The Green Knight is one of many figures from story who defy death. He holds his lopped off head in his arms and challenges any member of King Arthur’s round table to meet him a year hence. The Torah tells us of the immortal Elijah the Prophet for whom Jews still to this day leave a cup of wine during the Passover seder. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is itself testament to the rightful place of man to be with the immortal gods.
Most of humanity doesn’t make it. Stories have characters who are immortal or exceptionally long-lived, speaking, I think, of the terrible longing for health, life and love in us all. These stories, however, give only the barest of hints on how to achieve this. Are they only stories?
An examination of the self as presently alive leads one to acknowledge that certain strong habits of body, emotion, mind and spirit are as the chains locked tightly about the ankles of a miscreant imprisoning him. We carry the seeds of our own dissolution in our selves. Tripling merrily down the path blissfully unaware of the self is not escape from death.
Blavatsky writing in the late 19th century was one of the first to reveal to the general public the way to great wisdom and exceptionally long life. She claims that Morya, Kuthumi, et. al, now Masters, once were men subject to the fluctuations of hope and despair that characterize men, but that through prolonged self study and meditation broke through the mortal net and achieved a higher state of evolution. Indeed just as a man once was a boy so are there higher levels of development available to him who keeps growing. Unfortunately as Wilhelm Reich in the first half of this century documents, most men become crystallized at a rather immature age, that is, outwardly aging but not even gaining in even wisdom as they drop off into senescence. The key, Blavatsky and others after her say, lies in the development of the true self.
Sitting in Zen meditation brings the practitioner to a still pond where he might glimpse his original face. Theoretically control of the mind and permanence in the present moment ought to bring one to the other side of the pond, that is, away from and different than regular men subject to the vicissitudes of fortune. This path can be treacherous and full of self deception. Who is to know if he is only duped into believing that he is free when truly he is not?
The yogis of India assert a dorman knot of kundalini lies sleeping at the base of the spine, and that is only for him who awakens it to have unending bliss of consciousness and body. The attraction of this philosophy is that it addresses the physicality of the body. The body itself has within it a dynamic force that can completely change the body, emotions, mind and spirit. To sit in meditation with an awakened kundalini master makes clear that further development of the self is a possibility. When in the presence one feels an ecstatic pulsing energy. In Indian literature one can read of men who have surmounted the usual span of years, for score and ten, and who have either retained youth or have regained it through various practices. Paramahamsa Yogananda in his spiritual autobiography reports of meeting and becoming a disciple of Babaji, an immortal yogi living in the Himalayas. Modern day Kriya Yoga teachers following in the reported tradition of Babaji teach a method of self cultivation that they say will heal the practitioner of his inner and outer ills, strengthen the will of body and spirit, and bring one into contact with advanced masters of this method for further teaching. The ultimate goal, says Leonard Orr, author of Physical Immortality, is unending life.
In India we have not only stories of supermen but tracts and methodologies of practice to become such a man. The drawback, perhaps, is that the soil of India is a necessary fundament of the practice. Without it, the meditation masters who have come to America have floundered in the multifaceted everyday life of the west. Though they are men of undoubted charisma, power, and sometimes wealth. What separates them from rock stars or millionaire businessmen? Aldous Huxley in After Many Summers Dies the Swan tells the story of a very rich individual who hires scientists to find an elixir of immortality. He dies before the research can be completed. In a manner of speaking the yogis who have come to the west have also died too soon before their work can gain root.
Judaism offers a few examples of men who gained immortality. Curiously the greatest figures in the Torah, Moses and David, are not among such beings. King David, the author of the Psalms, lived only seventy years, his lifetime taken from Adam’s long life. Moses did not cross into Israel. Elijah merited immortality because he reached the state of Shalom, translated as ‘peace’, but meaning in this sense the invisible point of balance between tension and non-tension. Who in Judaism is greater than Moses? None is held so high. One might glean from this that the gaining of immortality is not the most important goal of Judaism.
The Shemoneh Esrei, perhaps the most significant prayer in the Jewish liturgy, mentions prominently several times the idea of bringing to life the dead. The general understanding of this holds that in the time of the messiah the dead will be brought back to life in Jerusalem. At the time of the messiah’s arrival a third Temple, the first two of which were destroyed, one by the Babylonians and one by the Romans, will be rebuilt. The world will be turned upside down, perhaps literally, in that the dead will come to life. Is this only a far off story?
The Shemoneh Esrei might be a prescription for attaining immortality, the state of Shalom. If this prayer is a call to the self’s inner world to bring back the Shechinah, the feminine aspect of God, from her exile away and apart from the self, and if by following the prayer’s eighteen benedictions, one can thereby join the Shechinah to the original face of the self, then perhaps such a whole entire being would become deathless. One who prays and meditates on this prayer is like one who is dead. The challenge is to bring that dead being to life. Such a path is hard beyond imagining. If the great figures of Judaism could not attain this marriage with the Shechinah, what hope has the normal Jew? The vague methodology and lack of belief of most in such a radical proposal as this is in itself a sufficient hindrance and would drag down the most diligent and sincere aspirant. Still, to gain immortality would appear to be the most important goal.
One could go full circle through the world’s esoteric traditions and find various levels of acceptance that physical immortality is possible. Some philosophies, Gnosticism, for example, tend to dismiss the body as a tomb gladly left behind at death. Alchemy hints darkly at a practicum for the disciple to follow in order to gain immortality, but the hints are so obscure, some say purposely, so that one could spend one’s entire allotment of years in a vain search for the yearned for elixir of youth. Vedanta, a school of Yoga, also relegates the body to a lesser status than the soul. The sincere seeker might see fit to dash his hopes against the rocky beachhead and like other shipwrecks sink into the vast uncaring sea.
Warrior, Felt, Undertaker, and other stories 