Deserving Immortality?

On another blog the other day I encountered the notion that living life right—so that we deserve immortality—is more important than belief. This got me thinking about different ways of approaching our ultimate fate. 

In one kind, and it comes in two versions, Reward and Punishment are the principal inducements for shaping behavior, as in that comment above, using the word “deserve.” These two are secular and transcendental. 

A. The secular has a low way and a high. The low says: “It’s all about winning rather than losing, and here is where that happens. Anything goes—if you are smart enough to get away with it. You only go round once.” The higher way sees things under the rubric of happiness. It is more likely to be achieved if we live a virtuous life. And while, indeed, we disappear on death, a kind of “beyond” is still there. We live on in the fond memories of the generations that follow. In practice—unless we were truly notorious—that amounts to roughly eighty years after the person dies. I still remember my Great Grand Mother, paternal side. I knew her over a scatter of days when I was very little and came on visits twice before she died; she gave me candy. I will soon pass on, and after I am gone, chances are she will also, under the high secular, entirely disappear. 

B. The transcendental versions are more complicated. One is based on reincarnation theories. Our deeds produce karma. If we can rid ourselves of those consequences, we go into a kind of unnamable bliss. If not, the lightness or weight of our karma will govern the kind of rebirth we shall have after we shed the current body. In the Judeo-Christian-Muslim conception, a real afterlife exits. Souls are immortal. They need not be earned or deserved. The beyond, however, has at least two, some say three, regions. Hell for the wicked, Heaven for the deserving, and possibly a temporary sojourn in Purgatory on the way to Heaven. Further complications enter in when we note that at the very end of this essentially planned process comes resurrection of bodies and life on a heavenly sort of earth.

Is there another kind of way? I think there is. You might say that it has elements of the high secular as well as embracing one certainty of the transcendental beliefs. The high secular is least driven by rewards and punishments but accepts life’s absolute termination at death. The transcendental faiths hold to the immortality of souls, and so would this third way of seeing things. But its motivation is purely internal. It acts because it wills to act—from inner motivation, not to achieve rewards or to avoid the punishments. There are people who classify themselves under A. and B. above who yet live their lives this way. We are, after all, immortal souls, not geese that crave the carrots and would avoid the stick. That’s for beginners, not travelers of this mysterious path.