"INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY"

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, January 19, 2003

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

The following words are quoted from the personal journal of Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know."

End quote.

I think I know what Emerson meant. On a subject like immortality, though, no one can say what they know, because no one knows anything. Under such circumstances, it is safer to quote someone else who doesn't know anything, so that they can be held responsible if it turns out to be wrong. You'll be hearing a lot of that in the next few minutes.

I speak today on immortality, not because I have any keen insight or understanding. On this topic, no one is an expert - at least no one living and able to talk about it. Everything that can be said is speculation. But apparently, there is quite a lot to be said about a subject concerning which no one knows anything for certain. In 1897, the great psychologist and philosopher William James gave a lecture on this topic, and he cited a book he used to prepare his lecture, and the book's bibliography cited over 5,000 titles of other books on the subject of "immortality." And that was one hundred years ago.

This is a subject which everyone thinks about from time to time, but no one on which one can give an authoritative opinion about. Seems like the perfect sermon topic to me.

The easiest way to approach immortality, of course, is metaphorically. It is not arguable that people who have made great impact on our world, whose work we turn to for wisdom, and whose life we look to for inspiration, can be considered "immortal." Plato and Jesus and Leonardo di Vinci and Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.: to say that the impact of their lives continues as strong, maybe even stronger, than it did during their lives, is to say, in some sense, they are all immortal.

This metaphorical sense of immortality is true even among those who are not famous. Most of us carry something of our parents' spirit, more than just their DNA, and we pass something significant of our lives on to our children or the world as well. What our lives mean does not end when we die.

This very deep sense of immortality is real and, I believe, true. As true as it may be, in one sense, it is also a cop-out. If by immortality we want to know whether our lives continue eternally, this metaphor is only slightly helpful.

Here is how Woody Allen said it: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying."

Up until the last century, the word "immortality" denoted some form of afterlife - heaven and hell or reincarnation, for example. It seems, however, as technology has increased, there comes a different meaning of "immortality" - that of actually living forever, aided by technology. We know, of course, of cryonics - the legend of freezing dead bodies in the hopes of reviving them when a cure is found in the future. This unproven dream could theoretically keep one going forever as new cures are found.

But there also seems to be an effort to keep people alive forever, through miracle diets, during their productive years of life, and the miracle medicines and surgeries and replacements of parts over an extended amount of years. We do know that human life expectancy has grown substantially over the last century, and there is no reason not to think that it will continue growing indefinitely. One wonders if there will come a time when enough part replacements will be available that people can expect never to die.

In preparing for this sermon, I ran across a whole new concept of immortality. It's called "cybernetic immortality." The theory is that computers may someday be able to read our minds, quite literally, and record what they read. Before we die, this theory says, we "upload" the contents of our minds into a computer. Though the body is dead, our thoughts, our memories, our imagination, our knowledge will live forever. Imagine what it would be like if we were able to access the contents of the brain of an Einstein, a Buddha, or a Jesus. These concepts are intriguing, but these are not what I wish to explore this morning about immortality.

It is not my intent to review the various theories and critique them. I hope rather to look at the concept of immortality more generally and see if there is any reason to consider it at all. To get there, though, I will begin by acknowledging some of the different scenarios that are widely believed.

Perhaps the most commonly held view in the Western world is that of personal immortality in a heaven or a hell. I confess from the start that I cannot accept, never have been able to accept, any theory of afterlife that includes the idea of a hell. There are many reasons for this, but I'll just briefly mention a couple.

The scenario of heaven and hell presupposes a God who designed the system. The act of condemning a person, for whatever reason, to everlasting torture is a dastardly act of cruelty. Even worse, if this God is all-knowing, including the knowledge of who is going to be saved and who isn't, that means God creates people knowing that their destiny is to be tortured for eternity. To accept this theory is to accept a tyrannical God, which I can't. That's one argument.

Another comes from the early Universalists who pointed out that if God is good and loves all of us, God would want everyone to be saved and live eternity in heaven. If this is what God wants, and God has the power to get whatever he wants, then this is what will happen. For any soul to be condemned to hell would prove that God failed with that person, and ultimately, God cannot fail.

These arguments are made from the presumption that there is a God who designed whatever system of immortality there might be. And of course if you remove the premise of a God, this heaven-and-hell system falls apart anyway.

So, I dismiss out of hand any theory that includes a concept of hell. The arguments I gave, however, do not apply to all ideas of afterlife; they do not deny the scenario of a heaven or at least some more simple scheme of continued existence.

