Afterlife | A Spiritual Evolution

Category Archives: Afterlife

January 11, 2015 · 7:45 am

Beyond Religion’s Painted Window

Long before Eckhart Tolle, there was Alan W. Watts:

…[Y]ou can only know God through an open mind just as you can only see the sky through a clear window. You will not see the sky if you have covered the glass with blue paint. But “religious” people… resist the scraping of the paint from the glass.

[O]ur beliefs… block the unreserved opening of mind and heart to reality.

Alan W. Watts
The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951)

Hi guys. So, like, what’re you using to read this right now? What’re you thinking stuff with? Is it this?

Fresh out of a cadaver. Click for more photos – or better yet, don’t!

“Gross, Louisa!” you say. “No way! Not me! I think with… uh… the space of knowingness.”

The brain is an organ the size of a small cantaloupe weighing about 3 pounds, 60% of which is fat. It processes sensory impressions, records them selectively as memory, and works out relationships among them based on principles of causality and classification – relationships we abstract as “truth.”

Now, if you’ll excuse me for a minute, I’m going to use mine (a little rounder than the one above) to determine the nature of the universe as a whole, and whether or not it contains a spiritual entity such as we call “God.”

Hmm. Okay. Sorry – still thinking… Meanwhile, here’s a random shot from the Hubble Telescope for ya.

Butterfly emerges from stellar demise in planetary nebula NGC 63

This dying star, once about five times the mass of the Sun, has ejected its envelope of gases, now traveling at 950, 000 kilometers per hour, and is unleashing a stream of ultraviolet radiation that causes the cast-off material to glow.

Back already? I’m still thinking about it. Here’s a representation our solar system’s planets – see me thinking on earth, there? I’m at my laptop.

Louisa on Earth, weighing god’s existence

Okay – ahem! – I’m ready. Religion? Atheism? Aren’t you just dying to know what I’ve decided is TRUE? Because it’s going to have so much bearing on reality, isn’t it? I mean, I’m so fully equipped with exhaustive knowledge on this topic, what’s left to guesswork?

Okay, maybe I’m being a tad sarcastic. Yet the hubris of people both religious and atheistic strikes me as ridiculous to the same extreme. Both purport to rule on something far beyond the limitations of human thinking. Sure, written language has enabled humans to compile the collective knowledge of successive generations and arrive at highly technical creations like the Hubble Telescope. But when we attempt to compile our thinking about spiritual matters, we’re trying to use words and symbols oriented toward material reality to represent that which can be experienced only inwardly and via immediate consciousness. And it doesn’t work.

Self-consciousness is a condition thrust on human beings. If our lives are to have meaning, we must construct that meaning, and contemplating who and what we are is essential to the process. However, contemplating or “opening the mind and heart to reality” does not entail nailing down a pronouncement or definition that we can believe in as “truth” and convey to others.

In fact, to stop short of closure, to embrace faith as NOT knowing, can be highly uncomfortable. We dislike the insecurity of trusting in something ineffable, of having no solid descriptions.

Religion stepped in long ago to flesh out those descriptions and abolish insecurity. Human brains do just fine with stories, characters, and rules, so religion provided them in order to harness a unity of belief among followers – and in some cases, wealth and power. By Watts’ metaphor, religious texts and dogma present us with a blue painted window intended to represent the open sky of god.

But religion, unfortunately, got distracted in specifying the exact shade of holy blue paint, debated oil versus latex and what holy brush had been used. Each sect developed “right,” easy to grasp answers – the “idols” of which Watts writes. If I am certain about the validity of my beliefs, I can say, “Fuck you and your wrong beliefs!” I can do this with terrific confidence, whether I’m a right wing Christian or a jihadist Muslim.

Atheists, on the other hand, point out, “Hello, folks?! That’s just some fuckin’ paint, dude! There’s nothing holy about it, any more than what’s on the walls and ceiling – can’t you see that? We should just close the goddamn shade and forget about it!” And they do. They stay in the brain-made world, never venturing outside its constructs to gaze up in open-mouthed wonder.

Whenever I talk of god, people tend to assume I’m talking about some kind of blue paint God. This is frustrating.

