Personal immortality. Unamuno, Life 7.20

Unamuno imagines our moments of awareness as soul, which leaves its trace in material that we know as our bodies (with feelings, emotions, and expression). As our bodily cells have moments of awareness whose totality is an expression personally ours, so he imagines the universe having moments of larger awareness that include but also supersede us, subsuming us into a universal personality that is larger than humanity—that is, in fact, divine. Ancient philosophers precede him on this path, though they often speculate that the individual vanishes in the collective, whose immortality or mortality is not the same as the immortality or mortality of the individual. Unamuno's desire is to retain some personal soul or awareness that is still uniquely his though it be part of something much vaster than he could ever be. He wants to be an constant, recurring current in the ocean of being, rather than a just a momentary wave.

Tal vez la inmensa vía láctea que contemplamos durante las noches claras en el cielo, ese enorme anillo de que nuestro sistema planetario no es sino una molécula, es a su vez una célula del universo, Cuerpo de Dios. Las células todas de nuestro cuerpo conspiran y concurren con su actividad a mantener y encender nuestra conciencia, nuestra alma; y si las conciencias o las almas de todas ellas entrasen enteramente en la nuestra, en la componente, si tuviese yo conciencia de todo lo que en mi organismo corporal pasa, sentiría pasar por mí al universo, y se borraría tal vez el doloroso sentimiento de mis límites. Y si todas las conciencias de todos los seres concurren por entero a la conciencia universal, ésta, es decir, Dios, es todo.

En nosotros nacen y mueren a cada instante oscuras conciencias, almas elementales, y este nacer y morir de ellas constituye nuestra vida. Y cuando mueren bruscamente, en choque, hacen nuestro dolor. Así en el seno de Dios nacen y mueren —¿mueren?— conciencias, constituyendo sus nacimientos y sus muertes su vida.

Si hay una Conciencia Universal y Suprema, yo soy una idea de ella, y ¿puede en ella apagarse del todo idea alguna? Después que yo haya muerto, Dios seguirá recordándome, y el ser yo por Dios recordado, el ser mi conciencia mantenida por la Conciencia Suprema, ¿no es acaso ser?

Y si alguien dijese que Dios ha hecho el universo, se le puede retrucar que también nuestra alma ha hecho nuestro cuerpo tanto más que ha sido por él hecha. Si es que hay alma.

Perhaps the enormous Milky Way we regard on clear nights in the heavens above, this vast ring in which our own planetary system is merely a molecule, is its own little cell within the universe that is the Body of God. All our bodily cells conspire and concur in their activity to maintain and kindle our consciousness, our soul. If all their awareness or souls should enter directly into ours, the expression that contains them all—if I should become aware of all that occurs within my bodily organism—I would feel the universe passing through me, and my painful sense of personal limitation would be undone. And if all the awareness of every being runs together without exception into a universal conciousness, the resulting awareness and liberation—God—becomes total.

Dark moments of awareness are born and die in us every moment, as elemental souls, and the series of their births and deaths constitutes our life. When they perish suddenly, by violence, they create our pain. Even so in the bosom of God are consciences born and done to death—do they really die?—their births and deaths creating the series that is the divine Life.

If there is a Universal and Supreme Awareness, I am an idea belonging to it, and is it really possible for any idea in such a total conscience to vanish utterly? After I am dead, God shall go on remembering me, and my being remembered by God—the maintenance of my consciousness as part of his Supreme Conscience—what is this, if not my persistence as something that exists?

If someone should here remark that God has made the universe, we can rejoin that our souls have made our bodies more than the other way round. If there is such a thing as soul.