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Yes, but who are you?

Yes, but who are you?

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Sunrise in Santa Fe, New Mexico
New Mexico sunrise

The traditional meaning of Good Friday and Easter is that Jesus died for our sins and by his resurrection people are given eternal life. For centuries, this has been the church’s carrot and stick. Believe in Jesus and you will have eternal life in heaven. Don’t believe in Jesus and you will die in your sins and go to hell, or at least not go to heaven.

I think the stick part of this message has almost completely lost its credibility. Even very few religious people believe in a God who punishes human beings for their wrongdoing, especially for eternity in some place of torture. As one of my seminary professors wryly said, “I may believe in hell, but I don’t have to believe anyone is in it.”

But what about the carrot of life after death? My sense is that isn’t much of a carrot anymore because people either believe in it or not regardless of their religious beliefs. I have a friend who grew up in a Muslim household but has no religious practice now, and he told me emphatically that there is life after death.

For most people today, life after death is real or not regardless of one’s beliefs about God or religion. Some say, “when you’re dead, you’re dead”, while others, like my friend, insist our lives go on “beyond the grave.” What form that life takes is up for debate, of course. In any case, few believe anymore that life after death is something awarded to us, by God or the church.

The church’s reward-and-punishment message was always a self-serving distortion of Jesus’ teaching and what the Bible in general says. It was adopted because it got people in the pews and kept them there. The church got away with it because there is no clear and consistent biblical understanding of life after death. So, the church’s theologians could pick and choose the verses and traditions which supported the message of salvation which the church wanted to promote.

Biblical scholars agree that the notion of life after death was a late developing belief in ancient Judaism. There is little discussion of it in the Old Testament. God’s rewards and punishments are almost entirely this worldly, and more related to the behavior of Israel as a people than of individuals. The dead went to Sheol, the underworld place of darkness. Later, the idea of a personal afterlife was likely picked up from Israel’s neighbors but was never universally taught or accepted. It remains a minority belief among Jews today.

Early Christians apparently were among those who did believe in life after death. In the gospels, Jesus clearly takes this position in a debate with some Sadducees. Yet Paul has to defend the idea of the dead being raised in 1 Corinthians in order to justify a belief in Jesus’ resurrection, so apparently it was not universally accepted among the first Christians.

In that same letter, Paul gives his most detailed discussion of resurrection and what he says would startle many Christians. Paul says flat out that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” Likening death to the planting of seeds, he says, “It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body.” Thus, Paul would have scoffed at the later gospel stories of the resurrected Jesus’ with a body that could be touched and felt and even eat!

Paul never defines what he means by his seemingly contradictory phrase “spiritual body.” But another statement he makes does point in a helpful direction. Using the idea of Jesus as the “second Adam” (i.e. God’s restart of humanity), he says, “Thus it is written, ‘The first man, Adam, became a living being’; the last Adam [Jesus] became a life-giving spirit.”

The divine spirit, often imagined as breath or wind (the words are the same in Hebrew and Greek), is one of the most important but underappreciated ideas in the Bible. The creation story in Genesis 1 begins with “a wind from God” blowing over the watery chaos from which the universe is made. In the creation story of Genesis 2, God creates the first human out of dust and “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

Spirit, God’s own breath, is what makes us alive and is the energy of all creation. Death is the departure of that spirit from the body. All four gospels describe Jesus’ death in those terms. Mark, Matthew, and Luke each say Jesus’ death was when he “breathed his last.” Before this moment, Luke has Jesus say, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” And in John, Jesus’ death comes when he “gave up his spirit.”

But in talking about life after death, we rarely ask who or what it is that might continue to live after death. Who is the “I” that we think will go on? This is the source of our confusion because we fail to ask the most fundamental question: Who am I? Ignorance of our true identity is the primary cause of our misery according to many of history’s great religious and spiritual traditions.

This has become a crisis in modern Western culture. Society emphasizes the individual personality and its free development, i.e. “finding” or developing ourselves. Yet we know that all our qualities, abilities, talents, and accomplishments are ephemeral—they won’t last. Am I more than these qualities? If so, who is the “I” that has them? Who am I besides the roles I play, my ever-changing physical qualities, or my mental and physical abilities?

While much religious language has become antique, the word “spirit” has remained meaningful and powerful. I believe this is because it points to what is unchanging and eternal, deeply felt and intuited, yet otherwise unnameable. It is spirit, according to ancient wisdom, that is our true nature and identity. And being spirit, we are then one with God.

