Life Without Afterlife: Making Peace with Mortality

This won’t make for light reading, but I’ve been moved by the recent trio of headline deaths—Terry Schiavo, the Pope and Prince Rainier III of Monacco—to collect my thoughts about death and, in particular, the afterlife. OK, I’ll lay it right out: I’m part of the minority on this one among Americans. If the surveys are accurate, I belong to the 20 to 30% who don’t believe in an afterlife. But I do consider myself to be in good company since neither Albert Einstein nor Isaac Asimov believed either.

I was once a fundamentalist Christian, so obviously I haven’t always thought this way. As a Christian I held to an afterlife mainly because it was part of the belief package; now I think as I do because I’m convinced it is true. That has to tell you something.

Since we have an almost infinite personal stake in the matter, it’s especially difficult to look at this issue objectively and to resist the temptation to project our desire to survive beyond the grave. Demosthenes’ famous quote is quite apt here: “Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true." So for starters, I think it's reasonable to be very suspicious of a belief that just happens to coincide with our strongest desires and our most powerful vested interest—self-preservation.

But the case against an afterlife reaches far beyond mere suspicion. Let’s be brutally frank with ourselves: There is no credible evidence that life survives the death of the body. None. Near death experiences, for all the hype, are just that—the experience near death—and not the testimony of someone who has actually died and returned, say days or weeks later, to tell the story. All our direct experience tells us that souls die with bodies. When parts of the brain are damaged by disease or trauma, or removed in operations, various functions disappear and mental capacities change. I watched this cruel process occur with my own father as Alzheimer’s disease attacked his brain and step-by-step his very personality changed. He literally evolved into a different person than he had been all his life, saying and doing things unimaginable for him.

Current neurological research confirms our common sense conclusions about body and soul. To cite just one example, it has even been demonstrated that damage to the temporal lobes can induce mystical, religious-like experiences. The simplest explanation is that the soul is not separate: it is a function of the body. When all our brain functions cease, the available evidence indicates that all our individual consciousness and mind activities cease.

It also strains credibility to assert that we are different than the other life forms on the planet. We surely don't think that a slime mold, a walnut tree or a codfish has an eternal soul, so why should we humans be any different since we are the direct descendants of earth's earlier life forms and the "cousins" of all living things on the planet? (About the only animals that anyone imagines having a soul are pets like cats and dogs, but here again it is human attachment that is driving this belief.) Yes, we have a more highly developed brain than all other life, and because of this a much more elaborate culture, but does that justify believing we have some kind of permanent, immaterial self or spirit? My answer is no. Such an idea is little more than a mix of wish projection, egotism and superstition. As much as I might wish it were so, I see no real reason to justify this belief, and some very good reasons for not accepting it.

Now I can fully empathize with those who would seek refuge in a comfortable myth -- any myth at all -- to avoid facing the full impact of the end of self. The prospect of personal annihilation is staggeringly frightening. But if we value a life lived authentically, we must resist this natural survival impulse and be willing to face the prospect squarely that the story, our own story, may not have quite the happily-ever-after ending we’d hoped for. The alternative is to cling to a desperate compensatory mechanism that panders to our darkest fears, to live in an Alice’s Wonderland because it is more appealing, rather than embracing courageously the world that actually exists.

Coming to terms with the death of self is, no doubt, one of the hardest duties of life. But it is not for this reason an optional aspect of the journey; rather for a life fully lived, it is one of the primary spiritual tasks to be accomplished. To avoid this task by embracing immortality is a hindrance to authentic spirituality, a failure to rise to one of life’s stiffer challenges, and is, in essence, a denial of mortality. The choice is stark: remain a child, buffered against reality’s harshness with happy tales, or face reality squarely and mature into spiritual adulthood.

Though difficult, the process need not end in despair, meaninglessness or a melancholy resignation. Yes it is true that we continue to live on through our progeny, in the way that our lives have affected others, and in the endless recycling of our physical matter in the natural world. It is also true that death returns us to the exact state of non-being that existed before we were conceived, a state where there is no pain or reason for fear. As Einstein stated: “The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead.” In my experience I have found this standard counsel helpful but insufficient in my efforts at making peace with my own mortality.

A more complete answer for me has come in the cultivation of two key perspectives. Alluded to above, I have found that nurturing my sense of connectedness to nature and its cycles, including the life/death cycle, goes a long ways toward making death seem natural and normal and not something to be loathed and explained away. Most important of all, I have found that gratitude is the key to facing mortality with grace. Though I don’t care for the nasty tone, N. Wilson in his paper, “Life after death: A fate worse than death,” jars his readers with the truth: “Like a greedy child, having stuffed its face with food, do you demand yet more?...Are you so obsessed with being you that you cannot accept the fact of your own non-existence?” Instead, like the kid who's thankful to have been given a part—any part—in the school play, we do far better to live every day with a spirit of gratitude for having been given a chance to play a part in the great drama of creation. Our moment in the sun is far longer, on average, than almost all other creatures. Enjoy the cosmic ride.