Immortality in Life
Death is a fact of life that most of us would rather do without. Frankly, it sucks. That said, let us console ourselves with rationalizations ...
Life as Process
Life is fundamentally process, or change. We have been taught a narrower definition, but that "biological" definition is not without equivocation. It leaves us asking, for instance, is a virus alive or not? The typical answer is that a virus is "alive" when it is active, or one might propose, when it is associated with change.
When we look at life as process, even the process of dying is a form of living. Cold comfort, I know, but in an objective sense, life is change.
We participate in a variety of processes as we live and die. There is really no part of us that is not part of some process, and no process that is not associated in some way with another. In this sense we are universal and immortal, though we may feel quite mortal.
And of course we are quite mortal. We are constantly dying and becoming someone else. Our subjective sensibility can only appreciate the moment, though our intellect remembers the past and anticipates the future. We imagine ourselves stretching into the past and future, but we are truly ourselves only in the present.
Temporal Immortality
There's a reason why you can never go home: home is ever on the move. We commonly think of time as an inexorable flow of causality, though we also have a sense of time moving in reverse, with people, places, and events suddenly emerging out of the dark haze of the future, and racing past us into the better visibility of the past. Still, we discard the past as though it were extinct, and we look forward to the future as though it were more real than the present. Perhaps the reverse view is more realistic, for though we look into a haze when we look upon the past, at least we look through the daylight of memory.
Watching my two children grow, I watch many children pass before me. The infants are replaced by toddlers, the toddlers by preschoolers, and so on. As children grow, each one is replaced by another child, never to return. I love the present child and mourn the death of the previous child.
Either way we look at time, we do often feel powerless, and estranged from both past and future, for they are remote countries, but is any remote country any less real than our own? It is true that, having never visited Nepal, it is less than a memory to me, even less real than a place in my past, for any place in my past is a place I have been, though I can never return; or should I say, it will never return to me.
This fact remains: I have no exclusive claim on a sense of the present; not over anyone I pass on the street, not over a person across the sea, nor even a person in the remote past. It seems to me that all these people live on, each in his or her own place and time.
Is the past gone? It is bad enough to contemplate never being able to rejoin one's loved ones without having to contemplate their absolute annihilation as well. Emotionally, we may even doubt whether they ever existed at all. This is not healthy! Why do we do this to ourselves? Has society taught us this? Did we turn away from the old myths without considering a proper replacement?
Group Consciousness
From whence comes this sense of being alive in the moment come? I'm inclined to think there is a universal capacity for subjective experience that is certainly not exclusive to humans. It is this sense of subjective experience that tempts us to think the past is less real than the present, and even that others are less important than ourselves, and yet it is this same consciousness that transcends reduction, and with that transcendance, how can we be so presumptous as to think that our subjective reality is a derivative of that objective concept of a universe that passes before our eyes?
Experience must be intrinsic to reality. There is reason to believe that the subjectivity that we experience as individuals merges into collective subjects, and finally into a single universal Subject. It seems there would have to be some kind of immortality where individual meets collective, but there is little reason to be believe this collective sense of experience resembles our consciousness. Still, it must have some sense of experience.
An Ontological Perspective
We regard death, unconscious and subconscious mental states, and other forms of existence as somehow being less than aware. We see our reflection in other people and some animals and extend a concept of awareness to them, and in so doing divide the living from the dead, but what do we really know of death? Is it not true that all we really know is life? We only know life, yet we strive to master death.
Looking Beyond the Brink
"We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality." – Marcus Annaeus Seneca
These arguments do not propose solutions for the some of the most profound problems that cause us to yearn for immortality: irreversible separation from loved ones, the temporal annihilation of self, and the injustice rampant in this life being examples. These are issues that demand to be addressed—if not solved, yet I believe great spiritual progress can be made should we strive to recognize and celebrate the ubiquitousness of life in experience, and resist the temptation to dread that undiscovered country that may yet prove to be a mere product of our limited imaginations.
"One world at a time." — Henry David Thoreau
When faced with the utter annihilation of our loved ones and ourselves, perhaps we ought to consider what the source of our sense of tragedy is, and then we might find a way to alleviate the pain of death. What cause, other than love, would deserve our grief? And so, what ought we do to heal our broken hearts? Perhaps the lesson is, as Saints John and Augustine and others have found, that we ought to broaden our love; to seek to love the divine in everyone and everything. Not to be detached from everything so much as to love the beauty in everything, so that when one flower fades, there are a thousand more to adore. Should we mourn our loss of the precise individuality of a single flower, or adore its beauty over and over across the fields of life?
beauty is its own excuse for being.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Rhodora"
The fruition of beauty is no chance of hit or miss... it is inevitable as life ... it is exact and plumb as gravitation.
— Walt Whitman, Introduction to "Leaves of Grass" (1855)
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