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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Four Ways of Facing Death

Becker, Buddhism, Existentialism and Wilber

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

One Human Problem, Four Very Different Responses

Few facts unite humanity more completely than mortality. Every human being is born into a body that ages, changes and eventually dies. Yet human beings are unusual among living creatures because we can anticipate this fate. We do not merely die; we know that we will die.

That knowledge creates a peculiar existential situation. We are organisms organized to preserve themselves, yet we possess a mind capable of imagining the termination of the very organism doing the imagining. We therefore find ourselves caught between two facts: the imperative to live and the knowledge that life will end.

What should we make of this contradiction?

Four traditions provide four strikingly different answers. Ernest Becker and Terror Management Theory interpret our behavior as a psychological response to death awareness. Buddhism questions the very assumption that there is a permanent self that needs to survive. Existentialism confronts mortality without guaranteeing that the universe provides an ultimate answer. And Ken Wilber interprets our dissatisfaction with finitude as evidence that our deepest identity is timeless Atman.

These are not merely four theories of death. They are four theories of what it means to be human.

And they reveal something particularly interesting about Wilber's Atman project: it is not the only possible interpretation of our resistance to mortality. In fact, several radically different interpretations are available.

Becker: Death as the Hidden Psychological Problem

Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death begins with an observation that is both simple and devastating: human beings are animals that know they will die.

An animal can flee a predator. It can experience pain and danger. But the human being can imagine its own death years or decades in advance. It can understand that no amount of success, wealth or power can ultimately prevent biological extinction.

Becker argued that this awareness creates an existential terror that human beings cannot simply contemplate continuously. We therefore develop symbolic defenses.

Culture becomes part of the solution.

Religions promise immortality.

Nations provide enduring identities.

Moral systems tell us that our lives have significance.

Children allow us to continue biologically and symbolically.

Art allows us to leave something behind.

Great achievements allow us to imagine that our name will outlive our body.

Civilizations create monuments, histories and traditions that place individual lives within something apparently more permanent.

The individual may be temporary, but the symbolic world in which the individual participates appears to continue.

This is Becker's great insight: human beings do not merely try to survive physically. They try to achieve symbolic immortality.

Terror Management Theory: Becker Becomes Testable

Terror Management Theory developed Becker's insights into a psychological research program.

The basic proposition is that awareness of mortality can motivate people to defend the cultural worldviews that give their lives meaning and significance. Mortality salience experiments have investigated whether reminders of death influence self-esteem striving, worldview defense, social judgments and reactions to people who threaten one's cultural values.

The important achievement here is methodological.

Becker proposed a sweeping interpretation of human existence. TMT asks whether specific predictions follow from it.

This does not mean that every TMT finding is beyond criticism. Like any research program, it has generated methodological debates and competing interpretations. But its basic orientation is fundamentally different from Wilber's.

TMT does not need to establish that heaven exists in order to investigate why belief in heaven might be attractive.

It does not need to establish that Atman exists in order to investigate why human beings seek immortality.

It begins with observable human psychology.

That distinction will become crucial when we reach Wilber.

Buddhism: Perhaps the Problem Is the Self

Buddhism approaches the problem from an entirely different direction.

Instead of asking how the individual can survive death, one of its central teachings asks whether there is a permanent individual self to begin with.

The doctrine of anatta, or non-self, challenges the assumption that behind the changing body, sensations, perceptions, thoughts and consciousness there exists an unchanging personal essence.

This creates a remarkable contrast with both Becker and Wilber.

Becker effectively says: the human being fears death because the human being knows that the self will disappear.

Wilber says: the human being fears death because the finite self is a distorted expression of an eternal Self.

Buddhism asks whether we have misunderstood the situation from the beginning.

Perhaps the problem is not that the self is going to die.

Perhaps the problem is our attachment to the idea that there must be a permanent self.

That is a radically different solution.

Buddhism Does Not Simply Say "Nothing Exists"

It is important not to reduce Buddhism to the statement "there is no self."

That can itself become a misleading simplification.

The Buddhist analysis concerns the absence of a permanent, independent, unchanging self. It does not deny that people exist in the ordinary sense, nor does it deny continuity, memory, responsibility or suffering.

The point is subtler.

What we ordinarily call "I" may be a dynamic process rather than a permanent entity.

This has an extraordinary implication for the problem of immortality.

If the self is a process, then asking whether the self survives death may already contain a questionable assumption.

It would be somewhat like asking whether a flame survives after the candle has been extinguished while treating the flame as a permanent object hidden inside the candle.

The flame exists.

But it is not a permanent thing.

