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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).

The Last Spiritual Illusion

Why We Want Death to Mean Something

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

The Question Behind the Question

We began with a simple observation: death is not an exceptional event in nature. Complex organisms are born, develop, reproduce, age and die. Individual organisms are temporary arrangements of matter and energy. What is unusual about human beings is not that we die, but that we know we will die.

That knowledge has generated an extraordinary amount of metaphysical speculation. Human beings have imagined immortal souls, heavens and hells, reincarnation, resurrection, karma, cosmic justice, eternal consciousness and mystical union with an ultimate reality. More recently, technology has entered the same territory, promising radical life extension, cryonics, digital immortality and perhaps eventually the preservation or reconstruction of the individual mind.

These proposals appear to be very different. Religion appeals to God, spirituality to Atman or Spirit, and transhumanism to science and technology. Yet beneath their differences there may be a common psychological assumption: ordinary human mortality is somehow not acceptable as the final story.

Perhaps this is the last illusion we need to examine.

Not the illusion that death exists. We know it does.

Not even necessarily the illusion that there is an afterlife. That remains an open metaphysical possibility, however poorly supported.

The deeper illusion is the assumption that death must have some larger meaning, purpose or continuation beyond the life that ends.

The Human Refusal of Finitude

Ernest Becker's great contribution was to recognize how strange our predicament really is. We are biological organisms organized around survival, yet we possess the capacity to imagine our own extinction. We know what every other organism apparently does not know in the same explicit way: that our individual existence is temporary.

This creates a psychological problem.

We want to continue, but we know we cannot continue indefinitely. We therefore construct symbolic worlds in which our existence acquires a larger permanence. Religion offers eternal life. Nations offer participation in something that outlasts individuals. Children carry the family line forward. Art and literature preserve something of their creators. Scientific discoveries enter an accumulating body of knowledge. Monuments and historical memory allow the dead to remain present in culture.

Terror Management Theory developed Becker's insight into a research program investigating how reminders of mortality can affect human attitudes and behavior. Its importance is not that it has demonstrated that religion is false. It has not. Its importance is that it offers a naturalistic account of why mortality might motivate human beings to defend systems of meaning and significance.

This creates an important distinction.

A psychological explanation of our desire for immortality does not prove that immortality is false. But neither does our desire for immortality provide evidence that immortality is true.

That simple distinction has enormous consequences.

The Argument from Longing

Wilber's Atman project represents one of the most sophisticated attempts to reverse the direction of the argument.

Instead of saying that human beings desire immortality because they fear death, Wilber suggests that our dissatisfaction with finite existence reflects something deeper. We seek the Infinite because our deepest identity is already Infinite. The finite ego cannot permanently satisfy us because it is not what we ultimately are.

This is an elegant idea.

It is also circular.

How do we know that human beings possess an intuition of Atman? Because finite things never completely satisfy us. How do we know that finite things cannot satisfy us? Because we are ultimately seeking something infinite. And how do we know we are seeking something infinite? Because finite objects repeatedly fail to provide permanent fulfillment.

But another explanation is available.

Finite beings want permanence because they are finite beings that know they are going to die.

Nothing in this explanation requires Atman.

The human longing for eternity may therefore tell us something profound about human psychology without telling us anything definitive about the structure of reality.

The Difference Between Meaning and Cosmic Meaning

This distinction becomes particularly important when we ask whether life has meaning.

There is an enormous difference between saying that a life is meaningful and saying that the universe has assigned that life a meaning.

The first claim is commonplace and demonstrable. A friendship can matter. A child can matter to a parent. A scientific discovery can matter to future generations. A work of art can transform someone else's life. An act of courage can matter to a community. A loving relationship can matter profoundly to the people involved.

None of this requires a cosmic guarantee.

The second claim is much stronger. It says that the universe itself has a purpose, that human existence occupies a predetermined place within that purpose, and that death somehow fits into a larger metaphysical narrative.

That is a very different proposition.

We often slide from the first claim to the second without noticing.

Because my life matters to me and to others, I begin to assume that it must matter in some ultimate cosmic sense. Because death is painful and apparently unjust, I assume there must be a deeper justice beyond death. Because good people sometimes suffer and die young, I imagine a cosmic accounting system in which everything will eventually be balanced.

