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LookingThroughGod’s EyesHan van den BoogaardNew Sarum Press

LooKIng THroUgH god’S eYeSFirst published by New Sarum Press July 2020Copyright ©2020 Han van den BoogaardCopyright ©2020 New Sarum PressFront cover photograph: Street Scene, 2020 by Robert SaltzmanNo part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior per-mission in writing from the Publisher.ISBN: 978-1-9162903-5-8neW SarUM PreSSwww.newsarumpress.com

To my wife Lucy, my daughters Sophie and Eva, and to Julie, our first grandchild, who has brought so much joy and innocence and love to our lives.

The Great Work is the reassembling of the tiny shards of light into which the universe was shattered at the Creation. Every story we tell, every poem we write, if it is true, reassembles a tiny piece of this light, brings us back closer to the heart of the mystery.Paul Kingsnorth

CONTENTSPreface • xiI: Looking through God’s eyes— A tale of trees and roses • 1II: An email conversation • 75III: Death and Dogen’s Being-Time • 101Acknowledgements • 112Bibliography • 113

xiPREFACEThought itself has no idea when to stop or when it does or does not overreach itself. As a result, during our life we start to live in an increasingly conceptual world that has to provide us with the main prize: wisdom and happiness. Thus we lose contact with the immediacy and wonder we’ve known as a child, the ‘is-ness’ or raw presence of every moment of life. And when you get back to it, by whatever apparent spiritual path or some incident in life itself, you find that no concept can give you any hold anymore. For concepts just divide Now into an ever increasing number of parts and particles and prevent even the least form of pure perception. Only by grace will you be able to bring your attention back to pure perception and become aware of the fact that everything is one fluid and seamless whole. Life invites you to let go of everything that can be doubted, and to see what’s left if you do. What is

xiiHan van den Booga ardraised above any doubt, remains effortlessly.Spiritual masters of ancient and modern times alike tell us that when you start searching for the knower or knowing which knows ‘I am’, you’ll find no foothold, and then again you’ll find everything there is to be found. For your ‘being there’ is indisputable, and from the moment all answers, explanations and opinions disappear and even the adage ‘Know thyself’ offers no more solace, all that remains is not-knowing. Still I’ve felt a need to say something about it any-way, for the same reason Scottish writer Nan Shepherd felt the need to express herself: “Place and mind may interpenetrate until the nature of both are altered. I cannot tell what this movement is except by recount-ing it.” I did this entirely for my own benefit, because every time I sit down to write I enter the unknown, dipping one toe into not-knowing. And just when this not-knowing is most dark and cold, the light tends to appear all by itself.The same is true for all other forms of creativity. Creativity also springs exclusively from not-knowing. The moment someone thinks they’ve reached perfection in any particular art form, they stop being an artist. A true artist is always starting afresh, waiting to see what happens. That’s why zen master Shunryu Suzuki titled his most famous book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. And that’s also why writing saved me somehow by giving me access to this unknown part of me that abides beyond all concepts. It gave me the opportunity to let go of the mask of conception and see myself as I really am, and not as the sick body that has shown its ugly head

xiiiLooking Through god’s EyEsso often these last few years. The moment we tell the truth, our view of ourselves changes forever. The mirror breaks and the light finds its way in.I consider the cardiac arrest I suffered in 2017 as a gift, a grace which has facilitated the breaking of the mirror and enlarged the crack in the glass, making it easier for the light to get in. With this book I hope to show a glimpse of what I began to see in that light.

I.Looking through God’s eyesA tale of trees and roses

Without giving attentionto all our sensesone comes into the presentunfinished, unable, distracted.

