Memory in Heaven?

[paduard]

Have they lost their free will? in that there is no possibility of sin?

A difficult one; but there appears to me to be a disconnect here. No possibility of sin would not affect free will if the will was by free choice - automatic through possession of the Beatific Vision. Not the best of answers I must confess though.

 

[J_Peterson]

That sounds more like Buddhist nirvana than Heaven. We do not “merge” with God; we retain our being.

And what about the bodily resurrection? Billions of bodies; none of whom has an individual mind any more?

I’d understand “union with God” as more like what our LORD had with YHWH and the Holy Spirit. HE was not the Father or the Holy Spirit, and did not become either of them even after undergoing death, although they were united.

I think the difficulty lies in the word “self”. In English, that word carries too many negative connotations (I.e. selfishness, self righteousness, self absorption) that we do not want to imagine in Eternity. I’d use the term “individual being” instead, although it is more cumbersome.

ICXC NIKA

I guess I do tend to use some of the language of Buddhism but what I meant was one with God by participation, not actually becoming one with God’s nature of substance (i.e. becoming God). I agree that we retain our individual being. I’m also talking pre-ressurection (that’s something that I know very little about other than it’s going to happen).

Again to borrow some Buddhist ideas, you are an “I”, a perceiving subject. If you can percieve something then that something is not part of the self or I that percieves. I can perceive my external appearance, my personality, my memories, my feelings, etc. The one thing you can’t perceive is the thing that’s doing the percieving (i.e. yourself), just like a camera can’t take a picture of itself. I believe that all of the things that are not “I” are part of the body and will die with the body (possibly until the ressurection?). I can only guess what’s left of our self after death but I’ll find out someday (for better or worse), I just have a hard time believing that our memories and personality survive.

I don’t think any of this runs counter to the teachings of the Church (if it does I’ll agree that I’m wrong). Also, I know a lot of it is half baked and needs some work.

 

[Vouthon]

That sounds more like Buddhist nirvana than Heaven

Buddhists do not believe in a Creator or a “merging”. Nirvana is the cessation of craving and release from samsara, beyond place and time. There is no “self” in Buddhism to be dissolved, which is why you have they doctrine of anatta (Notself).

Now while you are technically accurate (from a purely theological and philosophical perspective) ie objectively the essence of the soul and the essence of God are distinct, you would be wrong to suggest that a person who used the language of merging to describe their own subjective mystical experience of deification in which they lose awareness of self and become God by grace, is in error for using that language. For our mystics do claim to have “merged” with God. An example:

“…The two loves come face to face: the Creator and the creature; one little drop seeks to measure itself with the ocean. At first, the little drop wants to enclose the infinite ocean within itself; but at the same moment, it knows itself to be just one small drop, and thus it is vanquished, and passes completely into God like a drop into the ocean. At first, this moment is a torment, but so sweet that, on experiencing it, the soul is happy…My communion with the Lord is now purely spiritual. My soul is touched by God and wholly absorbs itself in Him, even to the complete forgetfulness of self. Permeated by God to its very depths, it drowns in His beauty; it completely dissolves in Him - I am at a loss to describe this, because in writing I am making use of the senses; but there, in that union, the senses are not active; there is a merging of God and the soul; and the life of God to which the soul is admitted is so great that the human tongue cannot express it…”

***- Saint Faustina Kowalska (1905-1938), Catholic mystic ***

To claim that one has thus “merged” with God is a legitimate and orthodox way in which some mystics choose to express their experience of Union with God.

Now, Faustina does not mean that she has become mingled with the Unknowable Essence of God and knows God as he is in Himself, however she has achieved divinization to the complete forgetfulness of a self independent from the Godhead and to her, and many other mystics, it “feels” like merging, like a water droplet dissolving in the ocean.

The problem, of course, is if you have a mystic who has a very poor surface intelligence and does not have the theological acumen to properly understand his/her experience. The followers of the 14th century Free Spirit Heresy are an example of those who probably had genuine experiences of deification, at least in some cases, but lacked the technical acumen to properly interpret that experience.

