IMMORTALITY

Fear of dying is something we all share. We spend our lives doing our very best to avoid the one true inevitability. There are those who say ‘I’m not afraid of dying’. There is a very simple experiment to test this: Point a loaded gun at someone who makes this declaration and see if they duck. Instinct will take over and that person will duck first and think later. It is very difficult to imagine a universe that our consciousness is not a part of and it is very uncomfortable to contemplate not being.

The instinct to stay alive is a Darwinian imperative. Any species that did not fear death would not last long in the survival stakes. All religions’ first job is to offer some way of dealing with that fear. Immortality, in whatever form, is their stock in trade.

The trouble is that fear makes people dangerous. The suicide bomber and the kamikaze both give their lives for a promise of immortality. People who ‘give their lives to Jesus’ do it because the other side of that contract is ‘the sure and certain knowledge of eternal life’. The reason such people have a problem with science is they can’t reconcile a scientific view of the universe with their need for immortality. Science says the bible is a myth, and therefore, when you die – that’s the end. Finish. Kaput. So they mount an attack on science. Never mind that they use the products of science every day in every way, and that it is science and not religion that has made the lot of the common man so bearable. It never ceases to amaze me that a person can watch an evangelical preacher furthering ‘intelligent design’ on that ultimate product of science, the television, and not have a problem with what the preacher is saying.

Science itself is not completely blameless in all of this. Science has great difficulty in dealing with ideas that it cannot quantify. There is a strong tendency in science to act from a perverse kind of scientific ‘belief’. When it comes to matters of the spirit and “the ‘super-natural’, instead of saying “I don’t know’, science says “if it can’t be described by science it can’t be true’. That is an assumption based on a belief. The belief is that the scientific method is infallible. One only has to look at the history of science to see instance after instance of radical thinkers (who later turned out to be absolutely right) being ridiculed and rejected as absurd by the main body of scientific thought. Religion does not have the monopoly on dogma. In fact every major leap forward in science has been resisted by scientific dogma. It is painful to watch so-called objective thinkers behaving in such a way but it goes on every day in the scientific community.

The word ‘immortal’ means exactly what? Not mortal – incapable of dying. Not even the most rabid fundamentalist would suggest that our physical body doesn’t die. The religious position is that there is a part of us that exists beyond the physical body (generally referred to as the ‘soul’) that is incapable of dying. Even that idea is problematical. I have witnessed, close up, the results of brain damage, and there are too many of us who have watched Alzheimer’s disease rob a loved one of everything that made them who they are. If the ‘soul’ is the essence of our being, how can this happen? Do Alzheimer’s patients recover their conscious awareness when they die? When all brain activity has eased and the body remains alive, where is the soul? There can be little doubt that our consciousness is a product of the physical structure of our brain, so when the brain ceases to be, must not consciousness also cease?

Science teaches us that time is not an inflexible constant, it changes with velocity and it is as much a physical dimension as up down or sideways. In our daily lives, this variability of time is not apparent at all. Clocks go at the same rate anywhere on the planet. For everyday purposes, measurement of time is constant. There is another component to time, however, and that is our perception of it. Time can seem to fly by or it can seem to drag on interminably. Our conscious experience of time is very variable indeed. There are states of awareness where time can seem to stop altogether. Eastern mysticism describes a mental state known as ‘Samadhi’, a state of bliss, achieved through meditation, in which one experiences time ceasing to be. In my earlier hippy years I experienced this by combining meditation with an unwisely large does of lysergic acid. This is not a practice I would recommend. While in that state of consciousness, time did, indeed, cease. From the point of view of one’s perception of time, it is possible for time to stop completely. If, time is not progressing, is that not a case of being aware and immortal? If time cannot pass and one is conscious, death (from one’s own perception) can’t happen. To dismiss this as mere hallucination misses the point. It is a demonstration of the fact that consciousness has a way of stepping outside physical time. In the physical universe, time does keep marching on. The point is that our perception of time is just as important as any other view of it.

There have been many surprisingly similar descriptions of ‘near death’ experiences. States of consciousness where one enters a tunnel of light, where one can look back at our physical bodies. These descriptions are so numerous and consistent that many scientists accept that such a phenomenon does in fact exist. Their explanation is that it is a natural experience of the brain finally shutting down prior to death. I find that a perfectly reasonable explanation. If, however, the experience of brain death is one that generates a state of timeless in the consciousness, then does this not constitute a conscious existence beyond the physical? If, by the very process of dying, one perceives time to cease, then one can have one’s scientific cake, and eat one’s spiritual cake at the same time. From the physical point of view, we do indeed die and cease to be. The brain can no longer support our consciousness. From the internal viewpoint, we have left the physical restriction of time altogether.

So there does not have to be an argument between science and spirit when it comes to death. Of course we die. Of course our consciousness is gone from the dead brain. But, in the infinitesimal moment of death, it is quite possible to achieve a state of awareness that does indeed constitute immortality.