Preface
The following exposition discusses certain difficult subjects. For example, we’ll canvass my current conceptions of death, grief, metaphysics, ontology, time, space and faith—to name a few. Should any topic contribute to a sense of unease, please pause your reading and resume whenever you feel ready. If you don’t want to read a section, please don’t read it!
Finally, although this is my longest reflection to date, i truncated my commentary on certain topics wherever possible. As such, reading this memorial in pieces may be just as fruitful as reading it all together at once. God Willing, one day, i’ll write out my entire, unabbreviated philosophy, but that day is, naturally, not today.
Today, we remember Ammini Susan Mathews (“Ammachi”), and all she left for us to learn.
Note: square brackets (“[]”) typically mark my choices to capitalize entire nouns which reflect God in either substance or accident. Curly brackets (“{}”), my stylistic revisions to convey the meaning clearly, improve force or both.
Epigraph
In man’s days, she lives her life merrily,
But as dream grass sways gently, wild and free.
Down the stream, she floats without grief to bear,
For she lays them before Her God in prayer.
Prologue
Dust gently wafts through the air as the afternoon sunlight strolls into the small apartment’s living room. Illuminated beams connect the windows to the floor. A young mother watches her children playing. All steeps in silence.
Suddenly, an aggressive knock at the door shakes the stillness. She hurries to the door but apprehensively opens it, and a surly voice greets her. The landlord, standing between two of his goons, furiously shouts at her, demanding the rent. He hurls threats at her—the deadline passed.
But, what can she do? Her husband works in a different country and sends checks home. She hopes the check arrives every month before the rent comes due, but this month, it did not. The landlord came to collect, and trouble came with him.
Nevertheless, she stands at the door’s threshold, blocking the apartment’s entrance. The commotion draws her seven-year-old son to stand behind her, his head barely above her waist.
Truly, to whom can she turn in her helplessness? She has a young son and daughter. She has no phone, so she couldn’t easily reach family or friends.
How did she pay the rent? When did the money come? Did she borrow it? Who was she?
Ammachi
My father earnestly described this memory of his mother, my grandmother. Not an infrequent occurrence, the Rs. 100 (~$75 USD today, inflation-adjusted) rent was not paid on time. He recalls the rough-hewn man shouting at her in Telugu, the state language of Andhra Pradesh, where they lived. Her husband worked in Dubai, and all her family lived in Kerala, where they primarily speak Malayalam. She couldn’t even appropriately reply to the landlord because she only knew the language’s basics. However, suppressing fear and helplessness, she stood her ground against the demons outside. She maintained a strong posture until the landlord left.
Ammachi faced many such challenges. Often a lone warrior, she navigated turbulent times as a young girl, wife and mother. She learned to internalize her grief, for she lacked even a shoulder to cry on. My father has never seen her shed a single tear. Her standing in the doorway protecting him and his sister, that scene remains etched in his mind. While my father isn’t sure how she kept them afloat during those dark times, he knows she constantly prayed.
More than just illuminating the path, God is The Path through the abyss
In the 2,023rd year of Our Lord, on the 20th day of the 5th month, Ammachi fell asleep in The Lord. Her physical departure guided the following reflections :)
Emptiness, The Great Teacher
Grief's Immediacy
Fundamental to the human experience, grief visits the dying individual and those who love the dying person. It’s not uncommon for dying people, during their grieving processes, to experience emotions their loved ones will feel after their passing.
Correspondingly, the language of 'loss' best characterizes experiencing a loved one passing away. While individuals process the physical death of others differently, grief generally proceeds through three stages. The first consists of the loss and the denial felt at the moment of physical departure. The second stage is losing, manifesting as the recurring feeling of loss during shared activities. The third stage, loosening, marks the inflection point when the bereaved reinvests into their own lives again after grief’s stranglehold relaxes. Naturally, people experience these phases with varying timeframes, if they experience any of them at all.
Grief presents a dilemma for managing suffering: continue dwelling on the unchangeable past or struggle with hope to strengthen an open-hearted connection with ‘what is’. On reflection, i certainly traversed these stages. Confusion hung over the days following Ammachi’s passing, for they did not feel real. Like a ship with a broken GPS connection, i felt disoriented. However, channeling Ammachi's resolve, i stood tall, so i could serve as both a steady voice of reason and a lighthearted spirit of levity on my family’s behalf.
After we laid Ammachi to rest, anytime i passed by her room, i found myself expecting to hear her laughing, praying, saying something…anything. Each failure to meet expectations punched me in the gut with heart-stopping precision. i often found myself at odds with reality, struggling to configure my subjective experience. These seeds sprouted into intense emotional experiences, the likes of which i've never experienced before. However, the symptoms of losing became mindful alarms reminding me to sit with what is, to proactively accept instead of reactively fight.
Finally, while i committed myself to studying the wisdom of well-respected thinkers, i cannot say that i opened the door to loosening until i began noting my thoughts. More broadly, writing, or introspective reflection, helped me capture the ineffably intertwined nature of my spirit at a particular point in space-time. Each iteration of note-making, idea connecting and rewriting exponentially accelerated my capacity to realign my mind with reality, with what is.
Living Forwards
Perhaps, most importantly, i acquired a simple protocol for opening my heart to others navigating the reality of physical death. Caring for grieving persons begins with predictably but unobtrusively offering your comforting presence. Don’t surprise them—instead, let them know when you’ll be around if you know them well enough to be there. Next, offer practical help early on. Uncle Al, one of my father’s closest friends, Uber Eats’d us Peruvian chicken with the simple message: “Close the kitchen!”, as funeral preparations inundated my family. If you can, offer to help out with day-to-day activities (e.g., food, laundry, errands, etc.) because grieving people think about them last.
Additionally, consistent acts of lovingly listening to the grieving individual give them the space to express otherwise unprocessed experiences. Something like “hey, i heard your grandmother passed away - i don’t know what that’s like, but i’d like to hear” respectfully conveys the intention.
Robust relationships rely on creating space for each partner to realize the truest version of themselves. Welcome strong emotions without attempting to contextualize or distort the message. Of those who loved the newly departed person, the physical finality of death sharply clarifies life's deepest priorities. Listening represents the shortest distance between two people, so embrace open, truthful expression.
Note: i’ve never been good at being present for others during similar experiences. However, going forward, i hope to emulate the empathetically, open-hearted love my friends and family showered upon those closest to me during these days :)
Everlasting Change
Ammachi’s last years attest to the truth of impermanence
Things yesterday are slightly different than they are today. Upon observing my body in the mirror, i behold the beauty of its decay, the process of its change from yesterday to today.