But nature does not obviously work that way.

Stars explode. Species disappear. Organisms are eaten. Children sometimes die before their parents. Earthquakes destroy homes without consulting anyone's moral character. Evolution produces both extraordinary complexity and enormous waste.

The universe may contain meaning for beings capable of creating and experiencing meaning. That does not establish that the universe itself has a purpose.

Buddhism Turns the Question Around

This is where Buddhism offers an especially interesting alternative.

Rather than promising that the individual self will somehow survive forever, Buddhist thought challenges the assumption that there is a permanent self requiring preservation in the first place.

The doctrine of anatta, or non-self, does not simply say that nothing exists. It challenges the idea that behind the changing processes of body, perception, feeling, thought and consciousness there must be an unchanging personal essence.

This transforms the immortality question.

Instead of asking, “How can I survive death?” Buddhism can ask, “Why am I so attached to the idea that there must be a permanent I?”

That is almost the opposite of the Atman project.

Wilber says, in effect, that the finite self suffers because it has forgotten its timeless identity.

Buddhism suggests that suffering is intensified by clinging to the very idea of a permanent identity.

The similarity between the two approaches can therefore be misleading. Both may involve meditation, ego-transcendence and a loosening of ordinary identification. But similar experiences do not automatically establish identical metaphysics.

One tradition can interpret the disappearance of ego as the discovery of an eternal Self. Another can interpret it as insight into the absence of such a permanent self.

The experience does not decide the interpretation by itself.

Existentialism Refuses the Guarantee

Existentialism offers another possibility: perhaps we should stop demanding a metaphysical solution.

Heidegger made mortality central to his analysis of human existence. Sartre rejected the idea that human beings possess a predetermined essence that dictates the meaning of their lives. Camus explored the tension between our hunger for meaning and a universe that does not obviously provide an answer.

The existentialist does not necessarily conclude that life is meaningless.

Quite the opposite.

Mortality can make life more urgent precisely because it is finite. If our time were unlimited, choices would lose some of their sharpness. There would always be another opportunity, another relationship, another journey, another book to read, another conversation to have.

But there isn't always another opportunity.

We have limited time.

Therefore we must choose.

And choice gives a life its shape.

Death is not merely an event that occurs at the end of a biography. It is one of the conditions under which the biography exists at all.

The Strange Beauty of a Finite Life

Consider almost anything we value.

A piece of music does not become meaningless because it ends. A sunset does not become meaningless because it lasts only minutes. A conversation does not become worthless because eventually it stops. A childhood does not become meaningless because it cannot be extended indefinitely.

In fact, their finitude is part of their character.

We do not normally complain that a song is defective because it has a final note.

We understand that the ending belongs to the form.

Human life may be similar.

Its finitude does not necessarily constitute a defect in an otherwise immortal design. It may simply be one of the conditions under which a human life exists.

This does not make death pleasant. It does not eliminate grief. It does not make premature death just. It does not mean that we should passively accept preventable suffering.

It means only that the fact of mortality does not by itself demonstrate that something has gone cosmically wrong.

The Religious Solution

Religion historically provided one of the most powerful answers to mortality.

Death is not really death. It is a transition.

The soul continues. God judges. The righteous are rewarded. The wicked are punished. The dead are resurrected. The individual enters another realm.

These narratives perform an obvious psychological function: they transform an apparently final event into a stage within a larger story.

There is nothing intellectually wrong with considering such possibilities. The problem begins when psychological attractiveness is confused with evidence.

The fact that heaven would solve the problem of death does not make heaven real.

The fact that cosmic justice would make the world more satisfying does not demonstrate cosmic justice.

The fact that an immortal soul would preserve personal identity does not establish the existence of an immortal soul.

The desire for an answer and the existence of an answer are two different things.

The Spiritual Solution

Spirituality can make the argument more sophisticated.

Instead of promising that the personality will continue forever, mystical traditions may claim that the personality was never the deepest level of identity. The ego is transient, but awareness itself is timeless. Individual consciousness participates in a universal consciousness. Atman is Brahman. Spirit is the ground from which everything emerges.

This is philosophically more subtle than simply saying, “I will live forever.”

But the same epistemological question remains.

