COHEN: To handle this extraordinary capacity, we would have to be evolved at the level of spirit.

WILBER: That's right. So let's say you have realized spirit in the deepest way possible. Let's say you have an enlightened realization that doesn't need to live forever in time. It's transcended the soul's version of immortality and therefore no longer needs to reincarnate, and it's transcended the body's idea of immortality and therefore does not have to eat food everlastingly and live everlastingly in the physical realm. You are a pure timeless presence and you have eternity in this moment. If human beings started developing the technology to live longer in a human body, would you choose to inhabit a body that might live longer, as evolution itself, if you were enlightened? Well, why not? Let's just suppose that somebody's born 10,000 years from now and they become fairly enlightened and at that time human societies do have bodies that live for 5,000 years—

COHEN: They'll be ready for it. They'll be prepared.

WILBER: That's correct. That's the point. It all hangs on that.

COHEN: Obviously the main problem, though, is that our technological capacities are so far ahead of our moral, ethical, philosophical, and spiritual development.

WILBER: As always! There's got to be some mathematical law about a lag period in human understanding, because I see no exceptions to it throughout history.

COHEN: It's very problematic.

WILBER: It is problematic.

COHEN: But the fact that physical immortality could make sense when we become more evolved at the level of spirit is totally intriguing. It gives one a perspective on an unimaginable potential in the future.

WILBER: Doesn't it? And in the meantime, though, I think what we're looking at here is the Atman Project, where the typical egoic self intuits that its own deepest nature is timeless, but it applies that intuition to a finite realm. And so it looks at its physical body and says, “I want this to live forever.”

COHEN: Yes, but of course, the “I” that wants to live forever wants to do so for all the wrong reasons. And if it wants to live forever for the wrong reasons, it is going to wreak havoc in this world.

WILBER: That's right—that's what the Atman Project is. In my book Up from Eden, I went through historical epochs to show how so much of the havoc wreaked in each of those eras was indeed the result of an intuition of infinity applied to the finite realm. You want to blow the finite realm up to infinite proportions—and all you can do is blow it up.

COHEN: Like the Nazis, for example!

WILBER: Yup.

COHEN: It seems to me that the nature or the structure of the universe is supported by and completely dependent upon the tension between the unmanifest domain and the manifest domain, between the time-bound mortal self and the timeless immortal spirit. It seems that the fundamental and inherent tension between those two is what holds the universe together. And it is that tension itself that is the creative process and is simultaneously the gravity that holds the whole in place. I think that if the mortal, or finite, dimension succeeded in becoming immortal, the universe would disappear.

WILBER: I think that's right. The great German idealists were some of the first to talk about it. You can actually look at evolution from two perspectives: you can look at it from the perspective of a finite thing, and you can look at it from the perspective of infinite spirit. And from the perspective of the finite thing, Hegel said, “Even the rocks cry out and scream and raise themselves up to spirit.” And Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schelling and Hegel gave extraordinary accounts of what's driving developmental evolution, which is the attempt of a finite thing to find infinity. And it can't do it. It tries and fails. It tries again at a higher level, and it can't do it there, and it fails. It gives up and then tries again at an even higher level. And each level gets closer to spirit, but it's still in the manifest domain. And like you said, if it ever actually reached the infinite, then the whole game would be up. And then as spirit you would close your eyes, dream for a billion years, open your eyes, sneeze and start the whole thing all over again.

COHEN: And it seems to be in the tension of that juxtaposition—where the mortal self awakens to its immortal nature as spirit—that enlightenment is found and that real immortality is attained. That's heaven.

WILBER: Yes, I very much agree. But here's what is so interesting: there's a little stretch of hell in our development from subconscious to self-conscious to superconscious. The subconscious realm doesn't suffer because it's not self-conscious. There's no existential angst. But then there's a period where you're self-conscious enough to know that you're finite and you intuit infinity, but you haven't yet awakened to real infinity. And between that is all of the hell of humanity.

COHEN: That's samsara.

WILBER: That's exactly right. It is absolute hell because you are on earth, you intuit heaven, and you're a mixture of both. I think the great archetypal figure of this is Christ. Because, for example, the sitting image of the Buddha is largely of one who is simply awakened and “off the wheel.” He's awakened to the infinite unmanifest but hasn't integrated the manifest. But Christ is both human and divine, and he knows fully that he's both. And the passion on the cross is the passion of humanity between those two points. I think it's a beautiful image. It's a sad, horrifying image, but it's very true.

COHEN: And of course, in his case he was aware of the predicament.

WILBER: Yes, he was, unfortunately.

COHEN: Most of us aren't, though. The tension between these two poles is actually the source of our deepest sustenance, our spiritual sustenance, our soul's raison d'être. But this is something a lot of people don't know about. A lot of us are looking for relief and release from the existential hell of postmodern alienation through the experience of the immortal self. But we're missing where the action really is: the tension point between both extremes—between the infinite, unmanifest, or immortal self and the finite, manifest, or mortal self.

WILBER: I agree that we have to embrace both poles. But let's keep in mind that there are two ways to get it wrong. On the one hand, you can stay on the finite side of the street, trying to get the physical body to live forever. These are immortality projects in the physical realm. On the other hand, you have the form of spiritual seeking where you want your soul to live forever and be reincarnated. And of course you can remember the times when you were building a pyramid . . . or Cleopatra! You're doing an immortality project on the soul level, still finite, still not realizing the timeless present, and therefore being propelled through birth after birth.

COHEN: And in a traditional enlightenment context, you want to rest beyond the world.

WILBER: That's right. You want to get off the wheel, which itself is an immortality project of the arhat.* And then there's tantra, which embraces both the timeless realm and the fact that the timeless realm is manifesting itself in the realm of time. With tantra, you want to be able to embrace both of those domains without pulling an immortality project on the one hand or getting lost in the unmanifest domain on the other.

TWO EXPRESSIONS OF OUR IMMORTAL NATURE

COHEN: What the concept of immortality means in relationship to our actual human experience is different depending on which dimension of ourselves we're speaking about. When we awaken to the timeless unmanifest realm, or what's called the Self Absolute, that experience is the awareness of eternity. Suddenly one becomes aware of the eternal present. One awakens to the presence of eternity now. In an instant, one goes from a state of finitude, of being locked in time, to an experience in which the awareness of time recedes into the background, if not disappearing altogether. The experience of this state is absolutely tangible. It almost feels material—as real as this table in front of me.

WILBER: And in that state, nothing changes; time doesn't touch this.

COHEN: Yes. There's no beginning and there's no end. That's instant enlightenment—unconditional freedom.

WILBER: And radical release.

COHEN: In that release, one becomes aware of the immortal nature of consciousness itself. Its very nature is always free of anything that happens in time. So this is one manifestation of the immortal nature of spirit—the unmanifest, timeless ground of being itself. But there is another manifestation of the immortal nature of consciousness, which is the creative evolutionary impulse to become. This is what I call the “authentic self.” The authentic self is the God impulse, the energy and intelligence that initiated the creative process in the first place. Now what does the authentic self, or evolutionary impulse, feel like when we awaken to it? It feels like a sense of absolute power, of indestructibility, expressed as a kind of ceaseless optimism, an almost unbearable positivity.