Conclusion of Entering Eternity With Ease

Have I made the case for entering eternity with ease (remember: I’m not talking about dying, but rather entering eternity NOW before death)? Have I described how exactly we go into eternity with ease, not to mention entering eternity with joy?

I doubt it. Living a human life, and letting it go joyfully is not a court case to be argued before a black-robed human judge, much less the “judge of the living and the dead” mentioned in the scriptures. Living and dying human is a story told by each of us with each beat of our heart and each breath of our bosom. Yes: diaphragmatic breathing taught by Yoga. I realize that I started this work to help myself (and, of course, possible readers) to face our death as a daily, constant reality.

Gradually,I am coming to see that maturity consists in the ability to face the reality of death. I am coming to see that death is not just one final act at the end of our bodily lives, but a lifetime reality. As soon as psychologically possible, we need to accept death as a lifetime process that we participate in actively every day. Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Death should be renamed The Five Stages of the lifetime process of living and dying. Why didn’t our parents and teachers tell us the real meaning of our night-time prayer:
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
And if I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take?

This childhood prayer pictures the distinct possibility that I may die at any moment in this precarious and perilous human odyssey in which I am engaged from the very start. I had written at the end of Back to Earth (the third book of The Twin Towers Trilogy) that we have to stop denying the impermanence of human life. I was convinced since my years in psychotherapy school that the denial of death goes hand in hand with the denial of life. Do we refuse to fully give ourselves to the joy of being human because we cannot accept the ultimate loss of our human life by dying? So we live in denial of joy and delight because we are in denial about the ultimate end of life in death.

First of all, we have to distinguish between the death of the body, and the death of self-conscious awareness. We can no longer say that we have “immortal souls,” that are “spiritual beings.” We thought that God was a “spiritual being” who existed in his own “spiritual world” called heaven, and we were destined to join him in glory in his other, non-material world, or be punished forever in the devil’s spiritual world of hell. In this book, I have tried to make the case that the next life up above in heaven that we were taught about as children no longer exists in actual physical reality. Heaven and hell, and judgment were metaphors for deeper realities, sacred mysteries that we can only point to in poetry and prayer. So now we are stuck with the mystery of what remains of us after the body dissolves by entropy into other forms of matter. We cannot stand the thought of separation from our body. “Out of sight, out of mind” is a most familiar comment on human relationships. One of the first stages of development of the human child is called “object constancy.” Here is the psychological description of it: “Object constancy is the ability to believe that a relationship is stable and intact, despite the presence of setbacks, conflict, or disagreements.

People who lack object constancy might experience extreme anxiety in relationships of all types not just romantic ones-and may live in constant fear of abandonment.” We know a child has reached object constancy because she can play hide and seek with you. Before that time, when you hide from her, she thinks you do not exist anymore. She does not miss you, or seek you because she does not yet have the capacity to keep you in her mind as a remembered object. But when she starts to remember you when she can no longer see you, she can miss you, mourn you, and weep over the separation.

One of the first things I learned in psychotherapy was separation anxiety. In fact, one professor opined that psychotherapy was all about separation anxiety. He thought that psychotherapy should be a course on separation anxiety and that the relationship between the therapist and the client should be mostly about modeling the actual separation, in real-time of the client with the therapist. He hated the tendency on the part of some therapists of allowing a dependency to take place between them and their clients. He insisted on dealing with the dependency and the separation as soon as possible in a course of therapy. If you apply this psychological insight to life and death, you see right away that we humans are born with a dependency on our bodily existence that is infinitely tenacious. How can we possibly let go of this bodily existence with which I am typing this page?

That is the problem I was faced with when I began writing this book. Entering Eternity With Ease, indeed! We have to learn how to mourn the loss that results from separation. First we have to learn that loss leads to relying on ourselves while we are strengthened by the bitter/sweet memory and mystical presence of the one(s) we have lost. I am looking now at the wall in front of my desk as I write. It is filled with upwards of a hundred photos and death cards of people who loved me and whom I loved who have now entered eternity. Losing them was a huge price to pay. How many times have I said, and had said to me, “I am sorry for your loss?” But these losses have made me what I am today. Every one of these people had an intimate part in creating the person I am today.

