Religious Studies, 2023

This article explores the concept of non-personal immortality. Non-personal theories of immortality claim that even though there is no personal or individual survival of death, it is still possible to continue to exist in a non-personal state. The most important challenge for non-personal conceptions of immortality is solving the apparent contradiction between on the one hand accepting that individual existence ends with death and on the other hand maintaining that death nevertheless is not equal to total annihilation. I present two theories of non-personal immortality found in Schopenhauer and William James and derive a set of systematic core theses from them. Finally, I discuss whether the notion of non-personal immortality is consistent, and whether a non-personal afterlife could be desirable.

Religious Studies, 2023

All the cards seem to be stacked against belief in immortality. Nonetheless, the resources of particular religious traditions may avail where generic philosophical solutions fall short. With attention to the boredom and narcissism critiques, intimations of deathlessness in Śāntideva's radical altruism, and recent Christian debates on the soul and the intermediate state, I propose two criteria for a coherent religion-specific belief in immortality: (1) the belief is supported by a fully realized religious tradition, (2) the belief satisfies the demand for self-transcendence as well as for self-preservation. Where self-transcendence and self-preservation are kept in balance, and where the whole idea rests upon the lattice-work of a fully realized religious tradition, immortality is a fitting object of belief. Moreover, such belief is compatible with considerable speculative freedom concerning matter and spirit, body and soul, and personal identity over time.

2023

Introduction: Michael Cholbi's book "Immortality and the Philosophy of Death" offers a profound examination of the notion of immortality and its philosophical ramifications. Cholbi goes beyond surface-level discussions and delves deep into the paradoxes associated with immortality, assesses the significance of mortality, and scrutinizes death as a form of harm. This review intends to build upon the previous analysis by providing a comprehensive evaluation of the book's primary arguments, shedding light on their strengths and weaknesses in greater depth.

Modern Light on Immortality, 1909

AUTHOR: HENRY FRANK MODERN LIGHT ON IMMORTALITY BEING AN ORIGINAL EXCURSION INTO HISTORICAL RE SEARCH AND SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY POINTING TO A NEW SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM BOSTON: 1909 EXTRACT: “They neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. " He does not affirm that “They of the resurrection" angels of God in heaven," but in respect of marriage like them. That is, as we may assume, the pure spiritual forms, which the heavenly host constitute, have no physical functions, but intercommunicate by mere ethereal vibrations; so they who believe in Him and live the life He displays will likewise know each other in the spirit more effectually than they can in the body; that there are soul-marriages, the blending of the mind with the divine principle, the merging of all in the consciousness of the divine essence.. (181-182)

Transcendent Philosophy: An International Journal for Comparative Philosophy and Mysticism

Central to any discussion of entheogens is the quandary in which we currently find ourselves. We live in a time of extremes that are visible everywhere; not only do things not appear to be in their rightful place, but they seem to be going abysmally wrong. To overlook the emergence of the psychedelic renaissance within this historical moment is to ignore the spiritual crisis of the modern world and its severe impact on the collective psyche. We need to acknowledge the momentous developments that led to the post-Enlightenment world and its desacralized outlook which has fueled the dominance of scientism and materialism. Unless we do so, it becomes difficult to properly assess the claim that psychedelics are the panacea for all the maladies of our time.

2010

Interview about the origins of my views on Megahistory (Big History) and human existence.

Journal of Ethics , 2015

Immortality—living forever and avoiding death—seems to many to be desirable. But is it? It has been argued (notably by Williams, recently by Scheffler) that an immortal life would fairly soon become boring, trivial, and meaningless, and is not at all the sort of thing that any of us should want. Yet boredom and triviality presuppose our having powerful memories and imaginations, and an inability either to shake off the past or to free ourselves of weighty visions of the future. Suppose, though, that our capacities here are limited, so that our temporal reach is fairly significantly constrained. Then, I argue, these alleged problems with immortality will recede. Moreover, similar limitations might help us in the actual world, where life is short. If we cannot see clearly to its end points, both ahead and behind, life will seem longer.

G. Blamberger and S. Kakar (eds.), Imaginations of Death and the Beyond in India and Europe (Springer 2018), 2018

Whenever I direct my attention to some place in my visual field, for instance, I am consciously aware of what is there. So it seems as if there must be something I am visually aware or conscious of even when I am not directing my attention there. But this too could just be an illusion, and what we should say is that the very act of casting one’s attention, like the opening of the fridge door, is what turns the light of consciousness on. Julian Jaynes, in his classic work,The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, put it like this: Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of…It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that doesn’t have any light shining on it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not. (1976, p. 23) I think that this same type of illusion is what explains the grip of the idea of immortality. Throughout one’s lifetime one is aware of being alive, and so it seems as if one is always alive, even when, at the moment of death, the door of life is closed. You think the light of life is always shining; i.e that you are immortal. Yet this is to forget that it is living which turns on the light of life. From the fact that for as long as we are alive we are conscious of being so, it does not follow that there is a similar consciousness even when we are no longer alive. In this paper I look at responses to the illusion of immortality in two thinkers widely separated in time and space: the 5th century Theravāda Buddhist exegete, Buddhaghosa, and the 20th century Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. As we will see there are some profound and surprising affinities between these two thinkers, and each can be read in a way that helps to illuminate the thought of the other.