Dialogue X

Whether it's heaven, reincarnation, or the fountain of youth, mankind has had a perennial fascination with immortality. But have we ever asked ourselves what it would really be like to live forever? In their tenth dialogue, Cohen and Wilber deconstruct the “immortality projects” of the human ego and in the process reveal a striking new vision of eternal life.

ANDREW COHEN: The twenty-first-century quest for physical immortality is the theme for this issue, so I thought it would be appropriate if we had a discussion about enlightenment and immortality. In fact, the first time I became aware of the possibility of extending our physical lives to a ridiculously long length of time—to hundreds, if not thousands of years—was when I read your book Boomeritis.

KEN WILBER: It really shook me up when I first heard about the possibility of physical immortality—or at least massively extended physical life span, perhaps several hundred thousand years—which is why I used it as a little subplot in Boomeritis. For about three days, I was in a daze, because when you think about that possibility, it seems to change just about everything!

COHEN: Precisely. It scared the heck out of me, too! But I think this is something we all have to begin to consider, because it seems that in the not-too-distant future, for better or worse, these capacities, these potentials, are actually going to be available to us. This fact should compel all thoughtful and sensitive souls to dare to face into some big and ultimately challenging questions. Initially, at a deep existential level, the notion of the mortal self, or ego, being able to carry on for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, just feels absolutely wrong. Intuitively, it seemed to me that if one could infinitely extend the life of the individual, one would be breaking some fundamental law of the universe—tampering with natural structures in the creative process that shouldn't be tampered with. It just seemed deeply chilling and even horrifying. But then it suddenly occurred to me that this is all inevitable—that sooner or later, we will have the ability to prolong our physical life span. And then I wondered: Would the possibility of extending the human experience still feel so deeply wrong if human beings were much more evolved at the level of consciousness? Or might extending our physical life span eventually be a natural expression of our evolutionary development?

WILBER: Well, I think that's a question everybody should ask. Let me give my own quick overview of what we mean by immortality.

COHEN: We're talking about physical immortality.

WILBER: I know, but physical immortality gets confused with other realms. Let me briefly give an overview of what we're talking about in terms of these realms—the body, the soul, and the spirit—and then we can focus on whether we mean physical immortality or the immortality of the soul or the immortality of spirit.

Human beings want immortality in a bodily realm because they intuit something deeper that's not bodily. That's one version of what I call the Atman Project, which is an intuition of infinity applied to the finite realm—when you want the finite realm to be infinite. And that's part of the difficulty. When most people think about immortality, they're thinking about some variation of overcoming time. And in the physical domain you overcome time by living forever. That's the body's idea of immortality. It's simply not physically dying. You're materially going on forever.

Immortality for the soul is usually thought of as reincarnation. The soul is immortal because it never dies. It goes from body to body to body. It's as if the soul takes off one coat and puts on another. That's another version of immortality, a higher-realm version, but ultimately it is also just another version of the Atman Project, because it is a fussing around in the realm of time looking for the timeless. It just fusses around a lot longer.

For the realm of nondual spirit, immortality doesn't mean living forever. It means the experience of timelessness; it means a moment of pure timeless presence, not going on forever in time.

COHEN: An infinite moment of timelessness.

WILBER: Yes, an infinite moment. It basically means without space and without time. Even Wittgenstein got it right. He said, “If we take eternity to mean not everlasting time but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”

So you can have eternal life by simply and fully being in the timeless present with spirit, now. And whether your body lives for a million years or not, you are still eternal. It doesn't mean you live forever; it means you're not in the stream of time. So all of time arises within the awareness or spaciousness that you are in this timeless present. The “I AMness” that you are is radically without time. So it's eternal in its fullness right now.

