“Entering Eternity with Ease”
In this my latest and fourth book, Entering Eternity With Ease, I discuss the idea that we do not have to wait until we die to get to heaven. First, we have to let go of our Ego and understand through mindfulness that we are simply an eternal awareness of living in love. Secondly, we have to see that there is only one world, not two worlds. We were taught that there are two worlds: a here and a hereafter. Regardless of how we picture the two worlds (material vs spiritual, temporal vs eternal, finite vs infinite), there is only one world, one universe, and it is made of matter. Besides losing our Ego, we have to see the convergence of time and eternity in one. We have to accept the mysterious reality that past, present, and future are all one in the Eternal Now which is another name for “God.”
“The Twin Towers Trilogy”
My Four Books are all in sequence and probably should be called a quadrilogy. They began when I was stranded in Monterey, California on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, and had to drive 3,000 miles back to New York. My story continued through the American Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Great Recession of 2008, culminating in the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, and now in the throes of the biggest public protests against police brutality in 50 years. The story of every human being on the planet can be told through the wars, pandemics, assassinations, and world-wide convulsions that surround their individual and social lives. This is doubly true of me. I was born in the shadow of the 1929 Stock market crash and lived through the Great Depression, World War II, the Cuban missile crisis, and the assassinations of John, Martin, and Robert. Just when it seemed that a modicum of One World Spirit had finally arrived with the collapse of the Soviet Empire, a Muslim group called Al Qaeda, pulled off a remarkable terrorist attack on America, using our own technology, our own planes, our own fuel to blast down the two tallest buildings in the world. They began the 21st Century with a statement that the 20th and American century was over.
The real-time history that I was living through was a trauma that I felt in my bosom, in my brain, in the depths of my mystical awareness. But since I am a mystic, I sensed intuitively that the trauma I was experiencing was more than political, more than economic, more than environmental: it was physical, and it was metaphysical, and thus spiritual, and sinking to the depths of the soul. Because of all the enlightenment and awakening that I had experienced in 73 years, up to 9/11, I immediately perceived the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York as the grave of God. Why? Because I was a cradle Catholic, who entered the seminary at age thirteen, served in the priesthood for 24 years, left the active ministry because I was strongly sensing that the God I had grown up with and served no longer existed as I imagined Him to be. When I read the diary of one of the hijacking terrorists in which he writes that he is committing this suicidal destruction in the name of God, I knew that both his God and my God never really existed. I wrote later about “The God Who Never Was.” In my first book, The Day God Died, I imagined a “God” coming to me for therapy with an identity crisis. “She,” I provocatively called her was having an identity crisis, because She had no idea what “God” or “Allah” the Muslims were talking about, or even what “God” President Bush was talking about in his war of “Infinite Justice” against the terrorists. The therapy I did on God turned out well because “God” was restored to the original Christian idea of “Love”: love as among humans, love for the planet and all it’s creatures, extending to the entire endless universe.
The second book, The Day My Ego Died was about Ego as a false self that all humans develop in every social environment in order to be accepted. In the first book I made the case that God is not a person in the human sense of person, therefore “He” does not have an Ego. So, if we are made in the image and likeness of God, as the Bible says, then neither should we have an Ego. Thus, the only path to human happiness is to go through the “Dark Night of the Ego” and find our true self as an awareness of our interdependence on all reality outside our “self.” As one saying goes, “Love is the realization that something other than one’s self is real.”
In the third book, Back To Earth, I primarily said that we have to die to our false-self Ego as a way of entering heaven now before we die.
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Sal Umana 