Likewise, the human self may be real as a process without being an eternal substance.

Buddhism and Wilber: A Superficial Similarity

At first glance, Buddhism and Wilber might appear to converge.

Both criticize ordinary ego identification.

Both encourage detachment from the narrow personal self.

Both emphasize forms of consciousness beyond ordinary egoic awareness.

Both take meditation seriously.

Both regard ordinary identification as a source of suffering.

But they diverge at a crucial point.

Wilber ultimately interprets the transcendence of ego through an affirmative metaphysics of Spirit and Atman.

Classical Buddhist traditions generally resist the move from the recognition that the ego is constructed to the conclusion that there must therefore be an eternal metaphysical Self behind it.

This is precisely where the two approaches should not be conflated.

" The ego is not the ultimate self" does not logically entail "therefore an eternal Self exists."

The second proposition requires additional argument.

Existentialism: Stop Looking for the Escape Hatch

Existentialism takes another route.

Instead of solving mortality through psychology or dissolving the permanent self, it asks what happens when we confront our finitude directly.

Heidegger placed mortality at the center of his analysis of human existence. The awareness that we are finite changes the character of our choices because our possibilities are bounded by death.

Sartre rejected the idea that human beings possess a predetermined essence that guarantees the meaning of their lives.

Camus confronted the tension between the human demand for meaning and a universe that does not obviously provide one.

The existentialist response is therefore neither "I will live forever" nor necessarily "nothing matters."

It is:

Given that I am finite, how shall I live?

That is a very different question.

Camus and the Refusal of Consolation

Camus is particularly relevant to the Wilber debate because he was suspicious of what he regarded as philosophical escapes from the absurd.

The human being wants the universe to make sense.

The universe does not obviously answer.

One response is to invent a transcendent meaning.

Another is to collapse into nihilism.

Camus attempted something more difficult: living without the guarantee.

The absurd does not mean that nothing matters. It means that our desire for ultimate justification confronts a world that does not obviously provide it.

This creates a striking alternative to Wilber.

Wilber says, in effect:

Your longing for ultimate meaning points toward an ultimate reality.

Camus says:

Your longing for ultimate meaning tells us something about you. It does not guarantee that the universe will satisfy it.

That distinction is very close to the central criticism of the Atman project.

Wilber: Death as a Misidentification

Wilber's solution is more radical than ordinary religious immortality.

The ordinary believer says:

"I will die, but God will resurrect me."

The reincarnationist says:

"I will die, but I will be born again."

The transhumanist says:

"I will die, but technology may preserve me."

Wilber says:

"Who is the 'I' that dies?"

The ordinary ego is transient.

But the deepest identity, Atman, is timeless.

Death therefore belongs to the relative self, not to ultimate identity.

In this sense, Wilber does not really promise that the individual personality will live forever. He claims something more philosophically sophisticated: the individual is ultimately an expression of a timeless reality.

That is precisely why the theory is so difficult to criticize.

If the claim is that your personality will continue indefinitely, empirical questions immediately arise.

If the claim is that the ultimate Self is beyond birth and death, the discussion becomes metaphysical.

But the metaphysical claim cannot simply be established by pointing to the human fear of death.

Four Diagnoses of the Same Fear

The contrast can now be stated very simply.

Becker: We fear death because we are finite creatures who know we will die.

Terror Management Theory: Mortality awareness motivates defenses of self-esteem, cultural worldview and symbolic meaning.

Buddhism: We suffer partly because we cling to the idea of a permanent self that does not actually exist in the way we imagine.

Existentialism: We must confront finitude without assuming that the universe owes us an ultimate meaning.

Wilber: We fear death because we have identified with a finite ego while our deepest identity is timeless Atman.

Notice what happens.

Becker and TMT explain the fear psychologically.

Buddhism questions the entity that supposedly needs protection.

Existentialism confronts the predicament philosophically.

Wilber transcends the predicament metaphysically.

All four take death seriously.

But only Wilber turns the fear of death into evidence for an eternal metaphysical identity.

The Circularity Problem Returns

This is where the Atman project faces its most persistent difficulty.

How do we know humans secretly know that they are Atman?

Because they are dissatisfied with finite existence.

How do we know their dissatisfaction is about Atman rather than death anxiety?

Because the finite ego cannot satisfy their deepest longing.

How do we know there is a deeper longing?

Because finite objects fail to provide permanent satisfaction.

And how do we know that the failure of finite objects points toward Atman?

Because Atman is the only thing that could provide permanent satisfaction.

The argument continually moves from psychological dissatisfaction to metaphysical conclusion.

