I read Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha back in the 60’s when I was in college. It was a rite of passage back then. But I did not really know experientially what it was all about until I was in my sixties. Later in this episode I am going to take a look the closing vision in Hermann Hesse’s book Siddhartha and show how it informs Christian nonduality, and in particular how it informs the nondual understanding of what happens after the death of the body. To lead into that I want to pick up on what talking about last time.
In my last episode I talked about what happens after death. This is an important subject for those of us who come from a Christian background. Christianity today is all about going to heaven. Christians seem to be obsessed with it. It has not always been like this. Christianity used to be about God, the Kingdom of God and Jesus Christ. Now it seems to be all about us. “Where are you going to spend eternity?” The evangelistic pamphlet asks. The evangelical gospel is all about who goes to heaven and who goes to hell, and how and why this happens.
When we discover what we really are – the True Self - then Nondual Reality disrupts the traditional Christian narrative. We discover that we are not little egos destined for heaven or hell. When we discover that this individual, temporary, mortal self is just smoke and mirrors – that it has no reality outside of our minds - then we have to rethink the idea of afterlife.
That is one of the most traumatic parts of spiritual awakening. We discover we have been living a lie. We are not who we thought we were. We have been indoctrinated to believe that when we die, our personality continues as a ghost or spirit. This immortal soul is understood as the repository of all our thoughts, emotions and memories.
This personal spiritual entity is thought to live for all eternity in heaven, which is pictured as an earthly paradise but not on earth. It is thought that there we will meet friends, live with family members forever, and worship God and Jesus for eternity, and live happily ever after, Amen. When we wake up to what we really are, that fantasy dissipates. As Lennon sang, “Imagine there’s no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us. Above us, only sky.”
If there is no heaven as traditionally conceived, what then? An eternity of nonduality seems very impersonal compared to the heavenly theme park we were promised in Sunday school. The nondual alternative feels like nonexistence. In the last episode I tried to say that is not the case. I did not have the time to explain this as fully as I wanted.
The key to understanding what happens after death from a nondual perspective is the Buddhist phrase “Samsara is Nirvana.” The word nirvana means extinction or disappearance. The word Samsara refers to the rich flow of life around us now. Samsara literally means “to flow around.” The phrase “samsara is nirvana” points to the reality that this physical world that comes and goes IS the spiritual world that is does not come and go. In Christian terms we say the Kingdom of Heaven is here now.
Sartre famously said, “Hell is other people.” The opposite is also true. Heaven is other people. Jesus described hell as utter loneliness, “outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.” He was talking about here and now, not then and there. Nondual Reality includes yet transcends heaven and hell. It is both - no people and all people.
We cease to exist as separate selves but we are all One True Self. We cease to exist as separate beings but we are one as Being Itself. When it comes to afterlife it means that even though the personal self does not inherit eternal life, the personal selves that we wear as roles during our earthly lifetimes are manifestations of this nondual Reality. They are the masks of God, to use Joseph Campbell’s term.
All persons throughout history have their source in God. Our egos are in the mind of God. That is why they feel so real. This cosmos is all in the mind of God. God thought up this universe and spoke it into existence; that is what gives it reality. Human egos are not real ultimately, yet as creations of God they exist in the timeless mind of God.
One of the places I have found this expressed best is in Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha and especially in the vision of Govinda at the very end of the book. The book tells the story of a man named Siddhartha in India who lived at the time of the Buddha. This Siddhartha is on spiritual quest. The other major character is his good friend Govinda. At one point in the story Govinda leaves Siddhartha to become a disciple of the Buddha, while Siddhartha continues his own way to enlightenment.
At the end of the book the two elderly men meet again after many years. Siddhartha is living by a river as a ferryman. Govinda comes to the river, and they recognize each other and talk about their lives. Govinda admits that he has not achieved liberation, but can tell that his old friend Siddartha has. So he asks Siddhartha for help. Siddhartha invites Govinda to kiss him on the forehead. When he does, Govinda has a vision. It says, “while he was still struggling in vain and reluctance to think away time, to imagine Nirvana and Samsara as one … this happened to him.” I will read what happened. This vision takes a few minutes to read, but it worth listening to. It says:
“He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha, instead he saw other faces, many, a long sequence, a flowing river of faces, of hundreds, of thousands, which all came and disappeared, and yet all seemed to be there simultaneously, which all constantly changed and renewed themselves, and which were still all Siddhartha. He saw the face of a fish, a carp, with an infinitely painfully opened mouth, the face of a dying fish, with fading eyes—he saw the face of a new-born child, red and full of wrinkles, distorted from crying—he saw the face of a murderer, he saw him plunging a knife into the body of another person—he saw, in the same second, this criminal in bondage, kneeling and his head being chopped off by the executioner with one blow of his sword—he saw the bodies of men and women, naked in positions and cramps of frenzied love—he saw corpses stretched out, motionless, cold, void— he saw the heads of animals, of boars, of crocodiles, of elephants, of bulls, of birds—he saw gods, saw Krishna, saw Agni—he saw all of these figures and faces in a thousand relationships with one another, each one helping the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving re-birth to it, each one was a will to die, a passionately painful confession of transitoriness, and yet none of them died, each one only transformed, was always re-born, received evermore a new face, without any time having passed between the one and the other face—and all of these figures and faces rested, flowed, generated themselves, floated along and merged with each other, and they were all constantly covered by something thin, without individuality of its own, but yet existing, like a thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, a shell or mold or mask of water, and this mask was smiling, and this mask was Siddhartha's smiling face, which he, Govinda, in this very same moment touched with his lips. And, Govinda saw it like this, this smile of the mask, this smile of oneness above the flowing forms, this smile of simultaneousness above the thousand births and deaths, this smile of Siddhartha was precisely the same, was precisely of the same kind as the quiet, delicate, impenetrable, perhaps benevolent, perhaps mocking, wise, thousand-fold smile of Gotama, the Buddha, as he had seen it himself with great respect a hundred times. Like this, Govinda knew, the perfected ones are smiling.
Not knowing any more whether time existed, whether the vision had lasted a second or a hundred years, not knowing any more whether there existed a Siddhartha, a Gotama, a me and a you, feeling in his innermost self as if he had been wounded by a divine arrow, the injury of which tasted sweet, being enchanted and dissolved in his innermost self, Govinda still stood for a little while bent over Siddhartha's quiet face, which he had just kissed, which had just been the scene of all manifestations, all transformations, all existence. The face was unchanged, after under its surface the depth of the thousandfoldness had closed up again, he smiled silently, smiled quietly and softly, perhaps very benevolently, perhaps very mockingly, precisely as he used to smile, the exalted one.”
This vision captures the richness of the eternal life that human beings participate in now and after death. Earthly life forms are simply masks we wear as the Eternal Self. As a Christian I would say that we are incarnations of Christ. We are masks of Christ. There was always only Christ, even though we thought ourselves different and pretended to be other than Christ and separate from Christ.
All the joys and sufferings throughout the history of earth, are actually the joys and suffering of Christ lived in and through us. That is the deep meaning of the Cross. The personal self is just a thin layer through which the light of Christ shines. You can identify with the layer or the light, the mask or the One who wears the mask.
There is only One enfleshed as all. This is the One I am, and that you are, and that We are together. In the very beginning God said, “Let us make humans in our image.” There is a We in the One. Community in Unity. That is the communion of Saints. It is the church triumphant. All are alive in God. That is what we are as children of God. That is eternal life.