Immortality

by Stephen Cave

  Such escorts might, however, be necessary if spouses cannot recognize each other: presumably, if you died an old woman it would not be your idea of heaven to spend eternity frail, bent and with two artificial hips. You might therefore prefer that your soul take on the form of your sweet sixteen-year-old self. Other people will have become addled in their old age, their memories and reason consumed by dementia. Most soul theorists assume that everyone in heaven would be healed of earthly wounds and diseases, including presumably those of the mind—no one wants to spend an eternity with Alzheimer’s. But we now have a soul in heaven that is radically different and discontinuous both in form and mind from the individual on earth. The claim that it really is the same person is again becoming increasingly tenuous.

  We must also ask where these bodies are coming from. Souls are supposed to be nonmaterial—that is, not made of stuff. This is what makes them immune to the degradations to which bodies are prone, and so immortal. But all the images of the afterlife that we have looked at sound very physical—full of people, thrones, even “transportation and communications.” Indeed, a next world devoid entirely of things, where even people have no form, is inconceivable. For Christians and Muslims, this problem is solved once the great resurrection has taken place and people have their bodies returned to them (though that, as we have seen, is a problematic notion in itself). But until then, it is a mystery how our souls are supposed to take on any form without losing their nonmaterial nature. Dante’s poetic answer is that the surrounding air collects itself into the shapes of the people and their various rewards and punishments he claims to have seen in heaven and hell: “So the neighboring air there puts itself Into the shape impressed upon it by The virtue of the soul.”

  An anthropocentric view of heaven as celestial tea parties and shopping malls is widespread in the modern West as well as in the Islamic world. But it is fraught with difficulties, as Jesus well knew when he suggested rather that the next life would be like that of angels. The theocentric view, therefore, is likely to remain the heaven of choice for popes and theologians. However, there are challenges that it too must answer—challenges that take us back to the question of whether living forever is a good idea at all.

  BACK TO ETERNITY

  THE theocentric view takes an altogether different approach from that of the anthropocentric. Instead of a sensuous Shangri-la, it offers eternal exaltation of the divine. Its advocates say that this encounter with God is love and happiness, far exceeding anything we might have experienced on earth. The theocentric vision therefore defines away boredom and dissatisfaction: by definition heaven is pure, unending joy.

  This view brings the Christian heaven closer to other mystical traditions such as those popular in Eastern religions. Its advantage lies in the claim that the afterlife experience will transcend anything we have or could experience in this world; it is therefore immune to the kind of criticism that says we would eventually tire of endless milk, honey or ginger ale. But this mysticism is a disadvantage too, for we are left wondering if such transcendence is really possible, whether it is an experience humans are capable of having—at least while remaining recognizably human.

  To remain unchangingly joyful for eternity, the theocentric vision cannot itself depend upon some particular set of realizations, like a series of good jokes or profound insights. Whatever it is that first amazed or interested us in the divine vision would presumably at some point cease to do so. Even if it was like the very best of what we had experienced in this life—the sublimity of a grand landscape, the companionship of friends—we would tire of it eventually. So, advocates suggest, this experience cannot be one that fits into the usual categories of surprise, interest, learning, discovery or entertainment, as all of these have finiteness built into them. It must instead be more akin to a trance, an unending state of perfection in which time has become obsolete.

  Perhaps such a thing is conceivable. Various mystics and religious practitioners claim to have had an experience close to this—although of course only for a limited time, not for eternity. Revealingly such experiences are usually described in terms of a loss of self or ego; all that is distinctive about the individual human personality fades from view—memories, preferences, dispositions are all irrelevant or even hindrances. Pope Benedict XVI’s description of the final state of heaven comes very close to this: “It will be a single act in which, forgetful of self, the individual will break through the limits of being into the whole, and the whole take up its dwelling in the individual.” What he and other sophisticated theologians realize—and Eastern religions have long known—is that eternal life could only be bearable if it is far removed from the pettiness and smallness of an individual life—indeed if it is not really individual life at all.