Change sits at the heart of the experiential truths of human experience. Although fearing change distorts its truth into a curse, it becomes a blessing when you use it as the fulcrum for liberating yourself from identifying with that which changes. Rather than resisting it, joyfully embrace the transformation to uncover its deep wisdom.
Rejecting the fundamental truth of impermanence leads to suffering. Value imposition - categorically delineating “good” from “bad” - stems from subjective, mental attachments. In the ever-unfolding process of change, leaning into likes (i.e., attraction) and leaning away from dislikes (i.e., aversion) creates suffering. It arises from viewing fundamentally impermanent processes as permanent, from knowingly or unknowingly rejecting the way of things. Rooted in the basic ignorance of separateness, it emerges from an internal clinging to the feeling of being separate. You must work with suffering when it arrives, but you don’t need to unnecessarily seek it.
Other important aspects of spiritual work include managing your own suffering and recognizing that of another. Investigating the nature of endings gently invites in, albeit indirectly, the awareness of death. For example, what do you witness in the breathless space between inhales and exhales? Find an equilibrium in the stable ground underlying both your intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives.
Bear the unbearable with a giggle. Trust your inner wisdom, and let action flow according to the essence of “what is” rather than the normative pressures of “oughts" and "shoulds”. Surrender to your compassionate heart. Trust that it will care of what needs to be done; for, the universe does nothing, yet nothing’s left undone. Refrain from being somebody doing something – relax, and be unconditionally. After all, you’re a human being, not a human doing!
Simplicity without a name
Is free from all external aim.
With no desire, at rest and still,
All things go right as of their will.
~ Laozi | The Tao Te Ching
Ammachi's last years evidenced the inevitability of one's mind and body's waning over time. Impermanence modulates both the axiological and aesthetic value, distinguishing the natural from the artificial. Consequently, we ascribe more worth to real flowers than their plastic imitations. Accepting the reality of physical death unveils a clearer understanding of life’s beauty. Truly inevitable, reaching the precipice is more a matter of 'when' than 'if'. Through indiscriminately embracing all of it, i’m slightly closer to achieving my goal of unifying with all of it.
The Natural Legacy of Infinite Possibility
Ammachi inspired contemplations of my wondrous but implausible existence
At every stage, physical death demarcates instances of bodily change: the death of the seed begets the grain, the death of the grain begets the meal, the death of the meal begets the gamete, the death of the gamete begets the zygote, the death of the zygote begets the man-in-the-womb, the death of the man-in-the womb begets the man, the death of the man begets whom?
Subatomic particles constitute your physical appearance, and each one traced a unique world line before collectively collaborating as the organism experiencing this sentence. As she played no small role in forming my father, some of the atoms in my paternal grandmother's body certainly transmitted compositional instructions to some of the atoms making up my own. Our bodies remain forever intertwined, for there's no me without her.
Even if, at the moment of my writing, you hadn’t been born yet, the very smallest material corpuscles that will constitute your body exist right now. Lacking organization, you’re a house waiting to be built: the builder has all the materials stored, but The Architect hasn't sent him the plans yet. You have infinite potential to be something actual.
The kicker - if you, having been physically born already, are perceiving these words, you still have infinite potential to be something actual. Still!
Before the body of a man, i had that of a zygote; before that, of gametes, of nutrients, of fungi, plants, animals and the very universe itself. Upon my conception, an unfathomable amount of possibilities collapsed into one actuality, which, in fact, represented yet another endless set of consequential probabilities. As my past, so my future: from ♾️ to infinity.
No-Thing Fulfilled
Awareness of death honors the finality of time, energy, knowledge and attention
Not even three weeks before her physical passing, we admitted Ammachi into at-home hospice care. Effectively the end of the health care continuum, it pertains to the care of those with some sense of their nearing physical death. It may very well be the opposite of pre-natal care, caring for those aware of their nearing birth. In truth, our condition is not too dissimilar from those in hospice. Physical death, ominously looming over our lives, threatens to instantly snatch all we hold near and dear. Long the contemplative subject of poets, scientists and philosophers alike, death subtly asserts itself as the ever-present reality that indiscriminately mocks the significant and the insignificant.
Beyond clarifying the important matters of my brief physical life, Ammachi's physical death reminds me to prioritize living well over dying well. That physical death imperceptibly hangs over all experience encourages me to take things less seriously and relinquish my tight grip on life. Appreciating life's brevity and its precious precariousness magnifies the necessity of intentional action right now.
Recall your last heated argument. That your body has a finite existence evaporates any reason for needlessly expending energy beyond clearly expressing your point. Why spend your attention on maintaining negative mind states if you only have a preciously limited amount of energy at your disposal?
Similarly, recall your last hearty laugh. Absent a strong philosophical foundation, the fact of the body’s finality could reasonably support the case for altogether avoiding the exertion of any effort, positive or negative.
You’ve had countless opportunities to thank those who helped you and express your love toward those you love, but you’ve missed most of them. Next time an opportunity presents itself, convey how you feel while being mindful of the feeling itself. Doing so subordinates yourself to a channel of expression, while intimately inviting the other to connect with the feeling. i hope to tame the seemingly irredeemable beast inside while treating others kindly. A monster under control, i hope to infuse an unmistakably joyful compassion into all of my relationships. As art invites your awareness to fulfill your life, death invites you to live life fully.
Cultivating mindfulness enhances your capacity to lovingly embrace moments without distorting them. Savoring the space between moments quickly elucidates life’s fleetingly precious nature. Observe wisdom without striving for perfection. Compassion arises from emptiness with the capacity to hold the hearts of others such that many hearts become one. Would the perfection of the world include the compassionate truth of your heart that hurts when someone else hurts because an inexplicably experiential fabric weaves all of our lives together? When Ammachi's body aches caused her to shriek in pain, i hurt with her. The shared agony perceived with our one no-mind impelled me to act, to write!
Death lines life, the vessel for living, with silver. Rather than confining you, mortality blesses you with the impetus to live fully. Whereas a vessel with infinite capacity never experiences complete fullness, a finite one can be filled to the brim. Recognizing the finality of each day, moment and breath refines your awareness of the here & now. Attend to tears and laughter as if they were your last, for living a full life involves experiencing the highs and lows of the ride without identifying with them. Thus, the awareness of physical mortality can precede experiencing a full life. Living with uncertainty means living at the edge of mystery, always gazing at the horizon of the unknown. Stop and experience that you are the thing itself.
Death’s profundity extends beyond our conceptually material understanding as a mere medical event. While a gradual decline may precede that point of no return, the mystery after the chasm is just that: a mystery! Physical death strips away all elements constituting my extrinsic perspective of the now-departed individual (e.g., tonality, personality, body warmth, skin tone, cognitive capacity, etc.). Ammachi passed from my extrinsic to my intrinsic perspective, for she still lives on in my personal dimension of imagination, emotion and ideas.