In my AA homegroup, for instance, there are a number of “praytheists” – people who pray because they get results, yet purport not to believe in God. As alcoholics in AA, we’ve all encountered the inexplicable fact that when we pray for help, something relieves us of a compulsion that has proven far beyond our control. One of these praytheists – a man sober 24 years – shared last night, “I met with my sponsee today. We didn’t mention god once. We talked about our kids, about our jobs – about real things we care about. God’s not one of those things.”

So much I wanted to ask him, “Why do you think you meet with your sponsee? Why don’t you tell him to fuck off and get a life? Why do either of you give a shit about your parasitic kids or your waste-of-life jobs? Could it be… LOVE? Might you share a faith in basic GOODNESS? Look into the depths of those feelings, of how it really feels to ‘care about,’ and you’ll see that you guys talked about nothing but god the whole time! You just didn’t abstract it and name it directly!”

But he would hear only blue paint. 😦 And I would be saying, “Fuck you and your wrong beliefs!”

In my experience, love is the clear window in our hearts – not our brains – through which we glimpse our own blue sky of god – the energy that powers our spirits. If you don’t sit with love, if you don’t pursue the meaning of its non-logical warmth as it is actually happening to you, you’ll take for granted love’s fragments here and there and never see it as the fabric of meaning that unifies your entire existence. As Watts says, “[L]ove that expresses itself in creative action is something much more than an emotion. Love is the organizing and unifying principle which makes the world a universe…” If you can make a commitment to actively love love, you’ll be jettisoned through Step 3 and toward Step 11. You’ll begin to feel god – not comprehend it.

Our brains, by the way, are not all we are. Among my own crowd of Near Death Survivors, all of us have experienced consciousness that continued while our brains were shut down and dying. We would argue that the “YOU” at the helm of your fat-bag brain is, in fact, your spirit. This is why people sometimes “know” things before they happen, or hear voices, or, in some cases, see spirits. People who have crossed over and come back with memories – whether brain experts like Eben Alexander or just ordinary schmucks like me – will tell you they felt more “themselves” and more highly conscious outside their bodies than within them.

Here too, though, the experience is impossible to convey in words. Even those people who want to believe us misconstrue what we describe, assuming the “other side” to be exactly like this material one. It isn’t. For instance, loving mothers like Mary Neal will tell you they didn’t particularly care about leaving their children behind, that they knew their children would be fine without them. Why? I think because on this side we parcel up love and dole it out selectively, as things we “care about,” so that we’re dependent on “loved ones” for meaning and spiritual sustenance in life. On the other side, love is all there is.

How does that work? I don’t know. I really don’t.

feel free to share ⇓

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Filed under AA, Afterlife, Faith, God, Near Death Experience, Recovery, Spirituality, Twelve Steps

Tagged as AA, Faith, god, Near Death Experience, spirituality, twelve steps

November 23, 2014 · 10:44 am

Near Death and God Stuff

I am weird. One night in 1982, when I was 22, I went out to a Manhattan night club, snorted quite a bit of coke, then bought and snorted what I thought was a gram more (though it didn’t get me high). I developed increasingly narrow tunnel vision from bradycardia (slowing heartbeat) and hypoxia (from respiratory depression), underwent a grand mal seizure, suffered a cardiac arrest, and died on the nightclub floor. That is, I was without vital signs for three minutes. I’d ingested enough lidocaine to shut down my central nervous system.

While a bartender worked at CPR and I began to look “all gray like a corpse, nothing like yourself…” according to my date, my consciousness shot off on a vivid journey. With keen awareness I traveled from sky to sea to beach to ancestral house before getting sucked through a window and over the dazzle of sunlight on the sea’s surface to plunge right into the heart of the sun. There I was subsumed by a light of love beyond measure. A strong presence was with me, beaming love through me, until abruptly it told me in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t done and couldn’t stay – after which cut the light to total blackness. (If you want the whole story, you have to buy my goddamn addiction memoir, but only if you’re also psyched to read about alcoholism and romantic obsession, because that’s mostly what it’s about.)

Anyway! As a result of whatever happened that night, the boundaries of my consciousness changed. I knew nothing of it. I was a smug atheist who’d never heard of Near Death Experiences or any of the related terms now commonplace in popular culture. What had happened didn’t fit with my scientifically based definition of reality, so I put it behind me. Over the next decade, however, two more distinctly impossible experiences forced themselves on me. I didn’t want them!

