majesty is the divine face of human wholeness. It is essence—who we really are—actualized and transposed to its full spiritual expression.

In the Kingdom of Heaven, majesty becomes the luminosity—the degree of magnification, or brilliance of expressivity—with which God’s love is reflected in the soul. It is at the same time the measure of the soul’s receptivity, the depth of its capacity to be filled with (hence, bear) divine love. And as on earth, so in heaven: when it comes to luminosity, orders of magnitude vary greatly, with some souls clearly outshining others. As Boehme expresses it, “They shall excel one another as the stars of heaven; but there will be no grudging, but everyone will rejoice at the excellence of the other, for there is no other light than God, filling all in all.”1

Normally, majesty must be attained in time—in bodily life—for majesty is precisely the measure of actualized essence, the path actually traveled. This is what I was driving at in my earlier comment that at the moment of death, when the template of our soul is illuminated by the light of Christ, “those parts that belong authentically to oneself but have not been fully actualized and integrated in life simply remain dark.” And, of course, this would then be precisely the arena in which the notion of growth beyond death would take on a concrete and objective meaning: it would be the nurturing into the light of those authentic parts of our essence that in life had remained unarticulated or unfulfilled, so that we could unfold up to the full degree of our intended luminosity in the Kingdom of Heaven. I think this also fairly closely approximates what Gurdjieff was getting at in his notion of Holy Planet Purgatory—not a place of punishment, but of further development of one’s innate potential and amplitude—“up to the highest degree of objective reason.”

But how could that growth continue to take place once death has put an end to time? Faced with this logical impossibility, the West by and large looks to final judgment while the East looks to reincarnation, but there is still one more possibility. Love is stronger than death and can find ways of working beyond time and body—if the union of hearts is sufficiently deep.

WRESTLING

Let’s return to the concrete: Rafe and me. I included the difficult story of our wrestling match because for me it contains the core experience of how love actually works to set essence free. Its transforming power lies in the shadow work.

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage,” writes Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet.2 In a single vivid metaphor he encapsulates what I believe is the basic metaphysical principle by which majesty is created in this life and grown in the next. The most mysterious aspect of the kind of intimacy between two beloveds on the path is the trust and intuitive support to wade into and transform the worst in each other: those dragons deeply buried, waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.

Before meeting Rafe, I had been married for nearly ten years to a man with whom I was functionally soul-blind. We struggled valiantly to make the relationship work, but the underlying malaise always resurfaced. At the deepest level we didn’t understand and were afraid of—repelled by—each other’s shadow side. He said that I seemed alien and bizarre; I feared what appeared to be a miasmal darkness and heaviness in his soul. In each of us was a barrier that the other could not cross, and the more the friction of intimacy rubbed the wounds raw, the more firmly the defense mechanisms were set in position to protect that dark, sleeping, and yet vaguely sensed as precious place.

Such relationships are not only useless but dangerous. They are a caricature of intimacy. For the deepest side of intimacy is that we are invited inside the other; as love follows its natural path toward what Bruteau calls the deepest, or “I-I” relationship—“to feel the other on the inside, as the other feels”³—we stand in the midst of one another’s dragons, which must be regarded with infinite tenderness and compassion. To look upon them with loathing is a kind of inner murder, like the fox minding the henhouse. Where such murder is quietly taking place under the guise of relationship, the partners gradually become outer shells, trapped more and more in their personalities and increasingly numb on the inside. The dragons recede deeper and deeper into the unconscious.

That’s who I was well on my way to becoming when I met Rafe. It didn’t take long for things to start to turn around. What was striking from the start was an extraordinary emotional trust between us. Even early on, the innate grasp of who the other was allowed us to fall through the surface roles and postures and address each other from dead center. Rafe noticed it, too, and was markedly vitalized by it. But inevitably, what soon began to happen was that our sense of relief, safe haven in the other, brought us both to that inner boundary line that neither of us had ever crossed.

From the start, it seemed, we were on a converging course with that wrestling match in the dooryard that morning. All our little fights headed toward it, exposing the core issues while yet giving us the confidence of emerging each time stronger and more together. At last we were down to the primal terrors: Rafe feared and loathed emotional confinement; I was desperately afraid of abandonment, but paralyzed to express my fear and rage. The moment was finally at hand.

I still don’t know exactly what triggered that moment. But we slammed into our worst terrors and were both shattered—and refashioned a huge step closer to who we really were. Even in the midst of the debacle, there was still a wild exaltation about it. I could feel my heart finally climbing free. It was my unabashed rage against losing Rafe that snapped me out of my long slumber of grief; plus somehow the trust that in an oblique way he would understand, as he did. He later told me that his awe that I could shatter so completely and still come through it whole gave him permission to open boxes within himself that had remained tightly padlocked and give free rein to that vulnerable and nurturing side in which his creative gifts could at last blossom.

What this means, of course, is that soulwork with an authentic soul partner can be messy, untidy, frequently turbulent. The beloved holds a key possessed by no one else, which allows him or her to plunge deeper into the other’s psychic realms than any other human being, to unlock dungeons that even the beloved cannot open alone. This aspect of relationship was probably the most shocking to Rafe—to me as well—and for a while everything in his monastic training recoiled against it. Only after that fight, I think, did he come to see this as a gift and accept it into his life. But with that acceptance came a softening in him, a setting down of burdens long shouldered alone and a willingness to share much more freely his fears, childhood memories, and intimations of his approaching death. Those darkening weeks of late fall were in so many ways a springtime for both of us.

Earlier on, I observed that in the struggle for wholeness with Rafe, it was our worst features and not our best that were transformed to make the new person. I believe this observation is not only personally accurate, but reflects a more general metaphysical formula, which goes as follows:

“dragon” + unconditional love = “princess”
(hidden essence… transformed in love… yields Real I)

What this formula means is that essence—who we really are, the heart of our hearts—seems truly and mysteriously to be bound up with our hiddenness and pain. Underneath those wounds, closely guarded in the place where we most instinctively draw back and hide, lies our most innate and vulnerable sense of selfhood, our seed of the Holy Particularity, the Name of God we bear. It is hidden precisely because it is the treasure in the field, the pearl of great price.

But who will unlock it? Healing in the modern sense—the bringing to consciousness and release of the pain—in some ways mistakes the corn for the husk, in the sense that we think that by getting rid of the pain we will be free to be who we really are. But the real process is more subtle. In fact, who we really are is the person revealed walking, like Shadrach in the fiery furnace, in the center of that moment when the pain meets and is illuminated by unconditional love. It is a new creation. That instant itself is the dawn of Real I, the breakthrough of the majesty into the human realm. And to live and share this with a human partner is to experience what Mouravieff calls the “baptism of fire,”⁴ the work of intense fusion that more and more allows that Real I to become the permanently experienced seat of individuality.