Jun 22 2008
Confronting our immortality
So, recently my wife and I had a conversation with a wife and her man. It was a fascinating conversation that broached several topics ranging from entheogens to the nature of reality to the best way to awaken people, and so on. At one point, the conversation even broached the topic of immortality and the survival of consciousness after death. I of course came down on the side of immortality. I’ve seen with my own eyes the reality of the soul, the preservation of identity past death, and the awesome wisdom and intelligence of the Fabric of Consciousness, so there’s nothing anybody can say to me that would convince me that when we die, consciousness ends. But this women had a different idea. Although she was very open to the idea of “higher consciousness,” and had apparently journeyed the highways of higher consciousness once or twice in her life, she did not believe that consciousness survived death. She believed that when you die, your body merges back into the cosmic energy soup and you end. Consciousness goes on, of course, but you don’t.
Now like any good mystic I off course took polite objection. I proceeded to point out what I considered (weak) empirical verification of the continuation of consciousness, but of course she wasn’t buying. She had the truth. She said that the problem was that a lot of people can’t confront the reality of their own mortality. Like Freud’s suggestion that religion was an infantile delusion, some people just can’t accept the fact that when they die they die.
Now at first glance this seems like a reasonable thing to say. We (or at least our physical units) are afraid of death. After barely a cosmic blink worth of life, nobody wants to just end, and so to avoid having to face the despair and angst at the premature termination of identity, it seems reasonable to think that the belief in an afterlife is an elaborate psychopathology, a comfortable illusion constructed as a daily bedtime story we tell ourselves to avoid the mind numbing depression that might result should we have to face “the reality.”
But I don’t think so. As a mystic, I have to object because I think she’s got it wrong. If you ask me I think that she, and those like her who believe in higher consciousness but pretend that identity is terminated at death, are taking the easy way out. If you ask me, it’s these people who are developing an elaborate bed time story.
Why?
Well because it allows them to stop asking questions.
I mean, think about it. If we all live a single lifetime, if “this” is all there is and when we die we die and that’s the end of the story, then you don’t really need to go any further with your philosophical speculation. You look at the world, you see hunger and suffering, war and violence and all this becomes simple to explain. We’re human, we’re not perfect, evolution takes a long time, and hopefully the collectivity will evolve into the “silver seed”, of Dylan fame, before we end this “natural experiment,” but it’s always been this way and that’s just the way it is. What else can you expect? The best we can hope for, individually, is to carve out a comfortable niche for ourselves while the world goes on as it is.
Unfortunately, you can’t do that when you assume consciousness goes on. If you survive after death, then the easy breezy explanations no longer count. If our consciousness survives death, if we’ve lived ten, a hundred, a million times before, then why is the world so f$%#@d up? Why is there so much hunger and violence, war and chaos. Why, if we’ve lived so many times, haven’t we got it right?
Right?
You see, if your consciousness goes on after death, philosophy gets really messy. The tie die simplicity of terminal termination evaporates into a colored muck of questions that, if you are going to retain some sense of psychological stability, need to be answered. And it’s not just that the conceptual/philosophical world gets messy, the ethical world gets messy as well. I mean if you have just one life to live, then adopting an individualistic and selfish attitude towards things is totally justifiable. “I’ve got one life to live, and I’ll live it the way I want to thank you very much.” But if you got more than one life, if you got as many as you want, then selfish individualism makes about as much sense as when a millionaire won’t give up ten dollars to help out a homeless person. So what if you spend a few years devoted to improving life on this planet. In the grander scheme of things, it’s a drop in the bucket.
And so you see, I think she’s got it wrong. It’s not that I have a problem confronting my mortality, it’s that she has a problem confronting her immortality. Right now, it’s easy for her. Everything is wrapped up, tied up in a pretty little box that requires no addition intellectual, moral, or social effort. Neat, tidy, and consonant is what she prefers rather than the messy implications and the complicated questions of immortality–and that’s fine–but unlike what she and others might think, her’s is not a philosophical, moral, or intellectual high ground. If it’s anything, its the kind of accommodation you find amongst upper class intellectuals who can see the horrible truths of this world (poverty, suffering, violence) and would rather fit themselves into the system than do anything substantial about it.
ms