As a heads up, this started one direction, went another, and landed somewhere else, so buckle up. I hope you have as much fun reading as I did writing and wrestling with some thoughts.
In my role as a mental health therapist, I work with a lot of adults concerning the difficulties and struggles related to matters of personal identity. The various forms of adversity are often highlighted by how each person views themselves in connection with the Values they seek to support through their behavior. In essence, it’s a connection problem, a deep desire to pull from the present what one cares about to facilitate in the future, immediate or otherwise, a desired outcome. In every action we take, we declare to the world and those around us: this is how I want reality to look; here is a contribution to my vision.
As with all behavior, there are multiple ways of connecting a story to it, what is typically referred to as a perspective. That story is itself always tied to at least one Value that is important to us. That Value set has already been triggered by events we’re responding to, initially through an elevated physiological response called a feeling, then personalized through an emotional word within a particular social context, and when explaining or justifying our actions to ourselves and others, by narratives or stories.
The nature of those stories is what fleshes out the content of our identities, the social labels we use to attach ourselves with others. Group solidarity and cohesion are about shared stories, narrative structures that each person uses to not only guide their own behavior towards what is deemed acceptable and away from what is considered not, but also to highlight for others that yes, we belong together, see here the shared story and its accompanying action that indicates my allegiance.
One such identity is that of a religious kind. I use the word “kind” here deliberately because religious identities are not one thing, precisely because the stories shared are not all the same. I’ve long found it amusing and worth a good groaning head-shake that people will use the ubiquity of religious ideologies to indicate the lack of a monolithic truth, and yet in almost the same breath make statements about how “religion does this or that,” as if the monolith that doesn’t actually exist, totally does if it means a criticism can be supported.
Suppose we acknowledge that identity is simply a label indicating a potential allegiance and/or alignment with a set of ideological points. In that case, we begin to see why calling anyone religious, or any other identity word, doesn’t tell us anything other than, perhaps, providing a small dirty window into how the person initially using the word thinks. I say “dirty” because without clarification first, all any of us are doing is simply filling in the ignorance gap provided by an identity label with our own biases, assumptions, and projections. We must first seek clarification on whether the image we have in our head is accurate. Well, we have to do this first if we’re interested in dialogue, that is. This is why I wrote the article about being anti-religious as a fool’s errand.
An Issue of Longevity
With that short exploration of identity out of the way, we can turn to the point here: how particular values are instantiated in specific behavior and, then, the identities that such behavior is connected to.
I remember the day of my Christian salvation experience, a promise of immortality that it held, the moment when, in the spirit of spatial impossibility, I “invited Jesus into my heart.” Countless others have experienced a similar moment, reveled in its seeming purification of the self, and soberly accepted the reality of a world in which death was no longer the enemy but simply a momentary stop on the way to worshiping the Lord in a celestial body. I was a child, or at least at 12, as close as makes no difference, but I recognized even then how the perception of the incredible power and weight of a divine final judgment could drive specific behavior. Changing that perception took ten years of various social experiences and personal study. However, the original framework still exists in a memory coughed up by an evolved biological mind that cares far more about providing a structure for behavior than it does truth.
That structure was a solution in search of a problem, where the dogma of eternal damnation and torture was used to create a problem of what exactly to do with eternity after death. I was a precocious child, or at least the fancy of my ego likes to think so, but considerations of eternality are not something that likely would have entered my frame of reference just yet were it not provided to me through the dogmatic allegiance of others. Thankfully, whereas then I saw “through a glass darkly,” now I see “face to face,” (1 Corinthians 13:12, for those interested, and yes, I do love using my undergraduate education at a Bible college in ways it was never intended) the reality of life being unbound from my simple attempts at constraining it.
Rather than seeing life as a continuance of this singular self, an ego trip of everlasting permanence, I found, eventually, that the Values of life, security, safety, and interpersonal connection need not cease at death but take on a new form. Whatever “I” is meant to be, it doesn’t end merely because the flesh currently instantiating it has stopped working.
Here, we return to a point from the beginning of this article: the process of connecting Values to Behavior is the attempt to take a piece of the perceived present and project it through behavior into a desired future. In a sense, we are almost never living in the present but always stepping into a future that we co-create with those we are in relationship with. The desire for an eternal ego is a relatively simple version, a narrow vision, of what we’re already doing all the time.
Life goes on, it must, it cannot do other than perpetuate its life-giving-ness. Where in that should fear reside? Where in a universe that has all that we can even potentially comprehend, pushing us by virtue of a creative desire to pursue and push against the frontiers of inquiry, is there room for despair? Life breeds more life just as love manifests more love, and joy luxuriates in the openness of more joy.
I believe the existential angst that death is associated with is not only an issue of life’s perceived finality, but of uncertainty about one’s continued influence on the future we’re constantly seeking to create. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the need for an answer that addresses it in kind. To push in a thumb-tac, you need only, well, a thumb. A nail requires a hammer. A steel pier for a building requires a large machine. An imagined eternity of consequences outside of one’s control can only be answered by the perpetuation of the very self that is lost and a cosmic plan that one then belongs to. Thus, in comes specific religious dogma providing the contours of an identity that we can share and find support from and with others.
What gets lost in imagining an answer to eternity is the process we’re engaged in all the time, right here, between one another: the manifestation of Value through Behavior. Who we are, what we do, already echoes into the future. Every conversation we engage in, meme shared, kind or judgmental utterance, hug or slap, projects into the future an influence, however small, that we have upon it.
We create narratives and stories to address the constantly shifting perception of the world we think we can influence into being. We are all novice scientists testing our hypotheses about how reality, in all its various layers, functions, in order to determine what behavior will best fulfill that vision. Identities are how we join in social solidarity to increase the power of our influence, hence why we like to associate with like-minded people. We want the world to go in a particular direction, so those perceived as being counter to that movement will not be considered safe or worth our time.
It’s little wonder that the myths and legends of our gods and afterlife, shaped as they are by the human desire to see Value manifested in particular ways in the future, echo the behaviors of those who adhere to them. We are in a constant loop of living in a future that we’re trying to make real through the actions we take each and every day. Whether doing so is done in a healthy or unhealthy way is largely determined by how myopically focused you are on demanding the future look a singular way.
The degree of flexibility in seeing how Values can be instantiated in various behaviors, of actively holding thoughts lightly in a spirit of epistemic humility and questioning what one believes is so that it may not be, will determine whether you are constantly lamenting that the world isn’t what it “should” be or eagerly seeking out new ways to influence what it could be.
Who wants to live forever? Turns out, we all do, and we’re engaged in bringing that forever into the present every day.