...life is but a dream! (bloopers up front, business starts at 0:34 🙂)
Metaphysical Assays
how might we experience death, specifically, what’s the 1st-person POV of death?
As i'm sure you've noticed, i've been particular, almost assiduous, about using the specific term "physical death" when possible, especially when discussing Ammachi's passing. Her falling asleep in The Lord brought the nature of spiritual experience to the forefront of my ongoing, multi-modal ontological investigations.
The evening before she passed, God blessed me with some time to care for her while my father, mother and brother were out of the house. i entered her room to give her water, but her evident cognitive decline limited her ability to interact with me.
Preceding her admission to hospice care, Ammachi received an unpleasant and ostensibly painful medical diagnosis. Accordingly, her healthcare providers recommended she receive morphine and managed its administration. Moreover, Ammachi experienced rather advanced Dementia and wasn’t eating much by this day.
seemingly, the perfect preconditions for altered experiences
She stared at the wall and made small motions while curled up in the fetal position. However, she clearly saw something completely awe-inspiring directly in front of her, for amazement frequently colored her countenance. Yet, where she gazed, i perceived nothing more than the wall.
Perhaps, she witnessed angels ready to guide her soul to The Heavenly Abode? That Place Where Eyes Haven’t Seen And Ears Haven’t Heard, That Place On Which Hearts Haven’t Meditated. Maybe, she briefly experienced beyond the veil limiting our physical lives?
All i said to console her was, "i hope you're enjoying your trip." As confident as i am that i saw her having a divergent spiritual experience—an adventure!—i'm convinced that her subjective experience has standing in objective reality. i wanted to understand the ideas underpinning my conception of reality, so i began investigating two chief metaphysical hypotheses: physicalism and analytic idealism.
The Old vs The New
Physicalism
Physicalism, a prominent part of our culture since our dawn but only conceptualized in the late-19th century, did away with our fear of death. While power structures manipulated this fear—our greatest fear—to control civilizations throughout history, physicalism ("materialism") axiomatically asserts matter as the only element in the metaphysical reduction base. Somehow, sensation emerges from physical matter. Consequently, the end of experience follows from the end of physical matter—death—and death reduces to nothingness. Although such a hypothesis roots itself in ordinary intuitions, every level of cultural interaction - from ancient philosophy to modern media - reinforces identity’s connection with matter.
Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If Death is, then I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?
~ Epicurus
Analytic Idealism
Analytic idealism posits that experience, not matter, constitutes reality, so the world, in and of itself, is a boundless subjective Mind at heart. Like quantum field theory reducing fundamental particles to excitations of their respective unbounded fields, analytic idealism asserts experience as excitations of the experiencer, the subject.
Furthermore, this Mind dissociates into alter-egos (“alters”), which we know as individuals. You and i are individuals with non-identical subjective experiences at the margins. Were we completely amnesiac in a perfect sensory deprivation chamber, we would effectively share the same subjective experience. Before we are "you" and "me", i believe "we are". Freedom from concepts effectively unifies our minds into one. Subjectivity, nature’s sole given, underlying all Mind - whether me, you or the nebula accreting mass at the furthest horizon of the observable cosmos - weaves dissociated alters together at this very moment.
Consequently, rather than the conclusion of the entire process, physical death marks the end of dissociation or the beginning of reassociation. Your core subjectivity, your essence, endures while you experience the reassociation process we call death, for it returns to the essence of reality itself. Since subjective mentation experiences death, like birth, just as another instance, man’s greatest fear returns.
OS Updates
Five values distinguish post-enlightenment rationality: logical coherence, internal consistency, conceptual parsimony, empirical adequacy and explanatory power. Analytic idealism is logically coherent and internally consistent, whereas physicalism is not. Analytic idealism is conceptually parsimonious, whereas physicalism is not. Analytic idealism is empirically adequate and explanatorily powerful, whereas physicalism is not. After evaluating both hypotheses, analytic idealism clearly overwhelms physicalism.¹
Unfortunately, along with the fear of death, materialism evaporates meaning from life and transforms it into a hollow husk. Were subjectivity nothing more than an epiphenomenon of material arrangements, physical death writes down the value of your thoughts and emotions to zero. All of the insights generated at great expense, all the suffering you endured to accumulate wisdom mean precisely nothing at the end of the road.
Analytic idealism props the door ajar for fear to peer in from afar, but it also welcomes meaning into your life like a cherished friend. The contents of your dissociative process, all the knowledge and growth earned in the face of hardship, realize a purpose when they become liberated in the broadest landscape of Universal Mentation. All of your experiences integrate with the larger fabric of the universe, so they’re ever-present and easily accessible to Mind at Large.
Miraculous metaphysical enclaves, our subjective experiences—our perceptions—represent not a transparent window into reality but an interface for interacting with it. This screen of perception comes with measurements from a complete suite of efficiently curated tools. Your observing things in your consciousness brings them into the realm of the sensible, the realm of ideas. Among the many sensibles, the paradigm of space represents yet another dial on the perceptual dashboard. Observables, the empirical foundation of physics, come into existence when measured; hence, their name! Unlike physicalism, analytic idealism asserts that the experienced physical world emerges from experience, utterly throwing physical matter out of the reduction base.
Reassociating Dissociations
Every morning, we experience a type of reassociation. When we sleep and dream, we internally dissociate and disconnect from prior self-conception. Perhaps, you initially recognize yourself as your dream avatar, but it slowly fades away after you wake up. However, almost paradoxically, you were it, but it wasn’t you. Instead, the entire dream flowed from you. All the emotions, all the characters and all the settings saw you as the source. While we may briefly mourn the loss of a pleasant dream, people generally don’t grieve over the passing of their dream avatars. The impulses of our lives soon subsume us as the reassociation process runs its course.
Inexplicably steeped in semantic context, dreams can teach us so much about ourselves. They unveil truths of your fears, hopes, anxieties and ambitions and offer guidance for integrating them. While studying dreams accelerates the process of individuation, we can only do so after waking up.
You no longer identify with your dream avatar when you wake up, but the mental concepts of your dream avatar survive in you. Analytic idealism suggests the same process occurs at various levels of the universe - a logically coherent possibility. Were we dissociated elements of the dream’s source, our death could differently be considered as waking up from the dream. Perhaps, we don’t mourn the death of our individual selves after life’s curtain falls, for the pressing matters of what comes next occupy our subjective experience. In the context of death, it could represent a similar reassociation at higher levels within the metaphysical hierarchy.
