Can Immortality Be Bought?

Some of the most powerful people in tech think death is a bug.

That immortality is the ultimate goal a species can pursue, the thing that unlocks abundance, prosperity, health, and more time with the people who matter the most to you.

These aren't fringe ideas anymore. They're backed by hundreds of millions of dollars and entire research labs.

Brian Armstrong, Coinbase's CEO, co-founded a biotech company trying to reprogram cells back to a younger state, on the theory that most major diseases are just downstream of aging.

Balaji has said flat out that the whole point of technology is eliminating mortality.

Vitalik Buterin has talked about wanting grandparents to just stop dying, as a thing that happens to everyone.

And then there's Bryan Johnson, probably the most measured human being on the planet right now, running every biomarker test money can buy. A few days ago he shared that he has an autoimmune disease that had been quietly active for over a decade, undetected by any of it.

I don't bring this up to make a point at his expense. If anything, it's the opposite. It's a reminder of how much is still outside anyone's control, no matter how closely you watch the data.

Living Forever

Maybe wanting to live forever is its own kind of shadow: the ego's fear of ending, projected outward as biotech, as longevity research, as a clean argument about scarcity. What if, instead of looking outward, we looked in, to find out what we're actually trying to keep alive?

What if what we're really trying to do by living forever is make our ego immortal?

The Fourth Way school of thought says something most people don't expect: the average human doesn't have one fixed self. Just a rotating cast of "I"s, taking turns at the wheel, none of them permanent.

So what exactly is all that money trying to keep alive forever? Because what actually deserves to live on, if anything does, might be the Self.

William Burroughs said it better than any of us could.

The tiresome concept of personal immortality is predicated on the illusion of some unchangeable precious essence: greedy old MEEEEEEEE forever. But as the Buddhists say, there is no MEEEEEEEE, no unchanging ego.

Western esoteric tradition has been answering this for a long time, long before biomarkers existed. Immortality isn't something you purchase. It's something you earn, through inner work, not physical maintenance.

Crowley called the result the Body of Light, a vehicle you build through discipline over a lifetime, until eventually you're living most of your life through it instead of through the body that's aging.

Personal immortality in a physical body is impossible, because a body exists in time, and everything that exists in time, will eventually end. And there's no fixed "I" to keep alive in the first place.

Becoming Immortal

Jung spent years studying alchemical texts and came to see the whole Great Work, gold from lead, the search for an Elixir of Life, as an archetype for something entirely psychological: individuation.

The alchemist dissolving base matter into nothing and slowly refining it into gold was, without knowing it, mapping the process of a person dissolving their ego and rebuilding something larger in its place.

Jung called that larger thing the Self, "the totality of the conscious and unconscious psyche," something so vast that the ego, which most of us mistake for the whole self, turns out to be only a small piece of it.

Which puts a different spin on the whole thing. All that money chasing physical immortality might, in the end, still just be trying to keep the ego around forever. The same ego that was never the whole psyche to begin with.

Here's what I actually believe: our own psyche is the most sophisticated technology any of us will ever have access to.

The Fourth Way, alchemy, the whole Western esoteric tradition, these aren't folklore. They're manuals for reaching the totality of that psyche, and from there, building the subtle body, the astral vehicle that actually survives what the physical one can't.

What all that money is trying to invent already exists. It's been sitting there for centuries, sometimes thousands of years, and it was never something you could buy your way into.

Real immortality was never locked behind capital. It was always available, to anyone willing to do the work.

That's the real path to immortality. Not stopping the body from ending.

Building the thing that was never going to end in the first place.

Every man and every woman is a star, Crowley said.

If consciousness is the vehicle, the stars were never that far away to begin with.