The great Ira Progoff of NYU’s Dialogue House taught us how we internalize all the persons with whom we had close relationships. Even though my mother and father and so many others have passed away, I carry an internalized version of them in my heart. And I can talk to them right now. All the things I remember that they did for me, all the truths they told me, in short, the deep, deep concern and love for me I treasure in my memory. Ira Progoff taught us to keep an Intensive Journal, which is a magnified Diary, with daily entries like any Diary, but also has several other sections where we have lengthy dialogues with these internalized loved ones or unloved ones, and work out with them any unfinished business we might have with them. When you get to be 80, much more, 90, you sense you are drawing closer to them, spiritually, and you want to stress how much they mean to you. I quoted above the beautiful poem e.e. cummings wrote, presumably to his wife, but can apply to any loved one: “I carry your heart with me(I carry it in my heart) I am never without it(anywhere i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling) I fear no fate(for you are my fate, my sweet)I want no world(for beautiful you are my world, my true) and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart I carry your heart with me(I carry it in my heart)”

Only poetry like this can hope to even intimate what I am saying about all the internalized loved ones who have created the magnificent human beings that we are, each of us, whether we realize it or not. Not to mention God (God forbid!) whom we have internalized to such an extent that we have become in a very real sense, godlike. To the non-religious, this may seem like a childish fantasy, but the greatest scholar of the historical Jesus, Dominic Crossan, writes that Jesus has been revered by millions as divine for two thousand years because he somehow internalized God as his Father, or Dad, (in Aramaic, Abba.) As Crossan says, Jesus was not actually divine, but he talked and acted as God would talk and act if God were a human being. In other words, no one in history ever talked or acted more like God as we conceive God to be, than Jesus. The saints of history, whatever their religion or philosophy, all spoke and acted like the compassionate and vulnerable God whom they had internalized through prayer and meditation. Finally, if we live each day in the light of eternity, we too will settle down into a peaceful, joyful experience of delight in both living and dying. Robert Frost has a mellow meditation on mortality in his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:

In these simple snowy images, Frost paints a picture of a snowy, darkening day that reminds him of his future last day, as the dirt piles up in his grave like snow “filling up” the woods. He looks forward to that day, but knows he has many tasks to complete before that final day. Another author, Mary Pipher, writes of death and snow:
I love the world but I cannot stay. Death is democratic and we will all participate in its enactment. I will miss the beauty all around me. I have taken so much pleasure in the natural world, in people and books, in music and art, in cups of coffee and lolling cats. If I knew that I had a month left to live, I wouldn’t spend my time much differently than I do now.
All of my life I have loved snow. When I was a girl in the 1950s, snow fell often in the long winters of western Nebraska. I remember one winter when, after the streets were plowed, mountains of snow 10 feet tall stood in the middle of the streets. As a young mother, my favorite days were snow days when our family could stay home and play board games. I would make soup and popcorn. I relished taking my children outside to do the things that I had done in the snow as a girl. I loved falling asleep with my family safe on a blizzardy night when the streets were impassable and a blanket of peace covered our town.
Now, snow has become a profoundly spiritual experience. When it snows, I sit by my window and watch it fall. I go deep into its purity and softness. Snow falls inside and outside of me. It settles my brain and calms my body. I hope death feels like watching the snow grow thicker and thicker. Doctors call dying of a morphine overdose being ‘snowed.’ I would not mind that at all. I would like to disappear in a whiteout.

May all of us unique snowflakes find a quiet wood filling up with snow on our last day, after we have exhausted our many miles to go. We are each a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

Once more we hear John Keats:

A Thing of beauty is a joy forever;

It’s loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness;

 but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health and quiet breathing

Therefore on every morrow, are we wreathing

A flowery band to bind us to the earth.

