A comment, if I may, about the Buddha's "Middle Way." An awful lot is made of that, some of it rather extreme. We need to keep it simple: the context of the Buddha's teaching here is in the pursuit of Enlightenment. He found that neither indulgence nor asceticism worked--in fact, they both were hindrances. Basically that is all there is to the teaching.
That the principle can be applied in other contexts is obvious, but invoking the Buddha's authority outside the limited choice of indulgence vs. asceticism is sometimes to go too far. Sometimes, depending on how the choices are constructed, a "middle way" is wrong.
A remark about the topic of this theme--the idea of human immortality. It seems absurd to me. It is obvious that we age and die, and science has done nothing but reinforce this point. Nothing persists forever. Even the stars and galaxies age and die and the energy of the universe gradually dissipates.
Most Buddhists think that the human "life spirit" generally persists after death, being driven by its desire for personal existence, to be reborn shortly in a new human life. Still, this is not immortality. The reborn person is not the person who died. It has new genes and new life experiences, and very little if any memory of the past existence, even in the subconscious.
Further, we constantly die and are reborn from moment to moment. What we are now is not what we were even a minute ago, and is a very different person from what we were, say, a decade ago. Memories give us the illusion of continuity of person, but they are fragile and easily lost or distorted, by disease, accident, limited capacity, and even just the passage of time.