I didn’t much associate my secret paranormals with whatever people called God. To me, that concept involved a personification of divine power – God as a super-boss. I rejected it and still do. But once I got sober, once I opened to a higher power and began to pray, the rate of paranormal “knowings” increased dramatically. Finally, in 2003 I had an astoundingly specific clairvoyant dream, and in 2004 was shown the break in my life the dream had foretold. It was a such an undeniably personal, otherworldly message that, at 9 years sober, I broke down, sobbing with gratitude, and finally surrendered the last of my reservations: god, I finally knew beyond faith, was an energy infusing everything that lives. Spiritual energy is a force every bit as real as gravity or electromagnetism – forces nobody personifies or insists we capitalize! That’s why I refer to it as “god.”

In 2010, after accidentally and embarassingly reading a friend’s mind regarding a romantic weekend with his wife, I went ahead and Googled “Near Death Experiences.” I eventually found a Seattle group that meets monthly to hear a speaker tell his/her Near Death story (Seattle IANDS). A year later, in 2011, I finally got myself to attend one of those meetings. And in January of 2012, I was the speaker. I discovered, just as in AA, that many experiences I’d long believed unique to me were actually quite common among this group. We speak brightly of our dying experiences: “I was thrown 20 feet from the car,” “I could see the surface but knew I’d never reach it.” Some of us talk about foreknowing events or catching an afterglow in much the same way AAs talk about the phenomenon of craving. Though I never saw my guardian angel, hearing descriptions from those who did (and a few who saw other angels, though they’re reluctant to use the term) has helped me understand who/what was with me in the light.

I can’t talk about any of this in an AA meeting. The purpose of AA shares is to allow fellow alcoholics to identify, to hear their own problems and psychic pain described by others, so they’ll be attracted to the solution of the 12 steps. No one imposes their beliefs on someone else – at least, not in theory. And the fact is, most newcomers are already freaked out by the word “God” in the steps – as I was at first. They’re worried about cultish, woo-woo weirdness. To hear someone talking about having left their body or experiencing paranormal after-effects would send them screaming from the church basement! It would help no one. And though AA friends came to hear my IANDS story, most assume Near-Death meetings must entail morbid rehashings of the close scrapes we call death, mixed with woo-woo chicanery.

I can’t talk about alcoholism at IANDS meetings, either. For NDE folks, the strangest part of my story is not that I left my body, journeyed, etc., but that I basically killed myself by snorting everything I could get my hands on whether it was working or not. Why would such a nice person be so self-destructive?! They assume AA meetings are penitent gatherings where we rehash old drinking stories and renew our determination. They express sympathy. The idea that we’re happily united in a daily immunity granted to us by a higher power, that we laugh at our own sick thinking, that we’re actually grateful for the program we live by – they just don’t get it.

Every person’s beliefs develop in the crucible of their family, social group, and culture, to be either confirmed or challenged by individual experience. Our culture at large tends to present religion versus atheism as an exclusive dichotomy, and many of us internalize that idea. My family and our academic community chose option B – atheism. For some time, I straddled belief in a higher power at AA and dismissal of the “weird things” that had followed my NDE. It took 30 years of personal encounters with physically inexplicable happenings to push me to the point where I could discard my old truth and seek out people who shared my otherworldly experience. I’ve since spoken at the Seattle Theosophical Society, been interviewed on a radio show (podcast here, starts at 15:00) and appeared in a documentary film /future television show. I am all in. But to be honest, part of me still cringes to hear, for instance, my radio talk sponsored by “Hugz from Heaven” – really? Have I gone that daft?

I often wish I could help others in AA who struggle with the god aspect to see the wide array of spiritual paths between religion and atheism, or even to discard the “God-boss” image in favor of the energy of love. Though it can be frustrating, in meetings I say nothing of my NDE or its after-effects. If it took me 30 years to accept my own experience, how the hell can I expect others to accept my words? I leave them to their own ideas, and share mine outside the rooms. Part of faith is accepting that those who want to hear – who, as I did, already share this truth deep within – will be listening.