Humans are the only living beings aware of our mortality. That certainty makes us dream of continuation — and the question of immortality in spiritual practice has haunted seekers across every tradition. But is it real? Or is it the ultimate lure, designed to keep us obedient and hopeful? This post examines the question of immortality in spiritual practice from my own trajectory — from initial belief to growing doubt.
The Longing That Defines Us
Humans are the only living beings aware of our mortality. That certainty makes us dream of continuation — the possibility that everything does not end with the inevitable physical death, that somehow we might continue to exist, in another form and another place, and not merely exist but be happy forever.
How Religions Monetized the Dream
This longing has been systematically exploited by religions◊On religions. The Egyptians already told their believers they would go to a better place — and an eternal one — after death, provided their soul passed the trial of the scales (if they had behaved well in life) and their corpse was properly preserved and buried in a glamorous location (Saqqara was very fashionable). This made the funerary business a lucrative source of income for those who monopolized it. The Greeks were more austere: after death, the soul continued to exist, but in Hades — a gloomy place where existence did not seem particularly pleasant.
Today, a large portion of humanity maintains this hope of living forever, preferably in Heaven. For their peace of mind, they prefer to trust the promises of religion: do what we say and you will go to Heaven; disobey, and you will burn in Hell. The ethical rules of religions — thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal — make perfect sense and have served to unite large collectives under a shared code. But they all share a systematic flaw: care for your brothers in faith, but the others you may slaughter — or even must, because “God wills it.” This absurdity is still visible today. And religious leaders achieve an astonishingly effective degree of control over the credulous (euphemistically labeled “believers”).
The Eastern Alternative
Eastern traditions do not seem like religions in this sense. They do not sell the fiction of an all-too-human god who rewards and punishes, who rejoices or takes offense according to the behavior of poor mortals. Instead, they suggest that through proper practice, we can realize our own “divine” nature — divine in the sense of transcending the visible. The aim is to overcome a worldview based on dualities and discover that all is one: the Dao of the Daoists, the Śūnyatā (emptiness) or Buddha-nature of the Buddhists. If all is one, there is no separation between human and divine — and that is comforting.
One conclusion that can be drawn is that, if we do things right, we can indeed become immortal. As the layers of the self are peeled away, we discover a bodiless, genderless “I” with no apparent physical boundaries, fused with the Whole. The most logical conclusion seems to be that this deep self — this pure consciousness — is indeed our immortal soul◊The dissolution of the narrative Self, which will continue to exist forever, perhaps in another form and place we cannot conceive, but which will ultimately allow us to go on existing, happily, forever.
From Elixirs to Inner Alchemy
The Daoist tradition is the one that, as far as I have explored, most clearly encourages this hope of immortality. After all, the quest for immortality goes back to very ancient times in Chinese culture.
First they tried waidan, external alchemy, designing all sorts of potions (elixirs) that supposedly prevented physical death. For some reason they concluded that mercury was the perfect ingredient — and with this belief they poisoned several emperors. When they realized it did not work, they moved the goal to the spiritual plane. The physical body died — that was inevitable — but the spirit could continue to exist. And so they shifted from external to internal alchemy (neidan)◊On neidan. Here, the magical elixir is synthesized in the “elixir fields” (dantians) — also called cinnabar fields, cinnabar being the basic ingredient of waidan — to gestate the “immortal fetus,” which in some way coincides with the deep “I” observed in profound meditation. The hope of immortality persists.
My Current View
This possibility is certainly more attractive than accepting the inevitability of our own annihilation. When I discovered my “deep self,” I fell directly into that temptation◊The pull toward belief. But the more I live with this experience — and the more I notice how easily the mind constructs meaning from intensity — the more I question it.
Living forever sounds appealing — but think about it for a moment: existing eternally sounds more like punishment than reward. However pleasant existence may be, living it for, say, a thousand years must eventually become unbearable. No cosmic reality show could keep us entertained for a thousand years, let alone a few eons.
So I am inclined to think — and of course, this is only my opinion — that the fruit of practice is precisely this: to face adversity serenely, including our own death, from the perspective of the unreality of the self and with the empathy that comes from perceiving the connection between our particular self and all the other selves around us.
Nothing more — and nothing less.
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