Meeting The Masters

 I went to a funeral yesterday. The deceased had had a long life and a distinguished career and was much loved by friends and family. It was a successful life well lived but he had been a religious sceptic up until nearly the very end. But not apparently at the very end. The canon who gave the address related how he had visited this man a few days before he died and they talked about the afterlife. Naturally, one's approaching end concentrates the mind and you become more open to things you may previously have dismissed. Their reality or otherwise is suddenly a matter of pressing importance. The canon said he had asked his friend, for they were friends, to imagine he was speaking to a baby just before it was born. What would he say? Something like this perhaps. "You are now in a dark, safe and secure place where your every need is met. You have nothing to do except to be and grow peacefully in silence. But very soon all that will change. You will come out into a world of light and sound and other people. You will change and form relationships. There will be challenges you will be required to meet and suffering too in all probability, but there will also be love, joy and fulfilment in various ways, for some more than others but for all there will be opportunity to make some kind of mark, great or small." How could the as yet unborn child understand any of this but if he could then might there not be excitement at the prospect? In the same way, said the canon, you are about to leave one form and phase of life for another. Your horizons will be hugely expanded in ways you cannot now envisage but, if you approach this change with hope in your heart and a faithful mind, all will be well.

I thought this was a good way of looking at things. After all, birth and death are two sides of the same coin. We come from mystery and at the end of our life we return to mystery. It's like the famous story told by the Venerable Bede in his account of the conversion of King Edwin of Northumbria of the sparrow that flies into a warm hall out of a wintery night and then out again at the far end of the hall. There is a great world outside the hall and the sparrow continues his journey. Likewise, we too are on a journey and death is but a stage on that journey, an important one to be sure, but still only a stage. It is not the end.

Apparently the dying man was reconciled at the end with the prospect of a new life in which he would meet his loved ones who had gone on before, and he ventured forth with a newly found hope in his heart. I believe in some kind of purgatorial purification after death so a simple shift of belief is but the beginning but I also believe that it is a necessary beginning and if we open our hearts to the reality of the spiritual life, even if that is only at the end as it was in this case, then we face towards the light and move in the right direction on the next stage of our journey.

 Today is the anniversary of the most important day in the history of the world. It is the day that death died and life was reborn into a new condition of total and complete freedom. It is the day when light shone and there was no shadow because everything became transparent, meaning absolute in purity. The veil that separated spirit and matter was ripped asunder and the two modes of existence became one, joined together in a fashion that made a new creation in which everything was holy.

At least, it was in the case of one person. But that person set a pattern in which this new life could be attained by anyone who followed in his wake. He broke down a wall and left a space through which anyone could pass who believed, that is, really believed, in the reality of his pristine perfection. Believing in him also means accepting his suffering because that is the means through which the soul is purged and cleansed of its residual filth, an uncomfortable word but one which any true believer will recognise as accurately describing the state of the soul before it allows Christ to shine his light into its darkest corners.

On that first Easter Sunday Christ burst the bounds of creation. He shattered the old forms and made a new one which could finally hold and express the glory of spirit with no impediment. We all still labour away with the old forms, the ones that darken and restrict and bind and limit and constrain and crush and weigh down. But the new form now exists and awaits all those who are prepared, through Christ, to make themselves fit and worthy to receive it. No one is worthy of themselves, of course, but we can become worthy through the giving up of self and the acceptance of Christ. This is what belief means. It is so much more than mere intellectual assent. It is opening up one's whole being to the reality of Christ and allowing oneself to be transformed by his spiritual light and power. That is the hope and promise offered by Easter Sunday.

How do we square the idea of evolving consciousness, to which I subscribe, with the doctrine that if we reject Christ we suffer a spiritual consequence in the afterlife, traditionally known as damnation or hell? Let me first of all say that nobody is sent to hell. You send yourself there and you do so by closing off your mind to Heaven. I would also go along with Dante's vision that there are different hells equating to different sins because I believe that in the afterlife the principle of like attracts like operates with one's outer environment reflecting inner consciousness. The universe is a thought. Life is Mind and in the spiritual world what you think is what you are and where you go. Thus, there may be hells which are not necessarily that unpleasant, at least not to those who go there, but which are nevertheless deprived of God and real goodness and real beauty. So, of course, they are unpleasant to the reasonable person whose consciousness has not been perverted by a misdirected will.