Codex Onomasius
Life’s meaning conclusively boils down to experience and what you learn from it, for reality fundamentally reduces to subjectivity. The evolutionary pressures of our planetary ecosystem choreograph our metacognitive dance, so the universe only metacognizes through life. Our metacognition enables our inquiry into the more profound questions - what is the teleological reason for reality? what is the self? how do i relate to the rest of nature amidst this dance? As far as we know, the mind of nature can explicitly take a self-reflective account of itself only through our eyes. Through dissociation and reassociation, nature learns and grows.
The laws of physics may actually be the expression of a learning process in an underlying...neuronal network that is immanent across the entire physical universe. It is the expression of that neuronal network of that learning process that we perceive and call the laws of physics, so the regularities we call the laws of physics are expressions of an underlying learning process of a neural network.
~ Bernardo Kastrup | Analytic Idealism: A Superior Hypothesis
Today, empyrean entheogenic journeys represent an unmatched nonesuch for experiencing reassociation. With intentional reverence, they’re absolutely benign with appropriate direction in a steady context. Moreover, they accurately emulate reassociation's experiential and physiological aspects. Rather than revving up cerebral function, they correlate with muted neurological metabolism, not unlike the harns shutting down when reassociation stands mere moments away. One may witness the predominantly challenging experience of the dissociation process dissolving. From there, the act of reconstituting the mind from its previously rent bits—a proper conclusion to any useful eleusinian emprise—altogether diminishes the fear of reassociation itself.
Might i just be one of the many dissociations of Ammachi, my body an extension of hers? In fact, might not my experience of being—including, at minimum, my body and my animating spirit—reflect a reassociation of myriad dissociating minds? The whole set of minds from which i emerge includes both those i know (i.e., relatives/friends of whom i'm aware) and those whom i don't know (i.e., relatives/other inspirations of whom i'm unaware).
Physical death, in and of itself, is nothing short of a mystery, for i can’t know it in its totality until i experience it myself—‘the meeting’ was as close as i’ve gotten. Consequently, holding the reality of physical death but living with unshakable peace, a remarkable capacity, requires cultivating natural awareness, the cosmic background before constellation construction. The natural, core subjectivity is not you as you know yourself, for it is not subject to the paradigm of ordinary experience. It sits outside of time and space, gain and loss, fame and shame and pleasure and pain. The ground state of awareness sits beneath the self-conception of the ego, which fears physical death because it both begins and ends with the body. While physical death represents the final page of human experience in this life, the spirit experiences it as another moment.
What happens after death remains a great mystery that i deductively know not. While it introduces fear of the unknown back into the equation, it also welcomes meaning back into life. Personally, i’m unfathomably blessed to have a resource as robust as an apostolic faith to investigate such a mystery.
Harvests of Right Glory
Ammachi silently taught me about the strength of faith, motivating me to examine the context and implications of my deepest beliefs
Ammachi helped me recognize a few crucial aspects of living a good, Orthodox Christian life: forgiveness, prayerfulness and joy. We had a complex relationship, and i can’t say we went 11 years without any hiccups. However, i count that initial distance as one of my greatest blessings, for, in that space, i learned of the simplifying power of repentance and forgiveness. Thank you ~ Ammachi ~ for giving me formulas of forgiveness that will uphold all of my relationships going forward.
Ammachi, throughout her life, embodied persistent prayerfulness. Had you met her one year earlier, you’d see her sitting on her chair diligently perusing her copy of The Holy Bible. Had you met her one month earlier, you’d hear her gleefully singing songs of old and new. Had you met her one week earlier, you’d witness her fervently signing The Cross, to the extent that her motor function allowed, while quietly repeating: “Lord…Have…Mercy.” Thank you ~ Ammachi ~ for showing me how one's Relationship with Christ, manifested in the body but fulfilled in the spirit, prefaces good health rather than requiring it.
See how she instinctually signs The Cross and sings Kurielaison? Ammachi intuitively participated in worship to the best of her ability despite her dwindling cognitive functions. Clearly, the instinctual energy beneath deliberate reasoning intermingles with prayer.
the family that forever prays together stays together forever
Your belief in life after death, or lack thereof, shapes not only the circumstances of your passing but also how you live your life. Fostering genuine relationships requires embracing vulnerability and creating the trusting environment that precedes genuine rest. If you can open your heart to your loved ones in the future when they are ill, you can do so right now. Truly, neither time nor circumstance precludes genuinely open-hearted expressions.
Physical death—the cessation of physical life as we know it—reminds us that we all belong to The Lord. Since your legacy consists of what you’ve done for all, live as if you’re the gift for which others have waited. Great ancestors, great advocates in heaven, perform small but invaluable deeds for their descendants even if future generations never know of the source.
For, one is approved if, mindful of God, he endures pain while suffering unjustly. For, what credit is it if, when you do wrong and are beaten for it, you take it patiently? But, if, when you do right and suffer for it, you take it patiently, you have God’s Approval. For, to this, you have been called because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you An Example, that you should follow in His Steps.
~ 1 Peter 2:19-21, RSV
Enlightenment—fundamentally outside of our control along with, even, an approximation of perfect knowledge of our time—remains unattainable without The Grace of God. While each of us ventures on unique journeys, God commends any who acts virtuously despite suffering. i don't miss Ammachi because i believe the speech act of "missing someone" reflects an irrational posture of the spirit. My missing her cannot and will not bring her back nor should i wish so. Thus, instead of mourning that she’s no longer here physically, i’m thankful that we had her at all.
The Wise Church
Infinitely wise, The Church’s prayers and hymns profess the evanescence of our physical existence. They strongly emphasize the importance of cultivating an awareness of death.
Oh, Virgin Saint Mary, Mother Of God ~ pray for us sinners, now and at all times, and at the hour of our death. amin
~ excerpt from 'Peace Be With You Mary' prayer
Nevertheless, despite physical death’s inevitability, we often try to avoid it. We deploy the term "later" to epistemically hedge our deeply held beliefs and intuitions against reality. As a counter, consider practicing negative visualization in the specific context of losing a loved one. Microdosing the shift from the extrinsic to the intrinsic perspective prevents a bursting bubble, while encouraging a smoother adjustment when the day inevitably comes knocking. At some point, all known things will no longer appear as i knew them - failing to integrate such a truth into my core exposes me to needless suffering, and fail, we cannot.
As for man, his days are like grass. halleluyah
Like the flower of the field, so he blooms. barekmor
~ Quqlion for The Faithful Departed, Pethgomo (Service Book of The Holy Qurbono, pg. 498)
Intercessory prayers, both heard and unheard, forever entangle us with the departed despite physical death seemingly separating us. The fabric of mutual love, the continuous act of commemoration manifesting as true communion, weaves us together with our beloved. You know not your time, but you will resurrect in true life or true death.
