THE ULTIMATE BOUNDARY to human life is death, and for thousands of years we have tried to travel beyond that boundary. Despite the obvious mortality of our bodies, moments arise when the clear perception of immortality shines through. The poet Tennyson wrote of experiences he had in his youth when his individual self “seemed to dissolve and melt away into boundless being.” This radical shift out of ordinary experience “was not a confused state,” he recalled, “but the clearest of the clear, the surest of the sure, utterly beyond words—when death was an almost laughable impossibility.”

Because they are totally subjective, such immortal feelings do not fit in to the worldview of science, and therefore we tend to label them religious. But thousands of people have been privileged to catch glimpses of the reality that encloses space and time like a vast multidimensional bubble. Some people seem to have contacted this timeless realm through near-death experiences, but it is also accessible in everyday life. Peeking through the mask of matter “we have a certain feeling, a certain longing that we can’t quite put into words. It’s a striving…a wish for something greater or higher in ourselves.” With these words the philosopher Jacob Needleman pointed to what he called “our second world,” which anyone can access under special conditions.

Our first world, Needleman wrote, is “the world we live in every day, this world of action and activity and doing,” ruled by everyday thoughts and emotions. But like flashes of spiritual lightning, there are moments when the second world makes itself known, full of peace and joy and a clear, unforgettable sense of who we really are—“vivid moments of being present in oneself,” Needleman called them. If the second world is inside us, so is the first, because ultimately there is nothing verifiably “out there.” Everything to be seen, felt, and touched in the world is knowable only as firings of neuronal signals inside our brains. It all happens in here.

Who you are depends on what world you see yourself living in. Because it is ruled by change, the first world contains sickness, aging, and death as inevitable parts of the scenery; in the second world, where there is only pure being, these are totally absent. Therefore, finding this world within ourselves and experiencing it, even for a moment, could have a profound effect on the process of sickness and aging, if not death itself.

This possibility has always been accepted as fact in the East. In India and China, some spiritual masters are believed to have lived hundreds of years as a result of achieving a state of timeless awareness. This is considered one of the options open to a spirit who has attained Moksha, or liberation, although not every master takes the option of extending his life span. In the West, such powers are viewed with extreme skepticism. But the new paradigm assures us that there is a level of Nature where time dissolves, or, to turn it around, where time is created.

This level is extremely enigmatic, even by quantum standards, since it existed before the creation of space and time. The rational mind can’t conceive of such a state, because to say that something existed before time began is a contradiction in logic. Yet the ancient sages believed that direct knowledge of timeless reality is possible. Every generation has affirmed that assertion. Einstein himself experienced episodes of complete liberation from space-time boundaries: “At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet gazing in amazement at the cold and yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable. Life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor eternity, only Being.”

It has taken three generations for the new paradigm to show us that Being is a very real state, existing beyond change and death, a place where the laws of Nature that govern change are overturned. Death is ultimately just another transformation, from one configuration of matter and energy to another. But unless you can stand outside the arena of change, death represents an end point, an extinction. To escape death ultimately means escaping the worldview that gives death its terrible sense of closure and finality.

“I’m very afraid of death,” an Indian disciple once confessed to his guru. “It’s haunted me since I was a child. Why was I born? What will happen to me when I die?”

The guru considered the matter thoughtfully and said, “Why do you think you were born?”

“I don’t understand your question,” the disciple stammered.

“Why do you think you were born?” the guru repeated. “Isn’t it just something your parents told you that you took for granted? Did you actually have the experience of being born, of coming into existence from a state of nonexistence, or didn’t it happen that one day in childhood you asked where you came from, and your parents told you that you were born? Because you accepted their answer, the idea of death frightens you. But rest assured, you cannot have birth without death. They are two poles of the same concept. Perhaps you have always been alive and always will be. But in accepting your parents’ system of belief, you entered into an agreement to fear death, because you think of it as an ending. Perhaps there is no ending—that is the possibility most worth exploring.”

Naturally the disciple was shocked, because, like the rest of us, he didn’t see death as a belief he had agreed to. What the guru was pointing out is that birth and death are space-time events but existence isn’t. If we look inside us, we find a faint but certain memory that we have always been around. To put it another way, no one remembers not existing. The fact that such metaphysical issues arise shows how unique humans are. For us, death isn’t just a brute fact but a mystery, and it must be unraveled before the mystery of aging—the process that leads to death—can be solved. The very deepest questions about who we are and what life means are wrapped up in the nature of existence.

When the spell of mortality is broken, you can release the fear that gives death its power. Fear of death reaches much further into our lives than our conscious minds are willing to concede. As David Viscott wrote, “When you say you fear death you are really saying that you fear you have not lived your true life. This fear cloaks the world in silent suffering.” Yet by seeing through the fear you can turn it into a positive force. “Let your fear of death motivate you to examine your true worth and to have a dream for your own life,” Viscott encouraged. “Let it help you value the moment, act on it, and live in it.”

I want to go even further and suggest that when you see yourself in terms of timeless, deathless Being, every cell awakens to a new existence. True immortality can be experienced here and now, in this living body. It comes about when you draw the infusion of Being into everything you think and do. This is the experience of timeless mind and ageless body that the new paradigm has been preparing us for.