OUR UNDERSTANDING OF the state of being of the deceased personality is obviously highly tentative. Survival of death has never been scientifically proved, for even the most convincing communications from our loved ones on the other side of death can be explained by mechanisms that do not require a survivalistic view of life. This is especially true of mediumistic communication, as I have already noted: much material purporting to come from the deceased does in fact originate in the sitter's mind. However, when the total evidence of alleged communication, whether through mediums of the most irreproachable integrity, such as have been investigated by competent societies devoted to psychical research, or through the much more personally evidential communion between loved ones and friends on either side of the veil of death, is analysed, a very good case for survival of death can be built up. In the end we have to come to our own conclusions; experts can point to pitfalls in the survivalistic hypothesis, but they cannot disprove it categorically.
If survival is a fact, as I strongly believe, it is the psyche which continues when the physical body decays after its death. This psyche, as I have already described, consists of a focal point of personal awareness surrounded by a vast unconscious, the contents of which range from primitive animal drives and painful memories of the past to ennobling drives leading to fulfilment of the person and the vision of God. The psyche of a newly deceased person will, in all probability, not be very different from its condition when it was still associated with the flesh. The confused unconscious material that seeps into awareness during vivid dreams might well be a presage of the sort of early after-life experience in store for many of us when we die.
Heaven and Hell It has been well said that we make our old age in our youth; a selfish attitude in youth bears its consequence in a selfish, cantankerous elderly person who is loved by few people. On the other hand, a self-giving person may be so open to God's love that he becomes a blessing to others even when he is very old indeed. Such a person grows in spiritual stature even as the years pass, and he begins to look forward to death as a new adventure in his life of self-fulfilment. The enclosed selfish person inherits dark, enclosed imprisonment on the other side of death, and this is the real nature of hell. What we have built up in this life is what we are to inherit in the world beyond death. Similarly, a person who has lived a life of self-giving devotion to others while he was still in the flesh can expect to be greeted with love by those in the greater life beyond death - and those who greet him will not be merely the ones he knew while he was still in the flesh but also the greater communion of saints who guard us and inspire our thoughts with the knowledge of God. This is, in my view, the "judgment" that is in store for all of us when we quit the mortal body: have you been self-centred in your attitude to life or have you been a servant of the highest you know, even God Himself, and shown this devotion to Him by loving your neighbour? The first type of person goes to darkness, the second to light. This is the realm that we call heaven, or paradise. Jesus promised the repentant thief on the Cross with Him that on that very day he would be in paradise with Him (Luke 23:43). Indeed, the thief was already in a heavenly state when he confessed the glory of the One crucified alongside him; even the disciples could not see this glory at that terrible moment. It could be said that the penitent thief was the first Christian believer, for he believed in the humiliated Christ without the evidence of the later glory.
Atonement and Forgiveness However, the post-mortem state is not the final one. If the person on the other side of death can bear the judgment of his past life and can pray for forgiveness, I have no doubt that he too can rise from the darkness and isolation of hell to the warmth and felicity of heaven. Both those states are of psychic, or mental nature. They are to be seen as a re-living of old attitudes in the light of the greater understanding afforded by a purely psychic mode of experience without the encumbrance of a physical body. If it is objected that I envisage too easy a transition for the penitent sinner from hell to heaven, without the dire eternal punishment threatened in the scriptures, I would say two things. The first is that the transition is slow and extremely painful, for the person is himself one of the judges of his own bad attitudes and actions. To have to confront our inherent sinfulness on this side of life can be distressing enough, as anyone consulting a psychotherapist or a confessor knows full well. A similar confrontation on the other side of life, where there is no physical body to conceal ourselves, is much more painful, for no secrets can be hidden there and all our thoughts and desires are open to the inspection of "all the company of heaven". The second point is that eternal punishment, apart from its contradiction of the love of God for all His creatures, is self-frustrating. What is eternal can have no end, and therefore there can be no hope of redemption for the sinner.
It is unfortunate that the scriptures so often threaten a vindictive punishment for sinners, a punishment conditioned entirely by human understanding of penal reward. There is in fact only one punishment that has any reality: separation from the love of God. And this is never initiated by God, whose nature it is always to have mercy, but by man, who through his gift of free will can actively exclude himself from the love of God. Until man repents, God cannot fill him with the living warmth that comes from His Holy Spirit. But when the light of repentance dawns, itself the result of the terrible suffering borne in the cold isolation of hell and an inner awareness of God's grace, God moves any distance to reclaim the sinner. However, forgiveness is only the first stage of real salvation, or healing. What we have done wrong has now to be restored, for our own sake as well as that of those whom we have injured. The atonement wrought by Jesus' sacrificial death and passion reconciles man to God, for God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself (2 Corinthians 5:19). There is forgiveness, and this allows us to continue the work of restoration and reconciliation without remorse or self-destructive feelings of guilt. It is now the love for those whom we have wronged - and indeed for all the world and for ourselves also - that impels us on to become full persons. While we are unforgiven, whatever movement we may make towards the light is selfish in motivation and therefore condemned to failure at its very initiation. When the motive is disinterested love, we are truly in God's service.