That danger is not enough to beware of words such as “merging”. That is, in my opinion, an excessive reaction.

Peterson, our dear brother, would thus be within his rights to use the word “merge” without being declared a pantheist or monist, or else we should accuse Saint Faustina, Saint Teresa, Blessed Ruysbroeck, Blessed Suso, Saint Catherine of Genoa and practically every Catholic mystic of the same.

If what brother Peterson says disturbs you, then you don’t want to ever read Saint Catherine of Genoa. It would likely give you a heart attack Here’s a taste:

“…The pure and clear love can desire nothing of God, however good it may be, that could be called participatin, for it wants God himself…I will not be content until I am locked and enclosed within that divine heart in which all created forms lose themselves and, so lost, remain divine…My I is God, and I know of no other I than this my God…In this way God so transforms the soul into Himself, its God, that it sees nothing but God…The more the soul is purified, so much the more it annihilates self till at last it becomes quire pure and rests in God…Thus purified the soul rests in God without any alloy of self; my very being is God…Everything that has being has it from God’s highest essence through participation; but the pure and clear love cannot be content with seeing that it has acquired God through participation, nor with his being in it as a creature…My being is God, not through participation, but through true transformation and through annihilation of my own being…So in God is my me, my I, my strength, my bliss, my desire. But this ‘I’ that I often call so - I do it because I cannot speak otherwise, but in truth I no longer know what the I is, or the Mine, or desire, or good, or bliss. I can no longer turn my eyes on anything, wherever it be, in heaven or on earth…I do not want a love that would be for or in God. I cannot bear to see this word for, this word in, for to me they indicate a thing that would be between me and God…Faith seems to me wholly lost…for it seems to me that I have and hold in certainty that which I believed and hoped in former times. I no longer see union, for I know nothing more and can see nothing more than Him alone without me. I do not know where the I is, nor do I seek it, nor do I wish to know or be cognizant of it. I am so plunged and submerged in the source of his infinite love, as if I were quite under water in the sea and could not touch, see, feel anything on any side except water…Everything to do with self passes away. It [the soul] neither sees, speaks, nor knows loss or pain of its own…God became man in order to make me God; therefore I want to be changed completely into pure God…”

***- Saint Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510), Catholic mystic ***

Yes, that is how far a fully orthodox mystic whose writings are approved by the Church can go without being a pantheist or monist. What brother Peterson said is truly tame by comparison, I am sure you will agree.

 

[Vouthon]

PS there is a typo in that quote from Catherine of Genoa (courtesy of my hasty typing).

“participatin” should be “participation” and I meant to say “the” at the start of my post rather than “they”.

 

[Vouthon]

I guess I do tend to use some of the language of Buddhism but what I meant was one with God by participation, not actually becoming one with God’s nature of substance (i.e. becoming God). I agree that we retain our individual being. I’m also talking pre-ressurection (that’s something that I know very little about other than it’s going to happen).

Again to borrow some Buddhist ideas, you are an “I”, a perceiving subject. If you can percieve something then that something is not part of the self or I that percieves. I can perceive my external appearance, my personality, my memories, my feelings, etc. The one thing you can’t perceive is the thing that’s doing the percieving (i.e. yourself), just like a camera can’t take a picture of itself. I believe that all of the things that are not “I” are part of the body and will die with the body (possibly until the ressurection?). I can only guess what’s left of our self after death but I’ll find out someday (for better or worse), I just have a hard time believing that our memories and personality survive.

I don’t think any of this runs counter to the teachings of the Church (if it does I’ll agree that I’m wrong). Also, I know a lot of it is half baked and needs some work.

The essential part of our being is our identity as the created image of God. Some mystics call this the “Ground”. It is free of all names, thoughts, emotions etc. which can be observed. It is perfect stillness to come into contact with our Ground or what the Desert Fathers called apatheia (a state of imperturbable calm). Hence why Saint Catherine says that her “I” is God. She isn’t lying. Union peels away the falsehood of our individual human self. People can easily misunderstand this and think that the mystic is saying something which he/she isn’t, ie that they are the Essence of God, which would be heresy and which no Catholic mystic has ever claimed (God forbid!).