  In support of this view, some theologians argue that eternity should indeed be understood not as endless time but rather as timelessness. Eternal life should therefore be seen not as a life that goes on forever but as one where time has ceased to apply, a life outside of time. For theologians such as St. Augustine, this reflected the idea of God as himself being beyond time. Dante attempted to capture the idea by describing how, in the empyrean, the flow of light moves from being like a river to being a circle, the symbol of eternity. The theologian Paul Tillich described this vision of the soul’s future as “rest in His eternal presence.”

  This is the logical extension of the mystical, theocentric vision, and it also fully reveals the flaws in that view. For an afterlife without time is not really a life at all. Everything that makes up human life—experience, learning, growth, communication, even singing hosannas—requires the passage of time. Without time, nothing can happen; it is a state of stasis, a cessation of thought and action. The attraction of the soul view was the unique aura it gave to every individual life, but its logical conclusion is an eternity of nothing, with life negated altogether.

  In the face of such difficulties, many people retreat behind the mantra “We do not know, we cannot know.” But these difficulties are conceptual ones that challenge any idea of heaven or an afterlife of the soul. The problem is not simply that we do not know which version of the heaven story is true; rather, it is that none of them seem to offer a coherent, satisfying account. But Dante, at least, offered a poetic one.

  BEATRICE’S SMILE

  DANTE’S challenge was to reconcile his pious love of God with his passionate love for Beatrice. He achieved this by making Beatrice his guide in heaven who escorts him up through the celestial spheres to the very empyrean. Instead of being the temptation that leads a weak man away from righteousness, his lady therefore becomes the grace that leads him to God. Beatrice’s soul lived on, and through her beauty, Dante thought he saw heaven’s glory embodied; in his love for her, he believed he came closer to the source of all love—Christ. Through Beatrice, Dante attains a spiritual state in which he is able to look upon the glory of the church, of Mary, Mother of God, and of the Father himself.

  This was a daring attempt to resolve the tensions between this world and the next: in placing Beatrice’s soul with the saints, Dante was steering very close to blasphemy. Here was a woman of no particular fame, not renowned for her virtue or with any particular accomplishments to speak of—indeed her sole claim to be placed in such godly heights was having been pretty enough to catch Dante’s eye. And yet she sits in the highest heaven, alongside the likes of St. Augustine and John the Baptist. It is an extraordinary inflation of her significance—and of Dante’s own, placing his beloved so close to God. And it is an extraordinary and risqué fusing of the sexual impulse—Dante’s crush on a beautiful woman—with Christian piety. Yet he pulled it off with such verve and style that his work was accepted as inspired by the Holy Spirit.

  Finally, before leaving him to return alone to earth and tell his story, Beatrice reconciled for Dante the theocentric and anthropocentric views of heaven. Of course, his paradise followed the theocentric orthodoxy of his day, with the ultimate satisfaction it offers of eve
rlasting worship of “the eternal light.” But the poet could not imagine an immortality in which his human love for Beatrice went unrecognized and unrequited. And so when Beatrice had returned to her seat in the great amphitheater surrounding the godhead, she had time for a final gesture that gave him all he needed of earthly satisfaction:

  So I prayed; and she, so far away

  As she appeared, smiled and regarded me;

  Then turned away to the eternal fountain.

  In this chapter, we have looked into the heavens—and not found paradise so easily as Dante’s great poem suggests. In the next chapter, we will look inside ourselves for the soul itself.

  7

  THE LOST SOUL

  REINCARNATION AND THE EVIDENCE OF SCIENCE

  AMID the mountains and steppes in the far northeast of the Tibetan plateau, a group of monks stopped at a small farm. They sought a boy, though they had no idea what he looked like or what his name was. For many months they had been walking the mountain roads and snowy passes until eventually they were drawn to this house by the unusual guttering, made of hollowed-out juniper wood. It reminded the senior monk of a vision reported by Tibet’s regent in faraway Lhasa. After making inquiries, the travelers had been told that a boy had indeed been born two years before to the simple, pious family that lived there.