May the child live according to Your [Will] and have a long life and good end. When our loved ones [depart] from this passing world, may we not be sorrowful but rejoice in the hope of Your [Salvation].
~ A Prayer for a Newborn Baby, (The Green Book of Common Prayers, pg. 377)
Even at moments of physical birth, of dust reinvigorated, The Church instructs us to remember death. Though we remember death in words, are we mindful of its quintessence? Do we contemplate it with our thoughts, minds and hearts?
God and Your Essence
You may know the essence as the spirit or spiritual body, but that description captures neither the term’s total intension nor its total extension. Perhaps, your essence represents How God Knows You, unifying the ‘you, as you may know’ with the “you, you can never know”. It integrates the “visible you” with the “invisible you”. God calls things, whether animate or inanimate, from non-being to being through remembering their essence.
Make memory – When we place a person for commemoration before God, we are praying that the person may have an eternal memorial, that the person may live on in [The Memory] of God. As humans, when we remember someone, we do so in a psychological way, namely, the person and the person's features, qualities and attributes are thought of in our minds, but when God remembers someone, He affirms the very existence and being of that person: the person's eternal life. Therefore, our supplication to God to remember both the living and the departed is, in essence, the supplication for the salvation of all.
~ Side commentary to Quqlion for The Faithful Departed, Qolo (Service Book of The Holy Qurbono, pg. 500)
The resurrection includes the resurrection of the body. However, only the spiritual body can carry the whole being to salvation, for the perishable, on its own, cannot inherit the imperishable. In fact, St. Paul associates eternity with the unseen, so your purely abstract and completely invisible essence must exist forever. The unseen is eternal: the essential, invisible.
Physical death separates the departed from their bodies, reassociating them with their ineffably essential nature. Now, Ammachi’s existence extends far beyond the small and frail body she inhabited towards her physical end; thus, her absence magnifies her present presence.
Ground your life in the need for God, for him who does The Will of God lives forever. He who believes in Jesus lives though he dies. He who eats His Body and drinks His Blood abides in Him, and He in him. The Father grants Jesus Christ, His Only Begotten Son, the power to save life through His Life, His Total Victory over death. He shall raise who fulfills His Will up on the last day, giving him eternal life.
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If any one loves the world, Love For The Father is not in him. For, all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world. And, the world passes away, and the lust of it; but, he who does The Will Of God abides for ever.
~ 1 John 2:15-17, RSV
May we, with faith, hope and love, continually strive towards unifying ourselves with God since The Father will show us greater works than anything the world can show us. Loving the world doesn’t equate to loving The Father. Instead, let us use these humble human forms to participate in The Divine Gifts Of The Holy Sacraments—especially, The Mystery Of Holy Confession—to continually ascend towards Life.
Interlude
As our hearts beat, so Our God bled.
As our lungs breathe, so Our God’s breath expired.
Yet, of His Own Will, he breathed again and breathes today.
As Our God lives, so too shall we not die.
Temporal Treatises
So, how do the days go: doth time fly, or doth it flow?
During her final years, Ammachi often confused her dates and times. She’d frequently forget the day of the week or when she ate last despite my parents and brother’s best efforts to give her a structured schedule. Most poignantly, she adamantly claimed, “I’m 98!” While Ammachi’s true age remains unknown, our highest estimate would’ve placed her in the low 90’s. Interestingly, while in hospice, her mind seemingly regressed to that of a teenager as she revised her age estimate to 16!
How Ammachi experienced time principally encourages me to reevaluate my perspective of time. Metaphysically speaking, if space resolves to an output of our experiential interface, then time must also because of its relation to space. Through deconstructing (read: demolishing) and reconstructing my understanding, i’ve stumbled upon two important debates: presentism vs eternalism & perdurantism vs endurantism. Each significantly impacts how we make sense of change and temporal identity. Before pairing my fresh percipience with my faith, i'll briefly summarize each stance below.
Presentism vs Eternalism
Presentism
Presentism assigns objective reality only to the ‘present’, while relegating the ‘past’ and the ‘future’ to abstract probabilities confined in conceptual chains. Before the present moment shifts in, the past passes out of existence. As the present passes out, the future shifts in. We experience the present’s “is”, remember the past’s “was” and predict the future’s “will be”. More accurate predictions tend to skillfully combine instinct, intuition and inference.
Often, proponents of presentism primarily deploy it to counter determinism and support free will, for it asserts our power to make choices outside of the determinable grasp of prior causes. Prioritizing human freedom, presentism emphasizes our decision-making autonomy. Moreover, one of its necessary but questionable corollaries posits that the world forms anew in each moment instead of initially flowing from an ostensibly unknown demiurge, a First Mover.
Eternalism
Eternalism equally assigns unchanging and objective reality to the past, present and future simultaneously. A dimension existing in its entirety, time effectively vanishes. Subsequently, time’s immutability could imply the predetermination of future events, for all moments exist as a static instance. Eternalism renders our perception of time’s passage as illusory at best.
Perdurantism vs Endurantism
Perdurantism
According to perdurantism, individual things persist through time as temporal parts. Complete, successive temporal parts constitute the essential whole. An object only exists as a whole at the end of its existence, but it exists as an incomplete temporal compilation before then. Consequently, the end fully redeems individuals and makes them whole.
Endurantism
According to endurantism, individuals endure time as wholes, wholly present at all moments. They surf the roiling sea of change, but their identities remain. They don’t have distinct temporal parts. Thus, individuals are wholly present for each sliver of existence, from beginning to end.
Run The Clocks
Weighing the core propositions in the eternalism vs presentism & endurantism vs perdurantism debates uncovers deep questions about the universe and its divine attributes. While cohesively parsing through each proposition and its corollaries, i'll overlay my opinions of time, knowledge, power and creation. Finally, i'll attempt to thread the needle and contextualize my discussion as a man of faith.
Were time a primordial objective reality independently existing from God and man, how does it relate to us? Does it subordinate God to time, for He would exist within it? To what extent would we be free to make choices?
i categorically deny any assertion that time constrains either God or humans. i believe God, eternally beyond space-time, simultaneously upholds and affirms the reality of all things. Our conception of time subordinates itself to His Divine Eternity. Time and space don’t bind God, for He knows the entire fabric of space-time as a unified whole without exerting an iota of effort.
While God exists beyond space-time, humans conceptually construct it through perception. Generally, individuals eternally endure time but predominantly depend on God’s transcendent and immanent power. Specifically, the fruits of our awareness grow rooted in God, for He endowed us with them.
God also exists beyond our perceptual paradigm. Our minds construct time, but God exists beyond the confines of any and all dimensions. Whereas subjective experience flows into our human vantage point via the shifting lens of each present moment, God comfortably pervades the unchanging present’s rolling landscape.
