Whether or not the human subject continues to experience life--of some sort or another--after the physical body’s death, is hardly a question that can be answered conclusively by armchair philosophy. We might as easily discover what are the hibernation practices of bears, or the genetic history of a breed of dog, by means of abstract logic and philosophical principles--divorced from observations in nature--as we may discover whether there is life after death with the same, in place of empirical observation. To rely on the logic of a theoretical interaction between the physical and the psychic, in order to give us answers to questions that can ultimately only be answered with empirical observation, is to reason as did the Presocratic Greeks, who sought to find the nature of the microscopic world by means of reason and reason alone--with zero gathering of data in nature. We are not going to find out what is the nature of the atom and quark by means of reason and what seems logical; rather we must make scientific observations to find the answers, rather than thinking them up.

We all will one day die and, presumably, we all will either find that life does go on, or we will sleep and sleep forever, finding nothing--this being our fate. But arguments of abstract logic are of nearly zero help in answering a question which is, ultimately, a question of a factual state of affairs in the world. We are not going to conclusively reason our way to one side of the debate or the other, when it is simply a question of what is a matter of fact, only verifiable or deniable on the basis of outwardly gathered data. Reason avails us very little, if it be not combined with the kind of objective data that could answer a question about a state of the world. So although the following are considered somewhat “quackish” studies, things like near-death experience testimony, apparitions of the dead telling people things they could not otherwise know, and people remembering past lives wherein the accurate detail of their so-called recollection could never be got through guessing--data in these areas found in the field are a thousand times more fruitful in telling us whether there is life in a world beyond than mere logical principles and our theoretical conception of mind and body.

So I hope the reader will grant the possibility--if nowhere else, epistemic possibility--of a life after the grave. To dismiss this as impossible merely based on an abstract principle involving a mind/body scheme or some other armchair theory, would be equal to thinking the Greeks of Democritus’ time could be certain as to the nature of quantum mechanics based on logical argumentation and armchair physics.

We have said above that eternal life and eternal death (that is, non-life) are equally or near to equally curses. But this is not the end-all of the possibility of categorical salvation; for one thing, mortality or immortality are somewhat of a false dichotomy.

Most--though not all--of the terrible nature of immortality, depends upon our awareness of immortality, and the awareness of its effect on our consciousness. It is our contemplation of an infinite life that causes us the most sorrow in such a scheme, rather than the infinite life itself. If we could live and live forever, and yet not know that we will live forever, this mitigates the evil of immortality significantly.

So let us look at the Eastern religions and their scheme of transmigration (reincarnation). If there is life after death, but we are blind to its reality, and can always suppose that this is the one life we have--though unbeknownst to us we are reincarnated again and again--this will let us engage ourselves in the world with vigor, and love the life that we (erroneously) believe to be brief. Again and again we live our lives, looking forward to a conclusion to that life and a final state. If we have this conclusion to look ahead to, if we are deceived into thinking this is our only chance to live, we will live well, with vigor and happiness--and best of all we could never contemplate the reality of our immortality.

This is probably the best scheme for us we could imagine. Not knowing our immortality, not being able to contemplate the vastness of an eternal life--we are rescued quite effectively from just about all that is so anguishing about immortality. And we have solved the other problem too--that of eternal nonexistence being anguishing as well. We may not remember this life once we’re in the next; but we will certainly experience the next (and next and next)--certainly this has nothing of the anguish of eternal sleep.

But such a scheme has major problems, and as we will see it cannot be our categorical salvation. For one thing, let us consider our ultimate fate in the transmigration scenario. Are we to go through life after life, incarnation after incarnation, truly eternally? Is not this a horrible fate also, when we push it on to that terrible “forever”? Is it not exhausting to think we shall go from life to life, career to career; read Homer or Plato again and again with each life, everything washed away to nothing with death, to be built up again in the next life, and be washed back to nothing again with the next death?

And so we still have the same problem when we consider the ultimates. Is this reincarnation truly to have us in its grasp--infinitely? If not, what is the alternative?--Well, that we must finally sleep, finally die, never to be reincarnated again.

And so we see if the idea of transmigration should truly go on forever, this is, and becomes, anguishing at last--when we consider a million years added to a million years for us. And at the same time, the only alternative to this infinite life of reincarnation is death, true death, true eternal sleep as we had it before--true mortality. Consider that after a cycle of lives--perhaps a few hundred thousand years long--we finally sleep; and if this sleep is to give us any blessing at all, it must also give us a curse: we must never wake up. If we do, the time in-between will not matter at all: we will go on not even noticing that we were sleeping. And so we must never wake up, for this sleep to rescue us from the anguish of eternal life--and we are faced with the same curses as before, the same dilemma: the anguish of eternal death. After this life, or perhaps after a thousand lives, we must, at last, either say we shall live thus forever (hell!), or depart from all life forever (hell also!). And if we depart from all life forever, there we are--all our life will have been nothing, and it will be as if we, all our lives with all the incarnations, and all the world, will never have been.

So no, categorical salvation cannot consist in a transmigration scenario--such a scenario is simply the least of three evils. Categorical salvation--if it exists--must be total, absolute, and complete--with nothing evil remaining, and zero evil not redeemed for us. We will not find this in either simple mortality, simple immortality; nor the mix of the two with transmigration. Categorical salvation, then, must be elsewhere, if it is anywhere.