4 What Is After My Demise?
Diana knew what she wanted the answer to be as to her life after death. She just didn’t want the answer to be her own made-up answer. Diana wanted her answer to be true, whether verifiably so or not. Diana didn’t want to accept an answer for its comfort or convenience, or even for its other beneficial effect on her life. Diana was willing, indeed insistent, on accepting the reality of life or no life after death. She just didn’t want to be fooled either way, into or out of a fruitful belief. So, Diana set about her search as if her life depended on it. Before too long, Diana came to find out that her life did depend on it. And Diana was very glad for the extraordinarily good news that it brought.
Postlude
Isn’t that the big question that one’s demise instantly raises? Is death final, or does something exist for us beyond it? For some folks, death does not at all raise the question of what lies beyond. They’ve answered the question in the negative. Life is evanescent. It ends in death and the utter disintegration of the person. At the spectrum’s other end, we find many folks embracing their transcendent existence after death, in the higher realm from which all meaning and material come. In between along the spectrum, other folks take a range of views that one’s existence takes some form or continues in some respect without form, individually or collectively. Given the difficulty of answering the question, and the mystery that it leaves, you’ll find answers all along the spectrum from nothing to everything and all points in between. You’ve plainly got some work to do to decide what’s real, true, and right. Fortunately, though, the answers are there, and as the above story illustrates, the answers bring the best possible good news.
Necessity
First consider, though, whether one must answer the question of what comes after one’s demise. In one sense, the question begs no answer, for those who would say that nothing lies beyond death. What do you mean, beyond death? the materialist might respond to the question about one’s post-demise state, seeing the answer as self-evident and the question therefore meaningless. To the materialist, the question is a waste of time insofar as their material perspective precludes anything but one answer. So, no, the question of what happens after one’s demise is not necessary to answer if one already has the answer within one’s particular perspective. To the materialist, one simply lives one’s life according to the dictates of materialism, dust to dust and ashes to ashes. If dust you are, then to dust you shall return.
Perspectives
Yet perspective is precisely the question. The question of what happens to you after your demise demands that you evaluate perspectives. To take a perspective first and then answer the question from that perspective is to defy the logic and purpose of the question. Thus, first suspend your various worldviews or lenses through which you might answer the question, in order to evaluate those perspectives. You don’t want to answer the ultimate question, when your answer depends on presuppositions that you haven’t examined. Don’t let an unexamined perspective that the culture or an affinity group silently and surreptitiously handed you for your discrete digestion. Instead, answer the question as reliably, deeply, and profoundly as you can so that when your time nears your confidence in the answer remains unshaken. You don’t want your impending demise to suddenly reveal to you unexamined issues troubling your view of what’s about to happen. Avoid the upset. Investigate before your time of trouble, if possible, so that you’ll be able to stand firm on what you discern and discover.
Contingency
You might even discover that your comprehension now of what happens to you after your demise affects what happens to you after your demise. That would not be at all strange if it were so, as indeed it is so. Much else that we decide about our world and our place in it affects what we do and thus what happens to us. Discern, for instance, that the world is relatively ordered, patterned, hierarchical, and just, and you’ll likely throw yourself into it and, believing in your efficacy, flourish as a result. But decide instead that the world is unstable and unjust, and you may give up and accordingly make a mess of your life. Why wouldn’t your view of your transcendence beyond death not likewise affect your course, in a relatively just, patterned, ordered, and hierarchical world? If you don’t believe in a real thing, you won’t generally gain its benefit. If you don’t discern your transcendent future, the lesser future you discern may indeed be your terribly unfortunate course. You thus have good reason to accept that your view of life beyond death is necessary not only to your peace of mind during your transition to the transcendent but also to your transcendence.
Wisdom
Whether or not you must answer the question of what is after your demise, you might be wise to do so. It may just be beneficial now, in this earthly realm, to know your transcendent future. You decide who lives better, the one who sees every word and act as having eternal significance in a glorious future, or the one who refuses to consider the question of a future at all? The answer should be obvious that your embrace of your transcendent future is the surest way to benefit yourself and others. Notice, though, that it is not your imagination of a transcendent future that supplies the benefit but instead your realization of it. As the apostle Paul wrote, if our hope of transcendence is for this life alone, then we deserve more pity than anyone. Wisdom comes not with false imagination but by aligning our thoughts and actions with what is true and real. Live with the expectation of transcendence, and see if you don’t begin to live more fully and effectively, having aligned your inner being with your external circumstance, including its vital transcendent dimension. And if you do indeed live better, take that flourishing as evidence that your conclusion is true.
Materialism
Materialism is the great modern obstacle to this sort of considered thinking about transcendent experience. Materialism is the sea in which we swim without noticing its perspectival effects. Denying the transcendent, materialism argues that everything is reducible to its discrete parts, as atoms compose cells and cells compose organisms of which humans are organically indistinguishable types. What, though, of meaning, pattern, purpose, and rationality, the very constructs by which materialists make their judgments? Who is their author, or what is their source? Neither material alone nor its random arrangement can account for that which we understand. What we discern, recognize, and understand carries meaning and purpose rather than reflects randomness. Material is only material and cannot on its own generate meaning, which inevitably transcends material. Don’t let a materialism that is neither true nor capable of generating discernment purport to answer a question that it cannot even ask.