Jesus said to them: Truly, truly, I say to you: before Abraham was, I AM.
~ John 8:58, RSV
As intimately as He knows the past and the present, God inherently possesses perfect knowledge of the future without predestining it. He grants us the space to allocate intention, attention and energy, evidencing His Unfathomable Love for Creation. In fact, that we perceive time flowing at all, that we feel some difference between yesterday and today, evidences an expression of God's Love. Order blesses sense makers, for we'd chaotically dissolve into an entropic soup without it. Like any printed book without ordered pages, the heights of joy and the depths of grief lose all meaning sans time binding them together. All subjective experience subsequently dissolves into a jumble of unorganized, insignificant qualia.
Sitting in a complex web of meaning, we relate to the universe through the boundless medium of transpersonal mind, unknowable in its totality. More than a mere collection of what happened, the past represents a rich tapestry of experiences narrating how we got here. More than a predetermined outcome, the future reflects the horizon of possibilities bordering where we could go. We may mindfully use both to cultivate a more pleasant present.
Eternalism conforms with God’s Sovereignty, especially the notion that everything happens according to His Will. The Orthodox Church’s liturgical calendar chronologically celebrates the events of soteriological history. The seeming preference for linear time can harmonize with the notion of an unchanging and eternal God Who Self-exists Outside Of Time. That Jesus is both fully Divine and fully human implies both His Divine and Human Natures endure through time.
Gregory of Nazianzus argues...“that which He has not assumed He has not healed.” The Cappadocians understand Christ [took] on human nature for the purpose of healing and deifying it. Christ did not take on a human nature but our human nature, the very same nature shared by every hypostasis in which it subsists.
~ Nathan A. Jacobs, "The Metaphysical Idealism of Eastern Orthodoxy"
God’s Essence is immutable, and we’re created in God’s Image. That He references His Likeness as a template not only bestows on us free will but also necessitates from us moral action. Human consciousness perceives time to sensibly arrange experience, granting us the freedom to make choices and the responsibility for their consequences. Thus, at least, an aspect of our expressive essence remains unchanging, thereby infusing us with dynamic resilience. Although we commonly perceive the world through our eyes—our ordinary metaphysical perch—God blessed us with the capacity to willingly shift our perspectives. Therein, freedom lies.
Although never explicitly weighing in on these debates, St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Gregory of Nyssa, early Christian theologians and philosophers, discussed the nature of time and the soul, respectively. St. Augustine conceived of time as a measure of change, an epiphenomenon of measured events. St. Gregory of Nyssa affirmed the immortal soul’s indivisibility, dynamically uniting substance with properties. Moreover, St. Gregory Palamas’ essence-energy distinction supports the endurantist view. Ultimately, believing in the body's resurrection and its indivisible unity with the soul undeniably exposes the enigmatic nature of personal identity.⁶
A shroud of mystery covers the seemingly contradictory relationship between eternity and time, for Our Eternally Immanent Creator transcends both through His Omnipotence, Omniscience and Omnipresence. Even, His Silliest Knowledge and Weakest Power surpasses the wisest of the wise and the strongest of the strong.
Yahweh declares:
For, My Thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not My Ways. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so My Ways are higher than your ways, and My Thoughts, than your thoughts. For, just as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and they do not return there {until} they have watered the earth thoroughly and cause it to bring forth, sprout, give seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall be My Word That Goes Out From My Mouth. It shall not return to Me without success but shall accomplish What I Desire and be successful in The Thing For Which I Sent It.
~ Isaiah 55:8-11, LEB
Temporal Reconfigurations
The differences between presentism/eternalism and perdurantism/endurantism reduce to 'perspective', literally subjectivity. Presentism and perdurantism explain our subjective experiences, but eternalism and endurantism seem like better explanations for what objective reality would be. We're keen to believe that things exist in the present as discrete temporal parts because we view the world that way. In the mirror this morning, i saw how i looked today as a 25-year-old boy, not how i did when i was a 4-year-old man.
The past, present and future intertwine in the minds of dissociated subjects. My ‘present’ may be someone else's ‘past’. During the daytime, i see the sun as it was 8 minutes ago. Interestingly, our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri—aka: Alpha Centauri C—sits 4.2 light years away from us. If it had a superintelligent civilization capable of studying Earth, it would only now receive data from 2019 due to light’s maximum speed limit. Its ‘present’ would contain information from our pre-covid ‘past’! Even you reading this sentence right now, you're reading, in the ‘present’, something scribbled in the ‘past’ :)
What a strange condition life is to maintain an organism outside of thermodynamic equilibrium for a few decades?
~ Bernardo Kastrup | Analytic Idealism: When We Die and the Meaning of Life
During The Celebration of The Divine Liturgy, The Holy Church prays as one body. However, the body extends beyond just those physically present there and then. All under The Holy Spirit’s Guidance, The Holy Church approved different versions of The Divine Liturgy that various church fathers penned. Therefore, the body necessarily includes the works and worship of those before. In fact, Ammachi’s birth and baptism each represented new pages in The Holy Church’s book, which we cannot know in its totality.
Moreover, The Church’s Life extends far into the distant future. Each body member fulfills a distinct purpose on a chosen day but shares the ideal same DNA. Similarly, The Holy Spirit cohesively conducts each member's organic operation.
The Eternal Nature of God, the essence-energies distinction, Theosis and The Incarnation-Crucifixion-Resurrection trifecta’s implication on our resurrections should all ground my perspective on personal identity.⁶ God’s revelations emphasize His Lack of Limits, while illuminating the paradoxical implications of some of our ordinary intuitions. The dynamic mystery of time intimately connects with God’s Plan for the world, for the past, present and future become real when they relate to His Plan.
I am the Alpha and the Omega, says The Lord God, Who Is And Who Was And Who Is To Come, The Almighty...
...Then, I turned to see The Voice That Was Speaking To Me; and, on turning, I saw seven golden lampstands and, in the midst of the lampstands, One like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden girdle round His Breast; His Head and His Hair were white as white wool, white as snow; His Eyes were like a flame of fire, His Feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and His Voice was like the sound of many waters; in His Right Hand, He held seven stars; from His Mouth, issued a sharp two-edged sword; and, His Face was like the sun shining in full strength.
When I saw Him, I fell at His Feet as though dead. But, He laid His Right Hand upon me, saying:
Fear not: I AM The First and The Last, and The Living One; I died, and behold: I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.
