Why People Don’t
Believe in God,
the Immortal Soul, or Afterlife
“Tell it unveiled, the
naked truth!
The declaration’s
better than the secret.”
—Rumi
For years I puzzled over why some people believe in God, the
immortal soul, and the afterlife and some people don’t, but in my long journey
of self-discovery I finally found an answer to this bedeviling riddle; if not
for the world (which would be a presumption), at least for myself. But having
said this, I can’t help but be reminded of something that the philosopher
Schopenhauer once said” “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”
It’s not without irony then that I expect what I’m about to say
in today’s spiritual musing to be ridiculed first, then violently opposed, and finally
(long after I have shuffled off this mortal coil, to be sure) be accepted as
self-evident; but then, what’s a writer for if not to explore the imponderable
mysteries of the human condition…
From the earliest age, I never doubted
in the existence of God, my immortal soul, and the afterlife; on the contrary,
it was because of my inborn belief that I suffered the existential dread, anguish,
and despair that I did growing up Catholic. I felt trapped and had no idea why.
All I knew was that I was born with a purpose, but I had no idea what that
purpose was.
And then in high school I read Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge and was inflicted with
what Professor Harold Bloom called an “immortal wound,” a wound of wonder, and
I became an inveterate truth seeker like Maugham’s hero Larry Darrell.
But that was long ago, and I’ve covered a lot of ground since
I began my quest for what I came to realize was my lost soul, which, ironically,
I had presciently foreseen in my poem “Noman” that I wrote that same year for
my grade twelve English teacher (who found it perplexing, to say the least) but
which I finally resolved many years later in my parallel life memoir The Summoning of Noman; but in my
awareness that I was a lost soul whose purpose in this life was to find my true
self, I solved the riddle of the human condition which I worked out in My Writing Life, a sequel to my memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway.
And herein lies the mystery of why some people believe in
God, the immortal soul, and afterlife and others don’t; it all has to do with
where one’s “I” is centered. And by “I” I mean the reflective consciousness of one’s
individuating soul self, which is the central problem of the human condition
that the great writer Leo Tolstoy explored in The Death of Ivan Ilych, a problem that stems from the paradoxical
consciousness of our soul self—our existential self and essential self, as the German
mystic and teacher of the sacred gnostic way of life Karlfield Graf Durckeim came
to describe the double consciousness of our soul self.
“We are citizens of two worlds, an “existential” one which is
a conditioned reality, limited by time and space, and an “essential” one
unconditioned and beyond time and space, accessible only to our inner
consciousness and inaccessible to our powers,” said K. G. Durckeim in Alphonse
Goettmann’s book The Path of Initiation.
And he goes on to say: “Only this union of the existential self with the
essential self, dealing with the whole of man, carries him to his full maturity
and bears fruits, the first and most important of which is to be able to say “I
am” in the full meaning of the word. From this becoming of the “I” in the full
blossoming depends the relationship between man and the world, man and himself,
man and Transcendence. At the beginning and at the end, at the origin and in
the development of all life is found this transcendent “I am.” At the heart of
all that is, man secretly senses this great “I Am” from which comes and to
which returns all life. Each being is called to realize in his own way to this
divine “I am” which seeks to express itself in modalities as varied and diverse
as are all creatures of the universe” (The
Path of Initiation, An Introduction to
the Life and Thought of Karlfield Graft Durckeim, by Alphonse Goettmann, pp.
33, 36, 37).
And now comes the tricky truth; which is to say, the gnostic
truth of our soul self as I have come to experience it that will be subject to
ridicule and resistance before it will ever be accepted as an incontrovertible
fact of the human condition: As K. G. Durckeim realized (as have many mystics,
poets, and God knows who else), it would appear that we have two selves; one
self, or “I” that is born of our life in the world, which makes it our ephemeral
existential self, and an a priori
essential and immortal self that we are born with. But what Durckeim did not
express in his prescient apperception of the double self of man, was the dual
consciousness of our ego/shadow existential self that I spent most of my life
studying and resolving as I lived my own gnostic path of self-initiation and
chronicled in The Pearl of Great Price,
the story of the self-realization of my own individuated “I am” consciousness.
Without going into detail, which I’ve done already in my twin
soul books Death, the Final Frontier
and The Merciful Law of Divine
Synchronicity, suffice to say in today’s spiritual musing that we all come
into the world as sparks of divine consciousness, embryonic souls pre-destined to
grow and evolve through life into fully self-realized souls, which K. G. Durckeim
defined as the blessed fruit of the “I am” consciousness of God; but to bear
the fruit of our own individuation process, we have to make one “I” out of our existential
ego/shadow self and our essential soul self, one “I” whole and complete unto itself
just as C. G. Jung realized in his own gnostic path which was confirmed by his
unconscious in a dream he had several days before his death at the ripe old age
of 85. In his dream he saw, high up on a high place, a boulder lit by the full
sun, and carved into the illuminated boulder were the words: “Take this as a
sign of the wholeness you have achieved and the singleness you have become.”
