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ONE SETTING THE STAGE—A NECESSARY PERSONAL WORD Certain persons, no doubt, get dragged into glory. Make me willing, sometimes even eager for the stretching journey… There to be known. Owen Dowling1 Before this book’s content can be engaged intellectually by readers, its character must be understood existentially. It is such a personal story that I need first to set its subject, “Life after Death,” into its own context. That context will also serve to explain to my readers why this was a book I had to write. There is a sense in which this book has been in preparation my entire life. I began wondering about the meaning of mortality when I first encountered its reality in the death of a family pet sometime before I was three. I have since lived through a variety of death experiences, as every person does, in the course of my own biblically allotted three score and ten years, a time-span that I exceeded almost a decade ago. I am, however, still counting. I have been drawn, it seems relentl
TWO LIFE IS ACCIDENTAL You cannot abandon what you do not know. To go beyond yourself, you must know yourself. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj1 Where do we begin this journey? How does one even talk about that which is beyond the limits of human experience? Human beings have used religious claims for millennia to hide our lack of knowledge even from ourselves. Are those reassuring but spurious claims all that life after death is about? Self-delusion is always easy. Yet something draws us, even if it is only our fears, into this discussion, so we must identify a legitimate place to begin. I, for one, can only start with what I do know. I can with integrity journey into whatever might be beyond this life, only by going deeply into this life, into the here and now. I cannot look at death and its meaning except from the vantage point of one who is alive. I cannot talk about the divine except from the perspective of the human. So my point of departure is the assertion that I am alive; I am a livin
THREE ALL LIFE IS DEEPLY LINKED I feel myself so much a part of everything living that I am not the least concerned with the beginning or ending of the concrete existence of any one person in this eternal flow. Albert Einstein1 Scientists today estimate that the universe in which we live is between thirteen and fourteen billion years old. The planet earth, a tiny part of that universe, is between four and five billion years old. No living thing, however, appeared on this planet until about eight hundred million years after earth came into being. Human life (depending on what definition is used for that life) did not arrive on this planet until somewhere between two million and one hundred thousand years ago. This suggests that neither human life nor even life itself was the purpose for which the world was created. For most of us who view all things from our own centers of consciousness, this knowledge comes as a shock to our inflated sense of self-worth. It challenges both our self-ser
FOUR DANCING WITH DEATH: THE DISCOVERY OF MORTALITY Make an island of yourself, make yourself a refuge; there is no other refuge. Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha1 My first actual experience with death came before I was three. With it came a slowly developing alteration in my definition of what it means to be alive. It is revealing to see what a child remembers about his or her first confrontation with death. When something lodges in the memory bank of a child not yet three, it has to have made an indelible impression. Death has the power to do just that. We had a small aquarium in our living room. I was fascinated by the darting, colorful fish seemingly so content just swimming in their pool. They were lively little creatures, coming to the surface with what looked like puckered lips to eat the food sprinkled on the top of the water. I might well have known the word “fish” by this time, but I do not think these fish had names. One day, however, when I went down for breakfast, I stopped t
FIVE THE LURE OF RELIGION You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star. Friedrich Nietzsche1 It is not just life itself that is accidental, but so are many of its experiences. The process through which my own religious options were broadened was clearly one of those accidental things. It began at an opportune moment through no decision that I made. It is, therefore, a story worth relating. In May before my father died in September we were visited by his older sister from Pennsylvania, my Aunt Laurie. Her visit was a sign that his sickness was critical, but I was not aware of that. Under pressure from this fairly aggressive lady I found myself on a Friday morning being taken to St. Peter’s Church in downtown Charlotte, a church I had never been inside in my life and one that was well outside my normal orbit. It was not outside my Aunt Laurie’s, however. My father’s family had moved in 1899 from Montgomery, Alabama, to Atlanta, Georgia. Remaining there less than a year, th
SIX LIFE’S DOMINANT DRIVE: SURVIVAL Man [or woman] is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he [or she] emerges as the infinity in which he [or she] is engulfed. Blaise Pascal1 Man [or woman] is the only animal for whom his [or her] own existence is a problem which he [or she] has to solve. Erich Fromm2 Is there something that all living things have in common? I believe there is, and to know what life is all about, this defining mark must be made clear and understood existentially. Charles Darwin, surveying the sweep and grandeur of biological history, called it “the survival of the fittest.”3 Richard Dawkins, England’s outstanding and perhaps most articulate scientist, called it “the selfish gene.”4 The drive to survive seems to be a biological reality in all living things. We can interpret it in a variety of ways, but we cannot deny that all living things, even those with no signs of consciousness, not only resist death, but also appear to participate in what might b
