ANDREW COHEN: I thought since we’re both over fifty that it would be nice to speak personally and philosophically about the subject of physical aging and spiritual immortality. I just turned fifty-two in October. How old are you now?

KEN WILBER: Fifty-eight.

Cohen: It seems, at least so far, that I’m stronger than I have ever been. I feel more vital, more awake, more mature, and more engaged with and committed to the life process than I have ever been. In light of all this, the notion of death and dissolution is something I can’t relate to. On one hand, I know this may be just part of being a baby boomer, because boomers, as I know you know, have a hard time growing old. But at the same time, I don’t think it’s only a boomer thing.

What I’ve discovered is that in awakening to the deeper and higher dimensions of one’s own self, in awakening spiritually, one’s center of gravity shifts from the ego to what I call the Authentic Self or evolutionary impulse, and one’s relationship to time changes. One begins to have a relationship with eternity and no longer just with a more localized, personal orientation to time. Once a fundamental spiritual threshold has been crossed in one’s own personal development—from the personal to the transpersonal—one’s orientation begins to shift from physical age and personal and psychological age to a more transpersonal self-orientation. One begins to identify more with eternity as the foundation for one’s fundamental relationship to existence.

The reason for this is that when you awaken to the Authentic Self and suddenly get deeply inspired about creating the future, your own soul simultaneously begins to become more aligned with the evolutionary impulse than it is with your personal karma, personal history, personal line of development. At a transpersonal level, you begin to relate to the whole developmental process from your soul!

The effect that awakening to this evolutionary impulse has on the personal self is amazing. The thrill of this kind of relationship with eternity alters the way one relates to personal time in the most fascinating way. Regardless of physical age, one finds oneself compelled by the future. At twenty, thirty, and even forty, it’s relatively easy to be excited about the future (even though not enough people seem to be!). But after turning fifty, it’s another thing altogether to be constantly looking forward and to be looking back less and less.

I have been wondering if this has to do with the unique time in history that we’re living in, because I know this isn’t something that’s only happening to me. A lot of boomers are living longer. We’re healthy, we’re exercising, we’re meditating, we’re taking vitamins, and we’re doing lots of good things to take care of ourselves. But the truth is that, for too many of us, our raison d’être is still to have yet another new and exciting experience. When we reach a higher level of development, having new experiences is not what we’re living for anymore. We’re here to do something, to create something, to make sure that something changes as a result of the fact that we are here. But too many of us boomers haven’t necessarily gotten to that point yet.

Defining Eternity

Wilber: That’s very true! Also, I’d like to clarify a few things I think are particularly important in terms of understanding notions like immortality, or eternity, or everlasting time. The first one has to do with defining “eternity.” Eternity doesn’t mean extending indefinitely in time—that would be “everlasting time” or “immortality.” Eternity strictly means a point without time. It means timelessness. So in that sense, the present moment, the now-moment, is without past or future, but it contains all past and all future moments in this present moment. Living in this present now-moment is eternity—it means to live in a timeless now. That’s one definition.

A second notion we need to define is “everlasting time.” And there are several different varieties of everlasting time. You have biological immortality, which is what the boomers are now hot on the trail of. Most Christians also believe in everlasting time, which they are going to win as part of their salvation. Their soul is going to live everlastingly in a heaven realm. And if you’re not a Christian—or the right kind of Christian—then you’re going to live everlastingly in a hell realm. Both heaven and hell, in this sense, are domains of extended, unending, temporal duration.

And then there’s another version of what everlasting time means, which is that time—in other words, normal, typical history as it unfolds and what becomes of that—will live on after I personally die.

As I’ve gotten older, my basic stance on these notions is, first and foremost, I live more and more in the timeless present. That just comes with resting in the Groundless Ground of all Being, resting in Big Mind, resting in Brahman/Atman, being awake to that timelessness and faceless fundamental Ground. That is something I find myself more and more absorbed in. Eternity, or timelessness, first comes to awareness when you get your first satori or awakening experience or enlightenment, and you realize that this whole stream of time that you’ve been caught up in is in some fundamental sense an illusion. That means there is just a pure, present now-moment out of which the illusion of time springs. Of course, you’re supposed to embrace both timelessness and time. But usually the first instance that you have of an experience of a timeless moment is with your first awakening. And that continues to deepen and deepen as your practice develops and as you grow older, particularly if you continue to pursue it.

As for the Christian notion of immortality, I have no relationship with that. It’s a mythic concept. Living forever in some heaven has no meaning to me.

Cohen: Yes, the idea of heaven as a static place is a human creation.

Wilber: Exactly. It’s part of the mythic structure of consciousness that gave rise to all the great traditions. The notion of a static heaven-realm is what is required at that level of development, and you always find that kind of belief system coming with mythic structures. I understand why it’s there, and I get it, but it’s not something that I have any relationship to.

Another version of everlasting time—of time that continues—is what happens after you’re dead. In terms of the Big Mind part of you, that is simply unchanged. That exists in a timeless moment and doesn’t change per se. In Big Mind, death changes nothing essential.

But at the same time, the whole notion of nonduality is that there is a union of pure emptiness, or pure Big Mind, and the manifest realm. A bodhisattva is somebody who’s vowed to unite those two realms—to unite the unmanifest, formless, timeless realm with the realm of manifest, evolving form in time. And that’s where evolutionary enlightenment comes along, because the manifest world is evolving. If you’re one with a realm that is evolving, then that is an evolving enlightenment.

So death in terms of timelessness changes nothing and doesn’t really bother me one way or another. But I do think about what will happen to my work, to anything that I’ve helped to create while I was alive. And I think about it more and more the older I get. I think about death in terms of “Will I leave something of value? Will I leave something that has made the world a little bit of a better place?”