  As they approached, the senior monk—a lama, from the Sera monastery—donned sheepskins and pretended to be a servant, while another monk acted as leader instead. They told the man of the house, who was clearing snow from the small yard, that they had lost their way and sought shelter for the night. The monks were taken to the front room, but the lama pretending to be a servant stayed with the mother and her young child in the kitchen, helping to make tea and carry firewood. The little boy, Lhamo Dhondup, immediately took to the kind stranger and climbed up onto his lap. He grabbed at the old rosary that hung from the man’s neck. “You can hold it if you can say who I am,” said the monk. “Sera Lama!” shouted the toddler.

  The lama was astonished. The little boy apparently recognized him although they had never before met—and he seemed fixated on the rosary, which had belonged to the recently deceased thirteenth Dalai Lama, whose new incarnation the monks sought. When the party prepared to leave the next day, the little boy pleaded to go with them. They appeased him only by promising to return—which they did, a few weeks later, as an official deputation.

  This time the party carried with them numerous objects that had belonged to the thirteenth Dalai Lama, along with similar items that had not. The little Lhamo Dhondup would have to pick those that had been the deceased ruler’s to prove that he was his reincarnation. The items—black rosaries, yellow rosaries, walking sticks, prayer drums—were arranged on a low table. First, the boy picked up the correct rosaries and put them around his neck. The monks held their breath in anticipation. He reached toward the sticks—and put his hand on the wrong one. The watching monks felt a shock of disappointment, but quite suddenly the boy took his hand away and firmly grasped the right one. The monks’ eyes filled with tears of happiness—they had found the fourteenth Dalai Lama!

  All Buddhists believe in reincarnation, the idea that when a person dies their soul will be reborn in a new body. The form of that new body—which can be any living thing, man or woman, flea or octopus—is usually a direct consequence of how that person behaved in their previous life. This is the cycle of cause and effect known as karma. But Tibetan Buddhists believe that some highly spiritually developed individuals can choose the vehicle for their next life. The Dalai Lama, the most senior of Tibet’s lamas, is one such enlightened individual. When the thirteenth incarnation died in 1933, his head was said to have turned to face northeast—indicating that it was there that he had chosen to reappear.

  It was 1938 when his newest incarnation was found. For five years Tibet had been ruled by a temporary regent, while the Dalai Lama’s soul was thought to travel through the “in-between state” before finding its next earthly vessel. The world below the mountainous plateau was on the verge of war, and new forces were emerging that would soon challenge Tibet’s studied isolation. The country needed its figurehead; to the simple people, the Dalai Lama was like a god, said to be an incarnation of the bodhisattva of compassion, an enlightened being returned to earth to guide his people.

  At the age of five, Lhamo Dhondup was initiated as a monk and given the name of Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama. Taken away from his family home, he was raised with monastic austerity in a huge, cold palace. On the rare occasions he left it, accompanied by a long and colorful procession, people would prostrate themselves before him. In 1950, at the age of fifteen, he was enthroned as worldly ruler of Tibet, just as a large Chinese army was crossing the border.

  THE SOUL OF THE EAST

  IN chapter 6, we looked at the soul in the Western tradition, from Plato to Pope Benedict. The phenomenal success of this narrative is a direct function of the emotional and intellectual satisfactions it offers: each of us, it declares, has some core that is pure and immortal, a spark of the divine. Physical death is therefore merely a transition to a better place where our spirits will be free.

  But we saw that, on closer examination, this better place proves somewhat elusive. Both where it is and what it is like are questions that are hard to answer without collapsing into contradiction. The Eastern version of the Soul Narrative, with its focus on reincarnation, has a partial solution to these problems: when you die your soul does indeed live on, but here on earth in a new body—at least until you reach enlightenment.

