You never really know the moment of your death – you become it, I suppose. In the space of a glance, I saw a truck sliding toward me in the rear-view mirror. The next moment, out of darkness, I found myself walking down a tunnel. It seems odd now that I didn’t stop and wonder, didn’t try to go backward instead of forward. Nope. Moth-like, I just kept heading towards the light. “I must be dead,” I thought. Sure enough, at the end of this archetypically clichéd tunnel were figures. It was Grandmother Leah and my cousin Mark, glowing like angels and smiling radiantly. I never really cared for them all that much, but I smiled anyway since they seemed so happy to see me. I heard barking and saw Tanner and Sam, dogs from my childhood looking fit and trim. I didn’t see any of the old family cats, however.
In an almost instinctual way, I began to understand where I was and how this place, heaven, operated. It was an infinite playground. I could see anyone I wanted and have any experience… subject to certain checks and balances. You can have whatever you want in heaven, but so can everyone else. As there were thirty or forty billion others there, we had to share the resources, so to speak. For example, I’d always wanted to visit with Thomas Jefferson, but so did a lot of others, so the waiting list is a bit long… 83 years to be exact. Not that we really kept time, but most folks preferred a rising and setting sun, so that’s what we have. Grover Cleveland, on the other hand, is quite easy to corner for a chat. I found him fishing for salmon with a few friends. Apparently, the more unpopular you were in life, the more uninterrupted fun you could have in death….
Despite the fact that everyone was smiling, all was not roses in heaven. Mr. Jefferson, I hear, was getting tired. He wanted to do a bit of visiting of his own, but whenever he set out, he would get pulled back to Monticello by the wishes of others. Even I, a relative unknown, would occasionally be pulled away from my pursuits by a curious ancestor or dinner with Grandmother Leah. Exactly how the wishes and desires of billions upon billions of souls were routed and prioritized, I don’t know. Though most say it’s God, I haven’t seen him yet. I suspect a sort of democracy of the masses is in effect.
I kept my suspicions to myself, and kept busy for a long time: visiting Jefferson and every other famous person I’d ever wished to know. Conversations with one luminary led me to another and another. For a few thousand years, all was quite novel and exciting. I noticed, though, that our heavenly conversations generally drifted to the topic of what so and so was up to. Old feuds apparently die hard, even after the feudists are dead! In fact, we spent most of our time gossiping. Since we all had infinite knowledge of heaven, the only thing we lacked was infinite knowledge of each other. So we spent our time speculating on the dalliances of one another’s adventures in eternity.
Experiences passed, countless memories formed and were never forgotten. Twenty… thirty thousand years rained upon my mind. A fog of eternity ennui began to creep into my thoughts. I mean, when was this going to end? I could take only so much of the human race, the same old patterns, and the same old adventures. The thrill of new experience was gone. I could plunge over a raging rapid, but there was no risk. I was already dead, and found it hard to get my heart pumping, my blood boiling, and the adrenaline rushing. My omnipotence became quite impotent and my omniscience rather dull.
I began to wonder if being alive again would be better – to live in fear, in ignorance, in mystery and wonder. The infinite pleasures of heaven seemed rather, well… boring. Yet no one I talked to seemed interested in questioning the status quo. Some had similar thoughts, but dismissed them as impossible. “We’re dead,” they said. “Even if you could return to life, you’d just die again and be right back here.” Still, there had to be some escape from the infernal certainty of eternity. Turning my back on the naysayers, I spent more time alone. More time walking in the woods of my childhood, wondering.
Amidst the silence of a deep, November woods, I wondered my self to a course of action. I would visit the mystics and Zen masters I’d read about as a young man. Surely these people, who had spent their lives plumbing the depths of eternity from the side of time, would know a solution to the dilemma of heaven’s eternity – a heavenly hell, I started calling it.
My quest was short-lived, however. I couldn’t find any of these wise people. Jacob Boehme’s wife said he’d only been in heaven a few minutes, then left. Many of Zen master Huang Po’s disciples were wandering about, still wondering what became of their master. They had hoped to follow him to heaven, but he must have gotten lost. Meister Eckhart’s flock gathered every Sunday for him, but he never returned to the pulpit. Ramana Maharshi? No where to be found. Surely these wise ones had not displeased the powers that be? Had they been banished for attempting to plumb the heights of heaven with their mortal eyes? Or had they gone to another place, outside the realm of heaven, beyond eternity, beyond infinity? Or maybe they were sleeping with the cats….
Perhaps the mystics were wiser than all the wisdom of heaven. Wiser than all the wishes of heaven, where all wishes came true.
With hopes of a quick answer dashed, I sat alone and called all of the great works of philosophy to me. Pouring through these spiritual works, I began to feel I was neither alive nor dead; that this so-called heaven was merely a distraction that would continue as long as I wanted anything. So I sat longer, for though I had infinite power to call into being any want, I found no satisfaction. I found I had infinite knowledge, yet was still ignorant of my essence. I sat and watched, until I knew my thoughts before they even arose. I knew my interior experience as well as the exterior. When inside and outside seemed the same, I turned away from infinite experiences and asked my self, “What within me is seeing experience?” Heaven had no answer to that question, yet I had to know. There was no alternative, as neither life nor death held any answer.
There I sat, alone in my power. Surely this mote of personality and memory was not the sum total of my soul. I who was dead came to wish I was dead; came to wish I was nothing – never born. I said to myself, be gone with this body, be gone with this mind, and be gone with endless lies! And they were gone!
What follows is increasingly difficult to describe. I saw that I was not a single “I” – I was all things. The ancient boundary of my self dissolved. I realized that I was heaven… and hell, and Earth, and the universe. I felt from every surface, witnessed every thought, saw from billions of eyes. Blake’s Ancient of Days had withdrawn his hand and two became one.
You must excuse my use of the personal pronoun “I.” That word has practically nothing to do with you and me; rather it refers to all of us, all things. I could say “god,” instead, yet that is equally limited by misunderstanding.
Now, you might be saying to yourself, “Oh, so all is one. I’ve heard that before. I like the sound of that.” You may think you know what I’m saying, but you don’t. You haven’t been squashed by a semi-truck, wandered in heaven for tens of thousands of years, sat alone for thousands more, then seen all you thought you knew dissolve into the One. Perhaps, if you can put aside all you think you know, and feel for what is between these lines, you might have a sense for what is happening.
Sorry, it’s just that I remember what is was to feel confident in our knowledge, to ignore the space between our breaths, to not see the skeleton beneath our skin. Anyway, back to this “all is one” discussion. If all is one, then what was one without itself? If all is one, where is zero? …there’s the rub. Some Native American tribes believed the Earth rested on the back of a giant turtle. When the wise ones were asked, by children I’m sure, what the giant turtle rested on, they said, “Another turtle. It’s turtles all the way down.” I’m sure you see the dead end in that philosophy. In truth, the turtle rests on nothing. God rests on nothing. All of us: you, me, God, I, the One – all of us know this and shudder in anticipation.
So the One sees that it is nothing, and becomes that (or un-becomes, and whatever is left is what Is). And in that, there are no more questions.
So I say. Maybe I imagined all of this. Because I am sitting in a chair right now, typing away – one word after the other flowing out of me and into you. One word after another, coming from where?