This world is a world of choice. You choose whether or not to believe in God and you also choose what sort of God you believe in. You choose or don't choose to acknowledge Christ and you also choose what sort of Christ to believe in because many people believe in their own version of Christ, a Christ who is a projection of their own thoughts and desires. There is the real Christ to whom you respond in the heart through the spiritual imagination, aided, of course, by scripture and even art (that is art's highest function), and there is a human created image of Christ who may be modelled on aspects of the real Christ but has some extra elements superimposed  as well as important elements missing. It is a mental version of a spiritual reality and, depending on its approximation to the real Christ, does only limited good. It may even do harm if the image departs too much from the reality and reflects more of social or political or personal concerns than spiritual truth.

Hell is separation from God. There are many degrees of separation and different souls will have separated themselves to different degrees. Some will be a long way off while others may retain some kind of connection to some aspect of God, maybe a love for beauty or concern with right behaviour. For them there is a way back if they will take it but it will mean opening closed areas of the heart and mind and that may be more difficult in the post-mortem state as we may then have solidified choice meaning the occasion for choosing is past as the specific conditions which form the test under which you make a choice no longer prevail.

It may be that souls who refuse to accept Christ's offer of Heaven are held back on lower levels of being while others progress onwards and upwards. They don't have hell in the traditional sense but nor do they have Heaven. It may also be that there are many such souls alive now because this is a time of reckoning when final chances are offered to souls who have turned down previous offers. Between Heaven and Hell there are many other spiritual states which are, returning to Dante, forms of limbo which was Virgil's region in the afterlife. Now, Virgil represented the best of humanity without God. He was virtuous and wise but he did not know Christ so he could not enter Heaven. (As an aside, I believe that all those born before Christ are given the opportunity to know Christ either through being reborn in this world or else in some other way so I would expect that a soul of the quality of Virgil is in Heaven now as are all other worthy pagans.)  Thus, non-believers do not necessarily go to Hell but they are barred from Heaven by their own lack of acceptance of it.

Evolving consciousness is one thing but accepting God is another. In reality both are necessary but you can have one without the other. The devil has a highly evolved consciousness. There are also simple souls who believe in God but are not able to express very much of him. Evolution means we can understand more of God and we can become more like him in terms of love, creativity and intelligence. This is the destiny we are called to. We must grow but we can only grow as we should when we grow according to the pattern of God. To grow according to that pattern is heaven. Not to do so, however evolved you are, is hell.

For some decades now there have been books published about people who have seemingly died but come back to life with accounts of what they have experienced during the period they were technically speaking dead. Like many tales of adventures beyond this physical world they seem to me to combine truth and falsehood or, better put, truth and illusion. I have not made a study of these stories principally because they do not come from saints and sages but ordinary people, and, without casting aspersions on ordinary people, that is not the quarter from which you would expect great spiritual insight. I am not doubting the honesty or integrity of these people nor the validity of the experiences, but how able are they really to process all this in a way to do it proper justice without a deeper spiritual understanding?

As I say, I have not made a serious study of NDEs as they are called but I have read a little about them and they seem to follow a roughly similar pattern. To begin with, the subject leaves his body and finds himself still conscious but outside the corporeal frame. Gradually he is aware of others coming to meet him, deceased friends and relatives who comfort and reassure him. Before this he may have gone down a tunnel or crossed a bridge, obviously symbolic of going from one plane of consciousness to another. He finds himself in a beautiful location bathed in light which does not come from an external source such as the sun but is part of the fabric of the region in which he now exists. Here what are generally described as beings of light take him through a review of his past life though in a completely non-judgemental way. He feels that he is surrounded by love and beauty, and when he is obliged to return to the physical world there is a great sense of loss and regret.

What could be wrong with that? Does it not confirm that we live in a universe of goodness and love and that we shall all be rewarded once we leave this sorry vale of tears? It does, but that is the problem I have with these accounts. They are all sugar and no salt let alone vinegar. Are we to believe that everyone goes to heaven after death, regardless of how they have lived their life, believer and atheist, saint and sinner alike? This is how a God of love would behave, or so goes the modern attitude with its egalitarian ethos. But I find this approach to be one in which quantity rather than quality is determinative, and that is a materialistic approach, quantity relating to matter as quality does to spirit. It is also quite at odds with the teachings of Jesus and the Christian tradition. We might think that actual experience trumps that but what exactly is this experience? Note that nobody actually dies for they all come back. They may appear to die but their experience is interrupted and we cannot know how it would have proceeded in the event of a permanent death.