This was the blessed fruit of his life, his precious pearl of great price.
As incredible as it may seem (this would be the resistance
stage of my gnostic truth), I also experienced wholeness and singleness of
self, which I creatively spelled out in my memoirs Gurdjieff Was Wrong But His Teaching Works and the sequel The Gnostic Way of Life; that’s how I
came to solve the riddle of our paradoxical nature that bedevils everyone,
especially philosophers and scientists, and it all has to do with what Jesus
revealed in his cryptic teaching about making our two selves into one.
In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, the master was asked by
someone when the kingdom would come, and Jesus replied: “When the two will be one, and
the outer like the inner, and the male with the female neither male nor
female.” And Thomas goes on to say, “Now the two are one when we speak
truth to each other and there is one soul in two bodies with no hypocrisy” (The Unknown Sayings of Jesus, by Marvin
Meyer, p. 95); which simply means, at the risk of inviting ridicule and violent
resistance, that we have to reconcile the false ephemeral consciousness of our
ego/shadow personality with our inner soul self, which we can only do by living
by values that are inherently self-transcending, as all the great spiritual
teachers of the world like Jesus, Socrates, and Rumi have revealed.
“These leaves, our
bodily personalities, seem identical, /but the globe of soul fruit /we make,
/each is elaborately /unique,” said Rumi,
which speaks to what C. G. Jung came to call the individuation process of the
archetypal self of man; and herein lies the quandary that bedevils the world
about God, the immortal soul, and the afterlife…
This is going to be a hard truth to swallow, but there is no
other way of saying it: our essential self is our inner, true soul self, and
our existential self is our outer, false self; and those of us who have an innate belief in God,
the immortal soul, and afterlife have been born centered in our essential self,
or shift our “I” to our essential self in the course of living our life; and
those of us who have doubts about God, the immortal soul, and afterlife have
been born centered in our ephemeral self, or shift our “I” to our ephemeral
self in the course of living our life, and by ephemeral self I mean the
unresolved ego/shadow consciousness of our individuating essential soul self. In
effect, we only have one I, but it is bifurcated; and our destined purpose is
to reconcile our false ego/shadow self with our inner, true self.
This of course presupposes a belief in reincarnation (again,
subject to incredulity if not violent resistance by some quarters like
Christianity), because our ephemeral self is the unresolved consciousness of
all the ego/shadow personalities that we have created over the course of our
reincarnational history which we bring with us in our unconscious mind with
every new life that we are born into; and it’s to the nature of our ephemeral
self that determines why people have doubts about God, the immortal soul, and
afterlife.
But why? What is it about the consciousness of our ephemeral
self that grows and evolves with the existential self of the ego/shadow
personality of each new incarnation that leads one to not believe in God, the
immortal soul, and afterlife? Why why
why?
That was the quandary of my lost soul self that I expounded
upon in The Summoning of Noman, but the
short answer for today’s musing can be distilled from my experience of finding
my lost soul, which should be convincing in itself but won’t be because, as Gurdjieff
liked to say, “There is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life.”
Nonetheless, the answer is simple enough, if totally incomprehensible to the cognitive
mind; but how can one possibly believe in God, the immortal soul, and the
afterlife if their ephemeral self is the I-consciousness of one’s non-being, the
paradoxical self of one’s essential self?
The ephemeral self that everyone experiences in moments of
despair as the unbearable sense of their own nothingness is ipso facto incapable of believing in
God, the immortal soul, and afterlife because it is the false self of one’s own
nothingness, and one cannot possibly believe in God, the immortal soul, and
afterlife if they are centered in the consciousness of their non-being; the
ontology one one’s own nothingness precludes it.
Our ephemeral self is the self of who we are not, the self of
who we are yet-to-be, the unresolved non-being of our being, the consciousness
of our existential self that is only conscious of its own mortality and the meaninglessness
and absurdity of life that Shakespeare described as “a tale told by an idiot
full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” This is the same self that the
existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre gave voice to when he said, “I am
what I am not, and I am not what I am.” This is why he called man “a useless
passion,” because he could not resolve the enantiodromiac dynamic of soul’s
individuation.
In effect, this is
what a lost soul is, a soul born centered in its ephemeral self; and if not
born this way, it becomes this way according to the values it has been brought up
with or chosen to live by, values that compromise one’s destined journey to
wholeness and completeness, values that serve the ego/shadow personality and
not one’s inner, true self.
And, at the risk of offending the non-believer again, not
until one has grown enough through the natural individuation process of karma
and reincarnation and is ready to take evolution into their own hands to
complete what nature cannot finish will one be free to reconcile their
ephemeral self with their essential self and become one self whole and complete;
only then will this truth become self-evident. That’s the mystery of the human
condition that the poet Emily Dickinson spoke to when she wrote: “Adventure
most unto itself /The Soul condemned to be; /Attended by a Single Hound— /Its
own Identity.”
——
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