Ad astra per aspera, usque in Olympum. Unamuno, Life 8.24

Unamuno asks why humans believe in God, and how we might make peace with our own personal mortality, in conditions where life appears to us as something indefinitely & even infinitely valuable.

Acaso en un supremo y desesperado esfuerzo de resignación llegáramos a hacer, ya lo he dicho, el sacrificio de nuestra personalidad si supiéramos que al morir iba a enriquecer una Personalidad, una Conciencia Suprema; si supiéramos que el Alma Universal se alimenta de nuestras almas y de ellas necesita. Podríamos tal vez morir en una desesperada resignación o en una desesperación resignada entregando nuestra alma al alma de la humanidad, legando nuestra labor, la labor que lleva el sello de nuestra persona, si esa humanidad hubiera de legar a su vez su alma a otra alma cuando al cabo se extinga la conciencia sobre esta Tierra de dolor, de ansias. ¿Pero y si no ocurre así?

Y si el alma de la humanidad es eterna, si es eterna la conciencia colectiva humana, si hay una Conciencia del Universo y ésta es eterna, ¿por qué nuestra propia conciencia individual, la tuya, lector, la mía no ha de serlo?

En todo el vasto universo, ¿habría de ser esto de la conciencia que se conoce, se quiere y se siente, una excepción unida a un organismo que no puede vivir sino entre tales y cuales grados de calor, un pasajero fenómeno? No es, no, una mera curiosidad lo de querer saber si están o no los astros habitados por organismos vivos animados, por conciencias hermanas de las nuestras, y hay un profundo anhelo en el ensueño de la trasmigración de nuestras almas por los astros que pueblan las vastas lontananzas del cielo. El sentimiento de lo divino nos hace desear y creer que todo es animado, que la conciencia, en mayor o menor grado, se extiende a todo. Queremos no sólo salvarnos, sino salvar al mundo de la nada. Y para esto Dios. Tal es su finalidad sentida.

Perhaps we might make a desperate attempt at total resignation, sacrificing our individual personality at the very last moment of this mortal life, if we knew that our death as persons would serve to enrich a cosmic Person, a supreme Consciousness or Awareness. If we knew that the World Soul feeds upon our own souls, feeds upon them and needs them to sustain cosmic Life, then we might offer them voluntarily to it. We could die with desperate resignation, or resigned despair, delivering our souls over to the greater soul of humanity writ large―handing the work that bears the mark of our own little person over to Humanity, which would in turn pass that legacy on, as part of its corporate soul, to some other soul-entity, when consciousness finally ceases on this particular Earth of pain and anguish. But what if the universe is not like this?

If the soul of humanity is eternal―if our collective human awareness endures forever, if the consciousness of the universe is eternal―then why would our individual awareness—yours & mine, dear reader—not be so, as well?

Would there be, in all the vast universe around us, an eternal awareness that knows and loves and feels itself uninterrupted with but one exception, occurring in the fate of a single organism that can only live within certain temporal limits, in a moment that passes away almost as soon as it has begun? It is not mere curiosity that drives us to desire knowledge of the stars―to know whether they are inhabited by living beings, entities with awareness akin to our own. There is a profound longing at the root of the ancient dream that our souls migrate hence to the vast reaches of heaven, where they populate the stars. Our feeling or sense of divinity causes us to desire and believe that all things have soul, that awareness or consciousness extends, in some degree, to every single thing that exists. We desire not merely to save ourselves, but to save the entire world, to keep it from becoming or being nothing. This is why God exists, for us. This is the purpose that we feel his existence fulfilling.