For those of you who believe in some sort of eternal existence, how do you envision your existence outside the window that lies between birth and death of the body/mind complex?
I believe that consciousness is essentially distinct from material, cognitive brain functioning in neurons and thus will persist after bodily death.
Did you exist before you were born? If so, in what capacity?
I tend to take as my working premise, the orthodox Catholic belief that the individual 'spiritual soul' came into existence either around the time of, or some time after (during gestation of the unformed foetus),
in vitro conception within the womb.
However, there is also a consensus in the mystical tradition of my church - as part of a doctrine known as '
divine exemplarism' - to the effect that all creatures, indeed the entire universe in all its varied forms, pre-existed in God from all eternity as "ideas" in the Divine Mind before and beyond their creation in time.
Ontologically speaking, we are dualists (God and the soul are distinct in essence as far as time and creation are concerned), yet the soul has an eternal being in God beyond itself as a result of God's eternal Idea of it (which is more akin to a non-dual
Advaita conception).
So, in one sense, Vouthon is a created being whose body and soul came into being 29 years ago in my mother's womb. Yet in another sense, I was always and eternally existing in the Divine Mind, and God knew me in Himself from all eternity.
What will you exist as after your body/mind expire?
Heaven, Purgatory and Hell are spiritual states of being (as opposed to physical locations) that occupy no location in space and are even apart from time as well, with the souls of the deceased thought (according to time-honoured, theological speculation) to exist in something mysterious called “
aeviternity”.
It entails an existence which is a form of “
participated eternity". This lies between the timelessness of God and the temporal experience of material beings - to us, for all intents and purposes, it is akin to “no-time” - although this isn't strictly true.
I believe Vouthon will continue to exist in aeviternity as a disembodied soul, aware both of my eternal being in God and my created being in time. I will always simultaneously be aware of both. God granted me an independent existence from Him by creating this embodied human soul in time. This was so that I could freely love and turn to Him. He will never revoke this gift of existence.
Nor, however, will I ever be "fully" creature again, for I will have been penetrated through with God by means of my direct, uninhibited enjoyment of the Beatific Vision in heaven (the sight, awareness and knowledge of God as He is in Himself, in His Essence) and have become by grace what God is by nature, as I always was from all eternity in His Mind, where I should hopefully: "
enjoy the same perfect happiness wherewith God is happy, seeing Him in the way which He sees Himself" (
St. Thomas Aquinas,
Summa Contra Gentes). Hopefully, anyway!
What parts of you will you retain and what falls away?
This is a very good question.
Blessed Henry Suso, who claimed to have experienced a foretaste of the Beatific Vision in this lifetime through infused contemplative mystical experience, had this to say on it:
"...
Essential reward, however, consists in the contemplative union of the soul with the naked Godhead, because it never rests until it is led beyond all its powers and capacities and is directed into the natural substance of the Persons and into the simple nakedness of Being. Face to face with this it then finds fulfilment and eternal happiness.
The farther it enters into the wild wasteland and the deep abyss of the pathless Godhead into which it plummets, where it is swept along, and to which it is so united that it cannot want otherwise than what God wants. And this is the same Being God is: They become blessed by grace as He is blessed by nature.
Eternity is life that is beyond time but includes within itself all time but without a before or after. And whoever is taken into the Eternal Nothing possesses all in all and has no ‘before or after’.
Indeed a person taken within today would not have been there for a shorter period from the point of view of eternity than someone who had been taken within a thousand years ago…
Now these people who are taken within, because of their boundless immanent oneness with God, see themselves as always and eternally existing.
When the good and loyal servant is led into the joy of his Lord, he becomes drunk from the limitless overabundance of God's house. What happens to a drunken man happens to him, though it cannot really be described, that he so forgets his self that he is not at all his self and consequently has got rid of his self completely and lost himself entirely in God, becoming one spirit in all ways with him, just as a small drop of water does which has been dropped into a large amount of wine.
Just as the drop of water loses itself, drawing the taste and colour of the wine to and into itself, so it happens that those who are in full possession of blessedness lose all human desires in an inexpressible manner, and they ebb away from themselves and are immersed completely in the divine will. Otherwise, if something of the individual were to remain of which he or she were not completely emptied, scripture could not be true in stating that God shall become all things in all things. Certainly one's being remains, but in a different form, in a different resplendence, and in a different power. This is all the result of total detachment from self..."
(Blessed Henry Suso (c. 1300 – 1366), Little Book of Truth)