  It is these Eastern traditions that we will explore in this chapter, in particular Buddhism and Hinduism, along with the reincarnation doctrine that they share. Reincarnation belongs to the Soul Narrative because it is something like a soul that is thought to survive bodily death and be reborn. To say that you were Napoleon or Cleopatra in a past life is just to say that the same soul that was in the Napoleon-body or Cleopatra-body and lived the Napoleon-life or Cleopatra-life is now in your body living your life. Reincarnation therefore depends on your having a soul to outlive your current physical frame—unlike, for example, the Resurrection Narrative, which claims that your current flesh-and-bone body will one day rise from the grave to live again.

  We will also look at where the reincarnation doctrine meets the realm of modern science: in the giant brain-scanners of the world’s laboratories and hospitals. It is in these machines that the scientific search for the soul is being conducted, and we will see what the very latest discoveries on the nature of the mind tell us about our prospects of living on.

  No one better represents the encounter of ancient wisdom and modern science than the fourteenth Dalai Lama. Born into a culture that had changed little since the Middle Ages and trained in a religion older than Christianity, he was nonetheless from childhood fascinated by technology. As a teenager, he experimented with—and crashed—one of the three cars he inherited from his predecessor, the only automobiles in all of Tibet, and went on to acquire quite a reputation as a repairer of watches. As an adult, he has sought dialogue with top scientists in every major field. When reassessing the doctrines of his faith against the latest discoveries, the Dalai Lama frequently cites the teaching of the Buddha, who himself said, “Monks, just as the wise accept gold after testing it by heating, cutting, and rubbing it, so are my words only to be accepted after examining them, not out of respect for me!”

  BUT much as the Buddha exhorted others to think for themselves, his own life story remains something like a founding myth for his followers such as the Dalai Lama. And as such this myth rivals Christianity for its explicit concern with confronting the fear of death. The boy Siddhartha Gautama was born to an aristocratic family in the foothills of the Himalayas, on the border of modern-day India and Nepal, sometime in the sixth century BCE. Various omens surrounding his birth were interpreted to mean that the boy would grow up to be either a great spiritual leader or a great king. In order to ensure the latter, his fat
her attempted to shield Gautama from witnessing the kind of human suffering that might turn someone to the priesthood.

  But the fates intervened to foil his father’s plan. On one rare journey outside of the family’s palace, the youthful Gautama saw an old man; when his charioteer explained that all people must grow old, he was thunderstruck. On his next journey, he saw a man who was sick and was shocked and dismayed when his charioteer explained that disease was an inevitable part of life. Then on the third journey, Gautama saw a corpse being taken to the cremation ground. On learning that we all must die, he was devastated. When on his fourth journey he saw an ascetic holy man, he resolved himself to find a way to overcome the great problem of the human condition: mortality.

  Although some Buddhists believe the story to be literal, many read it as a parable: Gautama’s sheltered life in the palace represents self-delusion and denial of the grim realities of human existence—that we all age, ail and die. The first three of the encounters represent the dawning recognition of these realities—an experience we each have as we mature. And the fourth encounter represents a turning to religion in order to cope with these truths. This story is therefore a perfect allegory of the first part of the Mortality Paradox—the realization that we are all perishable, finite creatures who one day must die—and of how this realization leads us to search for immortality narratives.

  Although he advanced rapidly under various holy masters, Gautama did not take to the life of the ascetic. After nearly dying of starvation, he realized such extremes were not the way to escape worldly suffering. So he sat down under a tree and resolved to meditate until enlightenment came—which it did forty-nine days later, from which point on Siddhartha Gautama was known as the Buddha—“the awakened one.”

  The particular realizations that came with the Buddha’s enlightenment are known as the Four Noble Truths: that life is suffering; that suffering is caused by the unceasing tumult of selfish desires that bind us to an impermanent world; that this suffering can have an end; and that this end can be achieved by giving up these selfish desires and leading a life of compassion and calm. Those who achieve this have reached nirvana, the state of liberation from the tribulations of this world, described by the Buddha as “deathlessness.”