Might our desire for eternal life come from our experience of an external long-living object not from an eternal soul?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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So can we say that our desire for living eternal life points to our spiritual nature? Because from our perspective there may be things which may live for so long that they appear eternal from us. And from them we may get the desire to live long like them.
And that is what we may conceive as eternality. Yes, there are two distinct aspects over here. One is the perception.
The second is the reality. So most of our desires come from our perception. They don’t necessarily come from the reality.
So for example, if I am in a desert and I see a mirage. I perceive that water is there over there and that’s why I run after it. In reality there is no water.
So our desires can come from our perceptions also. And even if the perception is counterfactual, still the desire may originate from that. So it is quite possible that we may desire a very long life which almost seems like eternal from our perspective as compared to the mountains.
But it’s not just eternality or indestructibility that we long for. We want to not just live forever, but we want to live young forever. Aging itself is something which is undesirable.
In some religions in the world, they project eternality from this world on to the next world. So they often conceive of heaven as a perpetual family reunion where all your relatives have died. Grandmother, grandfather, uncle, cousin, they are all there in heaven.
Now this might seem very soothing, but it’s problematic. If my grandfather, I knew him as an old person. If he is going to be heaven eternally an old person, that won’t be heavenly for him.
Isn’t it? And if I say that he is going to be young over there, well if he is young then how is he going to be my grandfather? So the point which I am making is, death is just one feature of the material world which recoils against what we aspire for. But even old age is something which we recoil against. So we don’t want just to live forever, we want to live young, we want to live energetic.
So that desire for youthful, energetic, eternal life, that is simply not a circumstantial desire. Because a mountain may exist forever, but it’s not having any consciousness, it’s not having any energy. It is simply existing from our perspective.
So at one level my desire for eternal life can come from certain perceptions that I have. But this is not just a fringe desire that I have. It’s a core longing within our very being.
It comes from its universe. It is something which is just like we see, we all need food. So different people may eat different kinds of foods, different people may desire different kinds of foods.
But the longing for food is universal. And where there is that core longing for food, there is the fulfillment in nature of that provision for food. Where there is core longing for water, there is provision of water over there.
So that which is a core longing, there is fulfillment for that in nature. I may have, I may imagine specific kinds of foods which may or may not be available. But we are not talking about the specific forms of the longings.
We are just talking about the principle of the longing. Similarly, the specific conception of what eternal life is like, that different people may have different conceptions based on their particular perceptions. So I may look at the sky and for me the sky seems to be always there.
And I may get a conception of eternality from the sky. Somebody else may get a conception of eternality from a mountain. Somebody else may get it from a river.
But we are not talking about the desires that have come from our perceptions or based on our conceptions. There can be desires for specific kinds of food which is different from the universal longing for food itself. Similarly, the specific conceptions of eternality may be circumstantially determined.
But the longing for eternality itself is a core longing. And that is fulfilled in nature but not in material nature. It is fulfilled in spiritual nature which itself is na sato vidyate bhavo na bhavo vidyate sata.
Krishna says, at the wise see that there are two natures. Of the material, there is no endurance. And the spiritual, there is no cessation.