A person may experience a profound dissolution of self-boundaries during meditation. They may experience timelessness, unity, emptiness, boundless awareness or profound interconnectedness.

Those experiences can be psychologically transformative and existentially important.

But the transition from “I experienced timelessness” to “my consciousness is ontologically timeless” is not automatic.

The experience is one thing.

Its metaphysical interpretation is another.

That distinction allows us to take mystical experience seriously without treating every metaphysical interpretation of it as established fact.

The Transhumanist Solution

Transhumanism approaches the same problem from the opposite direction.

Rather than discovering that we are already immortal, it proposes that we might become immortal through technology.

Biological aging becomes an engineering problem. Death becomes a technical limitation. Cryonics preserves the body or brain in the hope of future revival. Digital technologies raise the possibility of reconstructing aspects of a person's mind.

The rhetoric changes, but the existential structure remains surprisingly familiar.

The religious believer says:

Death cannot be the end because something essential survives.

The mystic says:

Death cannot be the end because the deepest Self is timeless.

The transhumanist says:

Death does not have to be the end because technology may eventually overcome it.

All three challenge the apparent finality of biological death.

Yet technological immortality faces a problem that spirituality cannot simply avoid either: identity.

If a future machine reconstructs a perfect copy of my memories and personality, is that copy me?

If two identical copies are produced, which one is the original?

If my brain is gradually replaced by artificial components, at what point does personal identity change?

Information preservation and personal survival are not necessarily the same thing.

The technology may eventually become extraordinary. But extraordinary technology does not automatically solve the philosophical problem of what constitutes the continuing self.

The Common Denominator

Religion, spirituality and transhumanism therefore appear to occupy very different intellectual worlds. Yet they share a remarkable structural similarity.

Each begins with the finite human being.

Each encounters death.

Each refuses to leave death as the final word.

Religion moves upward into transcendence.

Spirituality moves inward toward timeless identity.

Transhumanism moves forward into technological possibility.

The direction differs, but the existential impulse may be similar.

Surely this cannot be all there is.

That sentence may be one of the most powerful engines of human civilization.

It has produced religions, philosophies, monuments, works of art, scientific discoveries and technological ambitions.

But it is important to recognize what kind of statement it is.

“Surely this cannot be all there is” expresses a refusal, not a discovery.

It tells us that we find finitude difficult to accept.

It does not tell us what lies beyond it.

The Last Illusion

Perhaps this is the last spiritual illusion: not the belief that there is definitely an afterlife, but the assumption that there must be one because otherwise existence would somehow be incomplete.

Why should it?

Why should a finite life require an infinite continuation in order to have value?

Why should a death require a cosmic explanation in order to be tragic?

Why should a person's influence need to last forever in order to have mattered?

Why should consciousness have been designed to survive its biological substrate?

Why should the universe owe us permanence?

These questions expose a hidden assumption beneath much immortality thinking: that permanence is the ultimate measure of value.

But it isn't.

A thing does not have to last forever to have been real.

A relationship does not have to be eternal to have mattered.

A life does not have to be infinite to have been worthwhile.

A civilization does not have to survive forever to have achieved something.

A moment does not have to become permanent to have been experienced.

From Immortality to Continuity

Perhaps what human beings really want is not immortality in the literal sense but continuity.

We want our children to remember us. We want our ideas to survive us. We want our work to matter. We want our loved ones to carry something of us forward. We want the accumulated achievements of humanity to continue after our individual lives have ended.

This desire is perfectly compatible with finitude.

It does not require an immortal soul.

It does not require cosmic consciousness.

It does not require reincarnation.

It does not require an evolutionary force called Eros.

It simply requires that finite beings participate in processes larger than themselves.

In this sense, ordinary human existence already contains a kind of transcendence.

We inherit a world we did not create.

We modify it.

We pass something on.

Others inherit it from us.

Then they modify it again.

The process continues.

No individual needs to be immortal for the process to be meaningful.

A Spirituality After Immortality

What would spirituality look like if we removed the promise of immortality?

Perhaps surprisingly, quite a lot would remain.

Meditation would remain.

Contemplation would remain.

Awe would remain.

Compassion would remain.

The experience of beauty would remain.

The dissolution of rigid ego boundaries would remain.

The sense of connection with nature would remain.

The cultivation of attention and presence would remain.

