John Lennon is usually given credit for having said, “Life is what happens while you are making other plans.” The origin of the saying, however, pre-dates Lennon. That’s understandable, because it is a universal truth. Robert Browning’s version (expressed in Andrea del Sarto) was “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?” At some level, I think that most of us (past, present, and future) recognize that our current life does not represent us fully.
Most religions posit an “after life” of one sort or another: heaven “above” and hell “below.” Organized religions were established based on the human desire to extend life beyond what we experience on earth. Many of us have had “mystical” experiences that seem to support continued existence following life on the physical plane. I am among those who have had such experiences: no burning bushes or anything that couldn’t have alternative, nonmystical explanations, but sufficiently out of the ordinary that I have never forgotten them.
The first was a life-saving honk of a horn. I was speeding down the highway on my way to pick up my then girl-friend for a date. I was lost in thought about the possibilities, when I heard a loud honk of a horn. I looked up and saw that the traffic in front of me had come to a complete halt. I slammed on my brakes and managed to get stopped before rear-ending the car in front of me. I looked around to see who might have just saved my life. None of those close to me gave any indication that anything out of the ordinary had happened. I was left grateful and mystified.
My next two experiences were similar, and while both can perhaps be explained by the workings of my “unconscious mind,” my sense is that other forces were at work. The first of those was a message from my mother, who had had a series of debilitating strokes and was not expected to live. I had gone to California to see her and my dad, who was suffering greatly because of my mother’s condition. One of the nights I was there, my mother came to me in a dream. She said that she needed to stay (“in body,” I assume) for awhile longer to give my dad a chance to adjust. And that’s exactly what she did. By the time she died, Dad had adjusted to the idea of life without her.
I had a similar experience with my co-author for most of my business communication publications. She died of ovarian cancer after a six year ordeal (two surgeries, two rounds of chemotherapy, participation in the still experimental Taxol program. She had been a nun for 13 years and still had a Catholic’s faith. She went to Lourdes hoping for a miracle. She had another difficult year before dying. She came to me in a dream about a month after she had died. She looked healthy and happy and told me that she was doing well.
Neither my mother nor my co-author has continued to visit my dreams. My sense is that they had messages to deliver and, after doing so, went back to doing whatever people do “on the other side.” None of my experiences “proves” anything beyond normal physical life. It is, however, easy to see how such experiences could give rise to a variety of religious or spiritual beliefs. One of the things to note about my experiences is that neither promotes a specific religious belief. Neither my mother nor my co-author said anything about the need to have certain beliefs if I wanted to join them “on the other side” when I died.
Most religions tell believers not to be afraid. Not being fearful is not always easy, of course. We have a great deal of certainty about this life, but very little certainty about what might lie beyond death. I assume that’s for good reason. If we had the sense that nothing we did in this life mattered, we would probably not pay much attention to what we were doing or why we were doing it. Perhaps the one universal belief is that what we do in life matters and, in fact, influences what happens next. Commenting on life purpose, the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, has an aging Ulysses setting off on one last journey saying that his purpose will be “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
In one way or another, that may be what we are all being asked to do: strive, seek, and not yield.