But Becker and TMT provide another interpretation of exactly the same evidence.

Finite beings know they are finite.

They therefore seek permanence.

That is enough to generate the phenomenon.

No eternal Self needs to be added.

The Importance of Symbolic Immortality

This is perhaps the point at which Becker most effectively challenges Wilber.

Human beings have many ways of transcending their individual lifespan without literally surviving death.

A parent sees something of themselves in their children.

A writer sees their thoughts continuing in readers.

A scientist contributes to knowledge that will exist after their death.

An artist leaves behind a work.

A citizen participates in institutions that may survive for centuries.

A teacher passes knowledge to students who pass it on again.

None of these things makes the individual immortal.

But they allow a finite individual to participate in processes that extend beyond individual lifespan.

This may explain why human beings care so much about legacy without requiring a metaphysical Self.

And it reveals something potentially important about Wilber's Atman project.

Perhaps what looks like a disguised search for absolute immortality is often a much more ordinary search for continuity.

We do not necessarily want to live forever.

We may want our lives to matter beyond themselves.

Those are not the same thing.

Why Death Can Make Meaning Possible

Existentialism adds another dimension.

If we were literally immortal, the structure of human choice would be radically different.

There would always be more time.

Every postponed decision could theoretically be made tomorrow.

Every relationship could theoretically be repaired eventually.

Every book could theoretically be written later.

Every journey could theoretically wait.

Mortality changes this.

We cannot do everything.

Therefore we must choose.

And because we must choose, our lives acquire shape.

A human life becomes a finite trajectory rather than an infinite collection of possibilities.

Death is therefore not merely something that happens at the end of life.

It is a condition that structures life from the beginning.

This makes Wilber's attempt to escape mortality philosophically intriguing.

Perhaps by turning mortality into a temporary illusion, we risk misunderstanding one of the very things that gives finite existence its urgency.

The Buddhist Alternative Is Even More Radical

Buddhism offers a different escape from the immortality problem.

It does not necessarily say:

"You are immortal."

It asks:

"Why do you need to be?"

That is an extraordinarily powerful question.

Suppose the self is not a permanent substance.

Suppose it is a changing process.

Then the desire for immortality may itself be a form of attachment.

The problem is not that an eternal self has forgotten itself.

The problem is that a changing process desperately wants to become a permanent thing.

This is almost the exact inverse of Wilber's theory.

Wilber says:

You are already timeless, but you have forgotten it.

Buddhism says, roughly:

You are not the permanent entity you imagine yourself to be, and liberation involves seeing through that attachment.

The experiential practices may sometimes look similar.

The metaphysics need not be.

Where Becker and Buddhism Unexpectedly Meet

Becker and Buddhism are also more compatible than they initially appear.

Becker says that human beings defend themselves against the terror of mortality by constructing symbolic worlds.

Buddhism says that attachment to a permanent self contributes to suffering.

Both therefore direct attention toward the psychological consequences of our attempts to secure ourselves against impermanence.

But their solutions differ.

Becker's work is primarily diagnostic.

Buddhism offers a path of transformation.

The Buddhist does not merely understand that the self is impermanent. The practitioner is supposed to loosen attachment to that impermanent self.

In that sense, Buddhism might be described as a systematic attempt to live with mortality without requiring symbolic immortality.

Wilber's Unique Move

Wilber's originality lies elsewhere.

He does not merely want us to accept impermanence.

He wants us to discover that the deepest identity is beyond impermanence.

This makes his system particularly attractive to people who find ordinary mortality intolerable.

The ego does not have to win the battle against death.

It only has to be transcended.

But this raises the question that the previous essays have repeatedly returned to:

Is transcendence an empirical discovery or an interpretation of experience?

That distinction cannot be avoided.

A meditator may genuinely experience the disappearance of the ordinary self.

That is important.

But the conclusion that an eternal Atman remains is a further step.

A profound experience can be real without every interpretation attached to it being true.

The Problem of Metaphysical Inflation

This distinction becomes especially important when Wilber moves from individual experience to cosmology.

The argument can proceed rapidly:

I experience awareness.

Awareness can become detached from ordinary thought.

Therefore awareness is deeper than thought.

Awareness seems timeless.

Therefore awareness is timeless.

Awareness is timeless.

Therefore awareness is Atman.

Atman is the ground of my consciousness.

Therefore Atman is the ground of all consciousness.

Atman is the ground of all consciousness.

Therefore Spirit is evolving toward self-recognition.

A personal experience has now become a theory of the universe.

This is what might be called metaphysical inflation.

The original experience may be genuine.

The cosmology does not automatically follow.

