KEN WILBER: PANDIT. A scholar who is deeply
proficient and immersed in spiritual wisdom. Self-described
“defender of the dharma; intellectual samurai.”
Hailed as “the Einstein of consciousness,”
Wilber is one of the most highly regarded philosophers alive
today, and his work offers a comprehensive and original
synthesis of the world's great psychological, philosophical, and
spiritual traditions. Author of numerous books, including
Sex, Ecology, Spirituality and A Brief History of
Everything, Wilber is the founder of Integral Institute and
a regular contributor to WIE.
ANDREW COHEN: GURU. Evolutionary thinker and
spiritual pathfinder. Self-described “idealist with
revolutionary inclinations.” Cohen, founder of
What Is Enlightenment? magazine, is a spiritual teacher
and author widely recognized as a defining voice in the emerging
field of evolutionary spirituality. Over the last decade in the
pages of WIE, Cohen has brought together leading
thinkers from East and West—mystics and materialists,
philosophers and psychologists—to explore the significance
of a new spirituality for the new millennium. His books include
Embracing Heaven & Earth and Living
Enlightenment.
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?”