In these extraordinary times, religious remarks such as these seem common: “Nobody dies before their time”, “God is in control”, “Jesus is my sanitizer”, and “In God’s plans, nothing happens by chance.” These remarks are voiced by people from various religious traditions. On one hand they represent expressions of faith, religious fervor, and trust in a Superior power. They serve to comfort and give hope, they offer guidance, and represent solid ground for the believers. As such, nobody questions their value. On the other hand, if one thinks about them, with just small amount of critical thinking, they challenge the concept of God that so many have embraced.

In the U.S., we are now experiencing the dramatic expansion of Covid-19 virus, and the tragic death of so many people. The virus has been found in almost every country, and almost every large city of the planet. The media coverage brings the pandemic so close to all of us, and the world is transfixed by the horrible possibilities. The world over, people are adopting new behaviors, and learning to live in a new reality.

But, what does God have to do with it? 

If one believes in a God that keeps his thumb on every event of human existence, deciding on who contracts a disease, dies from it, or survives it, then God has everything to do with it. Our understanding of the role of God changes however, when take a small step back, away from the fears of the moment. Looking at a few points of our history on the planet, some things will inform the relativity of our views. Tuberculosis, a terribly long pandemic in the 20th century, is estimated to have killed 300 million people worldwide. The Spanish flu of 1920 is estimated to have killed over 50 million people worldwide. The Great Chinese Famine of 1958-61, killed over 40 million people. On the other hand, we must keep in mind, that the population of the Earth has grown from 1 billion in 1900 to approximately 7 billion in 2000. The notion that God is making micro decisions about the lives of every person is hard to sustain. Did God purposely create the bacteria that causes Tuberculosis, or the flu virus, or the natural disasters that caused the famine? 

Today, with proper clinical and public health management, Tuberculosis is 100% curable. Today, the medical field understands the flu virus, which was first discovered in 1933, and with vaccines and proper hygiene, fatality rates have been reduced to less than 1% of infections. Today, the Chinese are an industrial and military power, and are able to feed their population, which has doubled in size since the famine. 

These three examples share the same pattern: human existence on Earth is in a continuous state of transformation and progress. They show that the life of human beings on Earth is animated purely by growth. And, in a deeper sense, life, in all its expressions, is premised on transformation.

If one extends the meaning of the word “life” to contain the life of the soul, the eternal spark, then it is easy to conclude that the soul is also in a continuous journey of transformation, whether living temporarily in the flesh or not. Within or without the flesh, the soul is growing, learning, and changing towards an end that we may not yet comprehend, but that wise thinkers have called fulfillment. We are on the path of fulfillment in God.

If one looks at life solely from the perspective of the material body and its senses, the questions of death by a contagious disease, cancer, or famine don’t have satisfactory answers. But from the perspective of the spirit, the eternal being, they all serve a greater and wiser purpose. And, one day, every one of us will look back and be in awe of the wisdom that silently shaped our journey.

Meditative practices are a door to a richer inner life. No matter the format or tradition, in meditation the mind is absorbed in quiet and detached from the messages of the senses. The goal is to build within a state of peacefulness and allow it to be illuminated by kindness, compassion, and forgiveness. There is, too, the goal of knowing oneself more intimately. This knowledge is, at first, a step into the frames of reason, and next, a journey into the realms of unreasoned knowingness. These are however, the notions that one acquires through the wisdom of a few sages, and sometimes one’s own extraordinary moments of transcendence. Except for the few that have chosen a monastic path, a lifetime is usually insufficient for most of us to accomplish that real intimacy with the Absolute that we learned to aspire. 

Time is for most of us the treasure of infinite value. If we were given the option, how much more time of practice would we want to have available? Personally, my number would be several times greater than the span of a single life time. This brings us to the concept of time. The recent release of the Largest Map of Universe measuring the position of 200 million galaxies and offering the ability to track the evolution of these systems for billions of years, makes our concepts of time so amazingly limited. Thinking about the new images, it becomes almost impossible to conceive how our own journey through future time is going to evolve. One thing is clear, our journey is not dissociated from the life of the universe. We are not a nano particle of dust destined to be de-energized and vanish in a few years. 

Accepting the possibility that we, and life, will continue on, it may be fair to ask how we will change. For sure, any notions we may have at this point are basically conditioned to our current state. The entire future is not within our understanding, but the immediate future may be. Dr. Carl Jung, the famous psychiatrist, offers some interesting clues about how the changes may take place. In 1944, Dr. Jung suffered a heart-attack and a near-death experience. What he reports may make us a bit more comfortable in the Universe, and friendlier to the notion of our future life extending for some millions of years, albeit in very different conditions.

The joys of the inner journey, meditation, and union with the Absolute may not finish after a few decades on Earth, after all.

“It seemed to me that I was high up in space. Far below I saw the globe of the Earth, bathed in a gloriously blue light. I saw the deep blue sea and the continents. Far below my feet lay Ceylon, and in the distance ahead of me the subcontinent of India. My field of vision did not include the whole Earth, but its global shape was plainly distinguishable and its outlines shone with a silvery gleam through that wonderful blue light. In many places the globe seemed colored, or spotted dark green like oxidized silver. Far away to the left lay a broad expanse – the reddish-yellow desert of Arabia; it was as though the silver of the Earth had there assumed a reddish-gold hue. Then came the Red Sea, and far, far back – as if in the upper left of a map – I could just make out a bit of the Mediterranean. My gaze was directed chiefly toward that. Everything else appeared indistinct. I could also see the snow-covered Himalayas, but in that direction it was foggy or cloudy. I did not look to the right at all. I knew that I was on the point of departing from the Earth.