You are correct that we cannot presently understand what ‘we’ will be when we die, however I should think it will be as we are in Contemplation. We are still a person and soul but the individual self of thoughts, emotions etc. is not truly “us”, not really who we are at all. The saints in heaven are still “who they are” but they are wholly deified and dead to the individual human self, what Blessed Henry Suso calls “The fifth self”.

Soul is constituted of intellect and will, both of which we will still have, only except that our will has become completely one with the will of God (mystics say “merged” in God’s will). We will be God by grace just He Himself is by nature.

We will then be more ourselves than we are now.

When we die we will exist only as we are in God not as we are in ourselves. In ourselves we are nothing, our true life is “hidden with God in Christ” as Saint Paul says.

You might be interested to read this:

“…I am not who I think I am, and ‘You’ are not who you think ‘You’ are. What we call ‘I’ and ‘You’ is indeed a projection, and if we go far enough in withdrawing the projections and in piercing the veils, we shall reach a point at which there is no longer any ‘I’ or ‘You’. We shall reach a point at which we realize that our true self has nothing to do with ‘function’…a lawyer, a chimney-sweep, a doctor, a dustman, a priest…These are only functions, things we do; they are not us…These roles and functions are real projections…they give us a sense of security, a sense of identity and belonging. They prevent us from glimpsing the awful void and emptiness within ourselves: they make us feel solid, needed, valued and permanent…But it is not only our external, social personalities that are a tissue of projections and illusions. The same is true of much of our inner, private world, which we may well be tempted to regard as our ‘self’…We are not our social functions or roles; but neither are we our private thoughts or emotions…If we watch our emotions and thoughts long enough, we may eventually become aware of something which is not not these emotions or thoughts…There is something within me which is at all times perfectly detached, tranquil and serene. It is never excited about anything, never downcast or depressed by anything. It is like a deep, perhaps, bottomless lake; my various thoughts and emotions are like ripples or waves upon the surface. But below the surface, in the depths, there are no ripples; everything is still…We are a different ‘self’ depending on the moods or activities of the moment…There is nothing to give any unity or continiuity to my identity…I am not one self but a sequence of different or even conflicting selves…We are not real, unified ‘selves’, we are not capable of true action, until we learn to enter the Ground…It transcends place and time. Anyone who enters the Ground no longer cares about the past or the future: he is aware only of the present moment, and the present moment is shot through with Divine Light, because it is in the present, and in the present alone, that the world of time touches the world of eternity. Standing within this impregnable citadel, we are troubled neither by the thought of our past experiences nor of possible troubles and preoccupations still to come…”

***- Cyprian Smith OSB, Catholic theologian & contemplative of the Benedictine Order ***

Only once we have reached the stage of union with God can we truly understand that we are “not” the self we think we are. Since so few of us have attained to that, it will remain a mystery until we do so either in this life or in the hereafter after purgatory purifies us of all alloy of self (to use Catherine of Genoa’s words). Even then it is an ineffable, inexpressable, wordless experience. The human brain cannot comprehend it.

 

[Vouthon]

I wonder if this applies:

“…The supreme perfection of man in this life is to be so united to God that all his soul with all its faculties and powers are so gathered into the Lord God that he becomes one spirit with him, and remembers nothing except God, is aware of and recognises nothing but God, but with all his desires unified by the joy of love, he rests contentedly in the enjoyment of his Maker alone…”

- St Albert the Great (1193 - 1280), Doctor of the Church & German Dominican

It should be remembered though that when one is in Heaven, he/she is with God and therefore sees all things, all people, all history in one Ever-Present Now.

Read this great answer on a Catholic website:

We will have no need for our memory after our death, because we will see everything as the Lord sees things: eternally. We will see all previous historical events and all future historical events because of, as the Catechism states [this perfect life with the Most Holy Trinity — this communion of life and love with the Trinity, with the Virgin Mary, the angels and all the blessed.] — from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1024, on Heaven.

