What is Eternal Life?

What is the Eternal and how does one come to experience it? Eternal life is a matter of what you identify with. 

Transcript

A couple of Sundays ago the pastor of the church we attend made a statement that kept me thinking long after the benediction was given. That is the sign of a good sermon. His sermon was entitled “Dwelling in the Eternal.” A couple of minutes into the sermon he said this: “Eternal life isn’t possible. Doesn’t eternal mean having no beginning and no end? So how can anybody who has a birthday and a limited lifespan ever have eternal life?” Then he quoted Meister Eckhart, “People who dwell in God dwell in the eternal now.” 

I began thinking about that statement, and I barely heard the rest of the sermon. That also is the sign of a good sermon. A sermon is meant to bring us into the presence of the Divine. Once we are abiding in the Eternal there is no need for more words. They just get in the way. After the sermon my mind kept returning to the idea that anything that has a beginning and an end cannot be eternal.  

The body cannot have eternal life because it has a beginning and an end. That means that resurrection cannot be about the body, which is exactly what the apostle Paul said. He wrote, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.” It also means that the psyche - the ego, the personality, the self or whatever you want to call it – do not inherit the eternal life. The personal self is produced by the brain, which is part of the body, and cannot be eternal.

The psychological self is formed during the first couple of years of life. It is a result of our genes and our environment, including our upbringing and culture. It had a beginning. Nothing that has a beginning is eternal. It has an end. Nothing that has an end can be eternal. That means that eternal life has nothing to do with the personal, individual self that we mistake for who we are. 

So what is eternal life? The Rich Young Ruler came to Jesus and asked what he had to do to inherit eternal life. How do we “inherit” eternal life? Eternal life is a matter of identity. If we identify with the body or the brain or the ego or personality, then we die. Then Eternal life is impossible. The human self cannot possess eternal life.  

It is not so a matter of how to inherit eternal life as it is who or what inherits eternal life. That is the big difference between the teaching of Jesus and the teaching of traditional Christianity, which one listener recently referred to as “corporate Christianity.” That phrase also got me thinking for a long time. “Big box Christianity” is more a business than spirituality. It is more interested in numbers than truth. 

Evangelicalism, like most of the traditional and mainline Christianity, has become a business, whether that be the small business on the corner or the big business of megachurches. It sells the product of eternal life. Pray the right prayer, believe the right things, do the right things, say the right words and you get eternal life in return. It is a transaction. Beneath it is the assumption that the individual personal self can possess eternal life, as long as you jump through the right hoops. It is not true. No person can inherit eternal life. 

That is because the person is an illusion. It is not real. It has no substance. It has no existence beyond the brain. It is a momentary phenomenon that lasts a few years and then dies with the body. Persons cannot inherit eternal life. There are no persons in heaven. Souls – when understood as individual spiritual entities floating in the heavenly realm - are a myth. This idea is the desperate attempt of the ego to survive death. Our personalities are not eternal. They have a beginning and an end and therefore cannot inherit eternal life. 

So what does inherit eternal life? We inherit eternal life when we realize what we really are. We inherit eternal life when we identify with that which does not have a beginning or an end, when we see we are not born and do not die. So it is a matter of identity. That is why self-inquiry is so important. We are not persons. We appear to be persons temporarily but we are not persons eternally. We are that which includes persons yet transcends all persons. 

Furthermore – and this will be hard for Christians to accept - God is not a person. Our egos relate to God a Big Ego sitting on a throne in heaven, because that is all the ego can conceive. But that is not what we or God are. That is making God in our own image, projecting it on the backdrop of the universe and calling it God. This is God as a Great Ape. 

The Greek philosopher wrote in 500 BC Xenophanes wrote: “If cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw, and could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own.” 

God as a personal human Ego did not exist before humans thought him up. Even to call God “him” is a distortion. True God is eternal. Eternal life is gained by giving up our identification with that which is not eternal and seeing that what we really are is eternal. It is seeing through the illusion of what we thought we were and seeing what we actually are. We are that which was not born and does not die. 

The rich young ruler in the gospel story came up to Jesus and asked what he had to do to inherit eternal life. Inheritance implies a death and a gift. When my mother died years ago she left a will that spelled out the inheritance that each of her children would receive. For there to be an inheritance someone has to die. 

For traditional Christianity that someone is Jesus. That gave birth to substitutionary atonement and all that. Jesus did not talk about that. He talked about the death of the self or the soul. “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” 

The Greek word used by Jesus – if he was using Greek – was psuche, which refers to the psychological self. When the self dies we find our identity as the Eternal One – represented by Christ in this verse – and we inherit eternal life. It is not the self that inherits eternal life. The self is dead. It is the Eternal Self - Christ – that inherits it. Upon the self’s death what we really are inherits eternal life, 

So eternal life is really a matter of recognizing your true identity. It is knowing who we are, who Christ is, who God is. That is eternal life. As the apostle John said, (which is sometimes put into the mouth of Jesus in many translations of the Gospel of John): “This is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”

When we discover who we really are – not just believe ideas about nonduality but wake up to this as our identity - then eternal life bursts forth. It is a no-brainer. Literally no brain, no problem. Eternal life appears as a gift from the universe – from True God – to us. This gift brings joy and peace.

There is a story that I have told before about the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu. Chuang Tzu’s wife died. When his friend Hui Tzu went to convey his condolences, he found Chuang Tzu sitting with his legs sprawled out, pounding on a tub and singing joyfully. Hui Tzu scolded him, saying, "You lived with your wife, she brought up your children and grew old with you.  You ought to be grieving her death, but instead you are pounding on a tub and singing - this is going too far!"

Chuang Tzu replied, "When she first died, I wept like anyone else. Then I remembered her beginning and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body, when she was Spirit. She had changed forms before. Now there's been another change and her body is dead. It's like the change of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter. If I were to only weep and sob, I would dishonor her. It would show that I don't know who she is. So I stopped weeping and started singing.”

We are eternal. So we can sing with joy. We do not die. When we know this firsthand as true, we inherit eternal life. We awake to our true nature.