Beyond Heaven and Earth

by Steven H. Propp

  It was blinding in the sense that you couldn’t perceive individual objects within it; everything was undifferentiated. But it wasn’t a painful kind of blinding; it was more like a completely pure kind of light, with only a single shade of an exquisitely white light that was all around you, and everywhere.

  But no, that’s not correct, either. There were different colors in the light, yet they were all white. But how many shades and gradations of white there were! I had always thought that white light was a single, undifferentiated thing, yet there were so many variations, it was beyond belief. From almost translucent, to the brightest pure white. Why hadn’t I ever noticed that?

  In life, I had thought that a rainbow comprised all of the possible colors, but that was wrong: white doesn’t even appear in the rainbow, and yet the variety of colors within the category of “white” alone was infinite. It was only because of my limitations, that I had thought otherwise.

  How could I not have known this? It is so obvious, now…

  I remembered that you weren’t supposed to look directly at light—such as looking at the sun, or a solar eclipse; because you could burn your cornea, and permanently damage your vision.

  But this light was different: it was blinding, and yet it was completely visible. It differentiated nothing, and yet it illumined everything. It was not painful, but it felt warm, healing. You were drawn to it. It felt familiar, you felt as if you knew it, and had always known it.

  It was changing. I couldn’t tell whether I was moving, or whether the scene around me was moving, or both; or neither. But it didn’t matter—all that mattered was that the light was everywhere.

  I didn’t have a body, but it didn’t matter. There was nothing here that required me to have a body; all I needed was awareness.

  Why had I never realized what a burden it was to be physical? How much of an effort it required, to constantly be straining against the force of gravity. To have to drag yourself out of bed in the morning, to feel the soreness in your muscles, to experience the increased blurring in your eyesight as you got older. You had to get up, to move about, to try and get your stiff limbs functioning. No matter what you do in the physical body, there is always the sense of effort, of discomfort; of the straining of your muscles, the twisting and bending of your joints, the resistance of physical objects to your pull or push. And it is all so unnecessary; there is absolutely no need to be a physical being—all you need is your awareness. Awareness can encompass everything; there is nothing else you need.

  Without physicality, you are free. No longer are there the myriad of minor aches and pains that are associated with being a physical being. Without a body, you no longer have a growling stomach, or rumbling intestines; you can’t drool, burp, or break wind. You do not feel tired, or fatigued. And remarkably, there is no heartbeat throbbing inside your chest, to make you consciously aware of the passing of time.

  Yes, there are sequential thoughts and experiences, as well as memories; yet you do not seem to be “in time” as you were during your time while living in a body.

  And my mind, my awareness: it had clarity such as I have never experienced— not even in my highest emotional moments of intellectual or creative activity while on earth. In life, I would feel exalted on occasions when I felt that I had finally grasped some truth, or invented something novel and creative, yet these memories are laughable to me now. That was not creativity—true creativity is what is now all around me. Although my own mind was still limited by my knowledge, my experience, and my vocabulary that I learned back on earth, everything was completely different now. There was no more struggling to remember things, no need to strain to comprehend anything. The things that were, you simply knew, and that’s all there was to it.

  I remembered how in life I had thought that I was engaged in a quest for “truth.” How pitiful and absurd this quest was. All of my arguments, my intellectual gamesmanship, my cognitive parrying back and forth—inventing arguments and counter-arguments, cover-ups and obfuscation—meant nothing at all; when you knew, there was no need for pretense, no need for games, hypotheses, or techniques.

  And I felt—ashamed.

  Ashamed of who I was, what I was, what I had become.

  What arrogance I had felt in earthly life! I had no shame in calling someone a “phony,” or a “faker.” I felt superior to those with beliefs I considered naïve, or uninformed. Yet what level of knowledge did I have? What had I achieved? I had known nothing. All my intellectual pretensions were a sham, a fake; and I knew it, all the time, deep down.

  Return to life? Reincarnate? Resurrect from the dead? The body I had left behind was bloody, ripped apart by a bullet; would I want it restored, and revived? No, of course not. Now that I had seen the truth, how could I bear to forget it, and return to a life filled with pain, tears, frustration, and anxiety? I did-n’t care what I had left behind; I had no desire to find out what had become of my family or friends, because that life is only an illusion; it isn’t real—this is what is real.

  I thought about all of the cares and concerns of earthly life: Money, sex, politics, fame—they were all for naught. None of that really matters. Yes, I am aware that other people may have been hurt by the armed robber that killed me. I realize that my sister, brother-in-law, niece and nephew may be saddened when they hear of my death. But one day they will understand: Our time on earth isn’t even the barest moment, on the scale of eternity.

  And most important, you realize that nothing is eternally lost, nothing can be irretrievably harmed; since we live on, there is nothing to worry about, nothing to be anxious about. And one day, all of us will understand this…

  The things that mattered were not doctrine, or beliefs. Such things were only human attempts to express the inexpressible. The only things that were real were the unity of the light, and love.