A smart guy and he is correct. We see through God’s eyes. Remember Meister Eckhart’s famous saying:

“…The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love. Your human nature and that of the divine Word are no different. To guage the soul we must guage it with God, for the Ground of God and the Ground of the Soul are one and the same. The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God, as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge…”

***- Meister Eckhart (c. 1260 – c. 1327), Catholic Mystic & priest ***

Can you even begin to imagine that? Its an utterly superior form of knowing and being aware. Man is not annihilated, he is ennobled and uplifted so far above his current state as to be unrecognisable.

So, its not as if the person would not be “aware” of his life on earth, its simply that he/she would be in perfect happiness and freedom from the individual human self, to the extent that he/she would have no need to cling to those memories, when all its desire is sated in and all of its attention is taken up by God, in whom is its whole beatitude.

Our loved ones can and do intercede for us. They are aware of us. After all, love never ends. Love is the very nature of God, the mutual self-emptying of the Three Persons. But everything else is transient without any permanence including our thoughts, feelings and emotions that fluctuate in life. They are not self, not “who we are” at our core, which we find only in God and not in ourselves.

Yet nothing is uniquely “ours” once we die in a state of grace. Everything is shared - with God, with the Communion of Saints. We retain our distinct being yet lose wholly the possesiveness of the individual self. We cling to nothing as our “own”, even I would guess “our” memories. Everything is for God and in God just as in God everything is shared between the Three Persons and nothing is “self”-possessed . That is why Catherine says that in the state of purgatory “everything to do with self passes away”.

Its just a wholly superior form of existence, such that I do not think any of us can say aught about it, really.

 

[Vouthon]

Also from Saint Catherine’s Treatise on Purgatory:

“…They [the souls in purgatory] retain no memory of either good or evil respecting themselves or others which would increase their pain. They are so contented with the divine dispositions in their regard; and with doing all that is pleasing to God in that way which he chooses, that they cannot think of themselves, though they may strive to do so…”

***- Saint Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510), Catholic mystic (Treatise on Purgatory) ***

Its most thought-provoking

 

[Scirocco]

I think the first thing to realize is what Heaven is as the Catholic Church describes it.
newadvent.org/cathen/07170a.htm

APOCALYPSE - Chapter 21
haydock1859.tripod.com/id307.html

To me Heaven is a place of utter happiness and peace beyond any poetic description of beauty humanly conceived in wonder. A place where you soul has been purified in the fires of perfection becomes one in complete union with the Bridegroom of Christ.

The memories of our past human life would melt away into nothingness. Nothing survives in heaven except perfection in God. If anything survives in goodness in our past lives it would be the joy and hope of seeing our loved ones. But their focus as our focus would always be with our Heavenly Bridegroom in Jesus our Savior in the Mystery of the Holy Trinity. No sadness exist in heaven.

I have to disagree. One visionary in Medjugorje asked the Blessed Mother to show her the spirit of her grandmother in Heaven, and she did so. The visionary and her grandmother shared a temporary reunion as if she has never left the Earth. If that grandmother doesn’t have any memory in Heaven, then apparently she will not recognize her grand daughter in the first place.

And if we are in Heaven, how will we know about praising God if we don’t remember how to praise Him in the first place? If we don’t have memories after death, then we don’t have identity. And if we don’t have identity, who are we when we get to Heaven?

Then again, what do I know? I never went there.

 

[GEddie]

I have to disagree. One visionary in Medjugorje asked the Blessed Mother to show her the spirit of her grandmother in Heaven, and she did so. The visionary and her grandmother shared a temporary reunion as if she has never left the Earth. If that grandmother doesn’t have any memory in Heaven, then apparently she will not recognize her grand daughter in the first place.

And if we are in Heaven, how will we know about praising God if we don’t remember how to praise Him in the first place? If we don’t have memories after death, then we don’t have identity. And if we don’t have identity, who are we when we get to Heaven?

