The Mask of Eternity: The Quest for Immortality and the Afterlife

Abstract

When we are gone, only the ultimate question remains. Evidence that consciousness survives death remains elusive. With or without warm, welcoming smiles from relatives we may have loathed in life, it remains our obsession to know what happens when our screen-reality stops, and fades to black. Conscious immortality remains questionable. This writer remains firmly agnostic but enjoys entertaining wishful thinking.

Death is the greatest mystery of life. Buddha rejected the question as useless, according to Jung. Throughout history, it remains a source of wonder, fear, hopefulness, and puzzlement. We seek compassionate ways of dealing with this uncertainty that no discussion of entanglement or holographic memory can assuage.

There is little wonder we tend to fall back on traditional attitudes informed by simplicity, meaningful ceremony, and acceptance. It is something we cannot grasp at all, despite our conceptions of time and space and what might lie beyond them, even if some of our psychic experience seems unbound by spacetime. There is NoWhere to go and we are all going to get there.