Personal Immortality – Are You Sure You Want That?

Every moment of your life as you’ve known it has been highly dynamic, a process of change – your experience of a psycho-biological arc of maturing and aging. Throughout, there have been major cumulative changes not only in your biology and inner life, but also your potentiality.

Think, for example, of who you are now and who you were at five. Even as you became the person you’ve become, other possibilities for life have closed down in the wake of that path. For example, whatever training and education you’ve received and whatever you’re doing for work now, you had the potential for many more options when you were born.

Eternity Sounds Really Long…

Would immortality be the extension through all time of your life as it happens to be right now? As it was at age five? Twenty-five? Forty? Is it possible that eternal life-extension isn’t necessarily the best thing that could happen to you? Would you get bored, LOL? I mean, forever – that’s a really long time! Nobody’s even lived a thousand years. Our species has only been around for two hundred thousand years.

And while personal immortality as a kind of reunion with friends and family sounds good to me too, I have to wonder… Much as I loved, say, my Uncle Bob’s goofy sense of humor, would I feel the same after fifty million years?

And if you try to picture doing things with friends and family in a literal end-time - after time ended - what does that mean? Human thought, language, activity, and life are so time-bound that heaven as a glorified version of life as we know it minus the passage of time sounds like a contradiction in terms.

Does Anyone Know Exactly What They're Talking About?

I once read – as I recall it was in a discussion of Hinduism – that what people really want are infinite knowledge, infinite joy, and infinite being. That sounded good to me! Yet it also sounds bigger than me. Inclusive of me, but bigger. And stated in a much less precise way than “Someday you’ll be reunited with your deceased loved ones and enjoy their company again, but this time forever and in perfect health.”

Precise and wonderful as that sounds, not only do I have trouble picturing what an eternity with my loved ones would look like and uncertainty as to whether it’s what I’d really want; I don’t have confidence that it’s realistic or possible. It only takes a little struggle with Einstein’s concepts to realize that your common-sense impressions of what time is are far from the whole story.

What if you don't know enough to know exactly how you want life to turn out?

As Time Allows – I’m no longer able to reply to every comment and email I receive. My illness is progressive and bedridden time has gone up by a couple hours over recent months, so I need to focus on getting posts done. But I read everything I get, and at times take direction from comments and emails for upcoming posts. So please keep them coming and I’ll reply as time allows.