11.On July 31st 2017 my life stopped. Nobody had seen it coming, but on that day it literally stopped. From one moment to the next my heart stopped beating. I was incredibly lucky to have my wife sitting right next to me, for in almost any other circumstance I would have died. But in my case my wife happened to witness my sudden collapse and was able to act as needed. But not right away.Working as a psychologist in a nursing home, I had seen, in the years preceding my cardiac arrest, several patients who had been resuscitated after hav-ing suffered from a heart attack or a cardiac arrest. Without exception they went into a coma, and most of them never came out of it. The ones that did lived in a semi-conscious state in which they were completely dependent on twenty-four hour care. They often were in pain and made the impression of being extremely

2Han van den Booga ardunhappy. It was heartbreaking for me (and that became very actual on that day in July 2017) to witness this and not be able to do anything about it. I felt almost as helpless as the patients themselves. So I told my wife that if anything like a heart attack should ever happen to me, I didn’t want to be resuscitated. I was very sure about that.So when I sank into unconsciousness next to my wife, she panicked because she knew very well what I had said to her so many times during the previous years. She just sat there crying and holding my inert body in her arms. But then I made a sudden gasping sound. It’s called ‘the death gasp’, but my wife somehow felt it was a sign that there still was some life left in me. So she put me down and rang the hospital. Though I live close to it, it took the medics some time to get to my house, evaluate the situation and start giving me electric shocks. Luckily, after the second shock my heart started beating again. It’s been estimated that my heart had stopped for at least seven minutes, but more likely it was ten. I was put into an ambulance and rushed to the hospital. I didn’t get out of my coma until five days later. In the meantime my body temperature was brought down to 32 degrees Celsius (normal body temperature being 37 degrees) to try to limit possible brain damage. They hooked me to several drains that pumped all sorts of stuff into me: liquid food, painkillers (among which was Fentanyl, a synthetic opiate fifty times stronger than heroin), sedatives, anti-psychotics, blood pressure regulators and an assortment of other chemicals which

3Looking Through god’s EyEsare still unknown to me. My wife sat by my bed from morning till night, holding my hand and speaking soft words into my ear. If it hadn’t been for her, I’m sure I would have died anyway. Her incessant love kept me alive.To be honest, I don’t remember any of this. My wife had to fill in the details afterwards. In fact, she had to fill in the whole story. To this day I don’t remember the last month before the cardiac arrest until the day I came out of hospital. From that day on, my memory functioned again, be it rather inefficiently during the first few months at home. Looking back on the last couple of years I tried to find an explanation for what had happened, because the doctors hadn’t really been able to. I was surprised about their indifference in these matters. For them, my survival was the only thing that counted, and now that I seemed to have gotten away with all of it without much harm being done, they left me to my own ruminations. So I was sent home with a couple of coronary stents and an ICD inserted into my body, plus a list of medicine prescriptions and a phone number, in case I had any questions.To me, the whole thing started in 2012, when I had my first ‘attack’ of memory loss. The neurologist in the hospital said it was a rare affliction called TGA, Transient Global Amnesia. They didn’t have an expla-nation for it, but they put my wife’s mind at ease by telling her it wouldn’t last for more than a couple of hours, and they were right. Telling this to me was no use, as any information given to me was gone within five seconds. When the TGA was over, they just sent

4Han van den Booga ardme home.In the years to come I had several more TGA’s. Beside that I suffered from cognitive impairments, especially short term memory and attention span problems, a quite severe form of central Sleep apnoea which caused my breath to stop during sleep at least forty times an hour, a skin melanoma on my back which was discovered by chance and had to be removed immediately, and increasing problems with my heart frequency. It was irregular most of the day and slowly but steadily decreased to about 35 beats a minute. They finally gave me a pacemaker and told me not to worry about my heart anymore. But then I developed a thrombose very close to the pacemaker, causing my left arm to swell up during physical exertion. Luckily my body soon started to fabricate a new vein to get the blood from my arm through to my heart area, preventing my heart dying from starvation.After I had come out of my coma, I was so happy to have survived. In fact, I was euphoric all day, bordering on manic. I bombarded anyone who visited me with lengthy expositions on the oneness that makes up the core of our being. I loved everything my eye fell on, from the shoes and the tattoo of the nurse who took care of me most of the time, to cartoon films I saw on TV. When a female doctor came to talk to me, I just couldn’t keep my eyes off her and told her she had the most beautiful eyes in the world.Back home my euphoria very slowly became less intense, but it lasted for almost a year. I was declared unfit to work and was dismissed from my job. That was