  Love.

  The one I love, above all else.

  I remember Sophia.

  Sophia: The one whose loss devastated me so completely, the one for whom I would have given anything in my earthly power to have spoken with just one last time…and I felt again the longing, the desire, the love that I had for her.

  But how could she have spoken with me? What could she have told me that I possibly could have comprehended? Could I have understood her explaining that white light has an infinite variety of hues? Or that this light was really all that there was? Could I have understood what a burden it was having a body? Could I have understood how self-righteous, how ignorant, how futile all my arguments would have seemed to her? Suppose that I had been able to contact her, through some kind of spiritistic medium? And that I asked her a lot of foolish questions about religion, remarriage, my career, and other matters of purely earthly concern? The idea was laughable; how could someone from this realm remember what the former life was like? Why would they want to? And what would I tell her? Would I try and tell her, ‘what kind of week I had at work,’ ‘what the latest international news was,’ ‘what the weather was like,’ ‘what her parents had for dinner,’ and so on? There is nothing I could say that would matter to her, her having now seen this realm. And there was absolutely nothing she could have told me, no wisdom she might have imparted, that could have helped me grasp the reality of this sphere, while I was still trapped in the earthly realm.

  And I understood how—having once experienced this realm—one was not able to go back to earthly life. It was not a case of Sophia wanting, or not wanting, to communicate with me after her death; she would simply have known that there was no point or purpose to going backwards. It wasn’t that you were “ignoring” your earthly loved ones or their needs, because you now knew that your loved ones were in no danger: earthly life was not the end of our existence, because we lived on. In due course, they would die themselves, and then they would know that all their anxieties were for naught. The purpose of existence was to move forward, not backwa
rd, and one could not move forward while remaining on the earthly plane. Forward, not backward; that is obviously the unvarying rule. One must move forward. One must forget about the past, and live in the present.

  “Nothing that you once experienced is ever truly forgotten.”

  That thought entered my awareness; yet I knew that it was not “my” thought; it came from some source outside of myself.

  “Your physical brain on earth may not have been able to retrieve all the information, but your experiences are all still stored inside you, and they are having their cumulative effects on your current self.”

  And a form began to materialize in front of me.

  * * *

  This was the first time I had seen something distinct within all of the light; everything else was simply blending into the whole.

  But this was a definite figure, of a person.

  A tall, skinny form; with longish sandy blond hair, and long black sideburns, and ill-fitting clothes in an outdated style.

  But also a smile: a warm, loving smile, and broad eyes filled with openness, and acceptance, and self-deprecating humor. And kindness. And consideration for others. And a gentle, tender patience that not everyone could see.

  It’s my uncle Rick—my favorite uncle from childhood.

  The one that I saw at all holidays, or family occasions such as weddings or funerals. The only other family member who had lived near us.

  The one person who always took seriously my childish statements, my rambling fantasy stories, and my juvenile emotions, and treated them with respectful consideration, as one would treat a venerated adult. The one person who was always willing to sit down and draw with me, to read books to me, to play board games with me, to let me ride on his shoulders like a horse, to play soldier with me and fall down when I “shot” him, to play ball with me, to teach me how to play musical instruments—while all of the other adults were off in the next room, drinking their wine and cocktails, and talking about all of their “important” adult business. I saw visions of these happy times flash in front of me, and I was overwhelmed with the forgotten sense of love that I had felt for him when I was young. How could I have forgotten about Uncle Rick?

  And yet now I knew: He died when he was fairly young, only about age 30, and I was about eight. Although no one in the family ever talked about it either at his funeral or afterwards, I now knew the true story: Uncle Rick was an alcoholic, who had remained single and childless all of his short life. I understood that it had finally caught up with him, and he had died in a single car crash while driving drunk, and that the family had tried to “hush up” the matter, out of shame.

  But I wasn’t ashamed of him; he was my uncle, and I loved him…

  I only knew who he had been, and what he had meant to me. I could remember only the laughing, infinitely patient face of the uncle that I had loved so much as a child, who let me pull his sideburns, or accidentally poke him in the eye, without ever losing his temper with me. Who—even when the other “adults” would be talking negatively about him in the next room—never took offense, nor spoke out against them to me, or even spoke in defense of himself and his own behavior. I knew that the other adults had a bad opinion of him, but I only knew his treatment of me. Other adults would greet me with false enthusiasm, in an exaggerated “baby talk,” and then talk or play with me for a minute or two; but once the immediate novelty of it wore off, they returned to their “adult” concerns and ignored me.

  But not Uncle Rick: He would sit with me for hours on end, listening to and interacting with my childish babbling. He would play whatever parts I asked him to play in my stories and fantasies; he would jump up to fetch any toys I requested, and pick them up when I just as quickly lost interest, and wanted something else. The other adults used to reproach him for constantly catering to my every wish, insisting that he was “spoiling” me, but he would calmly reply that, “Jobey will only be a kid for a short time; let him have some fun!”