What would disappear is not spirituality itself but the metaphysical conclusions sometimes attached to spiritual experience.

We would no longer have to move automatically from self-transcendence to cosmic Self, from timeless experience to timeless existence, or from evolutionary complexity to cosmic purpose.

Spirituality could become less about escaping the human condition and more about inhabiting it deeply.

That might be a more modest spirituality.

But it could also be a more honest one.

The Courage to Leave the Question Open

There is, of course, a danger on the other side.

One should not replace spiritual certainty with materialist certainty.

We do not possess a complete theory of consciousness. We do not know everything about the relationship between subjective experience and the brain. We do not possess a final philosophical account of personal identity. We cannot logically prove that no form of existence continues after biological death.

But none of this gives us permission to fill every gap with whatever metaphysical conclusion we prefer.

There is a difference between saying “we do not know” and saying “therefore Atman.”

There is a difference between mystery and explanation.

Mystery is what remains when our knowledge runs out.

Explanation begins when we have evidence, concepts and mechanisms sufficient to account for something.

The mature response to mortality may therefore be neither dogmatic atheism nor metaphysical certainty.

It may be disciplined uncertainty.

What If Death Really Is the End?

This is perhaps the question spirituality most wants us not to ask.

What if consciousness really does end with the death of the brain?

What if there is no cosmic courtroom?

No reincarnation.

No heavenly reunion.

No immortal Witness.

No karmic database.

No evolutionary Spirit guiding humanity toward some ultimate realization.

Would life thereby become meaningless?

It does not follow.

It would mean that meaning has to be located where it has always actually been experienced: within finite conscious lives and the relationships between them.

Love would still matter to those who love.

Pain would still matter to those who suffer.

Knowledge would still matter to those who seek it.

Beauty would still matter to those who experience it.

Justice would still matter to those who care about how human beings treat one another.

And death would still matter because someone who mattered is gone.

The absence of eternity does not erase significance.

It simply removes the guarantee.

The Final Liberation

Perhaps this is where the various traditions can finally be brought together.

Becker teaches us to recognize the psychological terror generated by mortality.

Terror Management Theory shows how that terror can shape human behavior and cultural commitments.

Buddhism asks us to examine our attachment to a permanent self.

Existentialism asks us to confront finitude without demanding a cosmic guarantee.

Wilber asks us to look beyond the finite ego toward a supposedly timeless identity.

The first four perspectives need not be mutually exclusive in every respect. But Wilber's decisive metaphysical step remains optional. We do not have to interpret the transcendence of ego as the discovery of an eternal Self.

Perhaps the deepest liberation is not liberation from mortality.

It is liberation from the demand that mortality must be overcome.

That is a very different kind of spirituality.

It does not promise that I will survive forever.

It does not tell me that death is an illusion.

It does not tell me that the universe secretly guarantees justice.

It simply asks whether I can fully inhabit a life whose value does not depend upon its infinite continuation.

The Last Word

We began with the question of why human beings make such a fuss about immortality when death is perfectly ordinary in nature.

The answer may now be clearer.

We are not merely mortal.

We are mortal beings who know that we are mortal.

We therefore imagine alternatives.

We construct heavens.

We discover Atman.

We dream of reincarnation.

We build monuments.

We write books.

We have children.

We create civilizations.

We develop technologies that might extend our lives.

We tell ourselves stories in which death is never quite the end.

Some of these stories may contain profound wisdom. Some may eventually prove to contain truths we do not presently understand. But the desire for such stories is not itself evidence that they are true.

Perhaps the final intellectual and spiritual step is therefore not to discover the secret meaning of death.

Perhaps it is to stop demanding that death have one.

A finite life can be meaningful without being eternal.

A mortal person can matter without being immortal.

A moment can matter without lasting forever.

A life can have meaning without the universe having assigned it a purpose.

And perhaps death does not need to be defeated, explained away or transformed into a gateway to eternity.

Perhaps it is enough to recognize what it is: the boundary that makes this particular life this particular life.

We are here.

For a while.

We love, suffer, learn, create, choose, remember and change one another.

Then we are gone.

The universe continues.

And perhaps the fact that we do not continue forever is not the final insult to human existence.

Perhaps it is the reason we should take the existence we have been given so seriously.