On repeat
I was 14 when immortality in some form became my project. Not that I had much to work with at that point, but the motivation was there, the horror that overcame me when I thought about the void. The inevitability of it was also shocking: no reprieve, unless the afterlife were real, the big bet I learned about later, immersing myself in my project to avoid living in mortality’s shadow.
Ordinary life simply puts the situation out of mind, “the terror of the situation,” as Gurdjieff described it, trying vainly to wake people up. Awake, I felt I could too easily stand out, estranged and forced to seek out a few others like me. They formed a motley cohort, though, that I found unappealing, so my project was solitary for quite a while. As I learned more, as I applied what I learned to my project, individuals surfaced who proved useful to it. I realized, too, that my project is more widely shared than I’d imagined, if only in daydreams and idle speculations.
It’s clear that extinction haunts most of us and is the root of massive amounts of distraction. Money can be made providing it, but that’s a different project — the one that paid the bills and enabled me to self-fund my project from the residue. A project like this required a cover, so I married and had children, living an ordinary life of modest affluence.
Mortal life is an illusion we readily fall for, taking pleasure in its many distractions, its poignancy, its moments of pathos. It’s a facsimile of immortality, yet I wondered if its resonances would diminish as life stretched out. At 14, I thought that my project would protect me from the possibility that the afterlife was a false claim, but the penalty for that is oblivion, whereas the penalty of a bloodless immortality is hellish. As depicted, the afterlife retains emotion. Even hell’s suffering may resonate on a perverse level. “Better living through chemistry,” a slogan of my youth I found inspiring, now struck me as improbable.
Yet I carried on. To be completely honest, though, it was mainly a thought experiment, reading accounts of different strategies and tactics, watching as time proved them wrongheaded or ineffective, even counterproductive.
Materiality was the heart of my project, and materiality has inherent limits. Talk of cloning or uploading consciousness ran immediately into what I thought of as the two-body problem: it’s not me, it’s my twin.
The transmigration of souls stood out as a way past this dilemma, if souls can migrate with some kernel still extant on arrival. The births of my children and their uncanny first take on where they’d arrived made me question the wisdom of proceeding scientifically or technically. Even a longer-than-usual yet still vigorous life stiil has an ending, whereas metaphysics offered several ways forward, I came to see, substituting afterlives, dozens of them, for an afterlife that might or might not exist.
I kept this to myself, except for a notebook in which I jot down my thoughts and observations. My children chalk it up to philosophizing, probably, although my early science-and-tech-drenched entries may amuse or baffle them. When I reread it, it has a quest-like character, my dragging myself through modernity and finally finding metaphysics and reviving it.
Materiality has its uses. I’d have no children without it. We live in a material world that conforms to nature’s implacable laws about inputs, outputs, and the price of their violation. If we could shed some of it, that would be good, but we’re wedded to it, a species of consumers with a hunger for novelty: distraction again. It comes along with materiality, the way children come along with marriage, an innate urge. It does resonate: alive, alive again.