SEVEN RELIGION’S ROLE IN THE FEAR OF DEATH Old age is always fifteen years older than I am. Bernard Baruch1 Death is the destiny of everything that lives. Nothing ever escapes it. Human beings, however, relate to death differently than every other living thing. We, alone of all the living entities in the world, know that we will die. We anticipate our death, seek to deny it, and even try to avoid it. We fear it, dread it and yet have to endure it knowingly. Human beings are forever seeking to transform death in some way, and most of us search for some means whereby we can transcend it. More than any one of us seems to realize, or is willing to admit, death casts its shadow over our conscious lives, invades our every waking moment and penetrates even our dreams. Only human beings think that what is both natural and normal in the animal world is unnatural and abnormal. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that human beings try so hard and in such obvious ways to put distance between oursel
EIGHT THE FACES OF RELIGION In the South Sea Islands they call this mysterious force Mana; others experience it as an impersonal power, like a form of radioactivity or electricity––the Latins experience numina (spirits) in sacred groves. Arabs felt the landscape was populated by the jinn, when they personalized the unseen forces and made them gods, associated with the wind, sea, and stars, but possessing human characteristics, they were expressing their sense of affinity with the unseen and with the world around them. Karen Armstrong1 Human religion changes in response to human circumstances. That is a dead giveaway, it seems to me, that despite claims that locate religion in the realm of that which has been divinely revealed, religion is, in fact, a human creation that serves a human need. It is a device designed to enable human beings to bank the fires that the anxieties of self-consciousness ignited. We cover religion with myth and magic to make it easier to pretend that it is about
NINE THE TOOLS OF RELIGIOUS MANIPULATION Banished after his sin, Adam bound his offspring also with the penalty of death and damnation, that offspring which by sinning he had corrupted in himself, as in a root; so that whatever progeny was born (through carnal concupiscence, by which a fitting retribution for his disobedience was bestowed upon him) from himself and his spouse—who was the cause of his sin and the companion of his damnation—would drag through the ages the burden of Original Sin, by which it would itself be dragged through manifold errors and sorrows, down to that final and never-ending torment with the rebel angels…. …So the matter stood; the damned lump of humanity was lying prostrate, no, was wallowing in evil, it was falling headlong from one wickedness to another; and joined to the faction of the angels who had sinned, it was paying the most righteous penalty for its impious reason. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo1 We have now noted the fact that throughout history religi
TEN RIDDING RELIGION OF BOTH HEAVEN AND HELL It is too late to get ready for the past. A quotation from a conference called Common Dreams, held in Sydney, Australia, in 20071 Can life after death be freed from the ideas of our past, including our Christian past? If it cannot, then the whole idea of seeking a way to talk about and even to believe in life after death is really not worth the effort. The religious barnacles on the old concepts must be scraped away from the original idea before the idea itself can become either believable or inviting. We cannot content ourselves with the task of seeking to revive traditional hopes that are quite frankly based on no longer acceptable presuppositions; we must rather seek and hope to find a new point of entry into this subject. Is there one? That is the question that we will now explore. The Christian hope, indeed the religious hope, for life beyond the life of this world has heretofore always been dependent on the idea that there is an extern
ELEVEN PUTTING AWAY CHILDISH THINGS: THE DEATH OF RELIGION The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end. Quoted by Professor Sarah Coakley, Harvard Divinity School1 Jesus is always betrayed by those who profess to love him. Pastor Gretta Vosper, United Church of Canada2 We come now to the critical turning point in our quest. Why does it matter whether or not traditional religion fades and the external God of traditional religion dies? It matters because we would once more be alone facing realities that threaten us deeply. It matters because we have invested in this deity our sense of purpose, our sense of meaning and our hopes for eternal life. All of these things die if this God dies, or at least that is the common wisdom. When these issues are stated outside their usual “stained-glass” setting, their strangeness becomes apparent. It becomes clear that we believe these things not because we are convinced that they are true, but because we have a dee