In modern times, this was perhaps most clearly summarized by the 20th century French anthropologist, priest, and mystic, Teilhard de Chardin. In describing our true nature, he said,

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Is there a way to understand spirit in modern, even scientific, terms? Increasingly, spiritual teachers and scientists are finding common ground in the idea of consciousness. The study of fields as diverse as quantum physics and near-death experiences (NDEs) are causing scientists to recognize that consciousness needs to be seen from a new perspective. Many are beginning to speak of it in ways that echo the teachings of Eastern religion and Western mystics.

Earlier this month, The Guardian published an in-depth story titled, “The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’.” Among other topics, the article shows how our confusion about consciousness is impeding our understanding of both living and dying. The author quotes the bold prediction of Sam Parnia, an acknowledged expert in the fields of resuscitation and NDEs:

“I think in 50- or 100-years’ time we will have discovered the entity that is consciousness,” he told me. “It will be taken for granted that it wasn’t produced by the brain, and it doesn’t die when you die.”

Other scientists are going even further, asserting that consciousness is not how we perceive reality but where, in fact, reality starts. In his book The Case Against Reality, UC-Irvine cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman says of this new perspective, “Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality.”

How do we experience consciousness itself? For centuries mystics around the world have said this is the purpose of meditation. Through the practice of sitting in silence we develop the ability to become aware of awareness itself. This is our true self, such teaching holds, before any particular experience or thought. It is the self which knows such experiences and thoughts, is aware of them, but is not the experiences or thoughts themselves.

Not only is consciousness our true self, spiritual traditions have said, but it also Consciousness, or Awareness, our experience of our oneness with God, the one Self of all reality. This is why so many religions teach that knowing God requires a dying, a giving up of our ego, our false self, because it obscures our experience of our True Self. As Jesus says, we must lose our life in order to find it.

Alan Watts was a British-American clergyman who helped modern Westerners discover the Eastern religious traditions. Appreciating both the Bible and Eastern spirituality, he wrote:

You don’t really exist. That is, as an ego, a soul, a separate will. When you realize this, you’re liberated…. Ego is an abstraction…. So is one’s self. There’s a happening, but it’s not you. By dying to yourself, finding you don’t exist, you’re reborn. Forgetting yourself, the universe flows on.

This was the essence of Paul’s experience of the crucified and risen Jesus. In this letter to the Galatians he writes, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”

In his video, “What Happens After Death? A Nondual Explanation”, retired Baptist pastor and author Marshall Davis comes to this conclusion.

What happens after we die? The individual human consciousness comes to an end. No more me. But the universal eternal consciousness that is expressed as me, in me, through me, that consciousness that we call God, continues…. [W]e are one with this divine consciousness. This consciousness is the universe, is the nature of the universe, and this consciousness is always, and it continues. In that sense we continue after death because this is who we really are. The good news is that this divine consciousness can be known now. When I die, I expect that this divine consciousness that I know now will continue, although my individual personal consciousness will end.

A phrase I have not used until now is “eternal life.” It is so often misunderstood. Eternal life is not just life after death. The word “eternal” means “without beginning or end; lasting forever; always existing.” In John, which uses the phrase more often than any other  book of the Bible, Jesus teaches that “eternal life” is not something given later but known now. How could it be otherwise if it is eternal? In other words, our true self has no beginning or ending. Not only will we not die, but we were also not born, because our true self is the eternal Spirit of God.

One of the mystical metaphors that is especially helpful is that of waves on the ocean. Each of us is such a wave. It exists only in union with the ocean. The wave’s substance is entirely that of the ocean. When it reaches the shore, it comes to an end, even while other waves are following behind. Nothing “dies” when the wave ends. Only its form has changed while its true identity as ocean continues on unchanged.

Discovering this truth is the experience of salvation. In John, it is what Jesus means, in his conversation with Nicodemus, by being born from above or born again. In many religious traditions it is called awakening. It is seeing clearly, for the first time, who we are, and what life and reality truly are.

It is to be set free to live in the “eternal now”, without regrets about the past or fear of the future because neither actually exist. It is to be able to love life and our own existence, and to realize how literally Jesus meant it when he said we should love our neighbor as ourselves. It is to recognize our eternal oneness with God, or whatever word we want to use for the One that is the ground of existence, as Meister Eckhardt says. It is to recognize our oneness with everyone and all things. It is to know that our truest and most important identity is expressed in simply saying, “I am,” and to know that we always will be.

