38 Man has had to accept that his body cannot survive death. So he takes the most inaccessible and mysterious part of it, the brain, and claims that some of its functionings survive death.
39 There is no thought, no perception, no consciousness of it, no consciousness of consciousness, that cannot be traced to an electrochemical event in the brain. ‘I have an immortal and immaterial soul’ is a thought or statement; it is also a recording of the activity of certain cells by other cells.
40 A machine as complex as the human brain would also develop a self-consciousness, a conscience, and a ‘soul’. It would take pleasure in being the complex machine it was; it would grow metaphysical myths about itself. All that is is constructible and therefore destructible: not magic; not ‘super-natural’; not ‘psychic’.
41 Machines are made from ‘dead’ matter; brains are made from ‘living’ matter. But the frontier between ‘dead’ and ‘living’ is confused. One could not construct a machine as complex as the brain out of ‘dead’ matter; but part of the complexity (as proved by its actual inconstructibility) of the brain is that its machinery is made of ‘living’ matter. Our inability to construct mechanical yet fully human brains shows our scientific and technological inadequacy, not any real difference of category between the machine and the brain; between mechanical functions and supposedly ‘spiritual’ thoughts.
42 What survives death is putrescent stopped machinery. The consciousness is a mirror reflecting a mirror reflecting a mirror; anything that enters this room can be endlessly reflected and its reflections reflected. But when the room is demolished, no mirrors, no reflections; nothing.
43 The myth of a separate consciousness partly arises because of the loose way we use T. T becomes an object – a third thing. We are constantly in situations where we feel ourselves inadequate and where we think either ‘It is not my fault, since I am not the person I would have chosen to be’ or ‘It is my fault’. These self-criticisms and excuses give us an illusion of objectivity, of being able to judge ourselves. We therefore devise a thing that judges, a separate ‘soul’. But this ‘soul’ is no more than the ability to observe, to remember and to compare, and to create and to store ideals of conduct. This is mechanism, not ectoplasm; the human brain, not the Holy Ghost.
44 Life is the price we pay for death, not the reverse. The worse our life, the more we pay; the better, the cheaper. Evolution is the growth of experience, of intelligence, of knowledge, and this growth engenders moments of insight, moments when we see deeper purposes, truer causes, more intended effects. We stand at this great insight now: there is no life after death. Soon this will be as certain to everyone as it is certain to me, where I write, that there is no one in the next room. It is true that I cannot absolutely prove there is no one without going into the room; but all the circumstantial evidence supports my belief. Death is the room that is always empty.
45 The great linked myths of the afterlife and the immortal soul have served their purpose; have stood between us and reality. But their going will change all, and is meant to change all.
ISOLATION
46 The old religions and philosophies were refuges, kind to man in a world that his ignorance of science and technology made unkind. Never try to pass us by, they always said, for behind us is nothing but misery and horror.
47 It is cold and bare outside, says the mother; but one day the child goes out. This age is still our first day out, and we feel ourselves alone; more free and more alone.
48 Our stereotyping societies force us to feel more alone. They stamp masks on us and isolate out real selves. We all live in two worlds: the old comfortable man-centred world of absolutes and the harsh real world of relatives. The latter, the relativity reality, terrifies us; and isolates and dwarfs us all.
49 Greater social concern may, paradoxically, only increase this isolation. The more society interferes and supervises and plays the good Samaritan, the less needed and lonelier the secret individual gets.
50 More and more we know how far we are from the persons we should like to be. Less and less do we believe that a man can be any other than he is born and conditioned to be. The more science reveals our mechanical nature the more a harried ‘free’ man, a Robin Hood in each, retreats into the forests of the private mind.
51 Yet all these lonelinesses are a part of our growing up, of our first going out alone, of our freedom. A child, is protected from such fear and loneliness by having a falsely kind and simple mirage erected around him. He grows up and goes out into loneliness and reality and there he builds a more real protection against his isolation out of love and friendship and feeling for his fellow men.
52 Once again the indifferent process of infinity seems at first sight to have trapped us into a corner. But we are trapped only by our own stupidity and weakness. The escape is clear.
THE ANXIETIES
53 Anxiety is the name we give to an unpleasant effect on us, and personal to us, of the general necessity for hazard. All anxieties are in some sense goads. They may goad the weak beyond endurance; but it is essential that humanity as a whole is goaded.
54 In a happy world all anxieties would be games. An anxiety is a lack that causes pain; a game is a lack that causes pleasure. Two different men in identical circumstances: what one may feel is an anxiety, while to the other it is a game.
55 Anxieties are tensions between a pole in our real life and a counterpole in the life we imagine we would like to lead.
56 There are esoteric metaphysical anxieties and practical daily anxieties. There are fundamental universal anxieties and special individual anxieties. The more sensitive and self-conscious and aware of others man becomes, the more anxious, in his present ill-organized world, he is going to become.
57 Anxieties:
The anxiety of the ignorance of the meaning of life.
The anxiety of not knowing the future.
The anxiety of death.
The anxiety of choosing right. Where will my choices lead? Can I choose?
The anxiety of otherness. All is other to me, including most of myself.
The anxiety of responsibility.
The anxiety of inability to love and help others: our family, our friends, our country, all men. This is aggravated by our increased other-awareness.
The anxiety of not being loved by others.
The anxieties of the respublica – social injustice, the H-bomb, starvation, racialism, brink policies, chauvinism, and the rest.
The anxiety of ambition. Am I the person I want to be? Am I the person others (my employers, my family, my friends) want me to be?
The anxieties of social position. Of class, of birth, of money, of status in society.
The anxiety of money. Have I the necessities of life? There are situations in which a private yacht and a gallery of old masters may seem necessities of life.
The anxiety of time. Have I the time to do what I want?
The anxiety of sex.
The anxiety of work. Am I doing the right work? Am I doing it as well as it needs to be done? The anxiety of health.
58 To be alone in an office – dozens of telephones all ringing at the same time. These anxieties should make us one. We all feel them. But we let them isolate us, as if the citizens of a country would defend it by each barricading himself in his own house.
HAZARD
59 My only certainty in life is that I shall one day die. I can be certain of nothing else in the future. But either we survive (and so far in human history a vast majority has always survived) and having survived when we might not have done so gives us what we call happiness; or we do not survive and do not know it.