There are, at the very least, three types of “immortality.” There's the immortality of living forever in time—whether physically living forever or having the soul go on forever—and then there's the immortality or eternity of the timeless present as spirit's Presence. And you can have immortality and eternity in the timeless present, right now, with no further requirements whatsoever. But immortality through time, ultimately it just can't be done, not for any finite body and not for the soul, either, not really. You can make it live for a million years, but to go on for a million years in time looking for the timeless is simply to miss the point for a million years. So there's only one kind of actual immortality, and that's the immortality of the timeless ever-present clarity of spirit.

COHEN: Yes. The whole notion of physical immortality is strictly about the domain of the body and of the egoic self, which is inherently finite. When people speak about immortality in this way, it has nothing to do with the immortal nature of the spirit. Making these distinctions is very important. And one significant issue is that if we begin to experiment with extending our capacity or ability to live in the physical domain but are not more evolved spiritually, philosophically, and ethically, the picture becomes inherently problematic.

In the physical domain of the universe, there's a constant process of creation and destruction that's occurring in every moment at all levels. It's unbroken. It's never static. In fact, that appears to be the very nature of the manifest domain. And at some level it feels like attaining physical immortality would be interfering with that process. If we suddenly gained the capacity to live beyond what is currently considered our natural life span, it seems like we would be crossing over into a kind of ungodly realm of the “undead.”

WILBER: I understand. It violates nature's laws.

COHEN: Yes. Ironically enough, I imagine that if we do succeed in extending our capacity to live for hundreds or thousands of years, it just might create more fear and attachment than we're already burdened with. For example, I've noticed that people who have a lot of money tend to be more worried and concerned about it than people who have a lot less. In the same way, if I knew I was going to live for 5,000 years, I would probably take fewer risks than I do now. In fact, maybe I'd never want to get on an airplane or go bungee jumping, because if anything happened, I'd lose my chance to live for 5,000 years! Just as people who are very rich become more attached to money—it doesn't free them; it imprisons them—the gift of immortality could create a hellish life.

WILBER: You'd never go outdoors, would you?

COHEN: Precisely. It could be ironic and horrible.

WILBER: Otto Rank was one of Freud's initial five inner disciples and he was a brilliant man. He was one of the first to use the term “neurosis,” but he had an existential meaning for it, which is still quite extraordinary: a neurotic, he said, was somebody whose fear of death caused them to fear life. I drew a lot on his work when I was writing The Atman Project, which is basically about the fear of death, the ego's fear of death. The ego intuits that its True Self is spirit and is infinite and eternal. But it applies that intuition of eternity to its own finite body or self and then wants its finite body or self to be eternal.

It's that intuition of infinity applied to the finite realm that makes human beings such a peculiar mixture—both completely human and completely divine simultaneously, and constantly prone to confusing those spheres! When we confuse these two spheres, all hell breaks out, literally. That's why Rank defined neurosis as when somebody's fear of death makes them especially fearful of life, which is a beautiful understanding of neurosis and not at all what you get from standard psychoanalysis. So that's what you're talking about, and yes, if we actually extended our life span to 1,000, 5,000, or 10,000 years, you'd feel like an idiot if on your thirtieth birthday you got run over by a truck.

COHEN: You'd hate it.

WILBER: Oh, man, what a bummer!

COHEN: But what's interesting is that the people in our culture who are pushing this whole potential are, of course, those who have reached the scientific/rational worldview and have what you might call a scientific Atman project: they intuit their infinite Selves but want to scientifically make their finite selves go on forever!

WILBER: Absolutely. And the latest twist is that they want to download consciousness into computers. But then you always have to say, “What level of consciousness are you talking about? There are a dozen levels and basically all you want to do is download the egoic rational level. I mean, why?” They say, “We're going to live 5,000 years or 10,000 years—won't that be great!” I say, “Why would you want Hitler to live 10,000 years? Why do you want Saddam Hussein to live 10,000 years? What exactly are you talking about when you say that this is necessarily a good thing?”

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.

WILBER: And it has a passionate, desireless desire to change the realm of manifestation.