The other major school of thought about immortality is reincarnation, and there are quite a few forms this theory can take. There are probably more people in the world who believe in some form of reincarnation than any other belief of what happens when we die. The various views of reincarnation share a common vision of incremental perfectability - that is, with each successive life we are able to improve upon our previous life. The concept of reincarnation does not require, as does the heaven-and-hell concept, the existence of a God who oversees the process. Most Buddhists, for example, do not include a God in the scheme of reincarnation, while Hindus include millions of gods in theirs. Reincarnation can be seen as a self-perpetuating system that needs no outside control, much like evolution. Reincarnation and evolution do not preclude the idea of God, they just don't require it.

I am not going to say much more about the specific theories of afterlife - my hope is to discuss more the general concept of immortality. Before getting there, though, I want to comment on one other facet of these theories. Some people seem to insist that the existence of an afterlife is necessary for morality in this life. Some say the fear of punishment after death - or in the next life - is all there is to prevent most people from doing evil. Dostoevsky put these words in the mouth of one of his characters in Brothers Karamazov:

"If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would be dried up. Moreover, nothing then should be immoral, everything would be permissible, even cannibalism."

I have never been persuaded by the reward and punishment system of afterlife. I find it odd when people think the only reason for doing the right thing is to avoid punishment. Would the absence of an afterlife make me desire to be a liar and thief, or is honesty something I might value on its own? This is not to say that fear of punishment cannot influence some people to refrain from doing wrong, but surely some of us find better reasons than that for our morality. I cannot accept that the default mode of behavior for the human race is to be evil.

Having given a cursory view of some of the scenarios of afterlife, I would like to focus more broadly now on the general idea of immortality.

I come to this topic because of an inexplicable attraction I've had for almost twenty years, I suppose, to one particular poem by William Wordsworth. It is simply titled "Ode," with a subtitle "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." I don't know why I have felt attracted to this poem over the years. I can't say I understand a great deal of its meaning or even know for certain that it has meaning within it. I do know that its words are beautiful. And I have often wondered what in the world the words had to do with the concept of immortality.

I am by no means a literary critic. There are certainly people in this room far more qualified than I am to analyze the poem. Rather than do that for which I am sorely under-qualified, I will offer some ideas in a more narrative form that seem to me to be relevant to the poem, and then, in the end, offer some of the verses to speak for themselves.

In speaking about immortality, I hope you'll keep a couple of thoughts in mind. First, as I have said, no one knows with certainty what the facts are. That includes me. Secondly, it would be wrong to interpret anything I have to say literally. To speak of things which have no basis in fact the only way to speak is metaphorically.

In some sense, the question of immortality has less to do with us, and more to do with what came before us and what will come after us. To me, the sense of immortality seems to be about having our lives linked to eternal things.

Kirsopp Lake offers, I think an intriguing metaphor about immortality:

"There was once an archipelago of islands off a mountainous coast separated from each other and from the mainland by the sea. But in the course of time as the sea dried up, the islands were joined to the great mountain behind them, and it became clear that they had always been united by solid ground under a very shallow sea. If those islands could have thought and spoken, what would they have said? Before that event they would have protested against losing their insularity (and individuality), but they would they have done so afterwards, when the water which divided them from each other was gone, and they knew that they were part of the great mountain which before they had only dimly seen, obscured by the mists rising from the sea?"

This image illustrates for me what is meant by being linked to eternal things. The fact is, of course, that when we think of an island, we think of a discrete and individual unit of land. The truth is, of course, that this is largely an illusion, and all land on earth is connected to all other land. There is no distinct break in the earth that connects Mount Everest to the Sahara Desert or Iceland with Hawaii. What Lake seemed to be saying is that in a similar sense the individuality of our personal identities is similarly an illusion, and that at some level, our personhood is linked not only to every other person, but also to a universal sense of person that passes through the years long before and long after us. The point of immortality, then, is to realize and make more real the links we have to eternal things. Our immortal self survives after the illusory individual self fades. Lake also says it this way:

"Who knows whether the (individual) 'personality' of which (we) talk so much and know so little may not prove to be the temporary limitation, rather than the necessary _expression of life?"

In other words, does the idea of immortality require the continuation of a person's individual personality, or is that individuality an imperfect _expression of a more universal truth that is immortal?

I mentioned earlier about a lecture given by William James on this topic. In that lecture, James attempts neither to prove nor disprove immortality, but simply to show that it is not an impossibility. He begins by affirming the obvious proposition that our thoughts are a function of our brain. He then observes that most people would conclude that if our thoughts are a function of our brain, then when the brain stops working at death, thoughts and consciousness cease as well. A person cannot survive the death of the brain which causes their thoughts, consciousness, and existence in the first place.

