Theories of Personal Immortality

Shortly before my fiftieth birthday, my father announced that he had inoperable lung cancer. I see this moment as a snapshot. He’s sitting on the sofa in my son’s apartment, my mother beside him. After a long pause, I ask, “What are you going to do?” He answers in one word: “Live.” And live he did for two more months, hospitalized the last few days for palliative care. On the final night, they sent Daddy home with an oxygen tank. Another snapshot: he’s smiling in his recliner in the family room as we run a slideshow of family pictures, his life in review. We drove back to Phenix City before bedtime, and the next morning my brother called to say Daddy had died that night.

Daddy never shared his afterlife expectations, and they may not matter. Whatever waits after the heart stops and the body decomposes, I doubt that expectation changes anything. His religion did guide him well through life. He said he was a Christian because his father was the best man he knew. Even if I can't say the same, Daddy was a good and loving man. That last evening, nothing was said about meeting on the other side, but, whatever his posthumous expectations, he was, as the saying goes, at peace with the Lord. He died well, not an easy thing.

The hardest part of dying may be knowing you leave everything you know behind—a one-way trip into outer space. You may believe there’s a spaceport out there, but it lacks the old sun, moon, home, and friends. And that’s the good news. The bad news is that (even if the promises of old-time religion hold) you may lose what made you you on earth. The idea of heavenly justice, that “the last shall be first," sounds good, of course, to a dying slave, but a master dying in a canopied bed has baggage to lose. Once he sheds his earthly collateral, will anything remain of his proud ego? We all know you can’t take it with you, but does this refer to more than money?

Suppose that death is loss of ego, which for most of us is the same as to ceasing to exist. Ego is what I mean when we say I. I describe my ego when I say, I’m William, I’m married, I’m from Alabama, I have sons, I like eggplant, I dislike buttermilk, I’m an actor, I used to teach, I know Stephen, I’m tall, I’m cold, I’m old, I see the moon, and so forth. The list could include the whole catalog of my memories, such as seeing the Parthenon in Nashville and never having seen the one in Athens. Ego includes all that I consciously think, feel, believe, know, remember, and do. Losing all this indeed suggests blinking out to oblivion.

Ego can vanish at night in sleep, but there’s a sense of continuity because noises and dreams wake it up. We are on the shelf, not outside the house of self-consciousness. Ego remains on call, implicitly in charge. Most of us enjoy short vacations from ego and don’t experience sleep as “brother to death.” We embrace oblivion on long flights. Sleep is nature's time machine. But drugs can produce a state disconcertingly like absolute oblivion. One minute I was on a hospital table for a colonoscopy, staring lazily at the monitor--and the next I was wide awake a corridor. There was no sense that I’d slept for a long or a short time. A hospital hour had simply vanished. That hour was as empty as the trillions before birth. It was the void. Oddly, we have no problem that other void, the one before birth, but then we weren’t in a love with time and duality—head over heels with the sense of a Me distinct from Not-me.

The prevailing view in the New Testament is that physical death leads to period of such sleep in the grave, prelude to the resurrection of the body on the Last Day when Jesus returns and the dead are given imperishable bodies. The resurrection of the physical  body, thus of the ego-identity, remains dogma in the Catholic Church, so that the scattering of ashes is prohibited. Not that God can’t reassemble scattered corpses (say, burials at sea) but it's bad faith to make things harder for Him. 

There is also a belief—in tension with this—that we are inherently spiritual, ego-souls that float out of our bodies toward Heaven at death, homing in on the Pearly Gates. In mainstream Christian theology, in any case, each person is supposed to have an eternal soul, hermetically sealed off forever from the rest of the cosmos (though connected by love) and created ex nihilo at conception—presumably the moment the fleetest sperm pierces the egg membrane and and DNA strands embrace, a squishy lightning strike of miraculous creation.

Most of Eastern thought—Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and Shinto alike—handles selfhood another way, accepting dissolution of ego but asserting eternal existence in another sense. The human I-sense is, in this view, a passing phenomena that—except in the case of some adepts—dissipates when its host brain dies. Ego is a figment of the phenomenological world of matter that, because it is ever-changing, contains nothing permanent. The illusion that I exist apart from the rest of creation is a dream of suffering that I need to wake up from. I need to recognize my higher Self (or no-self) above and beyond the delusion of separate existence. I need to joyfully see that I am one with God and everybody else. I should celebrate my identity with the One.

Within this broad agreement, there are differences in emphasis, some Eastern religions emphasizing going wisely with the flow, others counseling meditative retreat, but, in contrast to Western religion’s denial of ego-death, the usual answer is some form of, “Get over yourself.” Most Eastern thought assumes reincarnation. The soul-stuff in a living body disconnects at death and later connects to another body. To some extent the soul survives but the personality—except for causal traces called karma—perishes. Personal ego does not survive, but, hey, most of us folks aren't keepers anyway. Eastern thought typically assumes that today’s life-in-ego is conditioned by unremembered past lives. Life everlasting isn't reward, but punishment, a chain of rebirths into lives of inevitable struggle and discontent. The aim is to escape the world of time.

Vedic philosophy, the source of much Eastern religion, describes a higher path and a lower path, both of which have value. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna, speaking as an avatar of the lord of all, promises to reward the worshippers of all gods, which are all faces of his Oneness, but he warns that good works offer no escape from the cycle of rebirth. The Gita describes a heavenly afterlife rewarding the lower religious devotee, something like the Christian Heaven except that it is temporary. Eventually, virtuous worshippers are dumped back into mortal life (9: 20-24).

Most Christian teaching follows the lower path by populating the afterlife with separate (if purified) egos, but there are hints of the higher path in Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart, who was prosecuted for it, and his defender Henry Suso, who was not. Suso, in his Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, describes two kinds of heavenly reward. One, resembling the lower path, is Accidental Reward, which is delight that souls obtain through “meritorious works.” The higher path is Essential Reward, which consists of “union of the soul with pure Divinity.” Such pure souls penetrate “into the vast wilderness and unfathomable abyss of the unknown Godhead, wherein they are immersed, overflowed, and blended up.” This implies loss of personal identity, a Catholic heresy that the editor of the 1887 translation (with imprimatur from the Bishop of Boston) hedges in a footnote: “Without prejudice, however to their own individuality” (Seuse, chapter XII)

Seuse, Heinrich, 1295-1366, and Walter Hilton. Blessed Henry Suso's Little Book of Eternal Wisdom: to Which Are Added the Celebrated "Parable of the Pilgrim" of Walter Hilton, And a Pref. by C. H. McKenna. 1st American ed. Boston: T. B. Noonan, 1887.