Our loveliness increases so that we will never pass into nothingness. Each new day we are wreathing a flowery band to bind us to the earth. As Teilhard de Chardin so powerfully sings (in Christianity and Evolution):
“If, as a result of some interior revolution, I were to lose in
succession my faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God,
and my faith in spirit, I feel that I should continue to believe
invincibly in the world. The world ( it’s value, its infallibility, and its goodness)- that, when all is said and done, is the first, the last, and the only thing in which I believe. It is by this faith that I live, and it is to this faith, I feel, that at the moment of death, rising above all doubts, I shall surrender myself.” We will go where Elijah went, Buddha went, where Jesus went, where Mohammed went, where all the delightfully dying went, back to earth, back to the humus from which all humans come. Amen. So be it. Così sia.

Epilogue
“Remember man, that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return”. This has been used for a thousand years on Ash Wednesday to open up 40 days of spiritual practice around Death and Resurrection. Now I read it as “Remember earthlings that you come from earth and are going back to earth.” Was it worth it, then, just to live, and then to die? Once upon a time, somewhere in the vast universe, really everywhere and nowhere at all, is the Spirit-Self, that we may call a kind of Anonymous God, A Divine Nemo, a Godly No One. This Unknown God, this Spirit-Self contains us all. The Spirit-Self is the transcendent power of matter. It is me; it is all of us who ever were or ever will be. Spirit has no matter, no parts, it is undivided, limitless, and infinite. It is One, it is True, it is Good, it is Beautiful. We, the Spirit-Self of living matter are here, we are now, we always were and always will be. We evolved as the Consciousness of the material universe. There is no past, no future, only now. We are all dead, and we are all very much alive. We have a love for Being which is ourselves, and also a Being For Love. In fact, we ARE Love, and because we are Love, we are a thing of beauty forever. Some of us are huge fans of Jesus because he convinces us that we are already living in eternal life. It is very exhilarating that the latest theologians like Bishop John Shelby Spong are now saying that the Resurrection of Jesus means not that Jesus went to heaven, but that he went back to earth where he came from. “He who believes in me, already has eternal life”; “I have risen and am still with you.” No other religion claims that. We can have eternal life right now, just as Jesus has eternal life right now, through his “resurrected presence” among those who love him. The rest of us will not have millions of believers and followers who will follow us down the centuries. That is why it is so important to grasp the significance of the “eternal NOW.” Eternity is NOW. Eternity always was and always will be. Eternity is not a lot of time before and after. Eternity is out of time, beyond time, beyond the material, beyond the moving parts of cosmic explosions. Eternity is now and forever.

The mystic/poet, Father John Duffy, CSSR, writes in “A Prayer For Sleep”:
God, through whom we sleep or wake
Here’s my soul for Thee to take.
Lift me in divine release
Out of time and back to peace.
Fold me in Perhaps and Seem.
Make me once again the dream
Dreamed before I came to be
The thing I am, this loved-by-Thee…

Duffy senses that both sleep, and finally, death, “lifts us in divine release out of time and back to peace.” We go back in time and explode in one big bang into eternity as we intimate the childhood prayer of laying down to sleep. We go back to childhood omnipotence and intimations of immortality. We die to live forever. “It is in dying that we are born to eternal life” as Francis of Assisi prays. Jesus went back to the earth where he came from, not back to a heaven he never came from. “He has gone before you into Galilee.” Galilee is where Jesus came from: from the earth of Nazareth, and it is to the same earth that we shall all return- where we came from. It is my consummate joy to be named Umana which means Human in Italian and in Spanish. Human, of course, comes from humus which means “soil.” We humans are all of the soil. “Remember humans that you are soil, and unto soil you shall return.” Humus also means “earth”, so we are earthlings, children of Mother Earth, or “Gaia” as the Greeks called the Goddess Earth. I can’t wait to go home to Mother earth. Yes, Tom Wolfe, you can go home again, FOR EVER. The earliest followers of the crucified Jesus would sing in their liturgies: Maranatha, Amen, Come Lord Jesus.

Now that I no longer exist as an Ego, where do WE go from here? Nowhere. We are already here. In fact, WE ARE. FOREVER.

Welcome to Eternity.

If I have another book to write, it will be either on this side of the grave or the other.

As my Sicilian-American paesano Sinatra wrote on his grave: The best is yet to come, I write THE BEST IS ALREADY HERE.

Isn’t that delightful? And I’m not even dead yet.