Trajectories of a human life seem to follow discrete patterns across fixed domains. After all, we are physical beings and cognitive beings and beings of self and personality. In any given moment, we could observe our body or our mind or our very self. For example we might think “my stubbed toe hurts” (body) or “I’m thinking too much about my toe” (mind) or “I’m too much of a worrier” (self).
Each observation seems factual and solid. But is it?
After all, the toe pain passes along with thoughts about it and self-judgments in relation to it. The point here is that most everything in the moment seems solid and permanent before it is whisked away in another moment or two. The bottom line is that our sense of a fixed reality might be more illusory than it seems. Decades ago, the esteemed Person-Centered Psychologist of his time noted that we are “a process not a product” and he called this process “becoming a person”. We are not product or static. We are not solid and separate from everything else. A beloved Tibetan Buddhist Nun put it succinctly: “nothing solid is happening”.
This reflection reflects the wisdom of anicca or impermanence. Nothing lasts; all is process whether me or the days of my life. On a good day we could appreciate the day’s fleeting goodness all the more and on a bad day, well, it’s nice to remember that (from the Sufi Poets) “this too shall pass”.
We are a process; we are becoming; nothing lasts. The child’s body and mind give way to the teen’s. Our young adult body and mind age into middle age, then old age. We are becoming, in this sense, to our last breath. And maybe beyond…
In the fourth Century, the Bishop of Nyssa embraced these principles of process, becoming and growth by invoking the concept of epektasis. From the Greek, it connotes a kind of stretching out and evolving; “never to stop growing toward what is better and never placing any limits on perfection”… “God is indeed in you” (Beatitudes VI).
If there is an afterlife and how we arrive there no one knows for sure. Death empties us of body and perhaps of the brain’s mind as well. Maybe we arrive with empty bags, no baggage, not a “me” anymore…and we somehow and immediately merge with the Godhead, the Buddha Nature on the spot. God is indeed in you!
But what if we arrive, as some believe, with bags full of the past: of childhood’s ego and egotisms as well as the identities and confusions developed from adolescence onward– a whole lot of ME at those Pearly Gates. It could be a messy afterlife. But perhaps, in that full suitcase case, we are in process too. In epektasis. We are becoming for eternity, we are less and less me (and my identity), and more and more the Essence (the Godhead) that has always resided in and around me.
In the first case, our beatific transition might be considered sudden and immediate; in the latter case, gradual and eternal. And one more thing. What if these are one and the same? What if eternity is timeless; a mere split second? Then temporal notions of sudden and gradual disappear into that fateful eternity. Either way, what a fate, Amor Fati!
Maybe we should start unpacking now.
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