Immortality

by Stephen Cave

  MUCH as Christianity emerged from Judaism only to take on a life of its own, so Buddhism emerged from the much older family of Indian religious and philosophical traditions today known as Hinduism. The Buddha’s Four Noble Truths drew on developments already well under way within Hinduism, as it moved from originally being a religion based on elaborate ritual and sacrifice toward being a philosophy based on each person seeking his or her own inner essence, the pure soul, or atman, that was the true self. Of all the teachings that Buddhism inherited from Hinduism, the most important is reincarnation, an idea central to all Indian philosophies.

  Hindus believe that the part of us that is conscious—the mind/soul/self called atman—is an essential part of the universe: “It is unborn, eternal, permanent and ancient. It is not killed when the body is slain,” explains the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most important texts in Hinduism. This, of course, sounds a lot like an expression of the second part of the Mortality Paradox—our inability to conceive of our own nonexistence. From the claim that this soul is indestructible, it follows that it must go somewhere when its vessel, the body, dies—and most naturally, this is another body. “Just as a man casts off worn-out clothing and accepts new ones,” says the Bhagavad Gita, “even so the embodied soul discards worn-out bodies and enters into different ones.”

  But which ones? There is all the difference in the world between being born a prince and a pauper—and that is if you are lucky enough to come back as a human; you could just as well be a termite or a mouse. We noted above that this, for most people, is determined by one thing: karma, the universal law of cause and effect. Karma means that if you do good, good things will happen to you, and if you do ill, then bad things will happen to you. Although these good things and bad things can take many forms, among the most important is whether you will be born into a handsome, healthy body high up the food chain or some nasty creepy-crawly destined to be squished. While some Hindus see karma as being dependent on the will of a supreme being, Buddhists in particular see it simply as a natural law, as inescapable as gravity.

  For Hindus, the proof of reincarnation and karma is all around us: some people clearly are born blessed with intelligence, riches or looks, whereas others are born dumb, poor or ugly. This, they believe, can only be explained as the consequences of our actions in a previous life. Lameness, poor teeth and a weak constitution are all thought to be just deserts for some prior sin. And just as important as your physical and mental abilities, your karma is believed to determine which caste you will be born into, and so your station in life. If you are born a dung shoveler, son of a dung shoveler, then you have only your (prior) self to blame.

  Some might see the doctrine of reincarnation as a fine immortality narrative in its own right. But even though it could be pleasant enough to be reborn to some high station, you would still face the prospect of eventually aging and dying again. The wise therefore hope to transcend this cycle of birth and death altogether; their highest aim is not to come back as prince or beauty queen but to attain what the Hindus call moksha, or liberation. In this state, the atman, having realized its true nature, no longer has to return to earth for another round but can live in eternal bliss, freed of the tribulations of bodily life. For the Buddhists, this liberation leads to nirvana, in which worldly concerns are extinguished, leading (in theory) to perfect happiness.

  Reincarnation depends on some idea of a soul that discards one body to take on another, but the Indian idea of atman is not identical to the Platonic-Christian tradition that we met in chapter 6. In the West, your soul is usually considered to encompass at the very least all aspects of your mind and personality. If you die and, as a soul, travel up to Christian heaven, you expect to take your memories, beliefs and painfully acquired wisdom and experience with you. The Hindu soul carries much less psychological baggage. It may be that when reincarnated you retain a few residual memories of your past life, but usually not. And when you are reborn in the body of a baby (let alone a worm or fish) it would seem a little precocious if you started manifesting the accumulated wisdom of your previous lives. Hindus and Buddhists therefore do not expect to take all their memories and beliefs with them—whether to the next body or to nirvana. Your soul, they believe, is more like pure awareness: you as a subject of consciousness, stripped of all particular traits and foibles.

  The Buddhists take this stripping down of the soul to its extreme, to the point where it is often claimed that they deny altogether that there is such a thing as the soul. But this is not quite right. If nothing of you survived death, then there would be nothing of you to be reborn. The doctrines of reincarnation and karma, which are crucial to all forms of Buddhism, would then not make any sense. So when Buddhists argue that there is no such thing as the self or soul, they are denying that you have an unchanging core personality that could be described as “the real you.” But there is still a mental/spiritual something through which you live on after your body dies—what the Dalai Lama calls a “capacity for awareness, a kind of luminosity.”

  They believe that this attenuated soul underpins all our experience but is so overlaid with the constant stream of thoughts and impressions that we cannot hope to perceive it until in the very last stages of the dying process, when the ephemera of this world have faded from view. Then our consciousness is reduced to this pure, selfless state, ready to move on to the next incarnation. This is a difficult idea to grasp or even express in clear terms. But one thing is clear: attenuated as it is, Buddhists consider this version of the soul robust enough to warrant your next incarnation being punished for whatever you got up to in this one.

  COSMIC JUSTICE

  THE doctrine of karma and reincarnation therefore does for Buddhism and Hinduism what heaven and hell do for Christianity and Islam and the “weighing of the heart” did for ancient Egyptians: it provides cosmic justice. In all these narratives, the structure is the same: an eternal life worth having is to be earned through good behavior, whereas wickedness, however defined, leads to annihilation or an afterlife of suffering.

  Even when helping old ladies across the road, giving to charity, or loving our neighbor, we are therefore very often pursuing our bid for immortality. At least, this is so if we are induced into such moral behavior by these threats of eternal punishment or prospects of eternal reward. And the sheer pervasiveness of this link suggests we are: rare is the culture that does not use our desire for a happy eternity to ensure compliance with the group’s ethical code. Ancient Egyptians, for example, in order to earn their place in the Otherworld, had to demonstrate that they had not committed any of the forty-two sins, which included stealing cultivated land and stopping up the flow of water.

  We might not like to think that we only engage in ethical behavior in order to further our selfish prospects of living forever, but most cultures and religious worldviews assume that this is exactly how we behave. Particularly among elites, there has long been an assumption that the masses will only be stopped from rape and pillage if their will to immortality is used to leverage some discipline: eternal life for the restrained, damnation for rapists and pillagers. As late as 1934, one noted psychology professor, William McDougall, for example, was moved to write in response to the scientific attack on the doctrine of the soul that it was “highly probable that the passing away of this belief would be calamitous for our civilisation.”

  The order and cohesion that this brings to a group is undoubtedly very useful for such a group’s survival. But the belief in cosmic justice also provides an excellent defense mechanism for the immortality narrative itself. Frequently built into a worldview’s account of what is to be rewarded are those behaviors that further that worldview, and similarly behaviors that could undermine it are punished with hellfire. Three of the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments, for example, are explicitly concerned with protecting the narrative (you shall have no other gods, worship no idols and not take the Lord’s name in vain). Similarly, many religions forbid killing, except in the case of holy
war to defend the faith, as seen in the Islamic idea of jihad or the Christian idea of the Crusade. Such norms, while contributing to the internal unity of a group, also ensure a steady supply of young men ready to die or kill to defend their worldview, helping to make the immortality narrative self-perpetuating.

  But it would be wrong to see this as merely a crude system of carrots and sticks; there is more going on here than simply frightening us into good behavior with stories of demons frying our entrails. A great deal of recent research shows that we have an innate sense of fairness—that is, we have evolved to want to see goodness rewarded and wickedness punished. But all too often this world is not fair; selfishness and deceit can bring you to the top, while selflessness and decency are merely exploited by others. What the ethical dimensions of these immortality narratives promise is that all will get their just deserts in the end. Bullies may flourish today, but tomorrow they will be ruing their ways in the fiery pit or when reincarnated as an intestinal worm.

  Such narratives therefore reassure us that, despite appearances, life is fair after all. This has close parallels to the way in which the Soul Narrative grants cosmic significance: there we saw how the message that every one of us has an immortal soul that is a spark of the divine allows us to believe in our unique importance. Similarly, the belief in cosmic justice reassures us that our deeds do not go unnoticed and that no matter how mighty our oppressors might now seem, they will eventually be punished for doing us little people wrong. This is a very satisfying message.

  Certainly the reassurance of cosmic justice through the system of karma has contributed to the remarkable stability of the Hindu worldview, which is still flourishing after well over two thousand years. But this stability means conservatism, in particular with regard to social structures: the doctrine teaches that those who are born to high positions have earned them in past lives, and similarly those born to lower castes have only themselves to blame. There is therefore no incentive to permit social mobility—indeed, doing so could even be contrary to the workings of justice. Worse still, deformities, sicknesses and other disabilities are regarded as cosmic punishment for previous ills, substantially reducing the sympathy and assistance they are seen to warrant. That is rough justice indeed.

  Nonetheless, the belief in cosmic justice has become so firmly established that some thinkers have turned the argument on its head: rather than establishing first the case for their immortality narrative, then using this to explain cosmic justice, they argue first that the cosmos simply must be just, and that as a consequence we must therefore be immortal, as this is the only way that cosmic justice is possible. What was a by-product of an immortality narrative therefore becomes an argument for it. The circularity of this reasoning is thereby complete: eternal life guarantees cosmic justice, and cosmic justice guarantees eternal life. Such eminent thinkers as the great German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant have been taken by this dubious line of thought.

  THE attractions of the Soul Narrative for the moralists extend even to its dark side: the belief in ghosts. There are countless tales of souls that do not go gently into the next world but stay here on earth to haunt the living. These ghoulish tales too have a didactic purpose, as the hauntings are very often portrayed as the result of some moral transgression. This is frequently some evil done to the deceased: in many cultures, improper burial is sufficient to set the spirit roaming, and violent murder is a surefire way to ensure a haunting—for example, as in the case of Hamlet’s father, who walks the earth until he is avenged. But equally, the cause of the restless spirit might be some wickedness they themselves committed, condemning them to either make amends or haunt the earth forever like the ghost of Jacob Marley in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, who was too miserly to deserve a proper place in the afterlife. Either way, such stories reinforce the message that we must be good in this life or we will get our comeuppance in the next.

  Belief in ghosts has been found in so many different societies and worldviews that many anthropologists consider it a cultural universal. Even in modern, secular environments, this belief remains high—according to recent polls, for example, 42 percent of Americans believe in ghosts; in the United Kingdom it’s 38 percent. Given the implications of such a belief—that bodily death, contrary to all the evidence, is not the end—these are remarkable figures. But we have already seen in the second part of the Mortality Paradox that we are predisposed to think of our own souls living on indefinitely; increasingly psychologists believe that similar cognitive mechanisms are at work when we think of other people.

  We are used to imagining friends and family when they are not physically present, psychologists argue, and that same ability—very useful in ordinary life—causes us to continue to imagine them if they die. In other words, our sophisticated mental picture of the world includes these people, and we cannot so easily erase them from this picture overnight—especially if they have played a prominent role in our lives. The result is powerful feelings, even hallucinations, that the deceased are somehow still with us. Or in a word, ghosts.

  It is tempting to think that the established religions frown upon such beliefs—certainly the clergy are often portrayed battling against the spirits of darkness. But wise priests have long recognized that belief in the Soul Narrative and belief in restless spirits go hand in hand. As early as 1681, the English clergyman Joseph Glanvill wrote a treatise denouncing skepticism about the existence of ghosts, suggesting it was the first step toward atheism and thence the end of civilization as we know it. Today, modern gurus in both the Eastern tradition, such as Deepak Chopra, and the Western, such as pastor James L. Garlow, mentioned in chapter 6, continue to cite ghost stories as evidence that souls are real.

  SOUL, MIND AND BODY: THE EVIDENCE OF SCIENCE

  THE question of evidence plays a central role in the Soul Narrative. Believers in the Resurrection Narrative expect a miraculous act of God; therefore only faith in him could justify their hope of immortality. But belief in a soul has always been different: the existence of the soul was a hypothesis amenable to reason; the logicians of both ancient Greece and ancient India considered it to be the best explanation for a host of empirical phenomena and puzzles of existence. So whereas Jesus, whose hope lay in resurrection, cried out for his God from the cross, Socrates, having rationally demonstrated that his true self was immortal and about to be set free, was able to drink the poisonous hemlock with utter composure.

  But what is it that is supposed to prove the soul’s existence? First, there is the fact of life itself. There seems to be an unbridgeable gulf between things that are living and things that are not. For many cultures, such as the ancient Greek, it seemed clear that living things had some extra component that gave them their vitality, something that rocks, dust and water lacked. This animating principle was the soul: being alive and being ensouled were one and the same.

  Second, there is the fact of consciousness. Some living things are not only able to move or grow but to think, imagine and believe. Once again, there seems to be a great gulf between material stuff, which is graspable, measurable and visible, and the realm of ideas, which float in our minds. Clearly minds are not like other things in the world, and their existence requires a special explanation: for many, that is the soul.

  Third, there is the more esoteric evidence: the young Lhamo Dhondup’s ability to choose the rosary and walking stick that once belonged to the thirteenth Dalai Lama, for example. Even more elaborate stories of Indian children remembering past lives are regularly reported and are considered by many as proof that souls move from one incarnation to the next. And as we just noted, sightings of ghosts are believed by some to be evidence for the existence of the spirit and its survival beyond death.

  These three arguments are no longer as obviously convincing as they were two thousand, two hundred, or even just twenty years ago. We saw in chapter 3 that the scientific consensus has long turned against the idea that an animating principle is required to explain li
fe. The modern understanding of how life works, from the organism down to individual organs, to tiny cells and to DNA, leaves no room for spiritual substances. The first of the ancient arguments for the existence of the soul we can therefore leave aside.

  The third argument, based on ghosts and other spooky sightings, is also best left to one side. Those who have attempted to investigate these phenomena in order to draw substantive conclusions have invariably come away disappointed. Rarely do ghost stories or past-life recollections bear much scrutiny, and even where no fraud or invention is involved, other explanations for what happened are usually at least as plausible as the existence of an active spirit world. If this sounds to some readers like short shrift, it is worth noting that the Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882 by some of the most eminent thinkers of the day to explore paranormal phenomena in a positive spirit, failed in over a hundred years of open-minded investigations to find any widely persuasive evidence of supernatural happenings.

  However, one source of purported supernatural evidence for souls is worth mentioning: that of so-called out-of-body experiences (OBEs). The classic case is that of a patient whose heart has temporarily stopped beating and who seems to experience leaving their body, perhaps looking down on it, or perhaps traveling down a tunnel of light where they are met by deceased family or other benevolent beings. These experiences can be life-changing for those who have them and are often interpreted as reinforcing their religious beliefs.