To get the beatific vision, you have to die for it. The ego has to be destroyed. At least for a little while. Whether it’s a few minutes or a few hours or a few days, it doesn’t take very long. But everything you thought you knew about life—everything—has to be annihilated. It makes no sense, but it’s what the mystics have been saying all along. There is no way around it. It is the sole piece of advice rendered at St. Paul’s Monastery on Mt. Athos in Greece, hanging right there in the reception room: “If you die before you die; you won’t die when you die.”
