Schopenhauer once said that his life read like a novel written by a single author. I hope he found that novel written with meaning and purpose. Otherwise, it would represent the vicarious societal survival schemes that represent the normal conditioning state into which all of us are born. Schopenhauer did well if he created his own life’s narrative both in terms of his authenticity and the legacy he left behind. But today my interest looks beyond this myopic view of an author-ego’s short life story. Socrates, for example, could face his death sentence with equanimity because he believed in an immortal soul—an entity no mortal could create for himself. Plato, one of his pupils, saw the world, including everything in it, as mere reflections of ideas or perfect forms existing in the pure light of consciousness outside of the shadow existence we experience. Kant recognized an imperative that guided our moral evolution with a transcendent inevitability beyond our personal reckoning. And even the existentialist saw our existence floating like an island on a sea of nothingness. Their nearsightedness did not grant them the wisdom to understand that “nothingness” was merely “no-thingness.” For the sea that supports us in existence truly is no thing and cannot be named: “I am who am,” explained Moses’ God. What we do name are first the things we touch, see, hear, smell and taste, and second, the things we never truly understand, the world of metaphors, including the infinitely unknowable and “un-name-able.” Language cannot encompass the concept of “god.” Even our quantum physics fails to pin down the tiniest particles of matter with certainty, for only the probability of their appearance in the material world is predicted by quantum mechanics. Our physicists, you see, have raised the specter of a non-material dimension—of transcendent potentia–beyond the pale of our limited imaginings. For many centuries now we have identified this as the “god-dimension” or simply as God where reside all things possible. We invariably acknowledge an underlying ground of our being and an all pervasive consciousness at the core of our humanity, haunting our dreams, inspiring our insights, and motivating our more selfless inclinations. Quantum energy is not just a fundamental force of nature but the conscious force of everything and, possibly, the very face of God.

Many contemporary physicists and purveyors of the so-called perennial philosophy have told us our mortal lives are the ongoing reflection of a consciousness that exists outside of time and space. In this context, we are already immortal, though not in the storylines of a script written by our egos during their short lifetimes. Instead, we foreshadow in our very being what transcends all we know and everything that is. Our immortality reveals itself in the ecstatic arrest of wonder, in the flash of intuition, in the gravitational pull of selfless love, and in that moment of dazzling revelation when the clouds finally part. As William Blake once wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.” Our personal lives are just the flickering manifestations of the divine. Acceptance of that fact weaves each individual’s personal story into the fabric of our species’ evolution. And that evolution is a growing awareness of who we are and wherein we find true immortality. Remember “The kingdom of God comes unawares . . . For behold, the kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:20-21).”