But what if we already live forever?
What if death itself is a great big hoax? I might be paraphrasing the late Alan Watts to some extent, but it seems to me that the essence of death is what we experience when “somebody else” dies.
Everything we know about death is ego-centric. It’s part of the so-called ego-centric predicament. When someone we know, dies, we’re the ones who suffer. A scientist might explain it in terms of our neurons dying — parts of our brain that were previously dedicated to maintaining a model of that person in our head, now get recycled/rewired, and that can really hurt. Even if they were a close family member, over time we slowly forget the details, we forget the things we don’t want to remember, but we also cling to certain memories so they don’t slip through our fingers like sand. We even suffer a vague feeling of having forgotten something important — if only we could remember what that thing was!
Looking at it a bit more mystically, we could say that that person has “gone to a better place” or somehow moved on. We go through a lot of mental acrobatics to somehow reduce the pain — they’re not really gone. Maybe they’ve reincarnated as something else? Maybe their ‘ghost’ lives on, Borg-like, in the minds of all the people they affected? Or in the mind of Nature as one big organism?
Ashildr from Doctor Who had to endure the kind of immortality that the naive might hope and wish for: living forever and ever and ever and ever… Her character suffered ongoing memory loss due to being stuck with a “human-sized memory”, so she took to writing.
But I think her creators were trying to suggest something more than just another character with magical superpowers. They broke the fourth wall when Ashildr started calling herself “Me”, and that’s a powerful thought. Suddenly, we’re not thinking in terms of a religion of a competitive atomic world, where the creatures are all separate entities. Instead, we get a little reminder that it’s more personal than that — we are all thoughts in each other’s heads. And we imagine that in our heads are our brains, which imagine our skulls and everything else as being on the outside. Which is just silly because where are we doing the imagining, if we’re not already there inside those little skulls?
A problem with this idea of “endless life” is that pain seems to build up over time. Life gets more and more complicated. The impossible starts to become possible, and eventually everything falls apart. The reincarnation cycle of the phoenix could be a great metaphor for this. What do you do when the burden of “knowing too much” or “starting to remember everything” becomes too great?
You have to forget. But when you do that, the illusion begins all over again! You can’t remember your real age. Everything is made to look like you’ve just been recently born. And you’re surrounded by world that keeps hinting things at you and trying to teach you things. And then it’s not “we” it’s you/I/they and so on, all over again.
