BEYOND GOODBYE – ‘We’ll meet again in the circle.’

The Russian / American poet and essayist, Joseph Brodsky, once said wisely that: ‘The one thing you can say about the future is that it won’t include you.’

Maybe it’s the proximity of my 70th birthday that turns my attention to what comes next after I shuffle off this mortal coil or perhaps it’s the death of my only sibling last year, my brother Michaell to whom I had become so close, that makes me wonder, as the last living member of my immediate family, if they will be waiting to greet me when I die. What’s next after death?

Christian theology does not have the stranglehold on afterlife belief. For example, although there is no one rigid Buddhist belief about what happens after death, reincarnation or the continuing recycle of death and birth follows until Nirvana, the letting go of desire and identity, is finally achieved. Other religions have a similar expectation. In Judaism the Written Torah is not specific about the state of an afterlife but the Oral Torah regards our earthly longing for the Divine as proof that this will be fulfilled in the next life. Faith in life after death is one of the six fundamental beliefs required of a Muslim to complete their faith. Human existence continues after the death of the human body in the form of spiritual and physical resurrection.

Even popular culture has opinions as to what happens after the death of the body. Interestingly, in 2012, roughly half of people in Britain surveyed said that they believed in an afterlife even though only about a third of them said they believed in God. A survey this year found that a quarter of agnostics think that death is not the end, while a third of religious believers rejected the idea. If so many non-believers have a sense of an afterlife, where does that belief come from? Arguably remnants of Christian belief have leaked into popular culture where in fact, music, movies, art, video and computer games, comics, stories of all kinds either present versions of the afterlife, or use the spiritual teachings of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory to tell contemporary stories.

I’m rather sympathetic to the attempts of the 19th century philosopher, Henry Sidgwick, who spent all his life trying to find evidence for the continuation of human consciousness after death. He believed that if we cease to exist when we die, there can be no basis for morality in our lifetime. Why shouldn’t we just follow the dictates of self-interest if there is no life after death. The only way of avoiding what he called this “intolerable anarchy” was to prove “the Postulate of Immortality” and he spent many years exploring paranormal phenomena without finding the evidence he longed to discover.

Although I’ve moved away from a rigid belief in Heaven/Hell and a judging God I have come to understand that if there is indeed no afterlife, this present life would have been a rather unfortunate joke. If there’s no family reunion after death, why were we allowed to bond so deeply in this life with family, our partners and all those whom we have come to love? Why too were we so seduced by the wonder of creation, the beauty of Nature, the discoveries of art, science and philosophy if it was all just a trip into a dead-end street, going nowhere?

To fulfil this yearning, I’ve come up with what I call THE CONTINUUM OF LOVE which is like an enveloping cloud of love and interconnectedness, encompassing both the present life and that ‘other’ world, which although unseen is adjacent to this earth. My CONTINUUM OF LOVE is an accumulation of all the people living and dead, who have loved me, cared about me or whom I have loved or cared about, all those I have touched even in some small way. This CONTINUUM also contains all the joys, pleasures and even pains that I have ever experienced, distilled into one intimate encounter. This CONTINUUM expresses all the beauties of this world, of Nature and the beauty yet to be experienced and can sometimes be glimpsed in dreams.

Bits of adjacent heaven do seem to trickle into this world from time to time. One of my favourite destinations is Trentham Falls in Victoria, where a huge waterfall towers above a valley filled with gigantic, ancient eucalypts.

For me a visit there is like entering a cathedral, a sacred space. The dunes along the sea near where I live, little touched by human interference, exude a similar aura. And last year during a visit to Spain I was fortunate to visit the Mezquita–catedral de Córdoba and was reduced to tears by the experience. For me it remains one of the most beautiful and spiritual built spaces on the planet.

At the very centre of my CONTINUUM of LOVE lies the intense and overwhelming love of the family whom I chose in this lifetime and who chose me. It brings that fierce love and care of my parents and my brother as well as of those potential brothers and sisters who were my mother’s miscarriages, to bring them all to the centre of each everyday experience.

I feel we all do still coexist somehow simultaneously. At its core this CONTINUUM is an expression of, a summation of the Other, of a God (if you please), of Transcendence, of Yet to be Realised or who my brother mischievously called the Whoever’s In Charge. I live in that world every day if I but be aware of it. Who would not want to live forever in this CONTINUUM OF LOVE?

Thomas Aquinas called a state similar to this CONTINUUM as ‘aeviternity’, which for him was the midpoint between time and eternity and the appropriate sphere of every created spirit, and the state inhabited by angels. I think my CONTINUUM OF LOVE could fit perfectly into that space between time and eternity. Of course, in the end, nobody has returned from beyond the grave to spill the beans, so what do we really know? In the meantime my CONTINUUM OF LOVE could be a possible contender.