All lifeforms on Earth are limited to lifetimes, some longer than others and some shorter. A few last only days, while a few others stretch into centuries. You’re about average, with a life expectancy of 80 years or so. Does that upset you?
Nature has equipped all forms of life with a developmental aim and “maturity clocks” that mark thresholds when it’s time to grow and stop growing, to reproduce and quit bearing young, to strive for existence and eventually succumb to extinction.
It seems that for all species but our own, these maturity clocks work instinctually to ensure that individuals actualize their natural potential and bring new generations to life in time.
An evolutionary breakthrough occurred millions of years ago when microorganisms called mitochondria were enveloped by other cells. Rather than assimilating these captives, however, the mitochondria were incorporated into cell biology as energy factories, thus catapulting the evolution of life to a whole new level of symbiotic complexity.
Several thousand years ago came another breakthrough, this time in our human lineage. With advances in social differentiation and cooperation, humans began to adopt identities that would allow them to participate in rather complex social role-plays.
By putting on these roles and masks (the Latin word is persona, from which our word person is derived), humans created conditions for the rise of self-conscious awareness.
Their careful attention to social cues in others, confirming varying degrees of recognition, deference, and respect, individuals became acutely aware of themselves as actors. This acting center of social identity is what we call the ego (Latin for “I”), and it wasn’t long before this separate center of self-conscious personal identity had insinuated itself in every human society across the planet.
Given ego’s place in the continuing evolution of humans toward ever more complex systems of social organization, we can appreciate this new arrangement of the social actor in a human body as the cultural equivalent of the much earlier mitochondrion revolution in cell biology and the evolution of Life on Earth.
Along with this remarkable and unprecedented advance into a separate center of self-conscious personal identity, however, came the awareness of the body’s mortality. Despite the intensely engaging carnival atmosphere of the social stage, in putting on and taking off the roles and masks of identity, a self-conscious individual was inescapably tethered to a biological lifeform that would one day die.
And this was terrifying.
One way of dealing with this new death anxiety was to get so completely distracted into the social role-play and identity management that it could be sufficiently ignored. At any rate, death could be imagined as a still long-distant future event, not requiring any further thought – for now.
But it wouldn’t entirely go away.
It was the innovation of a few storytellers, likely at midlife, who conceived the meme – referring to a self-replicating idea that quickly spreads through a society’s collective consciousness – of personal immortality. Capitalizing on the obvious fact of ego’s transcendent position with respect to the body, they first imagined and then believed that an individual’s center of personality might – no, must! – survive death.
Soon enough, elaborate departure narratives were devised to assure individuals of their postmortem continuation in life on the other side of death.
In the following centuries, these departure narratives would grow increasingly sophisticated and fanciful, depicting alternative destinations of heaven and hell, to be assigned according to the individual’s obedience to religious authority in this life, each with its own rings and levels of reward or punishment.
The great irony here is in how the emergence of a self-conscious center of personal identity, which signaled an advance in human social evolution, ended up generating profound anxiety and making individuals vulnerable to the schemes of one immortality project or another.
If these schemes provided a kind of shelter of distractions, they also had the effect of closing the human spirit inside and sedating its evolutionary impetus.
In the diagram above, a body’s mortal timeline is overarched by the adventure of ego. A separate center of self-conscious personal identity takes its rise sometime in early childhood, and returns to the body in late adulthood, just as the lures of social recognition start to lose their luster. Contrary to the promise of religion’s departure narratives, however, the personality goes with the body.
That is to say, it will go out like a candle.
If this sounds sacrilegious and depressing, it is only because the meme of personal immortality has insinuated itself so deep into our collective unconscious that anything less than everlasting life for the ego just feels offensive and wrong. When the body dies our light goes out? Anyone suggesting as much must be a heretic and a sinner – at the very least misguided, and perilously so.
This is where we have to reframe the whole point and trajectory of ego consciousness.
Our challenge is not to save ego from the body’s inevitable end, but rather to clarify its evolutionary aim in the larger picture of human destiny. This evolutionary aim according to the spiritual wisdom tradition of Sophia Perennis, which has been contemplating the matter for as long as humans have been wrestling with the question of what we are and where we are going, is only penultimately about social role-plays and managing an identity.
Ultimately – that is to say, in the final analysis and at the highest level of consideration – humans are destined for the liberated life in a planetary community of compassion, goodwill, justice and inclusion.
To his theistic audience, Jesus envisioned this ethically enlightened human destiny and called it the “kingdom of God.” It wasn’t up in heaven or in some post-apocalyptic future, but right here and now, coming up from within us and taking root among us, uniting us all in a Spirit of freedom and love.
As illustrated in my diagram, the elevated position of ego, transcendent of the body but not independent from it, provides a location from which consciousness can release and descend into the grounding mystery of Being itself. The dashes and subtraction sign (-) in and near the vertical arrow dropping from ego are making the point that this descending path involves a surrender of all the ideologies, memberships, ambitions, attachments, roles, and masks that define identity.
From the same location of ego’s position, consciousness can also connect with other persons and ascend together with them into the higher wholeness of transpersonal community. A solid upward arrow and addition sign (+) indicate that this higher realm of community takes up and includes each person’s uniqueness and the diversity represented in their differences.
Here we are not locked to our roles but can use them to contribute, add value, and participate with each other in the creative ways of a higher purpose.
So we can see that ego consciousness did not evolve just to be rescued to another world and a life everlasting, but instead to open pathways to the depths of Mystery within us and the conspiracy of love lifting us together as One.
It’s here that we become fully human.
Tracts of Revolution 