  Jobey. No one except him had ever called me that; that name was like a secret code between us. It signaled the special bond, the special communication that we shared. He was the one person who always took the time out for me; who carried me on his back even though it was aching from him working all week; who was always willing to play with me, who treated my childish babblings as if they were serious conversation, even when the other adults were all busily ‘shushing’ us. He was the one who, when every one else gave me commercial greeting cards and money for my birthdays and Christmas, always carefully hand-wrote and hand-drew silly cards that made me laugh, and that I kept in my drawer as if they were precious artifacts. Who hand-wrote and personally delivered special notes to me at the end of school each year, telling me how proud the family was of me for how well I was doing in school. The uncle that always made me feel ‘special,’ and valuable, and loved—and whose presence I missed so terribly at family gatherings thereafter, but whose name I was never even allowed to mention after his death— until ultimately, he faded from my memory. Until now.

  I was stricken with remorse; how could I have forgotten about him so completely? When I thought that I’d loved him so much? I felt an overwhelming surge of sorrow and shame for having forgotten so completely about him; I wanted to say something to him, to apologize for the many, many years in which he was absent from my thoughts, and my heart…

  But the gentle look in his eyes, and the kindly smile I remembered so well made me realize that there was no need. “It’s not like I had been doing much with my life, anyway.” I sensed, rather than heard, his words. “Welcome, Jobey.” I felt an emotion such as I felt during life when my eyes were brimming with tears, but I had no physical eyes to overflow—there was just emotion, and awareness.

  Although I had just been regretting all the years that I had forgotten about him, and been without my fond memory of him, I realized that it really hadn’t been so long at all. And although I felt ashamed for having forgotten him so completely, I again saw that there was no need for regret: my Uncle Rick was fine; in fact, he was better than he had ever been when I ever knew him in life. No longer did he have to disappear briefly every hour or two, to (as I now knew) take a quick shot of vodka, in order to stave off his craving for liquor. No: his cravings, and addictions, and all the other millstones associated with having been a physical being, were happily behind him.

  His appearance was somewhat vague, as if it were disappearing. Yet I sensed that it was him, with an absolute certainty of knowledge; it was like when you know that a particular person is walking behind you, or that a special person is on the other end of the phone, even before they speak. You know at a level that is so deep, there are no words to describe it.

  “I only appeared to you in this form so that you would recognize me, since you’re so used to looking at people that look like this,” he communicated to me. “In reality, we no longer have physical forms in the sense you would expect. Try and look down at yourself, for instance.”

  I realized that I could not; I didn’t have a physical neck to bend, and I somehow knew that I would not have a physical body to view, even if I could. It was as if I were looking into a telescope or similar object that restricted my visual field, and yet I had an unbelievable sense of peripheral vision. I felt as though there was nothing that could happen above me, below me, or on any side of me, of which I could be unaware.

  He projected his message, “That is why we have no need of mirrors, or other ways of looking at oneself here. Why would you even want to look at yourself, unless you were doing it with the kind of self-conscious emphasis on superficial external appearances that so dominated our earthly lives? The only type of looking at oneself that we countenance here is looking inward, with the notion of improving oneself.

  “Being in three-dimensional space during your earthly life tends to make you think that that is how reality truly is; but actually, the only thing th
at matters is perception. As long as you can perceive something, it doesn’t matter if you’re at the top of a mountain, the bottom of the ocean, in the deepest reaches of space, or wherever. Something is present for you, and that’s all that matters. This instant of present perception can take place anywhere, while occupying no space whatsoever. This level of existence we are in occupies no more space than does a thought: it is absolutely dimensionless. There are not billions and billions of souls here who are occupying their own assigned ‘turf,’ or crowding around to be in the presence of God, Jesus Christ, Buddha, or anything like that; everyone is simply where they need to be, because they can perceive things from anywhere.

  “Here, we don’t ‘travel’; that is, we don’t physically move from place to place. I wasn’t told that, ‘Rick, you need to hustle on over to the ‘Receiving’ station, so you can make sure that you meet Jobey as soon as he arrives.’ There is no need for ‘motion,’ because where we already are is always a perfectly acceptable place to be. And since we don’t have ‘bodies’ as such, they do not need the physical activity of walking in order to stay fit. All that is happening here is that our two awarenesses are able to communicate. It doesn’t require the placement of two separate collections of atoms into the same room, or anything like that, since everything that we are is already in the light of the infinite Mind, which is ever-present and all-pervasive here.”

  And I realized that I no longer perceived Rick with a physical appearance at all; there was no need—I knew he was here, and that it was him, and that was all that was necessary. His deepest essence was not determined by how old he appeared to be, how he wore his hair, whether he had a mole by the side of his nose, or whether he was overweight. His deepest essence was not even determined by who he had been at any given point on earth—his essence was simply who he was now, who he had become.