COHEN: Right. And it's like an unceasing explosion; it's a power that is inherently creative, and it also feels immortal because its very nature is immortal, but in a completely different way than the Self Absolute. And so these are the two different expressions of our immortal nature as consciousness or spirit.

WILBER: And the immortal God impulse that is creatively working with the manifest side of the world also finds that it runs up against itself. In other words, that infinite power runs up against the density of its own material manifestation.

COHEN: Yes. It's constantly striving to push beyond what it has already created—and that is its ongoing battle.

WILBER: So this infinite power of ours is running into our own density.

COHEN: Absolutely, constantly.

WILBER: And that's the tension of evolution.

THE EXUBERANT YES

COHEN: As we were saying earlier, when the mortal self considers what it would actually be like to live forever, something about that possibility is felt to be deeply and inherently wrong. Interestingly enough, most mortal selves find the notion of living unendingly quite unbearable. Just think about it for a minute. Would Andrew or Ken or anyone else really want to live forever as Andrew, Ken, or anyone else? The idea is actually quite terrifying, isn't it? But how does the authentic self, the conscious evolutionary impulse alive in us, feel about living forever? It was, after all, that same creative impulse that initiated this whole process fourteen billion years ago. In other words, from the perspective of the authentic self, the universe is our creation. We did it; we created all this. We were the ones who decided to do this. Of course, we forget that . . . but who else could it have been?!

The universe is the project of the authentic self, of the creative impulse. And the degree to which we awaken to the authentic self is the degree to which we awaken to that God impulse, which is none other than our own passion to move this process forward. Now, that part of myself and that part of yourself never think about what it would be like to live forever, because that part of the self doesn't have the capacity to think of itself as being separate from the ongoing creative process. It's only aware of this unbridled passion to create, to move forward ceaselessly. On the other hand, the ego, or mortal self, has an inherent fear of death and dissolution. We don't want to die. Our worst fear is dying. But from the perspective of the authentic self, or the part of you that is one with the evolutionary impulse, which is what I call God, we're just getting started.

From God's perspective, the fourteen billion years it's taken to get to this point is just the beginning—we're really just getting rolling. It's as if we're running a marathon and we're maybe halfway through the first mile, if that. We're just warming up! But when the mortal self considers the infinite nature of the evolutionary process, it finds it absolutely unbearable to think of having to be at it for that long. And what's so interesting about this is that the ego is presented with this contradiction: “Oh, I thought I wanted to live forever, but I really don't.” Just as we feel the relief of going to sleep at night after a long and busy day, even death can be felt to be a relief and a release from the experience of incarnation. It's like we need a rest in which we go through a process of regeneration before we get back in the fray.

From God's perspective, the infinite nature of this process is not frightening or overwhelming, or a process for which we need any rest. And this is why I have come up with a new definition of the bodhisattva ideal. The traditional declaration of the bodhisattva is, “I vow to postpone my own nirvana until all other sentient beings reach nirvana,” which is the point at which we all get released from the ordeal of the evolutionary process. But in the new version, it changes to “I vow to participate in this process forever because that is who I am.” It is the most frightening thing for a human being to say yes to that, because what that really means is, “I vow to be conscious for eternity.” And that is unbearable. It's ultimately frightening. It challenges our humanity at a soul level. And it's a new way to look at this whole notion of the bodhisattva ideal in an evolutionary context.

WILBER: It's true that we as human beings indeed have this chance—to consciously engage with the evolutionary process—for the first time in fourteen billion years, and this really has only occurred in the last microsecond of this whole evolutionary unfolding. So, on the one hand, we have the Christ figure who is fully aware of how deeply you can suffer when you're awake to both your natures—your infinite, eternal, timeless Self and your finite, suffering, existential, dread-and-angst self. The cross is a perfect expression of the suffering that is caused by the intersection of those two. On the other hand, there's the Eastern, nondual, tantric version of all this, which is: I vow to be both nirvana and samsara for as long as they both last. And that's the kind of vow you're talking about, which is basically a commitment to not withdraw from either.

