Defying Mortality, Defining Immortality
LIFE ON EARTH IS SHORT. It is much too short, that is unquestionably true. To say, however, that “Life is short” without adding the caveat that it is life on “Earth” that is short is a statement which, at a more profound level, misses the mark.
Quite fortunately.
If we really are “eternal beings” as virtually every seer, sage and wisdom master has insisted over the centuries, and we do live “life after life”, then life is not only not short, it is so long as to be unfathomable. It is beyond long. Those who have returned to the earth after a near-death experience invariably concur with this insight and that is not even the end of it.
We are eternal beings, the returnees tell us, precisely the same as the greatest seers, sages and wisdom masters of history.
That makes us timeless beings.
It makes us immortals.
Those who believe that life on earth is all there is, that nothing but oblivion awaits us once we “slip the mortal coil”, do not concur with this notion that we are timeless, eternal beings, of course. They do not believe that life goes on in any form once the physical body ceases to function. They insist that there is no “afterlife”, that we do not reincarnate, that we do not live “life after life” and that to think otherwise is the height of folly, fantasy and, basically, the sheerest self-delusion imaginable.
No, indeed.
Those who are of a worldly, strictly materialist, persuasion think that if we humans are ever to be “immortal” that will only be down to, and thanks to, science, to some brand of life-prolonging pharmaceutical or, if we get super lucky in this lifetime, we might actually become the recipient of some form of genetic engineering which will reset our internal longevity mechanisms and keep the body’s organs ticking over forever.
That is how a scientific materialist defines immortality. It’s strictly physical. It has nothing whatsoever to do with any so-called mythical Great Beyond. “Get real!” they say. “Come on! Wake up!”
Meanwhile, the greatest scientific mind of all time, Albert Einstein, made it very clear that he had no trouble believing that time is an illusion, “albeit a persistent one.”
Likewise, Max Planck, the co-founder of quantum physics once stated that “All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force… We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.” Planck here is clearly speaking of that “eternal” Supreme Being we call “God.”
God? Really?
But, wait: “God” is yet another word which is totally subject to definition, no? Both Einstein and Planck believed in a Supreme Being, but surely their definition would not be the same as those whose idea of God is that of an enthroned monarch who happens to look like “Father Time” and who judges us based upon whether we know of and follow “His” list of commandments or not. God is also “He” who subsequently determines if we will be admitted to share eternity with “Him” in “Heaven” or be sent off in disgrace to suffer forevermore in that place known as “Hell.”
In other words, definitions are damn tricky.
The all-important point? What each of us believes is subject to interpretation and definition. That is a fact we can surely all agree on and that means that each of us is free to make of this life what we will.
Let us be careful with that, however. As the Buddha once wisely advised: “Do not believe in what you have heard,” he said. “Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. Do not believe anything because it is rumored and spoken by many. Do not believe merely because the written statement of some old sage is produced. Do not believe in conjectures. Do not believe merely in the authority of your teachers and elders. After observation and analysis, when it agrees with reason and it is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it, and live up to it.”