~ Revelations 1:8; 17-18, RSV
The truth of impermanence remains true of life as i experience it, not reality as it is. Many scenes make a movie, but i can only experience life’s story scene by scene. Nevertheless, my inherently subjective limitations, my inability to grasp the abstract without biting it, do not and cannot limit reality itself. Entropy’s unstoppably dynamic current makes it seem as if the river of time moves forward, but it's a river wholly existing nonetheless. The delta and headwaters are equally the river, as the opening and closing scenes are the movie.
As such, i believe the tiny toddler version of Ammachi is innocently playing upstream. She has just woken up for her first day at Ms. Baker Memorial Girls’ School but hasn't even contemplated where life will take her. Similarly, my progeny - hopefully mimetic and maybe genetic - are happily frolicking downstream: they currently experience joy and grief, elation and heartbreak, deprivation and triumph. All weigh equally on the scales of objective reality, manifesting both to and as God, The One Subject.
Saying “time flies” seemingly misconstrues time’s nature, for it falsely implies that time exists, like a bird, as an independent, individual thing within the broadest metaphysical context. Instead, “i perceive time’s flow” might be the most modest claim i can make about time’s motion because it carries with it no objective existential import. Accepting time’s inherent complexity involves trusting God’s Loving Guidance, as He gives us the clock to grow closer to Him. Perhaps, apophatically and mystically embracing antinomic truths may be our best tool for studying The Divine Mysteries Beyond Comprehension.
The Order of Happiness
Finally, i've always wondered about the order of happiness and action. If my happiness depended on executing an action, satiating a desire, then will i be happy? Unless i escape desire's vicious grip, i will never be happy. If i condition my happiness on the world becoming happy first, i'm holding my own happiness hostage. Thus, the ‘action before happiness’ order falls short according to the standards of logic and pragmatism.
Instead, i believe happiness, peace and tranquility precede action. If the world appeared as a perfectly unified whole, would i desire to reconfigure it? To create a happy world, i must first be happy myself. Since unhappy people cannot create a happy world, i can only contribute my happy self to facilitate the world becoming happy. Absent any problem to solve, would my desire to reconfigure reality dissolve?
Ammachi’s persona—especially, during her final days—reflected an unshakable sense of cheer. If you asked her how she was doing, she’d say, "i’m very fine." If you asked her how she was feeling, she’d say, "i’m very happy." Even as her waning cognitive faculties left her increasingly confused, she kept a smile on her face - instead of “goodbye,” she’d say “hi” or “good night”. Therefore, instead of “goodbye ~ Ammachi”, i say “good night ~ Ammachi”, for, in faith, hope and love, i know you will wake again.
Epilogue
Physical death concludes our current physical existence as we know it. As my metaphysical understanding has evolved, i’ve grown increasingly convinced that my subjectivity not only witnesses physical death but also survives it. Meta-suffering (i.e., self-imposed existential dread) haunts me no longer, for exquisite meaning warmly embraces me. If infusing my life with meaning necessarily involves fearing death, i'm happy to pay the cover. i would rather live fearing death than live an unexamined life void of such fear. The end of dissociation releases the insights you've accumulated about life's big questions into the larger cognitive context, the very fabric of reality itself.
Apart from angels and demons, we haven't interacted with anything like us anywhere else in the universe—let alone, on this planet. Feel life and celebrate it. Express gratitude to God for this day. Believe in the best of people until your breath expires. See Christ in them, and continuously fulfill dreams. As far as we know, we are the only corporeal species with the metacognizant eyes of nature, distinguishing our immense moral responsibility towards all non-human beings, both animate and inanimate! You're blessed with the opportunity to guide other beings to The Path, for the matter within your body somehow collectively configures itself such that it correlates with your awareness experiencing the here and now.
You – a giant lump of atoms – can only find yourself in a universe where the strengths of the fundamental forces and the masses of the sub-atomic particles allow atoms to form. And what a journey those unlikely atoms have been on! Their constituent parts forming within minutes of The Big Bang, [coalescing] at recombination before hurtling across space, spinning into stars, exploding back into space, pulled into planets and eventually ending up inside a brain capable of contemplating its place in this vast and intricate universe.
~ Colin Stuart, David Kelly | Why Is Everything Made Of Atoms?
Only in the spatiotemporal nexus of here and now can you genuinely make contact with experience. Only in the present moment can you recall past events and anticipate future possibilities. As i am before i will be, i am before i was.
Before you step into the dark abyss at the edge of where the light of understanding illuminates the ground, faith assuringly whispers that you will have a place on which to stand or be taught how to fly. Living with mystery and faith gently integrates reality as a unified whole in clear, non-distorted awareness.
Remember, then, What You Received And Heard. Keep That, and repent. If you will not awake, I will come like a thief; and, you will not know at what hour I will come upon you. Yet, you have still a few names in Sardis, people who have not soiled their garments; and, they shall walk with Me in white, for they are worthy. He who conquers shall be clad thus in white garments, and I will not blot his name out of The Book Of Life; I will confess his name before My Father and before His Angels. He who has an ear ~ let him hear what The Spirit says to the churches.
~ Revelations 3:3-6, RSV
While everything has an appointed time, The Lord affords victory to those who diligently wait for His Coming. Though eternity be on our minds, we cannot ascertain the deepest dimensions of God's Intentions. Nevertheless, man’s search for meaning cannot and must not cease, for the search itself makes sense of the incomprehensible.
though our physical bodies always experience change, our ineffable essence remains
Core Bibliography
Old Testament
prayer before reading The Holy Scriptures
Merciful God ~ enlighten our inner eyes to understand The Holy Scriptures. Make us worthy to profitably learn from The Glorious Things Hidden In It, and help us live according to Its Precepts. amin
~ Adapted from The Green Book of Common Prayers, pg. 368
proverbs, chapter 2, verses 1 through 5
My Child ~ if you will receive My Sayings and hide My Commands with you in order to incline your ear toward wisdom, then you shall apply your heart to understanding. For, if you cry out for understanding, if you lift your voice for insight, if you seek her like silver and search her out like treasure, then you will understand The Fear Of Yahweh; and, The Knowledge Of God, you will find.
~ Proverbs 2:1-5, LEB
ecclesiastes, chapter 3, verses 1 through 15
For everything, there is an appointed time, a time for every matter under heaven: a time to bear and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to root up what is planted; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones and a time to gather stones; a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek and a time to lose; a time to keep and a time to throw away; a time to tear and a time to sew; a time to be silent and a time to speak; a time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time for peace.
What does the worker gain in his toil? I have seen The Busyness God Gives To Humans To Preoccupy Them. He has made everything suitable in its time. He also has put the past in their hearts, yet no one can grasp What God Does From The Beginning To The End. So, I realized that there is nothing better for them than to rejoice and enjoy themselves during their lives. And, for anyone to eat and drink (i.e., to enjoy the fruit of all his toil), this also is a Gift Of God.