The Spiritual Body The concept of an extensive psyche existing without form or limitation is difficult for us to envisage on this side of death. St. Paul discusses this difficulty in as great detail as is possible for mortal man in the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians. The body we leave at death is corruptible flesh; the body we assume after death is a spiritual body of such a nature that we cannot describe it with our earthly understanding and language. Esotericists describe a number of "subtle bodies" - of various consistencies between matter and immaterial spiritual substance - which surround and inter-penetrate us even while in the flesh, and come more fully into their own when the flesh is no more. They speak of a semi-material "etheric body" which closely surrounds the physical body and is possibly the medium of transference of psychic communication to the physical body. This is said to disintegrate some time after the person dies, and then the psyche is enclosed in a finer "astral body" with emotional characteristics. Then there is a finer "mental body" and a somewhat more rarefied "spiritual body" that ensheaths the soul (or spiritual self), which is far removed from the knowledge of most people while they are on earth. I think this scheme is both correct as far as it goes, and yet at the same time unsatisfactory. If the mind is separate from the brain, as I believe, this suggestion of intermediate subtle bodies might provide a mode of connexion between the two. On the other hand, the existence of such bodies is confirmed only by people with the gift of clairvoyance (it is also an article of faith in theosophical speculation, itself derived largely from Hindu metaphysics). Perhaps psychical research will contribute a more scientific approach to this problem in the future.
A much more impressive view of the meaning of the body is to be found in the theological speculations of A. N. Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin. They see the body as the complete psychic field of influence of a person, and not merely as the organism of flesh and bones that he inhabits when he is alive on the earth. This is merely the concrete form of a person ` while he is on earth, just as the man Jesus was an incarnate manifestation of the Christ Who is cosmic in scope and extends beyond time and space, begotten before the foundation of the world. But whereas the full body of Christ embraces the whole cosmos (and transcends it), our feeble bodies are enclosed in a little world of selfishness while we are alive. When we die to the physical body and are redeemed through the love of God, so our new body widens in sympathy and extends in love to embrace other bodies. This is the deeper meaning of the "spiritual body" that we acquire after the limited body of our humiliation has been left behind. It is in the wider participation of psychic life that the spiritual body - no matter how we conceive it, for it is beyond present human understanding even if we adopt the esoteric theosophical view - shows its radiance. The body of an aspiring person on the other side of death is more glorious than the one he has quit, for it brings him more closely within the body of Christ which includes all those who dedicate themselves to His service.
In the person of the risen Christ it would appear that His transfigured, resurrected physical body contributed to the glory of His spiritual body. In our own persons this transmutation and resurrection of the physical body is not to be expected, at least at present, because we are still worldly and selfish in our inner lives. Only one of the stature of Christ can have a physical body capable of spiritual transformation. But we must work towards a resurrection, not only of our own bodies of flesh but of the whole world so that we may fulfil St. Paul's visionary glimpse of ultimate reality, when "the universe itself is to be freed from the shackles of mortality and enter upon the liberty and splendour of the children of God" (Romans 8:21).
Rebirth It is evident that no man, other than the Incarnate Christ, can achieve this degree of spiritual integration in the course of one lifetime on earth. As the psyche progresses in the life beyond death, its composite elements of memory, selfish drives, and inner thoughts are incorporated into the soul (in its exalted context of the spiritual self), which grows in fullness through the experience of its life on earth and the period of meditation upon this experience that it undergoes after death. In due course, further experience in a plane of physical limitation becomes necessary for the further growth of the soul into the full knowledge of God. The psychic milieu of the immediate after-death state is one of inner meditation and learning rather than of active growth. This growth can take place only in an environment where self-giving love in relationships with other people is possible; in other words, sacrifice of self and the suffering that accrues from this is the way of growth to a full knowledge of God. What the nature of the realm of physical limitation is, no one can tell. I have already discussed this problem in connexion with a mystical experience I myself had. Suffice to say that it may entail a reincarnational sequence, or else occur elsewhere in the cosmos, possibly in a type of body of quite a different character to anything we can conceive in our present state of limited understanding. Indeed, too great an emphasis on this aspect of rebirth can lead us away from reality into fruitless private speculations, to which enthusiasts of reincarnation are especially prone. The Catholic teaching about purgatory (an intermediate state of survival between hell and heaven in which there is a progressive purification of the soul) seems to be the right one, provided its scope is widened to include all men, irrespective of religious belief, who are aspiring to the vision of God through living in accordance with the law of love. We are indeed in purgatory even now.
Eternal Life Eternal life is of quite another order from either the life we know in this world, or the life of the world beyond death of the physical body, or of a rebirth sequence. And yet it inter-penetrates all of them. Eternity is a state of reality, indeed is the full reality, that lies outside the limitation of space or time. It is the reality known in mystical illumination; it is the very life of Christ in His ascended form, When we have lived a life dead to selfishness, in the twinkling of an eye, as St. Paul puts it (1 Corinthians 15:51), we shall be changed and enter a new way of life altogether. This promise is not reserved only for those who have died in the flesh; it is the very present hope of all of us, whether here on earth or yonder past the grave. It is already known to the mystic in a brief glimpse, but I believe that it is to be experienced by all men, and indeed the whole creation, when human consciousness has been raised from the personal self to the spiritual self, and is informed of the spirit within it.
If survival and rebirth have any validity at all, they are to be seen as processes of purgation and growth of the soul into full union with the soul of the cosmos and with God Himself. In this way man will grow progressively into a knowledge of Christ. When the last enemy, which is death, is overcome, all things will be subject to the Word of God (or the Son), who will also be made subordinate to God the Father who made all things subject to him, that God may be all in all (1 Corinthians 15:27-28). The way to eternal union with God is also the way of the Incarnate Christ. To attain eternal life is the goal of man. The Buddhist concept of Nirvana can be equated with the life of eternity. It is very important to understand that eternity is outside time and space (and therefore beyond any concept of duration or finitude); it is a new way of life in which "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me" (Galatians 2:20). When eternal life is known, all other modes of existence, whether on earth or in the life of the world to come, pale into insignificance. They are put in their proper perspective as places of testing and of temporary rest and recreation before the glory of eternity is revealed to us.