For what it's worth I do believe these experiences are genuine as far as they go but I also think they give a faulty impression or, at least, an incomplete one. I am sure that we are surrounded by love in the afterworld and when we are judged, as we surely are, that is without condemnation. But it is not without consequence. Nobody gets to heaven, the real heaven rather than some astral version of it, without rigorous purification which I would compare to the episode in C.S. Lewis's book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when the insufferable brat Eustace, who has turned into a dragon, is stripped of his reptilian scales by Aslan who literally digs his claws into Eustace's body and tears them off. This is agonising. Similarly, when we are stripped of our sins there will be pain and suffering. This is the essence of purgatory. Moreover, it is not everyone who goes to heaven. I would surmise that what most of these NDE people experience is not heaven at all but what is known as limbo which is certainly a more ethereal level of consciousness than than that of the physical world but is still outside the true spiritual world.

One must also be careful about the beings of light. As every Christian knows there are many different sorts of spirits, good and bad, and Satan is specifically described in 2 Corinthians as someone who masquerades as an angel of light. That is not to say these beings are demons but the spiritually illiterate, which, to be frank, is what most modern people are, should be careful of accepting anything on the face of appearance alone. The average soul newly transitioned to the next world has not much more understanding of his environment than a baby just arrived in this world. Certainly such a soul would have the benefit of an adult mind but it would be a complete neophyte with regard to the structure of the world and its inhabitants. It would also not necessarily know that the lower levels of the next world are the ones in which lesser beings are most likely to operate. One shouldn't make the opposite error, which some Christians do and assume that all spirits are demons but one should exercise caution and discrimination without having a closed mind.

Death is the most important part of life and we should take it very seriously. It's not like children going away to the seaside for a holiday. There are weighty matters involved. All religions recognise this and the modern spiritual but not religious tendency to wrap it in pink cotton wool is a mistake. Yes, the higher worlds are worlds of love, beauty, glory and magnificence but God is not a fairy godmother. Aslan is not a tame lion. That makes the beauty far more beautiful and the love far more intense but it also means that the soul must become perfect if it is to enter into the realms of glory, and this spiritual perfection is not automatically gifted to everyone regardless but requires hard work and sacrifice. It must be earned. God does bestow his grace on everyone but only the fully opened flower can properly receive the rays of the sun.

All religious people need to have at least some understanding of death and what it is. In fact, everyone needs this since we all die but those who are serious about the spiritual life should do so in particular. The basic thing to say is that it is the shedding of the physical body and the release of the soul into the spiritual world but then you have to ask what is the soul and what is the spiritual world?

In the post mortem sense the soul is you, your mind and character which, to begin with at least, remain unchanged. The body is gone and one must assume that all conditions, mental as well as physical, that were linked to the body are removed. Does this mean that the blind can see and the senile regain their faculties? I would doubt there is a sudden change as that might be too shocking but there may be a gradual lifting of the darkness, both visual and psychological. Then the person stands forth as he is. But where is he? That depends on the person. In the spiritual world outer reflects inner so your environment after death will reflect your spiritual state. For some that might mean a plane of dimness and emptiness, for others there will be light both in the sense of illumination and the feeling of no longer being pulled down and trapped by the heaviness of matter. 

For all, though, the death of the physical body will be followed, sooner or later, by the stripping of self. First of all, the physical body has been shed but there remain many other layers of falseness and artificiality that we have built up and surrounded ourselves with as a shield and defence and wall against life while in the world. We all have an image of ourself with which we identify and which we project outwards and this must be dismantled completely before we are ready to move on to more celestial regions.