The light shines in the darkness

The light shines in the darkness

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The last “Reflections” post that I wrote for my congregation in Florida was about the death of our dog, Emma, a week before Christmas. I’ve re-posted it and you can find it on my website. There was one aspect of that experience I didn’t write about but want to explore a bit, and that’s the meaning of her death.

Just after arriving in New Mexico early last November, we were stunned to be told that Emma had a malignant tumor. In the following weeks she handled and responded well to chemotherapy. But then one morning she became sick and deteriorated rapidly. It didn’t seem related to the cancer, and we will never know exactly what happened.

That afternoon, we went back to the clinic where she was being treated, thinking we would then take her to an animal hospital in Albuquerque where she would spend the night. Instead, we discovered that she was in much worse condition than we realized. Her vitals were not good, she couldn’t walk, and most upsetting, she didn’t recognize either of us.

With her life expectancy due to the cancer only a matter of months, we knew that Emma’s life was coming to an end. We had the veterinarian euthanize her there in the office. The first shot put her to sleep, the second stopped her heart, and she was gone.

“Gone.” Gone? Gone where? It’s a strange turn of phrase. As a pastor, I’ve been present at people’s deaths on many occasions. I’ve watched other pets die. Recently, I’ve found some new ways to think about this experience, which comes to all of us and to everything.

“He’s in heaven now.” “She’s gone over the rainbow bridge.” Those images are helpful in our struggles with loss and grief. But we don’t press them too hard or too far. It’s just so difficult for us to accept that someone or something we loved and cherished no longer exists.

What happens when we die? We know the physiological event but what is the experience? The prime human experience that ends with death is consciousness, or awareness. There are, of course, ways of losing consciousness that don’t involve dying, but such experiences are often described as “death-like.” Sleep has been called a “little death” by sources as diverse as Homer, the Buddha, the Quran, Edgar Allan Poe, and George R. R. Martin.

Yet dying always means the loss of awareness of the world around us. And the living experience this, as well. When I realized that Emma did not recognize us, I felt that she was already “gone.” And when her eyes closed and heart stopped, it was her aware interaction with reality that had come to an end. From the world’s perspective, and ours, the story of Emma was over.

“Who am I?” is the most important question to ask according to many philosophical and spiritual traditions. In the religions of south and east Asia, the pursuit of that question, a practice called self-inquiry, is often seen as the path to spiritual enlightenment. Such an inquiry is not an academic pursuit, but a deeply personal discovery and experience of our true self. According to the modern Hindu teacher, Ramana Maharshi, self-inquiry is “the most sacred of sacred.”

The deceptively simple answer to that question, according to these traditions, is that our ultimate self is awareness. Awareness knows and precedes all our thoughts, feelings, sensations, and experiences. It is our sense of being, our ultimate knowledge of our self, our fundamental “I am-ness.” And when that ends, so do we.

But it doesn’t end, and that is where we can find intersection with the biblical religions of the west. Asian tradition says that our awareness is really a manifestation, an incarnation, of the one Self, which the Bible calls Spirit. It is the presence of God within us and all creation. It is the Spirit that moved over the waters in Genesis 1 and the Spirit that was breathed into the first human in Genesis 2. It is why, when Jesus dies on the cross in John’s gospel, it says he “gave up his Spirit.”

Spirit, our conscious awareness, is what unites us with all people and even all creatures. It is why we are all, ultimately, One. But as individual manifestations in the world, we are also separate. And, according to English spiritual teacher, Rupert Spira, overcoming that separation is our deepest desire and experiencing that overcoming is the meaning of love. My awareness meeting another’s is what we mean by love. It is most profound in our deepest friendships, yet it happens in other relationships, as well, even with a dog.

I described Emma’s death above as the ending of her story, and to me that seems a better metaphor than thinking of her “going” somewhere. I don’t expect to see Emma again anymore than I expect to find a good book, which made me sad when it ended, continued somewhere else. Yet the Awareness, Spirit, Love, I experienced in Emma is still all around me: in my husband, my family, my friends, strangers I may encounter, and in any number of conscious creatures, including our dog, Lana.

“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” Death’s “sting” is its incessant reminder of our seeming separateness. But separation in formal existence is transcended in awareness, in perceiving our real self to be the Light shining within us and in all those around us. It is the Light, John says, which “darkness cannot overcome.”

We may experience the Light go out in those we love. It will eventually go out in each one of us. But that Light is nonetheless eternal. It has been shining since the first moment of creation. We know it in every loving moment. It is the joy of existence itself, knowing that it shines within us and through us, in everyone around us, and in every atom of creation.