What is Death? Part I

Here we’ll look at one of the most essential questions of the human condition, which has plagued human consciousness since it arose. Both an absolute condition and a seemingly impenetrable barrier, there seem to be as many opinions about death available on the planet at any given time as there are individuals.

Yet if we begin to understand time differently, and begin to absorb the question of eternity not as a theory, but part of the marrow of the universe’s bones, a different picture of awareness and intelligence begins to emerge. There is a breathing in and out of intelligence and awareness; it diffuses and concentrates itself rhythmically, which is a process we see emulated and recapitulated in an infinite number of physical processes. The physical reflects the spiritual; that is, the physical is a mirror of the metaphysical. Emmanuel Swedenborg recognize this and wrote about it at great length, calling it doctrine of correspondences. Interestingly, he said that ancient people such as the Egyptians understood this doctrine well, and that all of their— to us—mysterious and extraordinarily evocative art was an illustration of its variations.

The idea of the physical as a mirror of the spiritual, of course, is not a Swedenborg original; it’s Platonic and even pre-Platonic in nature, since the recognition of this fact has been alive in spiritually competent beings since spiritually competent beings first arose on the planet.

Coming to terms with death and its nature, as well as its meaning, begins with the question of spiritual competence. To be competent means to be fit or proper; to conform to requirements. Death begins within life as a requirement. It’s impossible to separate it from life, so it is the same thing as life. 

It's just a part of it that doesn't seem to make sense to us.

Yet individuals with spiritual competence have, it seems, always found a way to come to terms with death and accept it. Death does not just inhabit the physical spirit that life arises in; it is equally a metaphysical entity with a metaphysical counterpart that corresponds to its physical existence. We can know this because under the terms of metaphysical humanism, all of the reality is merely a piece of clay into which the spiritual has been pressed, leaving an impression. It is a dynamic, eternal, and evolving impression, but it is always a reflection of God's Being; and not itself unto itself alone.

In order to approach a more intimate embrace of the nature of death, we might begin with permanence. The Buddhist doctrines teach that there is no permanence, that everything is impermanent; and of course mechanistic rationalism teaches much the same thing. Yet all of these observations are derived from observations of the natural world, not its metaphysical counterpart. Metaphysical Humanism demonstrates that the natural physical world is a derivative reality; and so we can’t understand death less we understand it from its metaphysical perspective. It’s equally impossible to understand a metaphysical event’s reflection in the natural world unless we understand the laws that govern it. 

As I pointed out in the original exposition of metaphysical humanism, there are three sets of laws that govern natural or material reality as we understand it, and two of them are metaphysical. Gurdjieff actually indicated this to his pupil P. D. Ouspensky when he explained that Man's "higher being-bodies" were not physical bodies, but “astral-intellectual” and “astral-emotional” bodies. He didn't use those exact terms (which here basically mean “of the stars”) but it captures the gist of his teaching on the matter in the sense that these higher bodies are metaphysical entities. They are on a higher level that is not physical in the way we generally understand the word. And because they are not physical bodies, they are not under physical laws.

In understanding death, then, we must attempt to understand it from the perspective of metaphysical law. We need to understand not just the physical fact of the cessation of existence of an individual being within the natural world, but also the intellectual and emotional law that govern that same apparent cessation of being.

Before we look at that in more detail, let us briefly touch on the fact that our impression of impermanence, which I brought up just a bit earlier, is already entirely wrong. From a metaphysical perspective, within eternity—which lives outside of time –there is and can be no death. The existence of all creation within eternity guarantees its absolute permanence. The experience of impermanence is a subjective one arising from the perception of time from within its action.

This should be considered in regard to Gurdjieff's discussion of time in his magnum opus, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. In the book, time – which Gurdjieff refers to as the merciless heropass —causes the substance of God's place of existence to erode, provoking him to create the universe. Gurdjieff’s comments on time come up rather early in the book (page 127) and state:

Only Time alone has no sense of objectivity because it is not the result of the fractioning of any definite cosmic phenomena. And it does not issue from anything, but blends always with everything and becomes self-sufficiently independent; therefore, in the whole of the Universe, it alone can be called and extolled as the ‘Ideally-Unique-Subjective-Phenomenon’.

Thus, my boy, uniquely Time alone, or, as it is sometimes called, the ‘Heropass’, has no source from which its arising should depend, but like ‘Divine-Love’ flows always, as I have already told you, independently by itself, and blends proportionately with all the phenomena present in the given place and in the given arisings of our Great Universe.

Several intriguing things emerge from this passage, which otherwise amply illustrates my point that the perception of impermanence is subjective. The first is that Gurdjieff compares time to Divine Love, which, by the way it is described, is almost certainly a reference to Emmanuel Swedenborg’s teachings on the subject; and the second is that by comparing it thus, he de facto assigns time the status of qualities that are emanated by God; even though he later outright states that God Himself is not in absolute control of time. Hidden here is, perhaps, the idea that, like human beings, God has parts of himself that turn out to be unmanageable. The idea is at the very least intriguing, and would underscore the idea that in even the most irritating particulars, man is a perfect reflection of God – right down to his numerous imperfections.

But let's get back to the subject of death. The point, once again, is that impermanence is a subjective impression. Within eternity, the concept of impermanence is meaningless. Impermanence can be inferred only in the presence of time. In this sense, already, we encounter Jeanne de Salzmann's well-known comment: there is no death.

But if there is no death – what is there? There is something.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.