“Later I discovered how high in space one would have to be to have so extensive a view – approximately a thousand miles! The sight of the Earth from this height was the most glorious thing I had ever seen.

“After contemplating it for a while, I turned around. I had been standing with my back to the Indian Ocean, as it were, and my face to the north. Then it seemed to me that I made a turn to the south. Something new entered my field of vision. A short distance away I saw in space a tremendous dark block of stone, like a meteorite. It was about the size of my house, or even bigger. It was floating in space, and I myself was floating in space.

“I had seen similar stones on the coast of the Gulf of Bengal. They were blocks of tawny granite, and some of them had been hollowed out into temples. My stone was one such gigantic dark block. An entrance led into a small antechamber. To the right of the entrance, a black Hindu sat silently in lotus posture upon a stone bench. He wore a white gown, and I knew that he expected me. Two steps led up to this antechamber, and inside, on the left, was the gate to the temple. Innumerable tiny niches, each with a saucer-like concavity filled with coconut oil and small burning wicks, surrounded the door with a wreath of bright flames. I had once actually seen this when I visited the Temple of the Holy Tooth at Kandy in Ceylon; the gate had been framed by several rows of burning oil lamps of this sort.

“As I approached the steps leading up to the entrance into the rock, a strange thing happened: I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence, fell away or was stripped from me – an extremely painful process. Nevertheless, something remained; it was as if I now carried along with me everything I had ever experienced or done, everything that had happened around me. I might also say: it was with me, and I was it. I consisted of all that, so to speak. I consisted of my own history and I felt with great certainty: this is what I am. I am this bundle of what has been and what has been accomplished.

“This experience gave me a feeling of extreme poverty, but at the same time of great fullness. There was no longer anything I wanted or desired. I existed in an objective form; I was what I had been and lived. At first the sense of annihilation predominated, of having been stripped or pillaged; but suddenly that became of no consequence.

“Everything seemed to be past; what remained was a “fait accompli”, without any reference back to what had been. There was no longer any regret that something had dropped away or been taken away. On the contrary: I had everything that I was, and that was everything.

“Something else engaged my attention: as I approached the temple I had the certainty that I was about to enter an illuminated room and would meet there all those people to whom I belong in reality. There I would at last understand – this too was a certainty – what historical nexus I or my life fitted into. I would know what had been before me, why I had come into being, and where my life was flowing. My life as I lived it had often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and end. I had the feeling that I was a historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many questions had remained unanswered. Why had it taken this course? Why had I brought these particular assumptions with me? What had I made of them? What will follow? I felt sure that I would receive an answer to all the questions as soon as I entered the rock temple. There I would meet the people who knew the answer to my question about what had been before and what would come after.

“While I was thinking over these matters, something happened that caught my attention. From below, from the direction of Europe, an image floated up. It was my doctor, or rather, his likeness – framed by a golden chain or a golden laurel wreath. I knew at once: ‘Aha, this is my doctor, of course, the one who has been treating me. But now he is coming in his primal form. In life he was an avatar of the temporal embodiment of the primal form, which has existed from the beginning. Now he is appearing in that primal form.’

“Presumably I too was in my primal form, though this was something I did not observe but simply took for granted. As he stood before me, a mute exchange of thought took place between us. The doctor had been delegated by the Earth to deliver a message to me, to tell me that there was a protest against my going away. I had no right to leave the Earth and must return. The moment I heard that, the vision ceased.

“I was profoundly disappointed, for now it all seemed to have been for nothing. The painful process of defoliation had been in vain, and I was not to be allowed to enter the temple, to join the people in whose company I belonged.

“In reality, a good three weeks were still to pass before I could truly make up my mind to live again. I could not eat because all food repelled me. The view of city and mountains from my sickbed seemed to me like a painted curtain with black holes in it, or a tattered sheet of newspaper full of photographs that meant nothing. Disappointed, I thought, “Now I must return to the “box system” again.” For it seemed to me as if behind the horizon of the cosmos a three-dimensional world had been artificially built up, in which each person sat by himself in a little box. And now I should have to convince myself all over again that this was important! Life and the whole world struck me as a prison, and it bothered me beyond measure that I should again be finding all that quite in order. I had been so glad to shed it all, and now it had come about that I – along with everyone else – would again be hung up in a box by a thread.

“I felt violent resistance to my doctor because he had brought me back to life. At the same time, I was worried about him. “His life is in danger, for heaven’s sake! He has appeared to me in his primal form! When anybody attains this form it means he is going to die, for already he belongs to the “greater company.” Suddenly the terrifying thought came to me that the doctor would have to die in my stead. I tried my best to talk to him about it, but he did not understand me. Then I became angry with him.

“In actual fact I was his last patient. On April 4, 1944 – I still remember the exact date I was allowed to sit up on the edge of my bed for the first time since the beginning of my illness, and on this same day the doctor took to his bed and did not leave it again. I heard that he was having intermittent attacks of fever. Soon afterward he died of septicernia. He was a good doctor; there was something of the genius about him. Otherwise he would not have appeared to me as an avatar of the temporal embodiment of the primal form.”