COHEN: But there's another dimension to it. Don't you think that as the energy, the intelligence that initiated the evolutionary process awakens to itself in us, the very direction of this process literally depends on our willingness to take responsibility for it? In other words, unless we are unconditionally willing to say, “Yes, I will do this with all of my heart, and all of my soul, and all of my being, for eternity,” ultimately, the process won't be able to continue to develop. It seems we're at this crossing-over point. Up until now, the evolutionary process has been occurring more or less unconsciously. But in beginning to become conscious of itself, it's becoming more and more dependent upon us to take it to higher and higher levels.

WILBER: I agree. And there are two different phases of it. One is the phase of promising not to withdraw from the finite realm. And that is the Mahayana or bodhisattva vow, which is basically, “I vow not to get off the wheel of samsara but to help it as best I can,” because essentially nirvana and samsara are not two.

But there is an extraordinary deepening of that realization with tantra or Vajrayana, which is a realization not just that I won't get off the wheel of samsara, but that samsara itself, the entire finite realm, is an ecstatic expression of my very own infinite selfless Self or True Nature. The best parts of tantra went further and played with luminosity. All of a sudden samsara becomes a sparkling ornament and manifestation, or radiant joyous expression and taste, of what you always already are. And so now it's not, “I promise not to withdraw.” It's, “I will fully enter that, and I will enter even the lowest domains of samsara as expressions of nirvana itself.” In this there's a little intimation of what you're talking about. And this comes to an even fuller flowering with an understanding of the evolutionary nature of spirit, which happened with the great idealists, and then Sri Aurobindo, among others.

I think that's close to what you're describing, which really has only come into fruition on the planet, East and West, in the last thirty years. It's God realization as the positive, absolute commitment to an exuberant embrace of the manifest realm, and the promise to carry it forward forever, as endlessly unfolding dimensions of your own deepest Divinity and Spirit-in-action.

COHEN: The beautiful thing about this is that it overwhelms the ego in the most absolute way. I mean, the traditional notion of ego death in the face of unmanifest emptiness, or the void, is one thing. That's when so many people declare, “I'm so afraid of the unknown.” But what about taking on the manifest realm forever? That pulls the rug out from under the ego and its fear of the dark! It's an instantly tangible, absolute confrontation that is profound, ever-new, and relentless. It shakes us awake to what we really have to step into now, and it destroys the split between the world and the spirit in a way that's essential at this time. Any spirituality that is merely a personal matter is completely undercut in this new way of thinking.

WILBER: Like I said, there were beautiful early intimations of this in the Mahayana and the Vajrayana turnings of the wheel. The Heart Sutra is a very static simple form, but it's still extremely beautiful: “That which is emptiness is non-other than form; that which is form is non-other than emptiness.” But then we discovered that form is evolving. Therefore, that which is evolving is none other than spirit. That which is spirit is none other than that which is evolving. That's the Heart Sutra in its updated evolutionary form. So all of a sudden, emptiness becomes the exuberant manifestation of its own evolving form, and that's what you're calling God, or the God impulse, which is to enter into that with an exuberant yes that is so actually immortal that it completely undoes the immortality project of the ego.

I think the form that you're expressing it in is exactly right. A thousand years from now they'll have a slightly different form. But that intersection between the infinite and the finite—that's the seed. It was the cross for Christ, it was the basis for Mahayana, and it was much stronger in tantra and is even stronger in the present-day nondual evolutionary panentheism, which is what we're speaking about. It's that extraordinary intersection between the infinite and the finite that is where all the action is. It's such a friction point—and once you get on the other side of it, you can't go back.

COHEN: Because now you know who you are, and there's no escape clause anymore. It's kind of like a permanent crucifixion.

WILBER: Yes, and liberation simultaneously!