It is a reasonable theory, he says, except that it assumes something it shouldn't assume. For most people, to say our thoughts are a function of the brain is to suggest that the brain produces our thoughts and consciousness. But for James there is a difference between producing something and transmitting something. A waterfall produces power. The sun produces heat. But consider the function of a prism or glass. What happens to the light that shines through that prism is a function of the prism - the light changes course, it bends, and changes color - but it is not correct to say that the prism produces the light. The prism is simply transmitting the light. The light already exists.

James then wonders if it is possible that the human brain merely transmits consciousness rather than producing it. Our brain is a finite _expression of a more universal consciousness, which is eternal. Is it possible that the individual consciousness I experience to be me and you experience to be you is not produced by the brain, but simply takes the shape it has because of the brain. Consciousness is eternal, and like a prism which doesn't produce light but shapes it, our brain receives the consciousness and shapes it to our individual personal identity. If this were so - and I remind you again that everything said on this topic is speculative - then it is at least conceivable that consciousness survives death. It may carry memories of lessons learned while existing in the prism of the brain, but it survives only to the extent that it re-connects with the eternal consciousness.

At one point James appeals to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

"In the great orthodox philosophic tradition, the body is treated as an essential condition to the soul's life in this world of sense; but after death, it is said, the soul is set free, and becomes a purely intellectual (being, a being without) appetite. Kant expresses this idea in terms that come singularly close to those of our transmission-theory. The death of the body, he says, may indeed be the end of the sensational use of our mind, but only the beginning of the intellectual use."

The "orthodox philosophy" which James cites is not just Kant but also Plato. It was Plato's view that everything in this world is an imperfect reflection of a perfect world of ideal forms. One popular example used to explain this is that we have an idea of what a chair is, but the idea does not exist, the only thing that exists in this world are the chairs themselves. The idea must come from somewhere, though, and so we postulate about another world of perfection, a world we cannot enter. There exists the idea of what a chair is, the idea of what justice is, the idea of what happiness is. In this world, we have imperfect examples of chair, and of justice, and of happiness, and so forth.

So our individual consciousness, then, may simply be the imperfect reflection of a more universal consciousness. This notion is also suggested by one other theory of Plato's.

Plato suggested that our souls exist in some sense in that world of perfection, but when we are born in this world, the perfection falls away, we forget so much of what we knew before our birth, and life in this world consists of our efforts to regain the wisdom we had before our birth. I know this can sound a little strange, but if you are willing to overlook any literal interpretation of it, and accept is as a metaphorical, even poetical, explanation of the source of human consciousness, I think it is worthy of consideration.

All of this brings me back to Wordsworth. I see in Wordsworth the ideas James struggled with and the ideas Plato struggled with. In each case, the world and this mortal life puts temporary restrictions on the infinite wisdom that was ours before we were born. Our life is a struggle to regain the wisdom we forfeited by the act of becoming mortal.

Here are the opening lines of Wordsworth's Ode, in which I see a longing for the wisdom, joy, and purity that once was known but now is merely a vague memory:

There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,

The earth and every common sight,

To me did seem

Appareled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore; -

Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more...

Here is that Platonic sense of mortal life being a reflection of the immortal from which it comes. Here is that notion that mortal life is a striving to regain that immortal wisdom:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come....

(We) behold the light, and whence it flows

(We) see it in our joy;

If, like Plato suggested, our souls exist in some sense of eternal perfection, and our efforts in this mortal life are to regain the wisdom we had before, then there would be infinite wisdom, and ultimately some sort of infinite immortality. In many ways, our so-called childhood "innocence" is simply the fact that the young children are far closer to much of that wisdom than those who have been away from it so long.

I said earlier that to me the sense of immortality seems to be about having our lives linked to eternal things. Here are some eternal things that can be found in our individual mortal lives: hope, ideas, passions, love. These are also some qualities that characterize the wisdom of children. To the extent all of our lives are about linking ourselves to that which is eternal, we are part of that eternity.

This is the good news: that we are part of that eternity, and that infinite wisdom is available to us at least in parts. In a later stanza Wordsworth seems to identify the joy that comes in linking ourselves to the eternal values that feed, I would say, our immortality:

... For these I raise the song of thanks and praise:

... for those first affections,

Those shadowy recollections,

Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain light of all our day,

Are yet a master light of all our seeing;

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal Silence; truths that wake,

To perish never;

Which neither listlessness, no mad endeavour,

Nor Man nor Boy,

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,

Can utterly abolish or destroy!

Hence in a season of calm weather,

Though inland far we be,

Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither.

Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the Children sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

So there you have it. Another sermon about something no one knows anything about. If nothing else, at least I got some of this Wordsworth thing out of my system for a while longer.

But if you take this all too seriously - which is way too easy to do on this subject - I'll turn away from quoting Wordsworth and close by returning once more to Emerson:

"Immortality. I notice that as soon as writer broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation."