Like a bird without a nest
Like a stranger in the night
And my soul calls out for rest
And the end is not in sight
— Russell Smith, The Amazing Rhythm Aces
Let’s start with a dive into the deep end: What makes you or anyone else think they were born with a soul? I ask the question because some people seem to get through life without ever having had one.
It’s clear, however, that a soul can be created by anyone in the process of becoming conscious. In fact, increasing one’s consciousness and building a soul can look like the same thing. You work, you sweat, you suffer to pay ever more attention to the world you live in and your role in it, and you become more aware, which means more sweat and more suffering and a bigger, better soul, at least if all that suffering doesn’t result in anger and bitterness.
Not a guaranteed thing. It’s easy to see why some people, confronted with a choice between having a soul or having money and power and rage, go for the latter.
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Ever since the baseball star Ted Williams’s head was cut off and frozen in the hope that medical science could one day restore his body, his youth, and his .400 batting average, I’ve been worried by the thought that I might live forever. Then when the life-extension enthusiast Ray Kurzweil announced that human immortality—perhaps in pill form—would be possible by 2030 or so, I realized that I might not even have to get decapitated and frozen to get cured of old age. This worried me even more, because getting one’s head cut off and dipped in liquid nitrogen had sounded like something you could refuse. Taking a pill and suddenly occupying a replica of one’s 21-year-old body, on a winter Saturday night in, say, Sun Valley, Idaho, during what used to be called February Airline Week, would be harder to turn down.
The problem with the latter scenario is that it wouldn’t be happening when I really did have a 21-year-old body. It’s been so long since Sun Valley had a February Airline Week that the visiting flight attendants still called themselves stewardesses, and beer was 75 cents a pitcher at the Ore House.
Now even one beer gives me a splitting headache. Once fond memories have become occasions for shameful regret. I stay the hell away from anyone calling herself a stewardess.
In 2030, snow on the slopes of Baldy won’t be guaranteed, even in February. In worst-case scenarios, electricity to run the lifts won’t exist. Food might be in short supply unless you have something of value to barter for it—a 21-year-old body for instance. Hard to imagine for someone who used to give his away.
Dystopia presenting as progress. No longer just a dark cloud on the horizon.
Plenty of people will swallow immortality pills when and if they become available, but I predict that a few of us will want to think it over for a decade or so, and during that decade, old age or societal violence or an engineered pathogen will make our choice for us.
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As regular readers of my occasional journal entries know, I reread Ernest Becker’s strangely exhilarating deathbed book, The Denial of Death, every few years, for sanity maintenance. That time has come around again.
Becker makes a good case for a near-universal human psychosis caused by people discovering that they will someday die, sooner rather than later if they’ve learned about geological time.
Becker says that most of us will blow a cognitive circuit-breaker rather than become conscious of our own demise. Our first reaction is to deny that we’re going to die, and if that fails, we resort to more desperate measures.
Denial and consciousness are opposed to each other by definition. Consciousness wants to pay deep attention to the world as it is, and denial wants the world to conform to cherished illusions. You could say that denial is psychotic and consciousness is sane.
Ernest Becker was writing his book while he was dying of cancer, so it’s easy to think he was choosing sanity whether he wanted to or not. Faced with the failure of denial, his backup strategy was to write a good, thinking, compassionate book.
The Denial of Death is definitely compassionate and definitely strangely exhilarating. Over the years I’ve realized that some small part of me is still in denial. Fortunately, Becker only insists that you admit to denial, not that you give it up. This is psychoanalytic heresy, but there it is. Permission to deny. You’re an idiot, but go ahead.
Just don’t confuse it with permission to project. It’s impossible, as far as I can tell, to remain conscious when you’re projecting your worst characteristics onto other people.
Anyway, denial. Now and then I’ll reject all available evidence and insist that my soul is a work in progress, one that will transcend mortal existence, like a crystal forming in a saturated solution. After death, I will live on as a happy-go-lucky crystalline free spirit.
Not a new idea. Religious rites and burial goods have indicated a belief in an afterlife since the Neanderthals were painting their ancestors’ bones red. Heaven, reincarnation, ghosts, simultaneous alternate universes that allow for a continually renewing colonial-organism self, and restorations of physical bodies through grace, acts, and divine intervention have all kept humanity from pure, well-lit, agonizing sanity.
Governments used to enforce this kind of craziness. Badly. Not believing in religious dogma has been a burning-at-the-stake offense throughout much of the last three millennia, severely limiting the happy-go-luckiness and afterlife architecture of almost everyone.
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Now we live in a secular age where you can challenge religion without being murdered by civil authorities. Almost no one believes in the supernatural as much as they believe in scientific materialism.
Unfortunately, scientific materialism doesn’t do much for free spirits either.
Matter and energy, space and time. It’s not much, but our science, our senses, and our logic tell us they’re all we’ve got going for us.
To compensate, we make use of scientifically-approved immortality projects—distractions—such as patriotism, identification with sports heroes, addictions, fetishes, and art. Becker says only the last one works.
Here’s why The Denial of Death is an exhilarating book:
Ernest Becker wasted none of his remaining time worrying about death. He spent the last half of his book advocating for intellectual play as the highest and best use of one’s mortal existence. He focuses on living as an art form, one where, if you practice it well, you treat all earthly experience as divine material.
It’s not easy. It requires deep and sincere attention, long periods of intense work, and a willingness to embrace the journey and not the destination (easier to do once you’ve figured out, at least intellectually, that the destination is death).
Artistic creation does deliver moments of eternity. If that sounds like an oxymoron to you, ask an artist to explain it to you.
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My grandmother, who used to babysit me when I was a five-year-old, was a believer in reincarnation. She told me I was an old soul who had seen some tough times, with more to come.
Lately, because we’re having such a resurgence of fascism in the world, I’ve begun to think there might be something to her ideas. Enough time has passed since Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, Mussolini, Stalin, and Mao walked the earth that they’ve had the opportunity, sitting around in the Bardo, to plan yet another eruption of evil into our world.
That could be why we’ve got a host of world leaders who are quite plainly bad soulless people with plenty of bad soulless followers. Besides lacking souls, they’re a curiously incomplete bunch, in a state of never-satisfied hunger, as if they’re missing something essential and they’re trying to get it by devouring the world and the people in it.
The Buddhists tell us to beware of hungry ghosts, lest you be possessed by them and become a slave to their hungers. It makes sense to apply that advice to politicians and cult leaders.
Buddhists also say that if you don’t finish your task of soul-building in this world, you get to come back, lifetime after lifetime, until you do.
If you mess up so badly that you kill your soul, you’ll try to make up for it by accumulating the material illusions of the world. It’s a recipe for eternal torment, with no way off the reincarnation treadmill.
Becker suggests the Buddhists are using reverse psychology—if death is the thing you most fear, you’re going to die over and over until you complete your soul-building. Souls are complex endeavors, so almost nobody finishes their project, not even Buddhists, even after an eternity or three. That there’s no deadline is a feature, not a bug.
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Becker doesn’t have much patience with Buddhists or anyone else whose belief systems allow them to deny their mortality. In another of his posthumous books, Escape from Evil, he says human evil begins when people with power and wealth decide they can arrange for other people to suffer and die for them.
This is a curious twist on Christianity, considering that most of the suffering and dying is done involuntarily, and no authoritarian leader has achieved immortality because someone else died for his sins.
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We’re a long way from Ted Williams’s frozen head bobbing in liquid nitrogen. But let me say that if there is any benefit to becoming a more conscious, more aware, altogether more unfrozen soul, it will come in this life, not the one after death.
A wise and generous and flexible soul might ruin your day every time you listen to the news, weigh your spirit down with voluntarily accepted responsibilities, and confront you with grief every time you turn around, but it does allow you to see the scientific material world for the flimsy thing it is. It will place you in a vaster universe, one far bigger and more accessible than the admittedly big one that the James Webb telescope is exploring.
A larger universe suggests the possibility that somewhere in the afterlife is a kind of hot-spring spa for souls, where justice is done and the righteous are rewarded with time off, and the restaurant has more stars than Michelin ever thought of. No guarantees of course, but there may be a place where the cares and worries of existence fade to irrelevance. If you get there, Nirvana won’t be even half of what you see.
It may have been Ted Williams’s heirs who decided he would be better off stuck here on Earth, where he could be restored to physical perfection when medical technology caught up with biological entropy. It may have been that they wanted him on ice for a century or so while they explored the glory of his power of attorney.
What they weren’t concerned with was his soul, which may have been crying out for rest, as the song goes, and the end it wanted was suddenly not in sight.