So, the first thing to be done after death if we wish to ascend is purification. This corresponds to purgatory in the Christian tradition. Only the pure can enter a world of purity. There can be no darkness in heaven. However, this may not apply to everyone. There will be worlds corresponding to hell in which the soul suffers the consequences of its attachment to one or several of the various sins, and others more like limbo where the great mass of souls probably find themselves. Limbo is a kind of semi-material world that interpenetrates the physical and is like the astral plane or desire world of occultism. The astral plane itself has many levels, some of which may be dark and dull, others reflecting higher forms of consciousness but these are all the creation of the created which is to say the outgrowth of human desire, imagination and thought. In these worlds the soul when it has found its appropriate place will be happy with all earthly woes and problems removed. It can live as it likes but it will not know God or the higher spiritual realities though there may be an imitation of these to which the conventionally religious may gravitate, and here they stay until they experience the inner urge to move on and progress to higher levels. Some may even think they are in heaven for this is a state of natural happiness in which the earthly kinds of desires can be satisfied. But there is no real spiritual fulfilment and no consciousness of the presence of God. The conventionally good person may gravitate here as well as those who are still attached to the phenomenal side of life.

At higher levels we may find regions corresponding to the prelapsarian Paradise, and also to the heavens of the various pagan religions. The spiritual law is like attracts like so what you are is where you go. To get to higher/subtler realms you must work to eradicate that in you that acts as ballast, essentially sin and ignorance, and encourage the finer feelings of spiritual aspiration and attraction to what is truly noble and good. Part of this is developing imagination but not in the worldly sense in which we understand that word now. True imagination is receptivity to higher things. It is linked to spiritual sensitivity.

Paradise is spiritual but it is not divine, the difference being that it is still part of Creation. Above Paradise there is the true Heaven which is where the fully purified soul stands in the presence of the Creator who is now known as the very essence of your own soul. He is still God the Creator but he is is also fully immanent. There is no separation between you and him. However, Heaven is not a single place where every soul is the same as every other soul. If anything, souls in heaven are more individual not less so. They are now fully themselves, a unique aspect of God, now completed, but at the same time while every soul in heaven may be filled with God, there is always more God to be known and so every soul stands at a point in which God may be at the centre of their being but they can always move closer to the centre of God's being. The law of life is growth and this continues in Heaven as it must or else Heaven would have a lack in it. It is not pure being as opposed to becoming but being and becoming together, always working to create something more.

Here I must introduce the vexed question of reincarnation. As a believer in that mechanism for the education of souls I would say that most souls, after a spell in one or several of the inner planes, experience an urge to return to Earth to further their development in a sphere in which that is possible, the material plane of full separation. Those who ascend to Heaven after life in this world are probably fewer in number than we have been told. At either end of the human scale there are those who are damned and those who are fully saved but many souls, in my opinion, need to return and continue with their course of spiritual development in this world. 

I will add a proviso. This might have been the pattern of the past. But we are at the end of an age. Now, souls may be facing an end of term examination in which their future paths are determined. It may be that the course is ending and souls must make definitive choices. That is my personal feeling. It also explains the vastly expanded world population. We are being called either to go up higher or, if we refuse to embrace that destiny, to fall back. The tests are coming thick and fast and it may well be that "wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: (but) strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." Words to take seriously now more than ever when everything in the world is conspiring to lead us to the wide gate and broad way.

Anyone who wants to which means anyone who doesn't want to go to Heaven. But understand that wanting to go to Heaven means loving God because God is Heaven. It's not just the desire to be saved or to have a beautiful afterlife surrounded by your loved ones or whatever it might be. It is loving God, your Creator. So, who goes to hell is anyone who doesn't love God. 

Let me explain what I mean by this. I don't see hell as just a place of darkness or fire or cold or whatever it might be, somewhere you are constantly tortured by demons with pitchforks. That may be an extreme version but hell could also be a place of utter banality. There are probably different hells of different degrees of separation from God that are created by the mindsets of those who go there and so reflect different mentalities. There may be hells corresponding to the various vices as in Dante or there may be intellectual hells where clever materialistic atheists go. They won't exactly suffer but they won't know the joys of Heaven and, unless they repent and turn to their Maker, they will start to shrivel up spiritually which means their consciousness and sensitivity to life will gradually attenuate, becoming less and less responsive. They will fade not blossom.

Those who go to hell are not necessarily bad people as the world sees bad. They are spiritually unresponsive in one way or another but they are not necessarily wicked or evil. They have just failed the greatest lesson of life which is to love God. Clearly, none of us loves God as we should but even wanting to love God is enough for him to work with.