This is How To Live Forever

Abandon your ego and leave death behind.

My cat is stupid. She’s going to live for less than 20 years, even with all the doting care a childless couple can give her. Yet she spends most of her day asleep, curled up on a chair or in a basket, completely insensible to the world she will one day have to leave, just as we all will. Doesn’t she realize she’s missing out? Doesn’t it bother her to think that this is how she’s spending her limited time on this earth?

Of course it doesn’t, because she’s smarter than me.

Nothing is lost.

The shattered ruins of abandoned empires support the buildings we live in today. On a busy street in the Italian town I used to live in, a humble milestone still bears the marks made by the tradesman who carved it. Probably he worked hard for his family and worried about the future. Probably he was glad to get a government contract, steady work to keep his table loaded with garum and wine. And where is all that worry now?

We are those stones. Formed out of the building blocks of the universe, part of the process that began with the Big Bang and ends who knows when? How, then, could we be anything other than immortal?

In that same Italian town, I saw the Google car coming down the street, with that conspicuous many-eyed dome rising ridiculously from its roof. I was on my way back from the store, carrying a jug of table wine that cost around six euros. The camera clicked, and there I was, captured right along with the cinder cone mountains and the tattered sun-scarred clouds. Part of the scenery, as though I belonged. As though I was part of this town that I didn’t know existed a year earlier. As though, within four months, I wouldn’t be gone forever.

Photos don’t last, of course. Especially not on the Internet. Google will update itself, and my image will vanish from the streets of Nocera while the mountains and the milestones stay behind. But as I write this, I’m still there, stomping along the cracked pavement with my head down. Striding from A to B as though there’s anywhere I could possibly get to that isn’t here.

I used to do that a lot. Just now entering middle age, I’ve crammed my life with targets and goals, pursued by the endless tick-tock of time passing, hurrying on to an end. My end. Cats may be wiser, but we humans have minds that race back and forth through time, reconfiguring the past and scripting the future. We live in a cloud of distraction, both fleeing and pursuing, a world divided into loves and hates, the good we hope for and the evil we fear. And above us, the clouds roll on untroubled.

Living in Italy changed me. It taught me to see the world as a process of which I am part. To remember that I matter as much and as little as a long-dead Roman stonemason or a sleeping cat on a window ledge.

Animals don’t fear death because they know it doesn’t exist.

Every cell that makes you is continually dying and being born. But we don’t identify with ourselves. We talk about my hand, my leg, my head, my heart, as though we are something other than these objects. As though these objects are separate somehow, not merely another part of the body divided from one another only by arbitrary classifications. As though you could ever hope to find an individual point where the world ends, and you begin.

The human ego is a magnificent thing. How many of the beautiful monuments our species has raised would exist without our need to make something last? To live on in some way, even if we won’t exist to enjoy it? But it’s the ego that fears death because it’s the only part of you that won’t survive it. It’s only that grasping, ravenous, eternally unsatisfied fold of your miraculous brain that is capable of fearing its own extinction. Everything else goes on forever.

We identify ourselves with our minds, with our ego, and to lose that seems like the end of everything. No more sunshine. No more laughter. What a loss, for the unique pattern of experiences and personality that makes you who you are to slip finally into the night!

But that’s only true if you think of yourself as something separate from the rest of the world. That’s the illusion of the ego. To the passing camera, I’m as much a part of the Italian town around me as the ancient mountains behind me and the grapes that made the wine I carry. It’s only me that thinks he knows better.

And meanwhile, the cosmic elements that made you are released back into the universe so that something else can come into being. How beautiful the notion that our lives are like a relay race, and that our deaths are only to make room for something new to grow.

The universe reexperiencing itself with fresh energy. Look at how alive a young animal is, a lamb gamboling in a field or a kitten batting a ball of yarn. Or the local kids kicking a ball against the wall as I hurried home with my irresistibly cheap wine.

The cast changes, but the performance goes on. And when you cease to identify with your ego, when you see a simple truth that you are this process of which your existence is a part, the world becomes ravishingly beautiful. And all fear disappears. You can’t believe in death, because nothing ever dies. It just changes forms and comes to life again.

Leave your ego behind, and see the truth that’s all around you. Not only will the truth set you free. It will make you live forever.