Then again, what do I know? I never went there.

I’d agree with you.

Our mind is the only part of “us” that can survive into the next life, all other factors, ie our bodies, genes, and stream of consciousness being lost during during the death. If the contents of your mind do not survive, there would be no “you” to experience that life.

ICXC NIKA

 

[Scirocco]

I’d agree with you.

Our mind is the only part of “us” that can survive into the next life, all other factors, ie our bodies, genes, and stream of consciousness being lost during during the death. If the contents of your mind do not survive, there would be no “you” to experience that life.

ICXC NIKA

Thanks Geddie, I really felt despair in the first place for reading around the net that we won’t have some sort of individuality anymore when we reached Paradise. Which is why I’m sticking my guns on my opinion.

But now I’m really curious about that last thing you said because my grandmother died of a stroke years ago, and it affected her memory. She did not remember anyone anymore. Will she be whole in Heaven? That I don’t know. Maybe she is because nothing is impossible up there.

 

[Oren]

From what I know our memories are purified in purgatory. Personally, I do not think we will ‘forget’ what we knew, but it will be purified in that even if we have memories of bad things, it will not be negative. We will know the purpose of each bad thing and the greater good God brought out of it.
We do not lose our selves in heaven. We have free will in heaven. Since we will have the beatific vision, we will not sin because we know for certain it would be ridiculous and stupid and there would be no motivation to do it since we would be perfectly happy. Who would walk off a cliff if they were perfectly happy in every way, no depression, no pain, loving family, everything you could ever want etc.

 

[GEddie]

Thanks Geddie, I really felt despair in the first place for reading around the net that we won’t have some sort of individuality anymore when we reached Paradise. Which is why I’m sticking my guns on my opinion.

But now I’m really curious about that last thing you said because my grandmother died of a stroke years ago, and it affected her memory. She did not remember anyone anymore. Will she be whole in Heaven? That I don’t know. Maybe she is because nothing is impossible up there.

I’d say yes. If for no other reason than her affliction was one of her body (your head is part of your body), and one receives a new body (pneumatikon soma) when they arrive in Eternity.

Imagine your memory as a library, but that you need very thick glasses for reading. Now say that those glasses are lost. You would become unable to read, but the library remains. If you acquired new glasses (or new eyes!) your access to the library would be restored.

ICXC NIKA

 

[JerryZ]

Also to point out is that many people who have suffered “temporary” death, report when they come back, they can remember and describe events that happened while they had been dead (No Brain activity), which point to the fact, that not only our “I” is alive and well, but also that memories are not intrinsically bound to neuronal activity only.

–

 

[Scirocco]

I’d say yes. If for no other reason than her affliction was one of her body (your head is part of your body), and one receives a new body (pneumatikon soma) when they arrive in Eternity.

Imagine your memory as a library, but that you need very thick glasses for reading. Now say that those glasses are lost. You would become unable to read, but the library remains. If you acquired new glasses (or new eyes!) your access to the library would be restored.

ICXC NIKA

Oh that’s right! That reminds me of Lazarus. Thanks again Geddie.

 

[Miriam1947]

That’s a good question but I’m not sure I can answer it. I’m more curious what others think about it. Here’s a quote from the introduction to “On Prayer and The Contemplative Life.” by Thomas, Aquinas (intro by VINCENT MCNABB, O.P., S.T.L.). Aquinas was speaking to his dead friend.

“What about that question we have so often discussed together: Do the habits we have acquired here abide with us when we are in our Fatherland?" But the other replied: "Brother Thomas, I see God, and you must ask me nought further on that question.”

It seems that union with God entails the total loss of our sense of self. If you think about it, it would be true freedom. Hell may be a soul eternally searching for a self that no longer exists. Sorry for being brief, I need to bone up on my theology plus I’m typing on an iPad which can be annoying

Don’t you have the little microphone next to the space bar on an iPad? I have one on my iPhone and hardly ever type when I text.