TWELVE THE SHIFT OF THE RELIGIOUS PARADIGM Envoi God within me, God without, How shall I ever be in doubt? There is no place where I may go And not there see God’s face, not know I am God’s vision and God’s ears So through the harvest of my years I am the Sower and the Sown God’s self unfolding and God’s own. From a tenth-century gravestone, St. Lars Church, Linköping, Sweden1 Enabling people to turn around in the way they think about and conceptualize God in order to embrace new possibilities is not unlike trying to turn the great ship Titanic around in a small pond. It is not impossible, but it feels that way. There are many who say it cannot be done. Perhaps there are many more who do not want it to be done. Yet turn we must. My personal journey has carried me through the arena of religion to what I now see as its bankruptcy. The human journey into God has reached a similar destination. God-talk still fills the world, but it is no longer believable in the way that it once was. Secul
THIRTEEN WHO AM I? WHAT IS GOD? O Light that none can name, for it is altogether nameless. O light with many names, for it is at work in all things… How do you mingle yourself with grass? How, while continuing unchanged, altogether inaccessible, Do you preserve the nature of grass unconsumed? Symeon, an early Byzantine mystic, from Hymns of Divine Love1 The world of science, which has concentrated its increasingly powerful gaze on the here and now, the seen rather than the unseen, has in the process come up with some fascinating insights that form the basis for the inquiry to which I now turn. Instead of speculating in a metaphysical direction about who or what God is, the focus of modern science has been on human life and what scientists can learn about who we are. Some of their discoveries have forced us to entertain thoughts that previous generations could never have contemplated. How many of us are aware, for example, that the same laws that govern life on this planet earth also ap
FOURTEEN THE APPROACH OF THE MYSTICS When we needed the outer form of a savior You were there for us. When our conscious mind matures we turn within rather than without to find You there, not separate or apart but one in the same with ourselves. We are moving toward Christ consciousness. Maureen Ramsay Hughes1 Are the mystics simply crazy? They might well be! They frequently say strange and weird things. A fourteenth-century Christian mystic named Meister Eckhart once said: “God’s being is my being and is the being of all beings. My me is God.”2 I have known patients confined to mental institutions to say similar things. On another occasion, Eckhart observed: “Between a person and God there is no distinction. They are one. Their knowing is with God’s knowing. Their activity is with God’s activity, their understanding with God’s understanding. The same eye with which I look at God is the eye with which God looks at me.” I doubt if these are lines that would communicate much either to ou
FIFTEEN RESURRECTION: A SYMBOL AND A REALITY Religion is no more— Fragmenting humankind with doctrine, creed and narrowness of heart. Not darkly through a glass Truth stands at length in beauty unaffected A prospect indivisible Love is her only name. David Stevenson1 Deepak Chopra, in his book Life After Death,2 approaches the subject of the afterlife through the lens and experience of his Eastern religious background. He does it well and powerfully. I admire his work and share in many of his conclusions. I, however, as a child of the West, cannot walk his path any more than he can walk mine. Both of us must arrive at the truth we seek by way of the religious system of our origins, not by rejecting or denying that system, but by transcending it. This means that I must go through my faith tradition to its center, its core and its depth, and only then move beyond it. I cannot start from a place where I have never been, but must set out from the place where I am. All of us are like St. Pa
SIXTEEN HIDING—THINKING—BEING Have we ever faced the possibility that to abandon such an idol [the external, supernatural God of theistic religion] may in the future be the only way of making Christianity meaningful? John A. T. Robinson1 We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the secret sits in the middle and knows. Robert Frost2 We have traveled a long pathway. We have looked at the journey of human life from consciousness to self-consciousness, into religion in its various forms and then finally beyond religion into modern forms of secularity. I have sought to parallel that human journey with my own personal trek through life as I too walked first into self-consciousness, then into religion and finally beyond it. My walk, however, deviated at this point from the human story, for I journeyed farther, going beyond the new secularization, into an expanded consciousness, a new realm of the mystical, and a new understanding of what it means to be human. With the hope that my personal j
SEVENTEEN I BELIEVE IN LIFE BEYOND DEATH Perhaps ultimately, with the fulfillment of the creative process, finite personality will have served its purpose and become one with the eternal reality, but we do not at present need to know that final future. What we need to know is how to live now. This is the way of love, witnessed by the saints and mystics of all the great traditions. John Hick1 The time has come to state my conclusions clearly. The attempt to place the issue of eternal life into a new context has been accomplished. I have walked through religion as the arena in which the human family has long sought answers. I have dismissed religion’s two primary premises: first, that God is other, a supernatural being who can do for me that which I cannot do for myself, a formulation that necessitated my gaining God’s favor; and second, that self-conscious human life is alienated from the supernatural being and that overcoming this alienation with some form of atonement is necessary. In
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