Phenomenology
From the ancients until now, humans have always drawn on the transcendent for consciousness, rationality, and reason. Every phenomenon we encounter, everything that we can identify as a construct and give a name, convinces us again that the world is far more than material. Transcendence may not be in our dead bones, but it is in our life, minds, and hearts, and in every object that has pattern and thus has identity and purpose. We know from our own senses that all meaning descends from an ultimate embodied ideal that must lie beyond the material that composes us and with which we must deal. The beings who we are and the being that we encounter in everything that we can name is beyond the material and more than the sum of its parts. And so we search for the source of this transcendence, suspecting that the only way that we will discover it is by its own revelation.
Revelation
More than three millennia ago, that revelation began its specific expression, which itself would take more than a millennium to record. The sacred writings revealed a much closer relationship between humans and the ultimate embodied ideal from beyond than we might have expected, indeed so close as to call us the ideal’s very image. The writings foretold that the ideal would enter the world in the humblest human form, to elevate and restore humankind to its transcendent destiny, not with power and might but instead through loving sacrifice. Two millennia ago, the foretold event occurred at history’s precise turning point, when the ideal’s entry into its own world would subvert the world’s deadly might and invert the world’s mortal hierarchy, moving a fierce love from the bottom to which the world’s death had subjugated it to the transcendent and eternal top where it belonged. The world’s history since then has been the flowering of this revelation around the globe to all its parts.
Rescue
The transcendent ideal entered the world not to condemn it further, as death had already condemned humankind, but instead to rescue humankind from death and to give us eternally transcendent life. To accomplish that incomparable feat so long foretold, the transcendent ideal gave its own life over to death in perfectly innocent, complete, and awful sacrifice. By doing so, the transcendent ideal turned death from the tool of human defeat to its rightful place as the author of human being and life. The transcendent ideal conquered the destructive power of death, restoring death to its rightful place as nothing more nor less than the path to eternally transcendent life. The transcendent ideal thus revealed itself as the rescuer and redeemer of life.
Resurrection
To perfect and prove its feat as the conqueror and transformer of death into eternal life in the realm beyond, the transcendent ideal rose from death to transformed and perfect life. Not only that, but the transcendent ideal promised transformed and perfect life to all who would recognize the transcendent ideal’s role as the rescuer of humankind through the transcendent ideal’s own resurrected life. The power of this complete and fully generative account of the world from its beginning to its end has so far transformed the lives of billions on earth. It will continue to do so until the transcendent ideal reunites earth with the transcendent realm from which the ideal generated earth. Join the billions who have embraced this account and as a consequence walked into glory.
Afterward
The afterward that the transcendent ideal’s record describes is indeed one of heaven reunited with earth. When you embrace the transcendent ideal and its offer of rescue, you too receive the promise of resurrected life. Your resurrected life after death won’t be vaporous but instead embodied in your own person, mind, and identity. Nor will your resurrected life after death be broken or corrupt but instead without pain or tear. You and those of yours who join you in the ideal’s loving embrace will enjoy eternal paradise. Much more than that, we cannot tell. Yet isn’t that more than enough? Just know the extraordinary assurance of your transformed and eternal life after death, in your necessary embrace of the ultimate transcendent one who came from beyond to give you that life.
Reflection
What lies beyond your demise for you? Do you treat that question as one that you must or should answer? From what perspective do you believe you may be answering that question? Do you recognize that you have a perspective and can change perspectives? Have you evaluated worldviews from which to answer the question of what lies beyond your demise? How would you do so? Do you accept that what lies for you beyond your demise may depend on how you view what lies beyond? Would you change your view of what lies beyond if you realized that you could affect it for the better? Does your view of what lies beyond your demise lend wisdom to your life? Do you recognize transcendence in your own consciousness and rationality? Do you see transcendence around you? Do you know transcendence’s source? Do you know the thousand-year account of the revelation of the transcendent one? Do you know the contour, if not also the details, of the transcendent one’s rescue of humankind from death? Have you acknowledged that rescue in the way that assures you of participating in it? Would you do so if you knew how? Do you have someone trustworthy and knowledgeable with whom you can speak about it?
Key Points
The answer to what lies beyond our demise is rich with eternal life.
Regard the question of what lies beyond death as necessary to life.
The answer to what lies beyond our demise depends on perspective.
What lies beyond our demise depends on what we accept and embrace.
Wisdom in this life depends on knowing what lies beyond our demise.
A materialist perspective distorts what we know of transcendent life.
The phenomena we observe show us life’s transcendent dimension.
The revelation of what lies beyond death began millennia ago.
The revelation was the ultimate ideal’s entry into the world as human.
The transcendent one came in sacrifice to rescue humankind.
The transcendent one’s resurrection gave us access to eternal life.