Mason's Meditations

If you're looking for something to chew over, some thoughtful seeds for mental cultivation, bookmark this page for Jeff Mason's monthly meditations. To think in or take away...

Number Eighteen: Time and Immortality

What is the fascination with immortality? What is the appeal of a life lived "always" and "forever?" Is it just the contrast with yesterday, today and tomorrow, the contrast with death and finitude? Like the fantasy of a ball that will fly through the heavens without ever coming to earth, we dream of a life immortal. Or do we? What would an immortal life be like? This is difficult to conceptualize. Immortality seems to be like the end of a Hollywood movie, when the good times are supposed to unroll in an uninterrupted stream. Of course, we never see what happens later.

Two views are common. One is that an immortal life would be exactly like our present one, except that we would see no end to our days on earth. The hypothesis of reincarnation accommodates this view. An essential self, transcending time and space, passes forever through a succession of lived bodies, thus attaining a kind of immortality. Of course, if you cannot remember any previous lives, an awareness of this immortality is out of reach. Some say that they do "remember" previous lives, and that would give them a sense of it, though still a limited one. One would always be looking back. Future lives cannot be remembered. There is a limitless time stretching out before us, rather than a rapidly emptying hourglass.

Some who believe in reincarnation also think that it is better not to be reborn at all, and that the end of our striving is a Great Peace. Like Heaven, this is hard to conceive. Even Dante, who was never criticized for lacking imagination, was less successful describing Heaven than he was describing Hell and Purgatory, in which time still holds sway. The meaning of our normal embodied lived time evaporates in the concept of eternity. On this account, immortal life is not going to be anything like the life we are now leading, one that is bounded by time, space and the necessity of living in an animal body. In this body, we cut a very small figure and then quickly disappear. Our experience of the continual death of living things confirms the ordinary view. It may be that we have a soul that is immortal even while the body dies, but it does not come into its own until after death. We have to be translated into immortal life held there eternally or timelessly. Dante picks the image of Heaven as a flower with many petals, and on each petal a saved soul sits singing the praises of the Lord for all eternity. Time vanishes. There are no more tomorrows, but just everlasting day. Do not forget to bring a sun shade.

There may yet be another kind of immortality, the immortality of one life lived once, but forever and always and eternally. This is just the life each of us lives from day to day. The life so many of us are afraid to lose, is, in fact, an inalienable possession. The illusion that we can lose our lives comes from the way that we are captured by a passing present due to embodied existence. Our sense of time is of its passing and our getting older. Willy Nilly we are swept along, and we cannot go back. That is true, but back then it is all still going on, and nothing can make that time and its passing cease to be. The future is always open, but it will always be the future we have had in our lives, not one a thousand years from now. Immortality is simple consequence of living, whether we like it or not, and no blind faith is needed to possess it.

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Previous Meditations

17. Perennial Philosophy (15 November 2001)
16. Pain and Grief (15th October 2001)
15. Paradise Now (15th September 2001)
14. The Life of Pleasure (1st August 2001)
13. The Most Terrible Thing (1st July 2001)
12. Assisted Suicide (1st June 2001)
11. Death (1st May 2001)
10. Pessimism and Optimism (1st April 2001)
9. Leisure (16th March 2001)
8. The Reflective Life (1st March 2001)
7. On Having an Open Mind (15th February 2001)
6. The Art of Conversation (1st February 2001)
5. Having, Doing, Being (15th January 2001)
4. The Good of Things (1st January 2001)
3. Is Happiness Overrated? (15th December 2000)
2. The Fiction of Forevermore (1st December 2000)
1. The Art of Living (15th November 2000)