Eternal Life: Union with God or Communion with God?

This episode comes in response to several comments I have received over the last few months from people struggling with the difference between the traditional idea of eternal life as endless individual existence in fellowship with God and nondual union with God which is often imagined as absorption into God and the loss of any sense of personal identity.

Transcript

This episode comes in response to several comments I have received over the last few months from people struggling with the difference between the traditional idea of eternal life as endless individual existence in fellowship with God and nondual union with God which is often imagined as absorption into God and the loss of any sense of personal identity.

People who come out of Christian backgrounds are loathe to give up the idea that after death they will continue to exist as individual personal selves. Personal individual afterlife is the big prize in traditional Christianity. Eternal life is something that people think they possess as persons. It is assumed by many people that they will continue to exist as individual selves after the death of the body.

For most Christians that is traditionally seen as either continued personal existence in heaven or hell. In the case of Roman Catholicism, there is the third option of purgatory, at least for a while until you are purged of your sins and allowed through the pearly gates. 

Many people who adhere to some forms of Eastern religions – Hindu or Buddhist - have the ideas of reincarnation and transmigration. The individual soul is reborn repeatedly in other animal or human or other forms on other planes of existence, until eventually released from the wheel of reincarnation.

Then there is the popular ides of ghosts in spiritualism. I am surprised how many movies and television shows are based on this idea. New Age mediums will put you in touch with spirits in other spiritual planes by means of channeling. The Bible is filled with heavenly creatures like angels and demons, which are thought to be eternal individual entities. The biblical concept of the resurrection of the body in an expression of this idea that the individual human will always and forever be an individual person, even having a body.

In all these there is the belief that the individual is of such supreme value that it must continue to exist after death and throughout eternity. Western society and democracy is based on the worth of the individual. Our country created the myth of rugged individualism. So it has deep roots in the psyches even of people who are not religious. Humanism is a prime example.

That is why I get a lot of pushback when I say that the personal individual self is an illusion. It is not real. It is a temporary phenomenon which only exists for as long as these physical bodies exist. That was the original teaching of the Hebrew Scriptures. In the Yahwist story of Creation in Genesis, God breathed the breath of life into an inanimate body made from the dust of the earth and humans became a “living soul.” 

So the living soul is seen as the temporary combination of spirit and flesh in the Bible. So humans were thought of as tripartite – having three parts: body, soul and spirit. The only permanent eternal element of the three is the Divine Spirit – which is the same word as breath. The body is not eternal and neither is the soul. At death the body returns to the ground from which it came, and the spirit returns to God. And the soul is no more. The word soul in the Greek New Testament is the word psyche. The soul is the psychological self, the personal self.

Only later in the Hebrew Scriptures did the idea of bodily resurrection appear. The popular idea of the eternal soul entered Christianity through Greek philosophy, which was very influential in early Christianity. Greek dualism produced the dualistic idea that humans have two parts: temporal body and eternal soul, which is now such a part of popular Christianity.

Why did this idea of the eternal soul as the personal self arise? It happened because the ego cannot imagine itself as not existing. Even though it knows it did not exist before birth, it cannot imagine itself not existing after death. So it creates religious ideas to perpetuate its hope that it will live forever. The hope of an eternal ego. That is all that heaven and hell and reincarnation are. They are egoic doctrines. 

I know that people are going to disagree. They tell me about memories of past lives, as well as near death experiences, which are thought to be evidence of afterlife, and how these prove the existence of the individual self before birth and after death.  I have talked about these ideas in previous episodes so I will not go into them again here. I will simply say that I have a different interpretation. 

First I think these experiences can be explained scientifically as having psychological and physiological causes. But if they cannot be explained naturally, then they are evidence of a larger consciousness than our individual consciousness. Such experiences may tap into a collective consciousness that transcends time and space - or maybe Jung’s collective unconscious momentarily becomes conscious in an individual. 

If Reality is an expression of One consciousness, which is what nonduality says, and if time is an illusion, which is what Einstein said, then all time and all places are present here and now. And there is no reason we cannot access that here now. Some people do. From a nondual perspective, I think that best explains accounts of past life memories and near death experiences. 

All such extraordinary experiences can be explained by One Self, which transcendentalists call the World Soul. The Upanishads call it Atman, our true Self which is identical to Brahman the Divine Self. That One Self is reincarnated in every person and every creature that has ever lived and is living now. In that sense reincarnation is true. I think the experience of that One Self is source of all ideas of personal reincarnation and personal afterlife. 

If time and space are illusions, then the lives of every creature that has ever lived are present here now. They are part of who we are. The whole human race is in our genes. That explains instincts that we and other animals have at birth. We do not have to relearn them because they are part of our genetic makeup. We are all our ancestors that have come before us and the whole race and all life on earth. In a sense we are each archetypal humans. 

We are one with all creation and we are one with God, who is the only Reality and the only Self. Everything comes from God and returns to God and is God right now, because there is in God no before and after, past or future. There is only the Eternal Now. We are This. 

The theological way of describing this is union with God. That is what the Christian mystics call it, rather than communion with God, which is pictured as an endless worship service or heavenly theme park that you enjoy forever with family and friends. But even the world communion, when you break it down into its parts, means literally “union with.” So I could use that term if I want. 

Union with God is our reality now and forever. The personal self is a fiction, but in a deeper sense it is an expression of this One Reality. Everything is ultimately an expression of this One Reality, even illusions. Samsara is Nirvana. Beyond time and space there is only One. That One is God. All selves are One Self. 

We are not absorbed into an impersonal Absolute, but rather we wake up to the One Self that we are and always have been. We have simply been hiding behind the masks of billions of people throughout history. The personal self is a mask of the one Transpersonal Reality. The historical and archetypal symbol of the conscious realization of this One Self in the Christian tradition and sacred history is Jesus Christ, who woke up. That is why I call myself a Christian. That is Christian nonduality.