I know Everything God Does endures forever; nothing can be added to It, and nothing can be taken from It; for, God so acts that humans might stand in awe before Him. What is, it already was; and, what will be, it already is; for, God will do What He Has Done.
~ ecclesiastes 3:1-15, LEB
New Testament
prayer before reading Catholic or Pauline Epistles
Lord, God ~ receive the prayers and petitions we offer You. Make us worthy to observe The Precepts of Your Holy Apostles and of Paul, The Architect of Your Church, forever and ever. amin
~ Adapted from The Green Book of Common Prayers, pg. 368
2 peter, chapter 3, verses 1 through 13
This is now the 2nd letter that I have written to you ~ beloved ~ and, in both of them, I have aroused your sincere mind by way of reminder: that you should remember The Predictions Of The Holy Prophets and The Commandment Of The Lord And Savior Through Your Apostles. First of all, you must understand this: that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own passions and saying:
Where is The Promise Of His Coming? For, ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation.
They deliberately ignore this fact: that, by The Word Of God, heavens existed long ago; and, an earth formed out of water and by means of water through which the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. But, by The Same Word, the heavens and earth that now exist have been stored up for fire, being kept until The Day Of Judgment and destruction of ungodly men.
But, do not ignore this one fact ~ beloved: that, with The Lord, one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years, as one day. The Lord is not slow about His Promise as some count slowness but is forbearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish but that all should reach repentance. But, The Day Of The Lord will come like a thief; and, then, the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, the elements will be dissolved with fire and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up.
Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of persons ought you to be: in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening The Coming Of The Day Of God because of which the heavens will be kindled and dissolved and the elements will melt with fire! But, according to His Promise, we wait for New Heavens and a New Earth in which righteousness dwells.
~ 2 Peter 3:3-13, RSV
1 corinthians, chapter 15, verses 35 through 58
But, some one will ask:
How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?
You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And, what you sow is not the body, which is to be, but a bare kernel—perhaps, of wheat or of some other grain. But, God gives it a body as He has chosen and, to each kind of seed, its own body. For, not all flesh is alike, but there is one kind for men, another for animals, another for birds and another for fish. There are celestial bodies, and there are terrestrial bodies; but, the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon and another glory of the stars; for, star differs from star in glory.
So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus, it is written:
Yahweh, God, formed the man of dust from the ground, and He blew, into his nostrils, The Breath Of Life; and, the man became a Living Creature.
The last Adam became a Life-giving Spirit. But, it is not the spiritual which is first but the physical and, then, the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; The Second Man is from Heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is The Man Of Heaven, so are Those Who Are Of Heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear The Image Of The Man Of Heaven. I tell you this ~ brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit The Kingdom Of God nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.
Lo: I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed—in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For, the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable and we shall be changed. For, this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
Death is swallowed up in victory. Oh, death ~ where is your victory? Oh, death ~ where is your sting?
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is The Law. But, thanks be to God, Who Gives Us The Victory Through Our Lord, Jesus Christ.
Therefore ~ my beloved brethren ~ be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in The Work Of The Lord, knowing that, in The Lord, your labor is not in vain.
~ 1 Corinthians 15:35-58, RSV
Prayer Before Reading The Holy Gospel
Oh, Lord, God ~ grant us The Knowledge of Your Divine Words, and fill us with The Understanding of Your Holy Gospel, The Richness of Your Divine Gifts and The Endowments of Your Holy Spirit. Grant that we joyfully keep Your Commandments, fulfill Your Will and receive Your Merciful Blessings. Our Lord and Our God, now and forever. amin
~ Adapted from The Green Book of Common Prayers, pg. 368
matthew, chapter 25, verses 1 through 13
Then, The Kingdom Of Heaven shall be compared to ten maidens who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. For, when the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; but, the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, they all slumbered and slept. But, at midnight, there was a cry: "Behold: the bridegroom! Come out to meet him." Then, all those maidens rose and trimmed their lamps. And, the foolish said to the wise: "Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out." But, the wise replied: "Perhaps there will not be enough for us and for you; go, rather, to the dealers and buy for yourselves." And, while they went to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast; and, the door was shut. Afterward, the other maidens came also, saying: "Lord, lord ~ open to us." But, he replied: "Truly, I say to you: I do not know you." Watch, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.
~ Matthew 25:1-13, RSV
Prayer After Reading The Holy Scriptures
Oh, Triune God ~ we offer praise, glory and thanksgiving to You for providing us with The Life-Giving Words in The Holy Scriptures. amin
~ Adapted from The Green Book of Common Prayers, pg. 369
Supplemental Bibliography
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Analytic Idealism with Bernado Kastrup | Essentia Foundation (course)
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Change is Inevitable, Awareness is Eternal (Ram Dass, lecture)
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Death and Dying - (Frank Ostaseski, podcast)
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Life after Death - (William Irvine, podcast)
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A Stoic Death - (William Irvine, podcast)
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The Lessons of Death - (Sam Harris, podcast)
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Life in the Shadow of Death - (Jason & Miles Rosenthal, podcast)
Postface
Think of this discussion as a dynamic representation of my current understanding. Although we can neither create nor destroy energy, correct knowledge helps facilitate its transformation. Accordingly, wouldn't it be fair to consider concepts as mimetic energy accurately mapped to symbols, terms and propositions? i primarily wrote this with myself as the intended audience. Less a static statue and more a mimetic organism, my learnings should grow like flourishing volcanic islands. Simple matter must first relate before complex, interconnected networks of living systems start forming. Generally, my understanding of any material—especially, of topics as significant as these—should continue accreting as i recreationally evolve.
If you believe i employed either fallacious reasoning or non-truths (i.e., falsities or incomplete truths) to make my case, please let me know how and where. Conversely, should any topic particularly pique your interest, please let me know. Let's reach the harbor of good ideas together!
Sharing good ideas is the cornerstone of my publishing adventure, and all good ideas are true ideas. Therefore, i strive to authentically express the truths revealed to me. None—i repeat, none!—of the ideas conveyed here originated in my mind. Instead, Someone entered them into my stewardship and tasked me with fashioning them such that the inaccessible may be slightly more accessible. Call Him what you want, but i know My King's Voice when i hear It.
May all glory and honor be to The Blessed Trinity - The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit - now and always, forever and ever. amin. ☦️
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For the sake of brevity, i concentrated these dense claims into one paragraph. However, the entire exploration deserves an expository essay.
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i'll reserve a comprehensive discussion of each after i've properly studied them! as of this point in time, my reading of The Holy Bible - let alone the commentary of The Church Father - is far (FAR!) from complete :)
first time reading? please check out the sailing manual for helpful guidance!