Four Responses to "I Will Die"

We can now imagine four people receiving the news that they are going to die.

The Beckerian might say:

"Of course I am terrified. I am a creature that has spent its entire existence trying to survive."

The Buddhist might say:

"My suffering comes partly from clinging to an impermanent self. Perhaps I can learn to let go."

The existentialist might say:

"This is terrible, but it makes my remaining choices more urgent. I must decide how to live."

The Wilberian might say:

"The person who dies is not my ultimate identity. Atman is beyond birth and death."

Each response contains a profound insight.

But they make very different claims.

The first is psychological.

The second is contemplative and philosophical.

The third is existential.

The fourth is metaphysical.

The mistake would be to treat them as though they were simply different descriptions of the same fact.

They are competing interpretations.

Which One Requires the Most Assumptions?

A useful way to compare them is through explanatory economy.

Becker needs a finite organism, mortality awareness and psychological defenses.

TMT adds experimentally investigable mechanisms involving worldview defense, self-esteem and mortality salience.

Buddhism requires a sophisticated analysis of self, impermanence and attachment.

Existentialism requires no particular supernatural ontology at all.

Wilber requires an additional metaphysical structure: an eternal Self underlying individual consciousness, together with a developmental or evolutionary relationship between finite existence and that timeless reality.

This does not make Wilber false.

But it makes his theory carry a much heavier burden of proof.

The more metaphysical machinery we introduce, the more independently supported evidence we should demand.

The Risk of Reductionism

Yet the critique must remain symmetrical.

It would be a mistake to say that Becker or TMT has "explained away" spirituality.

People have mystical experiences.

People report profound transformations through meditation.

People experience self-transcendence.

People sometimes lose their fear of death through spiritual practice.

A psychological explanation of these experiences does not make them meaningless.

Nor does it establish that they are illusions.

The same experience can have psychological, neurological, existential and perhaps spiritual interpretations.

The point is simply that interpretation must not be mistaken for observation.

This protects both science and spirituality.

A More Modest Spirituality

Perhaps the most interesting outcome of this comparison is that spirituality does not have to disappear when Atman is removed.

A person can meditate without believing in an immortal soul.

A person can experience awe without believing the universe has a cosmic purpose.

A person can feel connected with nature without believing everything is literally one consciousness.

A person can cultivate compassion without believing karma is a cosmic bookkeeping system.

A person can experience ego-transcendence without concluding that the universe is Atman.

Spiritual practice can therefore survive the collapse of spiritual metaphysics.

That may actually make spirituality more intellectually resilient.

What Death Finally Teaches Us

The four perspectives ultimately converge on one important fact.

Death changes how human beings understand themselves.

Becker says it produces terror.

TMT shows how that terror can influence cultural and psychological defenses.

Buddhism says attachment to a permanent self intensifies suffering.

Existentialism says mortality gives our choices urgency.

Wilber says death reveals the inadequacy of identifying with the finite ego.

Perhaps there is truth in several of these observations.

But the most controversial step remains Wilber's conclusion that the inadequacy of the finite self demonstrates the existence of an eternal Self.

That conclusion is not forced upon us.

We can accept mortality without embracing nihilism.

We can transcend egoic fixation without postulating Atman.

We can experience timelessness without claiming to exist outside time.

We can seek meaning without believing that meaning is cosmically guaranteed.

And we can confront death without turning death into a metaphysical mistake.

The Final Question

Perhaps the deepest question is therefore not:

"Which theory defeats death?"

None does.

Becker explains our resistance to it.

TMT investigates some of the psychological mechanisms involved.

Buddhism challenges the self that demands permanence.

Existentialism asks us to live despite finitude.

Wilber attempts to transcend finitude by discovering an identity that was never finite.

But there is another possibility.

Perhaps death does not need to be defeated.

Perhaps the demand that death must somehow be overcome is itself part of the problem.

The human being is a finite creature.

It can know that fact.

It can suffer because of it.

It can deny it.

It can ritualize it.

It can philosophize about it.

It can meditate upon it.

It can construct civilizations against it.

It can promise itself eternity.

Or it can gradually learn to live with it.

And perhaps that last possibility is the most radical of all.

The real spiritual achievement may not be discovering that I am immortal.

It may be reaching a point where I no longer need to be.

Then Becker's terror, Buddhism's non-self, existentialism's finitude and even Wilber's transcendence can be placed within a larger human story.

We are creatures who know that we die.

What we do with that knowledge is one of the deepest questions human beings can ask.

But the fact that we ask it does not tell us that death has an escape hatch.

It tells us that we are human.